Road to the Oscars 2025: This is nominated for 1 Oscar and it´s best documentary short.
What do you do when your job ends? A question asked to Orin O'Brien a very interesting character to interview for the simple reason she doesn't really wants to be here. It´s fascinating how the documentary wants to be political but is shot down by its own subject matter that does not see herself as anything significant even though the world did. That is the blessing and the curse of this documentary. It´s subject matter is interesting but is never fully developed by the nature of the protagonist of our story here.
Orin O´Brien, the first female to be in the New York Philamonic reflects on her carrier as she is retiring.
Orin is an interesting and fun person. She can seem a bit out of it at times and a bit collected and calm yet not. An accept that I love about her and the aspect that ruins the nature of the documentary is that the documentary wants to make her important but she herself doesn't see herself as important. She is just another musician in a band, and without the others in her band she would be nothing. The world wanted her to be more important, first girl in the band, she has nepo parents, but to her she was none of that and that makes her so cool, yet it takes away the significance of the story told, as we are told, yup, this person was just anyone. It is a nature that conflicts with itself and creates a mess of a doc.
Because what now? This is a goodbye doc, to a woman I just got to know and since she says herself she is not important or special, what am I supposed to do with that? It creates a celebration of a person that is in her own words not important and that just makes the doc seem less important. Everyone says she´s important but our lead tells you to not bother.
The score under this is lovely, highlighting the bass music O´Brien must have played through her career.
The doc wants to be political but fails at it by the nature of O´Brien. It wants to say that was slander about her, that her parents was famous and she wanted nothing of it, but it seems like O´Brien isn´t really that interested in talking about that and more about her just retiring more than anything and the feelings that comes with that.
This is a fine enough doc with a fun lead to follow, but it´s weird nature and conflicting ideas creates a bit of a mess in my option.
Oscar predictions:
This might have a chance to win for the simple reasons it´s made by a major studio in form of Netflix(although the Oscars notoriously hates Netflix wins) and that Leonard Bernstein is mentioned a fresh in mind name for the academy since "Maestro"(2023) was a thing. Personally I liked both "Instruments of a beating heart"(2024) and "Incident"(2023) more and think they have more solid subject matter. Of the 3 I have watched I think "Incident" should win, but We´ll see if the academy is brave enough to let something like that win.
