E: 2024 Oscar’s biggest question – bigger than who will win the acting awards, or who will wear or say what – is this: just how many Oscars will Oppenheimer win? Honestly, the big awards are all pretty set, if you follow the Oscars. There’s not much suspense in the acting categories. But the over all picture? Yeah, that’s what I’ll be watching.
These days we’re lucky if Best Picture even matches up with Best Director! (Let’s be real – these days we’re lucky if they even nominate the Best Picture frontrunners for Director.) This year, though, the stars may align. It’s been a long time since we had a true landslide – it’s much more typical to see a CODA with three wins, or Parasite with four. It’s been 20 years since Return of the King wracked up 11 wins. Last year, Everything Everywhere All at Once picked up seven statuettes, the highest for a Best Picture winner since at least the introduction of the preferential (i.e. ranked choice) ballot, while All Quiet on the Western Front picked up most of the technical awards. Oppenheimer is poised to do at least that well. Can it make inroads into the technical awards? The Brits gave most of the technical awards to The Zone of Interest (sound) and Poor Things (production design, costumes, hair and make up), which would cut Oppenheimer out of real landslide territory.
Honestly, that’s why nominations are more exciting to me in some ways than the show itself – by the time the show comes around, we’ve seen the same folks win over and over, and we’ve heard their speeches. Of course, Oscar is the big deal – it means more, and it shocks more emotion out of people than any other, so the speeches are often more interesting. And we all know that odd stuff can happen! Let’s talk about the big categories, for sure, but we can also take a quick look at the smaller awards and speculate on them too. Most people think there’s aren’t any surprises brewing at the top, but I have a gut feeling about one race. So let’s talk Oscar!
Oh, but first? Remind me never to save all the dark depressing movies I don’t think I’m going to enjoy for the last week before Oscar night, will you? Because jamming The Society of the Snow, Bobi Wine, El Conde and Poor Things into these last few days was a big mistake. Huge. Huge mistake.
Best Supporting Actor:
Your Winner: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
How Sure Am I? 100%
If Not Him, Then Who? Nobody
The Losers: Sterling K. Brown, Robert DeNiro, Ryan Gosling, Mark Ruffalo
If I Could Vote, I’d Pick: Robert Downey, Jr.
Robbed of a Nomination: Milo Machado-Graner, Anatomy of a Fall
Veteran 3 time-nominee Downey is going to get an early 59th birthday present Sunday; his is a story of failure and redemption, one that’s cycled through drug use, reports of toxic behavior, tabloid splashing and then a love that’s sobered him and a Marvel-ous new act. It’s a story that’s played out in front of audiences for the last 35 years or so. In other words, this has been a long time coming. It’s not surprising that the normally larger than life Downey is initially unrecognizable as drab, quietly Machiavellian bureaucrat Lewis Strauss – playing small is going to be his ticket to the world’s biggest cinematic prize. He’s a huge talent and I’m happy for him, and it was one of my favorite performances this year, so I really have nothing to complain about here. Expect a funny speech, for sure, probably with his usual self-mocking cockiness, and definitely giving credit to his wife for everything.
Why him, why now? How do I know? I know he’s going to win because he’s won every major precursor award on offer this year – the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice, the British Academy’s BAFTA, and the Screen Actor’s Guild.
One performance that pleasantly surprised me was Robert DeNiro’s William Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon; his work was subtle, without his characteristic winks at the camera; even though you know much too quickly that he’s the mastermind behind the Osage murders, he doesn’t show his hand. He’s kindly and avuncular for so long. I loathed his work in The Irishman (the most recent of his previous eight nominations) and I wasn’t expecting to see anything other than his usual ticks and bluster here, but I was wrong.
First time nominee Sterling K. Brown, darling of the Emmy’s, made me snicker through American Fiction as a surgeon blowing up his own life (divorce! coming out! drug use! getting fired! prostitutes!) and glorying in the broken pieces, leading first with snark and then with wisdom and heart. He gradually became one of my favorite parts of one of my favorite movies from this year, and I’m so excited that he’s graduated to the film big leagues. I can only hope this means more varied and substantial roles for him.
