#oswin benjamin

The 40-Year-Old Version (2020)

Director - Radha Blank, Cinematography - Eric Branco

WINNER:

PAUL RACI as “Joe” in SOUND OF METAL

Plays Joe with an edge, but there is an always palpable empathy and compassion beneath his stony expressions. Nails the tricky, at times somewhat combative mentor/mentee dynamic with Ahmed’s Ruben, while always remembering that tough love is first and foremost still love.

NOMINEES:

OSWIN BENJAMIN as “D” in THE 40-YEAR-OLD VERSION

D’s cold, reserved demeanor is played as a joke, but Benjamin is able to telegraph a wide array of emotions- intrigue, frustration, desire- with just a flit of the eye or a shifting of his weight. A wonderfully interior, slyly physical performance.

JOHNNY FLYNN as “Mr. Knightley” in EMMA.

Achieves that challenging balance of haughty prickliness and sensuality that Austen demands of her love interests. It’s thrilling to watch him subtly navigate his dueling, often entangled feelings of affection and admonishment for Taylor-Joy’s Emma in real time.

GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL as “Gastón” in EMA

Knows that Gaston is a self-serious, emotionally manipulative, gaslighting dickhead, and appropriately plays him with a certain fussiness, always knowing where to land jokes without undercutting his character’s point of view.

DAVID STRATHAIRN as “Dave” in NOMADLAND

Subdued and shy, Strathairn plays Dave with uneasy schoolboy flirtatiousness, vulnerably reaching out to McDormand’s Fern and gently attempting to get her to let her guard down and let someone in.

