The Nick Cave Top 75 Countdown (#60-56) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends, old and new! As we're moving up the ladder of Nick Cave's countdown, we'll encounter more songs by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the artist's longest and most fruitful vehicle.

Before the countdown continues, however, let's begin with our bonus track, from one of the soundtracks that Nick Cave wrote in his long and illustrious career. To Have & To Hold (1996) was the second collaboration of several between Cave and Australian film director John Hillcoat. It was a mystery thriller and it starred Tchéky Karyo and Rachel Griffiths:

At #60 is a song by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: The Witness Song is a track on The Good Son (1990). It is loosely based on the traditional American gospel song Who Will Be A Witness?. This is Cave at his leering, vengeful best, a gospel knees-up where false hope is scornfully decried from a Hammond-stacked pulpit as the Bad Seeds gleefully lay waste to all around them.

This is a live version at the Pinkpop Festival, 04.06.1990:

This is Who Will Be A Witness? performed by the Courville Concert Choir:

At #59 is a song from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' follow-up to The Good Son, Henry's Dream (1992), called John Finn's Wife (she of the "tattooed breasts and raven hair… legs like scissors and carving knives"). And then, oooh mercy, that coda. For me, at least, that perfect line - "John Finns' wife took all the flowers down from her hair/ And threw them on the ground" - has always allowed just enough ambiguity to make it unclear whether she throws them to the ground in mourning of her dead husband, or as a way to indicate that she had only used the unnamed narrator to provoke and murder her "mad" husband.

Regardless, the song is a beautiful encapsulation of Cave’s songwriting abilities, and of the versatility and sensitivity of the Bad Seeds as a working band. That the song manages to look ahead to Murder Ballads at the same time as it looks back to the blues and frontier preoccupations of earlier Bad Seeds albums is just an additional facet to its many fine qualities.

Listen to the band holding back - and their knowledge of exactly how much they should hold back when they have to, and listen to them unload everything when the time for that comes. You'll see what I mean:

This is a great version that appeared on their follow-up album, Live Seeds (1993):

At #58 is yet another song by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Nobody's Baby Now, a work of wry, understated elegance with a particularly lovely guitar/piano line. It is found on one of the band's best album's ever, Let Love In (1994). Few singers have made the transition from bawling swamp punk devil to devastating piano torch singer, but Cave made it look so easy. Written for Johnny Cash but kept for the Bad Seeds, Nobody’s Baby Now captured the lingering, forlorn memories of a romance that proved too slippery.

This is a great live version:

Besides being noteworthy as an astonishingly good all-covers album, Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) is notable for the arrival of a new key member for the Bad Seeds, drummer Thomas Wydler. Besides being a fine percussionist, able to perform at both the explosive and restrained levels Cave requires, Wydler also allowed Harvey to concentrate on adding guitar and keyboards live as well as in the studio, a notable bonus. Race reappears briefly to add some guitar while former Birthday Party cohorts Rowland Howard and Tracy Pew guest as well, the latter on some of his last tracks before his untimely death.

The song at #57 is from this album: It was a no-brainer that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds should cover a song from the seminal rock album, Andy Warhol presents the Velvet Underground & Nico. It was a perfect fit. The song they chose is All Tomorrow's Parties - and their version is as manic as required, with an undercurrent of ambiguous glee:

Here they are, live in Ljubljana, Kodeljevo, 1988:

Finally for today, at #56, is the song Sad Waters from the album that came right after Kicking Against the Pricks, called Your Funeral... My Trial. Cave later said, "That particular record, which is my favorite of the records we've done, is very special to me and a lot of amazing things happened, musically, in the studio.

The gentle, but still melancholy moods of Sad Waters, detailing a riverside scene between a couple, are simply grand. It's one of his beautiful dream-like love songs. A harmonica plays over the bridge.

Recorded when Cave was nearing the peak of his heroin addiction, Sad Waters takes the form of an almost-duet where he sings both identical parts. This has the strange effect of the song being very easy to interpret in different ways depending on your mood, although the romantic current comes through most strongly in the acoustic version housed on the recorded version of The Secret Life of the Love Song. In the 1986 original, the lovely rising basslines and breezy organ sound are matched by the lyrics, some of Cave's most flowery and ornate. He casts himself as a prisoner of love, and this is not altogether bad or good - if sadness can never be banished entirely it must be embraced as part of living, and all of life’s moments and details savored.