The last two nominees can only be defined as whiney boyfriends; 3 time nominee Ryan Gosling to hilarious effect as Ken, Barbie’s most underappreciated accessory, and 4 time nominee Ruffalo as lothario turned weepy lunatic Duncan Wedderburn. (Two odd things about the latter: first, he made this short list over castmate Willem Dafoe, who I typically like less but there liked more. And second, Poor Things repeatedly refers to him as a handsome devil or pretty boy, in a way that somehow served to make him less attractive. Or maybe it was the terrible hair and mustache? Or perhaps all the whining? Or the twenty year age gap between him and the woman he was supposed to be enchanting?)
You could maybe make a case that Mark Ruffalo, who was the National Board of Review supporting actor of the year, is the most viable competition, but honestly, just no. You have to go back to last year to find someone who didn’t top their list with RDJ. Someday, it ought to be the Hulk’s time, but Iron Man has it this time. Sorry, Bruce Banner.
Given my druthers, I’d definitely have swapped out Ruffalo for the utterly spellbinding Milo Machado-Graner, who plays a blind tween trying to explain his father’s mysterious death. He’s incredibly talented, and I cannot wait to see more of his work. May December‘s Charles Melton figured in some early critics prizes and snagged a Globe nomination this year – his impressive turn as a young husband with an infamous past should get him bigger jobs, too.
Finally, let me note how excited I am for the new format the awards are using – instead of last year’s supporting actress (Jamie Lee Curtis) presenting the award, there will be five former winners personally introducing each nominee, as was done in 2009. I adored this when they did it the first time and it’s honestly the thing I am most looking forward to about this year’s show, at least as much as hearing Billie Eilish sing “What Was I Made For,” which I also expect to be a highlight. I have no idea who they’re getting for the supporting men, but I can’t wait to see.
Best Supporting Actress:
Your Winner: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
How Sure Am I? 100%
If Not Her, Then Who? No one
The Losers:
Emily Blunt, Danielle Brooks, America Ferrara, Jodie Foster
If I Could Vote, I’d Pick: America Ferrara
Robbed of a Nomination: Florence Pugh, Oppenheimer and Erika Alexander, American Fiction
This is SUCH a stacked category, oh my gosh. Da’Vine Joy Randolph has been the biggest lock of the year; her non-competitive competitors all have much higher profile careers and generally higher name recognition, to no avail. However, she does very much fit the mold of supporting actress winners, which tends to feature either veteran performers (Jamie Lee Curtis, Laura Dern, Allison Janney, Regina King, and Viola Davis), or as in her case, unknowns (Ariana DeBose, Alicia Vikander, Lupita Nyong’o, Melissa Leo, Mo-Nique). Or someone like Yuh-jung Youn, who is a woman of color (who have a very tough time in lead but much more success here), unknown in America but also a veteran actress; the trifecta! In a category much friendlier to women of color than lead actress, Randolph fits the type of role that the Academy likes to honor women of color for – she plays a cook grieving for her dead son. She does a great job, but I’m mildly surprised she’s been this dominant in a year of fantastic performances by so many women. She puts a lot of heart into her speeches, and I’m looking forward to that.
Emily Blunt has had Oscar buzz since she broke her leg as Miranda Priestly’s savvy assistant in The Devil Wears Prada, and it is finally her moment. Um, in the sense that she’s finally secured an Oscar nod, not that she’s going to win. She excelled as the much put upon wife of genius philanderer Robert Oppenheimer – a bridesmaid nominated for all the awards, which were all won by Randolph.
I never watched Orange is the New Black, and wasn’t fortunate enough to see The Color Purple on Broadway, so Danielle Brooks really only entered my awareness singing at the Tony’s where she lost to my girl Renee Elise Goldsberry. This winter we’ve been watching her on Instant Dream Home, where she’s been charming and full of life, traits she has in common with Sofia, her character in The Color Purple. It’s absolutely fantastic that she’s nominated here.
The best news of a bad nomination day for Barbie was America Ferrara’s unexpected inclusion as the angst-ridden Mattel employee who inadvertantly fills Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie character with the untoy-like questions about her cheerful pink universe. I’ve been a huge fan since her days in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Ugly Betty, so her inclusion thrills me. Even though Robbie is the star, Ferrara moved the film’s action. And of course it’s Ferrera’s speech about the difficulties of womanhood that’s THE iconic movie moment of 2023. Even if we don’t get performance clips of the acting nominees, we’re going to see that one (host Jimmy Kimmel has already riffed off it for a genuinely funny commercial for the telecast, about the difficulties of hosting the Oscar).