The 40-Year-Old Version

There really aren’t many rappers who have been putting out music for so long who put out their best work this late in their career. There also aren’t many rappers as skilled as Royce Da 5′9″. Royce has always been one of the best but I feel like ever since he got sober, he’s been on this incredible run of excellence. Royce has been rapping his ass off on every project but projects like PRhyme, PRhyme 2, Trust The Shooter and Bar Exam 4 were Royce getting his bars off and his albums like Layers and Book Of Ryan were for more serious and focused content even though he’s still rapping his ass off on those. The singles didn’t necessarily set my expectations for what this album was going to be like but I knew that this album was gonna be good because it’s Royce. The loose single, Field Negro was incredible and didn’t end up on the album but I think it kind of goes along with some of the subject matter on this album. The most impressive thing about this album is that Royce produced all of it. Royce is very new to producing which intrigued me and scared me at the same time. He produced some great beats on Eminem’s most recent album. Royce usually picks great beats but I wasn’t crazy about some of the beats on his most recent solo albums like Startercoat and Legendary. I love the song and first single, Overcomer but it took some getting used to. The beat is absolutely perfect for Westside Gunn, who is featured on the track because that loop is fucking beautiful. Westside talked his shit like I expect him to with lines like “pistol in ya mouth like a root canal.” The drums in the rest of the song caught me off guard at first because they sounded a little flat or didn’t sound like the right drums but after one more listen I loved how the whole song sounded. I was surprised that Royce dissed Yelawolf on the song. I still don’t know what it’s about but I can tell it’s personal. Overcomer isn’t reflective of what the rest of The Allegory is about or sounds like but it is one of many fantastic songs with dope beats and rhymes both produced by Royce. The album pulls you right in with the Mr. Grace intro, which starts with a clip of a man questioning his kid with all these questions about intellectual property and upselling. I think this audio clip along with the similar ones in the Ms. Grace interlude where the daughter about guns really set the tone because it does speak to a lot of the things that kids should be taught in society and Royce as a father may have told something like this to his kids in case anything happens to him. There’s another audio clip where a kid asks his mom what an allegory is and she responds. Before this album, I didn’t know what it was and this album as a whole as well as the songs by themselves are an allegory because they have these underlying political messages but they aren’t necessarily political and preachy songs because he is still coming at you with the bars. The song Dope Man for some reason gave me To Pimp A Butterfly vibes with Emanny killing it on his parts, the talking from Cedric The Entertainer and the “dopeman” sample that has been used throughout Hip Hop history. I feel like comparing this album to To Pimp A Butterfly is a fair comparison because they both aren’t super political albums even though they obviously have a message throughout their concepts and they both feel very important to hip hop culture and hip hop’s role in social commentary as well. After Dope Man, Royce really brought it on I Don’t Age. That song was definitely one of the more bar-heavy songs. I love the way he is rhyming on his verse on the song I Play Forever. Some of the best punchlines are on the menacing Thou Shall with Kid Vishis. That song is one of my favorites on the album but I feel like Kid Vishis’ verse started off well but he kind of got carried away because he started rapping about a “Room full of naked chicks, surrounded by pussy.” One of the best verses on the entire album comes from Conway on Fubu. He had this really dope bar where he said “They know this extendo we got on us Can't name a time when it's not on us / Hope they try robbing us / So they can go back and tell n****s about all these bullets they got from us.” To complete the Griselda feature trifecta, Royce grabs Benny The Butcher for Upside Down which is one of my favorite songs on the album. The beat is dark and gloomy but I love the vocal sample that says “upside down.” The hook from Ashley Sorrell is great and she had a dope feature on Pendulum as well. I thought the single Black Savage was great to have on this album. Royce set it off with his verse and CyHi The Prynce and T.I. followed it up with stellar verses as well. The Perspective skit with Eminem really stood out to me because I felt like I could relate to it because he mentioned we have “little white kids growin' up with black idols and you got black kids growin' up with white idols.” As a white kid that has grown up on Hip Hop, I get it and I agree that “nothing has brought more races and more people from all different walks of life together than hip-hop.” What was interesting to me is that Eminem talked about Elvis becoming the face of rock and roll even though Chuck Berry and Rosetta Tharpe came before him and it interested me because Eminem has often been compared to Elvis as he is the one of the highest-selling rappers ever and he’s been called “a guest in the house of Hip Hop” because he is white. Em understands the frustration behind that and black kids having a “chip on their shoulder” because they weren’t represented in pop culture at all back in the 60s and 70s. I liked how he ended it by saying that “we don't get to choose our parents” and “we don't get to choose what color we're born” but it’s about what you do with what race you are “to make a difference” and this whole thing really left an impression on me not only because I could somewhat relate to parts of it but the fact that Eminem is saying this on an album centered around “black people in America.” The issues I have with this album are the hooks on some songs. The hook on Tricked is too repetitive for me and I kind of expected more from a Royce and KXNG Crooked song because they always go at it on songs but I understand why it wasn’t a total barfest because this isn’t really that type of album. This song is more in line with KXNG Crooked’s Good vs. Evil albums and less Mr. Pigface Weapon Waist. Although I did like Young World with Vince Staples and G Perico, I did feel that the hook kind of ruined the whole song. If the pre-hook was the hook, I think I would have liked the song more. Vince hasn’t rapped like this in a while so it was good to hear him on a song like this. I thought Hero was a fantastic way to end this album because Royce rapped a lot about family issues on Book Of Ryan and his father’s addiction and I liked the way he addressed airing out his father’s dirty laundry with lines like “I talked about his past, I thought I did it with respect / But I'm just dragging all these bags, and all these feelings is suppressed.” I get that it was important for Royce to talk about those moments in his childhood on songs like Power and Cocaine but I liked how Royce apologized to his father, making a great ending to a great album. I do love this album and I think it’s important to Hip Hop and society as a whole but I did learn a lot from this album and albums that teach me things don’t come around very often. As a high school student, this album taught me a lot of shit that school doesn’t teach like the origin of the Ice Cream truck song and that detail about how Eric Cartman from South Park originates from Sara Baartman. I also liked that line that Crooked had about how “the right to bear arms was only made for Grizzly Adams.” These allusions and other parts of this album taught me new things that are still relevant to today and I really think that that speaks to the importance of this album. I often go to Royce for just hard bars but his solo albums will give you something to think about and The Allegory is just that. Thank you Royce.