In 2020, Scarlett Johansson joined a very special Hollywood club. That year she earned two Academy Award acting nominations. The first was for Supporting Actress in Jojo Rabbit. The other was for Leading Actress in Marriage Story. But while she didn’t take home the golden statue for either, she has now earned an even more exclusive recognition. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is using her memorable screaming match with Adam Driver in Marriage Story to scare off wolves.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the famous fight scene from Marriage Story is now being used to keep gray wolves away from livestock and cattle by scaring them away. With the once-endangered species revival in the West, cows and other animals have become especially vulnerable. To combat the problem and help ranchers, the USDA employs quadcopters outfitted with thermal cameras and spotlights. When they find a wolf, they then blare loud sounds. Some of those noises make perfect sense, like when they play recordings of gunshots or fireworks. They also use AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Obviously, no animal of any kind would want to eat when they’re too busy rocking out to a classic.
Okay, not really. It’s actually that researchers want wolves to know they shouldn’t mess with humans. “I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad,” Oregon USDA district supervisor Paul Wolf told the Journal. (Yes, yes, that’s actually his name.) One way they do that is to play sounds of humans yelling. And if you need to pick one human out of the billions on the planet, you might as well use the highest-grossing actor of all time. So the department has turned to director Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film Marriage Story for maximum “humans are bad” and wolf scaring energy, specifically the scene where Johansson and Driver have an all-out screamfest.
Absurd? Yeah, kind of. But the program — after working out some issues — works. Like when the USDA deployed its drone patrols to a region of southern Oregon where wolves had killed 11 cows in 20 days. Over the next 85-day period, wolves only killed two. We guess Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are just that scary in Marriage Story to wolves, but maybe to any species that hears their yells.
Clearly, the scene makes an impact on the predators. However, there’s no word yet on whether the wolves think Scarlett Johansson should have won an Oscar for Marriage Story in 2020.
Content shared from nerdist.com.