Finally, two-time winner and five-time nominee Jodie Foster surges back to the Oscars, after a nearly thirty year absence, for her role as best friend and coach trying to make Diana Nyad’s epic open ocean swim achievable – and keep Diana grounded in the process. Though without the razzle dazzle of the top nominees, it’s a thoughtful, endearing movie and Foster’s performance holds it fast.
What a year it’s been for female supporting roles! I wish there had also been room for Florence Pugh, as Robert Oppenheimer’s tormented lover Jean Tatlock; her brilliance and magnetism captivated the scientist, and her socialist connections wrecked havoc with his reputation and career, but Pugh showed us a compelling woman wrestling with her own demons, rather than his.
Erika Alexander’s Coraline, however, is an insightful lawyer who knows her own worth; she tethers the film American Fiction and the other characters when they start to get to fanciful. That film is a showcase of top notch acting, veering between comedy and pathos, but of all those fine performances (Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross, Leslie Uggams) I most wish Alexander had gotten more appreciation. Seriously, if you haven’t seen American Fiction, do it!
Best Actor
Your Winner: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
How Sure Am I?
70%
If Not Him Then Who?
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
If I Could Vote, I’d Pick: Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction
The Losers: Bradley Cooper, Colman Domingo, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright
Robbed of a Nomination: You know, nobody really stands out. The most prominent snub, of course, is Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. I appreciated his performance more than I usually do, but I’m not crying for him. I think these are the right five guys.
As with most years, the two Golden Globe winners have been the frontrunners this season. Typically the drama (Cillian) trumps comedy (Giamatti) but the Critics Choice confused the picture by choosing Giamatti. Then SAG and BAFTA settled on Murphy, and it feels pretty solid that the prize is his. Often Best Actor is a bit of a life time achievement award – they like a long established career before they let you into this particular club – and you’d think this would work better for two time nominee Giamatti than first time nominee Murphy, but Oppenheimer seems to be everything this year.
And Cillian Murphy, who’s worked with Christopher Nolan since Batman Begins, would certainly be a worthy winner. He plays Robert Oppenheimer as a visionary haunted by history, by the weight of what only he could accomplish and what it might unleash on the world, as well as his problematic personal decisions. To me, one of the most searing scenes in recent film history is Oppenheimer’s interrogation, where he’s forced to recount his infidelity, because Nolan stages it with both Murphy and his lover Pugh naked, coupling, their most private actions laid bare. It’s excruciating, and Murphy imbues his performance with all the complicated shame and humiliation and love and defiance there is. We feel what he feels.
I can’t deny, however, that Paul Giamatti too would be a worthy winner. We all know this sort of teacher – smarter than anyone else and ready to let you know just what a bore he considers you, and what a waste of his talents spending time with you is. But we come to see the inevitable dissatisfaction beneath his disdainful exterior, his self-loathing and also the true kindness and grace in his heart that he learns to give both to one student and to himself. This is why it’s worth seeing the nominees – because usually they all have something interesting to say about being human.
I don’t think there’s a second in Maestro where I’m not captivated by Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein. He set himself a serious challenge – embody a larger than life public figure with a specific skill set, and famous cadence and brilliant badinage – and he achieves it. You can tell that Bernstein made the people around him feel seen and fascinating while they were together, and you can see Cooper do this – he’s big and wild and enthralling, but he also makes you feel that way about yourself, while his focus lasts. It’s not a shabby attribute, in a flawed and challenging genius. As a multi-hyphenate, writer-producer-director-actor Cooper picks up his fifth nomination this year for acting, and his twelfth over all. Seems like perhaps they’re going to make him wait (maybe till he’s not so pretty) but sometimes, it’s got to be his turn – because the Academy likes him. They really, really like him.
First time nominee Colman Domingo swaggers into a Civil Rights movement that really doesn’t want him. He’s too loud, too gay, and too imperfect to fit into the particular model of Black excellence the movement wants to present to the White world. Still, he persists, and he has unique gifts and enough belief in them to step up to his moment, bringing together the diverse groups within the larger movement to plan the March on Washington, which in turn helped motivate Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act. Blink and you’ll miss soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mahalia Jackson, singing on the steps of the Washington Monument; Rustin himself appears in another of this year’s nominated films, The Color Purple as well.
