The Oscars are announced! And one achievement of the feature film Anora that didn't attract an Oscar (the film did win six Oscars for other things) was that its spoken dialogue (more accurately its raged and shrilled dialogue) used a particular, vulgar American slang word several hundred times.

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The word cannot be spelled out here in this family column, but when I pass on Wikipedia's advice that the word is "an English-language vulgarism ... sometimes abbreviated as mofo, mf, or mf'er", worldly readers will know the word I mean.

The film's scriptwriters hardly gave any of the main characters a sentence to emit that wasn't "m'fer" enriched. I didn't count how often star character Anora Mikheeva (portrayed by Mikey Madison and winning her the Oscar for Best Actress) shrilled, hissed and spat at others that they were effing m'fers, but if it was any less than 100 I'll donate Peter Dutton, and the Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, a lifetime of moviegoing choc tops.

It's not so much that the film's dialogues offended as that they were an artistic disappointment. At the theatre one wants actors to say the occasional original, witty, profound, memorable thing but the way in which Anora's dialogue is all f-words and nothing but f-words gives the film, whatever its other virtues (and some of its sex scenes are fabulous) a mind-numbing aural monotony.

Another Oscar-contender, The Brutalist, is attracting feverish criticism for its several artful uses of generative AI.

Yes, generative AI is a sinister thing and is a robotic beast suddenly everywhere, coming to change our lives, but if allowed to supply the dialogue for Anora it would have produced a script a zillion times more plausible, more effective, more memorable than the film's human writers have.

And yet, perhaps, generative AI may have struggled to give Anora........

© Canberra Times