This is the original studio version:

This is the rare acoustic version:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; there was a 10% increase in the number of weekly visits, even though there were fewer new stories. I guess that our new readers found the time to look through the older stories. The stories that benefited the most were relatively recent - all but one came out in 2018. Of the new stories, the Oscar Predictions did slightly better than the previous Nick Cave Song Countdown.

As far as countries are concerned, this was the United Kingdom's week; it easily sits at the top of the weekly chart. Turkey is still going strong - and so is Canada, which managed to overtake underperforming Cyprus on the all-time list. Spain and Australia each had a good week after a few weaker ones, while the Netherlands' good weekend showing helped propel it on the weekly top 10. Germany is nice'n'steady - while joining Cyprus on the underperformers' club are France, Greece, Russia, and Italy. The main underperformer continues to be the United States...

Here are this week's Top 10 countries.

1. the United Kingdom

2. France

3. the United States

4. Turkey

5. Canada

6. Greece

7. Spain

8. Australia

9. the Netherlands

10. Germany

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, Ghana, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Uganda, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 28.1%

2. France = 27.2%

3. the United Kingdom = 9.5%

4. Greece = 7.1%

5. Russia = 3.0%

6. Germany = 2.0%

7. Italy = 1.44%

8. Canada = 1.18%

9. Cyprus = 1.08%

10. Turkey = 0.68%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!

The Oscars: Final Predictions

In less than three days from now, this year's Oscar ceremony will take place. I predicted the nominations well, I got 94% right. Let's see how I will do with what's even more important - the actual awards. Having seen all but four of the nominees (except the shorts, but we won't go into those), the judgment will be more personal. By the way, the four that I haven't yet seen (and their nominations) are: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Score, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Visual Effects), All The Money In The World (Supporting Actor), The Greatest Showman (Song), and The Insult (Foreign Language).

The Oscar-winners come in all shapes and sizes: prestige small-scale dramas and epic blockbusters, veterans and newcomers, consensus winners, as well as divisive ones. What usually makes the difference is the narrative surrounding each win or loss. For instance, last year's narrative was sending a message of opposition to Trump: what better way to do it than elect a film whose central hero was a black, gay, drug-dealing man. That Moonlight was an amazing movie didn't hurt either, but it was the prevailing narrative that helped it over the line. Another example is Argo. The moment the Academy failed to place Ben Affleck among the five nominees for Best Director, his "unfair" omission became the prevailing narrative. Since the couldn't award him as a director, the awarded him as a producer instead, by making Argo that year's Best Picture, which, in my humble opinion, it wasn't.

This year there are two conflicting narratives and either one could prevail: there's the politically correct narrative, that says that The Shape Of Water should win Best Picture. It has thirteen nominations, across the board. The critics speak highly of it. Guillermo Del Toro is loved and respected among the industry people. It has no major controversies surrounding it... Well, perhaps one: the movie has hit some stumbling blocks on the path to Oscar glory, in the form of multiple allegations of plagiarism. The accusations focus on a 2015 Dutch short film (The Space Between Us made by a film student in the Netherlands named Marc S. Nollkaemper) and a play from 1969 (Let Me Hear You Whisper by Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Zindel, who died in 2003). While the former was dropped, the latter has resulted in a lawsuit, the claims in which del Toro and Fox Searchlight vehemently deny.

Plagiarism or not, my issue is that The Shape Of Water is definitely a good film, but certainly not the best among the nine nominees. I watched it twice, just to make sure: For me, it's the seventh best among the nine. I will dare predict that The Shape Of Water will not take the Best Picture trophy. To compensate, the Academy will award Guillermo Del Toro with the Best Director Oscar. Alexandre Desplat will probably win Best Score for the second time, and The Shape Of Water will collect a third Oscar for Art Direction.

Call Me By Your Name may be my favorite of the nine, but I know very well that it stands no chance of winning; not enough people saw it, and the Academy voters will figure that by awarding it for Best Adapted Screenplay, they will have done their duty. A Fantastic Woman, which features a transgender lead, will probably be awarded for Best Foreign Language Film, so with two awards going to gay-themed movies, there will be no room for accusations of homophobic voting.

