Special Academy Awards: Once Upon A Time in … Hollywood

We continue with the countdown to the awards on February 9. On this occasion, we will review one of the most anticipated films of 2019 and the latest production of the acclaimed Quentin Tarantino: Once Upon A Time in … Hollywood. The film has ten Oscar nominations: Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Bard Pitt), Best Film, Best Director (Quentin Tarantino), Best Original Screenplay (Quentin Tarantino), Best Cinematography (Robert Richardson), Best sound (Mark Ulano and Michael Minckler), Best costume design (Arianne Phillips), Best production design (Barbara Ling and Nancy Haigh) and Best sound editing (Wylie Stateman).

Once Upon A Time in … Tarantino's mind

Quentin Tarantino's latest feature tells the story of a Western actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the Hollywood of the seventies and his friend, who is also his double (Brad Pitt). Parallel to this, we see two other stories: that of actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), wife of director Roman Polanski, who is pregnant, has just released a movie and has a crush on all of Hollywood; and that of the Charlie Manson sect, which is scattered around Hollywood and is based in a hippie community that has settled on an old set of westerns outside Los Angeles. During the film, these three stories subtly intersect in what is also a tribute to the cinema and Hollywood 70s in a nostalgic and cheerful scenery that revives this golden age.

The film, however, climaxes in the last forty minutes, in which the three stories end up crossing and all the characters finally all coincide on the same stage. As is customary and formula and signature of Tarantino, the end of this film has been imagined by him in a kind of tribute to Sharon Tate, in which the story takes a different course from the one he had in reality. In the middle of the bloody scenes (which unlike many of his other films, only happen here towards the end in the last scenes), the end imagined by Tarantino is a joyful ending that, as he has already done in others like Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, changes the course of the story and gives, although in fiction and on the screen, a different ending and revenge to the victims of their stories.

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The tribute tribute

Although with a tender and cheerful ending, Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood can become exhausting for the viewer. Although it is visually interesting and very entertaining, the film lasts three and a half hours, of which not everything contributes to the main plot or the premise of the film. When trying to pay tribute to absolutely everything, Tarantino overloads his audience with scenes and long sequences in which he concentrates on different aspects of Hollywood that he admires so much and for which he feels nostalgic: recording studios, westerns, doubles, the child actors, Sharon Tate, etc. The director was very close to dedicating a scene to each specific element that he wanted to honor, and although the result is entertaining to watch, he does not say much more besides evoking Hollywood from another time.