Deutsche Welle (English edition)
'Mank' leads Oscar race with 10 nominations
The Academy Award nominees have been announced. Six films have collected six nods, but David Fincher's "Mank" leads the race with 10.
The Indian actor, singer and film producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas and her husband, the US singer and actor Nick Jonas, have revealed the Oscar nominees through a livestream on Monday.
Following Nomadland's winning streak from its premiere at the Venice Film Festival through the Golden Globes at the beginning of March, the film, directed byChloe Zhao and starring Frances McDormand, has obtained six Oscar nominations, including for best picture. Five other films have equally collected six nods: The Father, Minari, Judas and the Black Messiah, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7.
David Fincher's Mank leads the race, with 10 nominations.
All of those films are in the running for the Academy Awards' top category, best picture, along with Promising Young Woman.
Along with Zhao and Fincher, the nominees for best director are Lee Isaac Chung ( Minari), Emerald Fennell ( Promising Young Woman) and Thomas Vinterberg
( Another Round).
It is the first time in Oscar history that two women — Zhao and Fennell — have been nominated for best director. Only one female filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow, has ever won that Oscar.
Germany represented through a coproduction
The Danish director Thomas Vinterberg is also in the run for an Oscar in the best foreign language film category. His film, Another Round, was the big winner at the European Film Awards.
A German coproduction is equally included among the category's nominees, with Quo Vadis, Aida? by the Bosnian director Jasmila Zbanic.
The other nominated films are Romania's entry, Collective, by Alexander Nanau; Better Days, by the Hong Kong filmmaker Derek Tsang; and Tunisia's The Man Who Sold His Skin, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania.
Strong diversity among performers
Five years ago, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was created in reaction to the lack of diversity among nominees. There has been a manifest change in this year's selection, as nine of the 20 acting nominees are people of color. Among them is a posthumous nomination for Chadwick Boseman, as best actor in
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
The other nominated actors are Riz Ahmed ( Sound of Metal),
Anthony Hopkins, ( The Father), Gary Oldman ( Mank) and Steven Yeun ( Minari).
Boseman's co-star in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Viola Davis, was also nominated for best actress, along with Andra Day ( The United States vs. Billie Holiday), Vanessa Kirby ( Pieces of a Woman), Frances McDormand ( Nomadland) and Carey Mulligan, ( Promising Young Woman).
The awards ceremony will take place on April 25 — two months later than usual due to the pandemic.
Klara is the perfect companion for young Josie: always there when you need her, friendly and willing to sacrifice herself when the girl is in danger. But Klara is no ordinary friend. At one point, a neighbor asks her, "After all, are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?"
Klara is an Artificial Friend, an android put in place to accompany a human child into adulthood.
How AI influences society
Klara and Josie live in the United States in the distant future. A world that is perhaps not so far off after all, and in which people are categorized in a caste system — those who still seem to be useful to society, and those who are sorted out because they don't want to participate, or because
they are no longer needed, as artificial beings have taken over many tasks and made many jobs superfluous.
It's a realistic scenario, argues Kazuo Ishiguro. "I'm not one of those people who are terribly frightened of artificial intelligence," he told DW.
"However, I think there are challenges that we have to face concerning the question of what happens to employment in our society," he adds. "The way we organize our societies, we all have jobs and that's how we earn a living and feed ourselves and our families. That is going to be seriously challenged in a time when we can't all have jobs anymore. Many important decisions in our lives will be made by artificial intelligence systems."
A world without memories, without rebellion
Klara and the Sun is not simply a dystopian fantasy. Like all his books, Kazuo Ishiguro's eighth novel revolves around existential questions: How do we remember — and what? What makes us human? What does it mean to love — and what price are we willing to pay for love?
Klara has no memories. She discovers the world through observation and only gradually understands what task she has been assigned. And she learns what friendship is, what love is.
One day, Klara's job is done, and she, too, is sorted out. She doesn't even think about rebellion. She has a lot in common with Ishiguro's perhaps bestknown literary figure, the docile butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day, which garnered Ishiguro the Booker Prize in 1989 and which was also an international box office success in a film starring Anthony Hopkins.
'We are just not good at rebelling'
But why do his characters never rebel? The truth is, we're simply not good at rebelling, says Kazuo Ishiguro. "In the world of movies and perhaps in the world of novels, very often people accept their fates. People by and large accept orders, accept their fate, and even in the era of freedom and prosperity that we fortunately live in the West, I see people all the time who stay in violent families and bad situations."
He points out that in the case of the butler Stevens, the protagonist does go through "a very important journey, from thinking
that one set of values was correct to thinking that they weren't correct."
Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro's first novel after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Again, he proves to be one thing above all: an elegant narrator, a great moralist who shows us the fragility and also the beauty of human existence.
Check out our interview with Kazuo Ishiguro and many other authors on our YouTube channel DW books.
This article was translated from German by Dagmar Breitenbach.