My second favorite Best Picture nominee, however, is my proposal for Best Picture winner. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is staggeringly entertaining - its script performs a series of hairpin turns with a mastery that leaves you agog. Writer-director Martin McDonagh has long coaxed comedy from the friction between the idiotic, the unthinkably painful and the banal. But in this scorching, luminous tragicomedy, the sadness is sadder, the jokes more outrageous, and the space between the two smaller. It's a film designed to make you feel before you think.

Not all those feelings are nice ones, however, and McDonagh's film has suffered a bigger backlash than the rest of the best picture nominees put together. The criticism centres partly on the Peter Dinklage character, whose dwarfism is a frequent catalyst for humor, as well as what has been perceived as a redemption arc for Dixon (the racist cop), who we are lead to believe has tortured a black man in custody, and is treated by the film with both derision and affection. McDonagh has responded, contesting the idea that Dixon is redeemed and describing his film as "deliberately messy and difficult."

Three Billboards is not a medieval morality play: it's an unblinking depiction of (largely) white working-class America. As with unblinking depictions of anywhere, it contains unsavory things, but it's not in the business of simplifying or sanitizing reality, or of sorting it into right and wrong. In a society that is creeping towards social media-policed moral absolutism, it preserves fiction's right to nuance and complexity, to portray characters who are bad, but whose humanity extends beyond their wrongness.

A slightly thornier issue is the humor derived from this cruelty. But Three Billboards is the polar opposite of the mindless Frat Pack fare its jokes sometimes resemble. McDonagh has spent his career making people laugh at things that are not amusing - mainly physical violence, but also the violence of language - and then forcing them to question why they have been entertained.

The film has been loved by most, but not all critics; it has been a big hit with the public, as well as the various precursors to the Oscars - the SAG Awards, the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, the AACTAs, etc. What is more, the African-American Film Critics Association called it the second best movie of the year, also giving Frances McDormand their Best Actress award. If the prevailing narrative is that the Academy supports edgier movies, then the Best Picture Oscar will go to Three Billboards.

Speaking of, Frances McDormand is all but certain to win the Best Actress Oscar and so is Sam Rockwell as far as the Best Supporting Actor award is concerned. So that makes three Oscars for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

My third favorite nominee is Dunkirk. It would be a worthy Best Director and Best Score winner, but these awards will probably go to The Shape Of Water. However, Dunkirk will win three awards (Best Film Editing, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing).

My fourth favorite nominee, Get Out, will not walk away empty-handed either. It will receive the Best Original Screenplay award for Jordan Peele's groundbreaking work. If it weren't considered a genre film, it would probably have a shot at Best Picture, but horror movies don't get Best Picture, The Silence Of The Lambs being the notable exception.

I expect Darkest Hour to win two Oscars - one for Best Makeup and one for Best Actor. The appeal of veteran and respected British thespian Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill is too great for most Academy members, which is a pity because Timothee Chalamet's visceral and vital performance in Call Me By Your Name shouldn't have gone unrewarded. However, the prevailing narrative is that he's still so young - and therefore will have plenty of chances to win in the future.

The other acting award (Supporting Actress) will probably go to I, Tonya and Allison Janney unless enough Academy members want to give something to Lady Bird, in which case Laurie Metcalf will win. The favorite, however, is Allison Janney.

Roger Deakins is the most nominated cinematographer without a win, with fourteen nominations. There are only three cinematographers with more nominations and they all have Oscars. Plus, they've all been long-dead. I believe that this year it's Deakins' turn to win, for his work in Blade Runner 2049. The Phantom Thread will probably win for its costumes, and the Oscar for Best Visual Effects will probably go to War For The Planet Of The Apes. Agnes Varda & JR's Faces Places is the favorite to win Best Documentary Feature, while the Best Animated movie of the year, Coco, will win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, as well as (most probably) the Best Song Oscar for the nostalgic Remember Me. If there's a spoiler here, it will be the extremely popular and epic This Is Me from The Greatest Showman.

These are my predictions. If you have your own opinion, please share in the comments. In less than three days, we'll know whether we're good prognosticators or not...