This brings us to Jeffrey Wright, star of satirical wonder American Fiction, a disgruntled professor and novelist who returns home to deal with his mom’s increasing independence problems. Like Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is pretty convinced he’s the smartest guy in the room, and he’s annoyed at the small minded bureaucrats who have control of his life and the public who rejects his classical mythology informed books. He’s wasted on a tasteless world, in other words. In a fit of pique, he writes a novel in what he guesses is a Black gangsta voice, and has his high brow agent submit it to publishers as a joke. Of course it turns out that the joke is on him, as his book becomes the sensation of the literary world, and he’s left to grapple with his own snobbery and the oblivious White gaze. It’s all funny and insightful and dangerously honest.
Best Actress
Your Winner: Emma Stone, Poor Things
How Sure Am I? 60%
If Not Her, Then Who? Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
The Losers: Annette Bening, Sandra Huller, Carey Mulligan
If I Had a Vote, I’d Pick: So hard! Annette Bening (or Mulligan! Or Huller!)
Robbed of a Nomination: Margot Robbie, Barbie and Greta Lee, Past Lives
I am quite aware that I’m taking a risk here – my only risk of the big six prediction slate, actually. Everyone assumes it’s going to be SAG winner Lily Gladstone over BAFTA winner Emma Stone. Here’s my reasoning for disagreeing.
First, Stone and Gladstone have been duking it out since they both took home a Golden Globe at the start of awards season. Emma won the Critics Choice as well as the BAFTA. When Gladstone took the SAG, people started declaring the race over. Momentum had shifted! While it’s true that awards races are all about buzz, I think this is a premature conclusion.
SAG is a massive voting body. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is tiny – 9 thousand people against more than 165,000. Pull any few thousand folks out of SAG, and you’ll get a different vote distribution every time. While SAG is a good predictor of Oscar wins, it’s not a perfect one – particularly in the cases of actors of color. SAG cares more about honoring representation in film than AMPAS has historically. They’ve nominated excellent movies that Oscar ignored like The Color Purple and Straight Outta Compton (I’m not joking, it’s a great movie), and have helped to boost the profile of many others (Parasite, Everything Everywhere All At Once). Within the last several years they’ve honored actors of color – Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, for example – whom Oscar ignored. And perhaps because it’s an utter moral nightmare, they avoided giving Poor Things a best cast nomination.
BAFTA, on the other hand, loved Poor Things and lavished it with ten nominations and five wins. BAFTA didn’t even nominate Lily Gladstone – perhaps in part because some people question whether she’s the lead or a supporting actress, but perhaps for odd reasons of their own. While the actors are the largest branch of the Academy, the biggest overlap in membership is not between AMPAS and SAG, it’s between AMPAS and BAFTA. It’s not really a shock that BAFTA didn’t respond strongly to Killers of the Flower Moon; it tells a very American story, which historically BAFTA doesn’t embrace. But so many of those people who don’t get it are part of the American Academy, too. And AMPAS, like BAFTA, has nominated Poor Things 10 times. Inexplicably, they like it. The Golden Globes and the Critics Choice liked it. Only SAG didn’t. SAG is the outlier.
Add to all this the fact that last year Oscar honored Michelle Yeoh over Cate Blanchett, making her only the second best actress winner of all time who’s a person of color, well… The Academy may not feel motivated to do that again so soon and bring us the first ever Native American best actress. Of course, Emma Stone has won before, and that’s a mark against her. But so many times that I’ve guessed wrong (Boyhood, Boseman, etc.) it’s been in places where BAFTA showed a shift that wasn’t clear in other awards, and I didn’t believe it. This year I’m listening.
At any rate, my gut insists this award is not sewn up for Gladstone, and I feel like the facts back me up.
Blackfoot member Gladstone, in case you’re wondering, plays what her film calls a “blanket” – that is, a female member of the Osage people who wears a beautifully crafted blanket as a kind of cape over her clothes, who is coveted by white men for her oil rights. These rights also make her – and her sisters, and many like her – a target for murder by those who claim to be closest to her. With calm intelligence and a watchful spirit, her Mollie Burkhardt tries to navigate an increasingly brutal situation, and it’s her successful pleas in Washington that bring the FBI to town, saving countless lives at great personal cost. It’s a deeply lived performance, but largely a quiet one. When she’s won awards at the Golden Globes and at SAG, she’s given deeply powerful speeches about the importance of representation and ally-ship.
