A master triumphs with career-topping ‘Flower Moon’
When an artist stays both relevant and revered for a period of half a century or more, it’s hardly going out on a limb to suggest they know how to work a crowd.
After all, as the late Stephen Sondheim once lyrically observed, “art isn’t easy, any way you look at it.” That might seem like a cynical way of framing things, but in a world where free-or-nearly-free content abounds, it puts an unvarnished sense of reality on the situation.
The commercial viability of art, perhaps more than ever, has become entwined with the “mood of the moment”, and only an artist with the necessary savvy to recognize – and play to – that ever-metamorphosizing fancy of the public imagination has any chance of staying in the game.
For reasons that should be obvious, there’s no art form in which this is truer than cinema; expensive, collaborative, and arguably more reliant than any other medium on the favor of the mainstream populace, the immediacy inherent in its very nature demands that it cater to the interests of its day.
