Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers reflect on nuggets of wisdom that we should commit to heart. This week, having arrived in Los Angeles to cover the 97th Academy Awards, Hadley Freeman writes about the power of movies. If there were an Oscar for Best Scene, she suggests, it would go to Jesse Eisenberg’s outburst in “A Real Pain,” in which he asks: How can we dare to find our comfortable, safe lives difficult, given what our ancestors went through?
This year marks my 10th year of coming to LA to cover the Oscars, and I do this for the most basic reason imaginable: I love movies. Sure, books are great—I’ve read some and even written a few in my time—but the cultural moments that have shaped my expectations of life, the ones that I quote endlessly to friends and even more endlessly in my head, they all come from movies.
Every time I take out a colander to strain my spaghetti, I think of Rick Moranis wearing a colander on his head in Ghostbusters. When my children learned about Moses in Hebrew school, all I could think about was Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor singing that “Moses he knowses his toeses aren’t roses” in Singin’ in the Rain. My 40th birthday was very happy and surprisingly free of neuroses, but that didn’t stop my brain screaming—on loop, all day—the When Harry Met Sally lines, “I’m going to be 40! Someday!” And perhaps unhelpfully, anytime someone asks me what I’m looking for in a partner, I have to physically restrain myself from quoting Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot: “I don’t care how rich he is, as long as he has a yacht, his own private railroad car, and his own toothpaste.”