In contrast to Burkhart’s quiet, five-time nominee Emma Stone plays a howling newborn transplanted, Frankenstein-like, into the body of a beautiful young woman. Not only does her body raise the temperature of the men around her, she becomes quickly enamored with sexual feelings. I imagine the filmmakers enjoy the comic dissonance between her ability to understand what she’s doing (happy jumping!) and also the frankness of what they imagine one’s attitude toward sex might be if one were freed from societal restraint (and even as she grows, Bella Baxter is fully resistant to societal norms, in a way the movie posits as freeing but has no relation to the way an actual human child matures). The movie doesn’t deal with the actual ugliness of grown men consorting with a toddler; it wants the funny, and it wants to see naked Emma Stone making orgasm faces. A kind of fairy tale exhibitionism, in other words, versus historically accurate restraint. We’ll find out tonight what the largely white, largely male make up of the Academy prefers.
Five time nominee Annette Bening plays Diana Nyad, the braggadocious long distance swimmer who, as a sort of late mid-life crisis, decides to retry the one achievement that eluded her famous youth – swimming from Cuba to Florida on the open seas. She struggles through many attempts, pushing forward with a determined and inflexible will, but learns as she does the value of those who support her efforts. She learns, in other words, how to be part of a team; how to trust and depend on others, and how to recognize that it’s not her achievement alone. So sure, it’s an inspirational sports movie, but the main character (an elderly lesbian) is highly unusual for that genre. The film is fun with depth.
There was some thought earlier in the season that Bening could sneak in, a la Adrian Brody, if Stone and Gladstone split the vote enough. Bening certainly would fit the lifetime achievement model for a win, but they care about that much more with men. Oscar has no problem handing a win to a beautiful young woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) where handsome young men (Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio) need to age up. At any rate, I’d be delighted for Bening who, like Glenn Close, turns in brilliant performance after performance without ever quite being “her time,” but there’s no actual evidence this is going to happen.
German actress Sandra Huller absolutely slays as a wife suspected of murder in Anatomy of a Fall. Was she flirting with the graduate student who came to interview her? Did her husband try to passive aggressively sabotage the interview out of jealousy, and why didn’t she just ask him to turn the loud music down? Was she drinking too much? Does her alibi make any sense? Does a marriage ever really make sense to the people outside of it – the things we endure, the ones we laugh off, the things that break us? Huller was nominated as a supporting actress by BAFTA for her work in The Zone of Interest; I’ll be curious to see if we start seeing more of her in America after this very successful year.
I adore Carey Mulligan, and I’m pleased to see her pick up what I can’t believe is only her third nomination as actress Felicia Montealegre, who lived a lavendar marriage to the not-exactly-closeted and epically unfaithful Leonard Bernstein, struggling between love for him, pride in his achievements, and a frustration in being utterly suffocated by his need to take up all the air in the room (and, you know, the lying and the super-blatant cheating). She’s hopeful but brittle, and so very smart and talented. I have some issues with the film itself, but the acting, particularly Mulligan and Cooper, is sublime.
This category, I can’t even. There were so many wonderful lead performances this year! It was likely the second biggest snub of the year that Margot Robbie didn’t make this short list, but unlike Gerwig’s exclusion, I think I put this one down in part to a super competitive year. I also think it was a factor that the movie came out in the summer, so it wasn’t as present in voters minds, and Robbie was unable to support the role to the press because of the strike. And of course, so many people in the awards community have denigrated the film as just being about a toy, minimizing the massive challenge Robbie faced bringing an iconic doll not only to plausible life but to filling her with depth and unexpected emotion. I’ll say it over and over again: that movie shouldn’t have worked, and the fact that it does (to the tune of almost 1.5 billion dollars) is down to Gerwig and Robbie.
The hyper realism of Past Lives is another contrast to Barbie, but I also adored Greta Lee as a woman considering the charms of her high school sweetheart and her husband. The film is so smart, so kind to all concerned, so fascinating and so genuinely suspenseful. Unlike many of the films this year, you really walk out of it understanding why the characters have made the choices they do. You know who they are, and what they want, and it’s a joy to live with them; I highly recommend streaming the film if you haven’t yet.
