It’s time for another mailbag edition, where we attempt to answer your cultural questions. This week: awards frontrunners, dirty drum’n’bass drops and a bit of Bamber Gascoigne …
“What’s going to win the best picture Oscar? My vote (if I had one) would go to Oppenheimer” – Jordan
A tough question! We haven’t even had the nominations yet, or even the Screen Actors Guild Awards that tend to serve as a bellwether for the big prize. What we do have are the betting odds, which seem to have coalesced around Oppenheimer as heavy favourite.
That does make sense – Christopher Nolan’s biopic is a weighty, critically acclaimed film that has received major props for helping save cinema this year. Of course, another film also did some heavy lifting in the whole “Barbenheimer saving cinema” business, but Barbie’s brand tie-in aspect might turn some Academy voters off. Oppenheimer is a good compromise candidate in that regard, hugely popular without being based on existing IP (er, unless you consider the atomic bomb as intellectual property), and unlikely to spawn an endless array of spin-offs.
Although, there are a few small doubts around Oppenheimer. For one, Christopher Nolan is regarded as such a shoo-in for the best director Oscar that people might decide to split their ballot and opt for another film. Though, countering that argument is the fact that the directors behind three of the last four best picture winners also won best director. And there’s also the issue of Oppenheimer’s relatively early release date (July), which might create a sense of fatigue among voters seeking something newer and shinier (though again, that hardly seemed to hinder last year’s winner, Everything Everywhere All At Once).
If a film was going to offer an upset, my dark horse would be The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s dramedy about a teacher and his students spending Christmas in a 1960s boarding school. Both critically acclaimed and a slow-burning audience hit in the US (you’ll have to wait until 19 January to see it in the UK), it’s the sort of feelgood, nostalgic movie that could do very well among the more traditional corner of the voting bloc, amid a host of chewier, more downbeat films. But still Oppenheimer is the film to beat.
“Is drum’n’bass back? And if so, why? I seem to hear it a lot at the moment” – Alison
Talk of a DnB revival tends to bubble up every few years, and some – the Redditors sharing the latest clattering breakbeats and disgusting drops on their forum, say – would argue it’s never gone away. Still, aside from the festival bill-topping likes of High Contrast and Chase and Status, the genre hasn’t really had much interaction with the mainstream for some time.
But it’s impossible to deny that something is stirring right now. Alexis Petridis wrote about the genre’s sudden popularity post-pandemic among Zoomers and since then things have only accelerated. Bradford DJ Nia Archives (above), probably the face of this new wave of DnB and jungle, had a huge year, with a big New York Times profile and eye-grabbing sets at Glasto, Primavera and All Points East. Old handers Chase and Status’s collaboration with Becky Hill, Disconnect, has been all over dance radio this autumn. And an album that is likely to appear near the top of a lot of year-end lists, Yaeji’s With a Hammer, features more than its fair share of DnB breakdowns.
Yaeji is a good example of how this new wave of DnB and jungle tends to appear in places where you might not expect it: see also the bedroom pop of early revivalist PinkPantheress or the NYC lo-fi artist Sipper, or even – as we covered in a recent Guide – the shoegaze of Hotline TNT. For these artists drum’n’bass serves as a surprising texture to add to songs, its syncopated breakbeats and sub-bass blasts sounding relatively novel after a decade of minimalist trap beats and the corporate sheen of EDM and house. So for now, DnB is in vogue, but for how long? Bring on the gabber revival of 2024! (Oh wait, no – we had that already.)
“Why can’t I find a streaming service anywhere that has University Challenge with Bamber Gascoigne? Surely one of the great quizshows of all time” – Harry
I’ve got bad news, Harry. You’re going to struggle to find a comprehensive collection of the Bamber Gascoigne-era University Challenge episodes. For a start, a lot of those episodes – including most of the show’s first 10 series – no longer exist, having been wiped or overwritten to save costs.
While the rest of the episodes do exist, tucked away in the archives of Granada (who originally broadcast the programme before it moved to the BBC in the 90s), they’re unlikely to be uploading them to a streaming service any time soon. Digitising old TV programmes is a time-consuming process, and requires a lot of space – read this great Guardian piece from last year about the lengths the BBC are going to digitise their archive – and ultimately there’s only so many older shows that are likely to find their way online officially.
Of course, unofficially it’s a different story. YouTube has many old University Challenge episodes uploaded. We can’t link to them here because of copyright issues but they’re easy enough to find, so you can luxuriate in the era’s brown backdrops and dodgy haircuts to your heart’s content.
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