Best Director
Your Winner: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
If Not Him, Then Who? Greta Gerwig (which is to say, no one)
The Losers: Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lathimos, Martin Scorcese, Juliet Triet
If I Could Vote: Christopher Nolan or Juliet Triet
Robbed of a Nomination: Greta Gerwig, Barbie, and Cord Jefferson, American Fiction (and Celine Song, Past Lives)
What can I say here that hasn’t been said? I’m sorry that 8-time nominee Christopher Nolan’s long delayed win will be shadowed by the ridiculous exclusion of Greta Gerwig, who took the world’s most unlikely topic and turned it into a four-quadrant hit that brought people to theaters for the first time since the pandemic. She was always going to lose, but she’s more present in not being nominated than she would have been if she was on the list. This year the box office proved something the Academy couldn’t wrap its mind around; well-made movies will find audiences. Studios take the wrong lessons out of a lot of things – if The Marvels failed, it must be because audiences don’t like movies about female heroes! – and their worst mistake this year was thinking there was something easy about turning a plastic doll into a funny, moving story. I’m not sure why people don’t understand the miracle of tone that made that movie work for kids and adults alike, and how it had nothing to do with cup size.
Maybe I can add something a little more nuanced to the national conversation, however. When predicting this category, I wrote that it was totally within the realm of possibility that the directors would leave out Gerwig comfortably because they could nominate Triet – and they couldn’t possibly be sexist if they nominated one woman out of five, right? To my horror, I saw a female Oscar pundit make the same argument without any irony – that indeed, Triet’s inclusion proved the men had done enough.
What I think is this. I think that Triet’s inclusion was a bit of a beard, but I also think that Gerwig’s exclusion goes down to jealousy and sour grapes as much as it does to her gender. The point of the Oscars has always been to make more money; in the last 30 years or so, the Academy has increasingly eschewed movies which have experienced box office success. This has been clear the longest in the documentary field, where films you’ve heard of (like this year’s Still or American Symphony) fail to gain nominations, as worthy but little-seen films are deliberately given a boost, but it’s ever more obvious in Picture and Director.
At any rate, what I’m trying to say is that while the Hollywood community absolutely devalued Gerwig’s work because she was a woman making an unabashedly pink movie about a “plastic doll with big boobies” (thanks, Golden Globe host who will continue to slide into obscurity), but they’re also absolutely punishing her because people liked her movie a lot. The box office was her success. The Academy was jealous of James Cameron’s success with Avatar, for example, but they respected him enough to nominate him.
Of course, no one should be surprised that the more obscure Oscar gets with its picks, the less people watch. The Academy knows that’s a huge problem – that their show is no longer the so called women’s Super Bowl – but they can’t figure out how to change it.
I’ll talk about their films below, but I’m most happy for Frenchwoman Triet, who made a fascinatingly twisty Law & Order style procedural drama and turned it into gripping, comprehensible art, despite using enough languages (French, English, German) for it not to have been submitted in International Feature. What a bad choice that was.
Best Picture:
Your Winner: Oppenheimer
How Sure Am I? 100%
If Not That, Then What? nothing
The Losers:
American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killer of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Past Lives, Poor Things, The Zone of Interest
If I Had a Vote: Oppenheimer (but also there’s Anatomy of a Fall and American Fiction)
Robbed of a Nomination: Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse
It was over long ago. Oppenheimer roared into last summer as the most popular serious movie we’ve seen in many years, and has won almost every prize with an unusual consistency. Nothing else is in the running. It’s a big movie, has a serious purpose, it’s made with originality, and it has something to say. Check, check, check and check. The fact that everyone has seen it is a nice plus for audiences.
You know, I’m generally pretty happy with this slate, now that I’ve seen them all. 7 out of 10 are probably the ones I think deserve it, and considering the variety of tastes out there, that’s not at all bad.
Oppenheimer may not be my favorite movie here – I haven’t watched it since the theater last summer and really need to in order to rank it properly – but I’ll be happy to see it win. I don’t go into the Oscars expecting my favorites to win; usually it’s enough not to hate the winners, and liking them is a huge boost. Christopher Nolan is an enormous talent who has deserved more recognition that he’s received, and I’m fine with it being his time. The movie taught me a lot about American history (and I’m a nerd for a true story), but delivered that knowledge in such in an innovative way that it kept my interest the whole time. Of course I know that’s not true for everyone, but I found it pretty captivating.
Also at the top of my list: American Fiction, with it’s skewering of white liberal guilt. Do I think this is an accurate portrait of the current publishing situation? No (as a person who reads for a living, I can tell you trauma porn is out and Black Joy is in). Does the movie have a clear grasp of what it’s like to be a professor? Nope. Do I believe it used to be true, and still has a ton to say about modern America, race and human nature? Heck yeah. Did I enjoy the heck out of it? Yes. Yes I did. Do I want to drive down to the Cape and befriend the main characters? Yes I do.
Competing for my favorite is the engrossing drama Anatomy of a Fall. What is truth? What was the truth of this moment? It’s fascinating to watch the trial and the police procedures, so different from American courtrooms and norms. You’re always wondering about that main point, though: did successful mystery writer Sandra Huller kill her (less successful writer) husband? Could his death have been an accident, or did he take him own life?
Oh, Barbie. Why didn’t the Academy see what an incredible achievement you are? I can’t get over how hard it must have been to make you so funny and accessible and moving. Oh, sure, they liked you, but not as much as they should have. That’s just Ken proving he’s not cool enough to get you. At least you have your own money, honey.
Maybe it’s because I (and half my family) work in education, but I love a good boarding school story. The Holdovers‘ grumpy teacher Paul and no-nonsense cook Mary shepherd the “holdovers” during Christmas break – that is, the students who, for a variety of reasons, can’t go home. The movie focuses on the relationship between Giamatti’s Mr. Hunham and Dominic Sessa’s brilliant but troubled student Angus Tully. Does it fall prey to the most common cliches of inspiring teacher stories? Yes it does. Does that stop it from being incredibly enjoyable and also moving? Not one little bit. Did it help that it was set in Massachusetts and featured people and places I know? Sure, but I think even if you haven’t eaten at The Chateau, it’s still going to warm your heart.
Marriage story Maestro brought us incredible acting, but I wish it gave more insight into the main characters and their relationship. It may be the downfall of the film that it hews so closely to the historical record that it can’t give us insight that biographers don’t know. What did Felicia think her marriage to Bernstein would be? When did it fall apart? Did Bernstein know Felicia was his true (platonic?) love?
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie as smart about people and the way they fall in love and choose what to do with their feelings as Past Lives. Nora and Hae were best friends as children before Nora’s family left Korea for North America, reconnected as young adults, and finally meet up in their more-settled 30s. Again, maybe it’s easier to do when you can make it up, but this is the most grown-up, self-aware film I’ve seen in ages. It manages to be clear, precise, and as mysterious as the human heart. You absolutely come out of the film understanding Hae and Nora and Arthur and their complications, what they’ve said and left unsaid, the millions of tiny interactions and ambitions and entropy that lead them all to the lives they’re living now.
The ones I don’t think deserve to be there? The Killers of the Flower Moon: it’s an important story, well-acted and meticulously researched, but the film is years too long, and though the filmmakers shifted the narrative a lot to center the story around Mollie Burkhardt rather than the FBI’s investigation, think how much more effective that would have been if they’d gone all the way, the way L.A. Confidential did – if the main character of the movie was actually Mollie and not her husband Ernest, and if we’d gone the bulk of the film without knowing who was killing the Osage? It could have been riveting.
The sexy-Frankenstein Poor Things is, truly, a sophomoric abomination of a film, with the mistaken notion that centering re-animated corpse Bella Baxter’s personhood in her genitalia makes for a freeing feminist fairy tale. From the host of consent issues (no one should be taking Taylor Swift’s “sexy baby” line that literally) to a jaw-dropping variety of chauvinistic choices the movie makes from almost the first moment, it’s clear that writer/director Lathimos’ idea of feminism is that a young woman wants to do just what he wants to see her doing. And those ideas, wow. Mark Ruffalo’s magic penis literally turns the world from black and white to color! Sexual degradation – i.e., sleeping with anyone who wants you, however they want you, whether or not you want them – is necessary for personal growth! The person who forwards this theory doesn’t bother to explain why, by the way. And Bella the would-be scientist just accepts it as truth, without evidence. It’s also an interesting quirk that almost the only men who don’t attempt to sleep with Bella are young men of color, which again seems to go back to what the white man in charge wants to see, not what Bella herself might organically want. The production design takes 19th century architecture and adds into every location anachronistic curved buildings with huge round windows and unattached columns – gee, I wonder what those are supposed to represent? There’s certainly an interesting movie to be made from the idea of a truly sexually free woman and how she confounds male expectations – but this is too firmly filmed through the male gaze to be it.
That leaves us with The Zone of Interest, a study of Nazi’s infamous “banality of evil” that took banality much too seriously; it’s a Holocaust movie about the camp commandant’s idyllic family life in a lovely home and garden just outside the camp walls. Zone feels studiously dull, which is certainly a choice that gave my husband and I a lot to talk about after we saw it. The main characters – almost always filmed at a clinical distance – are laughably entrenched in their own comfort and the intricacies of their “work” (raising children, growing a garden, murdering civilians). In the end, I’m not sure Glazer believes that real people could live with the cognitive dissonance, even though of course we know they did; I don’t think the movie ever understands them, and that would have been the gift. No one needed this film to feel superior to Nazis.
*******
So. The “little” things. Editing, cinematography and score have consistently gone to Oppenheimer, bringing its total to 7 with supporting actor, actor, director and picture, but somewhat surprisingly it’s not the mostly likely to win screenplay. I feel like screenwriting is often a consolation prize for a great film that people know won’t win anywhere else, and this year, that seems to be American Fiction in adapted and Anatomy of a Fall in original, phenomenal best picture nominees that are very unlikely to win anything else. It seems quite unlikely to take either production design or costumes, and has no shot at supporting actress, so beating The Zone of Interest (with it’s ever-present buzz of background horror) for sound is its first and best shot at surpassing Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s 7 wins. Surprisingly excellent sci fi epic The Creator seems like the best bet for Visual Effects, a truly odd category this year; I’d have been much happier seeing Oppenheimer‘s nuclear explosions in there than Napoleon‘s battles.
Barbie‘s best chance of winning an Oscar is clearly (and maddeningly) best song, and as much as I really need that movie to win something, I really really need for the gorgeous “What Was I Made For” to win, rather than the cute and silly “I’m Just Ken.” If Ken wins, I tell you, it will just be a kick in the face to the entire film – proof that the Academy really just does not get the movie at all. “I’m Just Ken” is funny, but is also about a guy complaining because his girlfriend is so much cooler than he is. Ken gets over it in the movie. Grow up and move on, Academy.
I would desperately love to see Barbie take production design and costumes, especially over the hideous and anachronistic melange that’s Poor Things inane costumes and sex organ-inspired production design, but I don’t know if it can triumph. I’d love to see Oppenheimer take it then, even though we’re just talking about very basic clothes. Heck, I’d even be happy to see Napoleon win, and that was just a bad movie.
These are the small technical categories that will make or break my Oscars. One thing that seems likely to make me happy – Ludwig Goransson’s presumed win in Score for Oppenheimer. Do I know him better from The Mandalorian and Black Panther? Absolutely. But I’m a fan, and I can’t wait to see Mr. G. get his second Oscar in three tries.
I’m not sure that there’s been a clear consensus in precursor awards between Miyazaki’s last work, The Boy and the Heron, and the innovative Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, but I think it’s maybe more likely the latter will triumph as it did at the industry’s own Annie’s. Editing, cinematography and score have consistently gone to Oppenheimer, bringing its total to 7 with supporting actor, actor, director and picture.
Signs point to the harrowing 20 Days in Maripul being the documentary feature; though there aren’t a lot of well-publicized awards for documentary shorts, the one that seems buzziest to me is The Last Repair Shop, a documentary about some of the staff who fix student instruments for the LA unified school district. It’s enormously moving and speaks to the power of art and service to change us all. What’s not to love? All five films are cool, but the L.A. story Repair Shop, The ABCs of Book Banning and The Barber of Little Rock were all phenomenal and need to be seen. They’re all less than an hour and they’re available easily on streaming, so do yourselves a favor and look them up!
This year I was only able to see one of the animated shorts, but it was truly a fantastic one – Ninety-Five Senses. I’ve heard it’s the best of the bunch and I could easily believe that, but also that it may lose to the name-dropping WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko. Of the four very cool live action shorts I was able to view, Brittany Snow’s abortion drama Red, White and Blue spoke to me the most deeply; it could lose to David Oyelowo’s searing The After, or the Academy could gift an Oscar to Wes Anderson for his whimsical piece The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
And I think that brings us to the end of my happy and grumpy rantings. All this said, I really am looking forward to tonight’s show – especially the new format for announcing the acting winners, and the song performances. I saw 39 movies for Oscar this year, and liked most of them, and learned something even from most of the ones I didn’t like. I think Jimmy Kimmel’s capable of doing a really good job, so I’m excited to see what he’s come up with. And of course there’ll be tears and beautiful clothes, and for all that I’m thankful. Happy Oscar Day!
Relatively Entertaining 