The Nominees: Call Me By Your Name, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Get Out, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best Picture is the only category to use a weighted ballot, so you rank the nominees from favorite to least. Typically you rank only five of them, but I've gone ahead and ranked all nine. So here would be my ranking of the nominees:
- The Shape of Water
- Get Out
- Call Me By Your Name
- Phantom Thread
- Lady Bird
- The Post
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
- Dunkirk
- Darkest Hour
Before I discuss the four lowest ranking films let's briefly list a few films that deserved recognition in this category: The Florida Project, Coco, Mudbound. Well, with that out of the way, let's get down to business!
Darkest Hour is generic prestige pap, all bleached out images or muddy ones with a great actor giving a serviceable role as a major historical figure. You know the type, and the fact that it's stacked up so many nomination is a bit mystifying to me, especially with that egregiously stupid scene in the subway car. Then there's Dunkirk, a film that's all cool, impressive technique with no dramatic stakes, no engaging characters, and editing that renders much of the narrative incoherent. It's glorious in bits and pieces, and the two films function as two-sides of the same coin with several of the same problems.
The Post is too rushed and clearly demanding we acknowledge its relevance to modern times too often for its own good. It's a solid entry in the careers of Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep, but that's not enough of a reason to justify handing it an award. On paper this just screamed "Oscar bait" material, and it plays out a bit like that at times.
Now we come to the hot button movie, and one that I entirely understand the backlash towards, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Great acting from the three principals manage to salvage a screenplay that is heavy on speeches that are apropos of nothing in particular, pearl clutching in its persistent need to toss out epithets, and prone to having characters change on a dime. It's a movie that's way too happy to toss off Molotov cocktails without any follow-through as to the massive amount of damage these characters have caused. That sound you hear is that of white liberals patting their own back about a movie that wants to be about big subjects without actually handling them.
Whew, now let's get to the good stuff!
Lady Bird is a charming little movie about the senior year in a teenage girl's life, and it's a funny, empathetic experience. The major relationship of the movie is that between mother/daughter, and every facet of that massively complicated subject matter is addressed head-on. It helps that director/writer Greta Gerwig got a cast of up-and-comers, stage veterans, and character actors to deliver this material. It's perhaps too slight for the big prize, but it's perked my attention to what Gerwig's next project will be.
Phantom Thread is one of three romances nominated for the big prize, and each of them take that huge subject from a different vantage point. Phantom is all remote and withholding gothic romance between a great artist and a waitress. Orbiting around is his sister, a woman that organizes his life seemingly down to the millisecond and makes sure it never veers off its predetermined course. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of cinema's current geniuses, and Phantom Thread is another oblique, meticulous masterpiece from him.
While Call Me By Your Name is all about the euphoria and agony of first love. The hunger and terror of lust is written all over Elio's face from the first moment he glimpses Oliver, and the two of them awkwardly dance around each other before crashing head-first into a passionate affair with a clear end date. Elio's heartbreak is profound, and one gathers the sense that he'll never fully recover from it. Much like the book, the film moved me in its exacting nature of youthful desire gaining knowledge and hurts that are perhaps too large to properly put into context at the moment. We all have our Olivers.
Get Out is something of a shock to see here. Not because it's undeserving, it very much is and I'm happy to see it, but because it's so rare for the Academy to acknowledge horror and films released earlier in the year for the top prize. Praise be to first-time director Jordan Peele for tackling some powder-keg topics with a combination of smartly delivered black humor, psychological terror, and a steady drip-drip-drip of escalating horrors. Get Out isn't just about the zeitgeist, but a work that touches way back into America's shameful past, present, and (probable) future.
I alternated between Get Out and The Shape of Water for number one, but there was just something about Guillermo del Toro's old-fashioned romance that stuck with me long after seeing it. Imagine, if you will, Creature from the Black Lagoon enacted as though it were Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. You're somewhere in the ballpark of approaching the major accomplishment del Toro created here. It plays like a romantic drama from the studio-era, no surprise given the persistent presence of old Hollywood films littered throughout and a dream sequence where Sally Hawkins and her aquatic god make like Fred and Ginger. It's an oddball story where Michael Shannon's white lawman is the villain, and the ragtag group of heroes are a black woman, a gay man, and a mute woman. Guillermo del Toro is asking us to empathize with the "other" in society. Add in plenty of bits from mermaid folklore and you've got a film that I bought all in from the opening frames until the final kiss.
The Nominees: Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk), Jordan Peele (Get Out), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water)
Well, it's about damn time that Christopher Nolan got a nomination in this category, but it's a damn shame that it's for his least interesting and personal film to date. Hell, I thought he brought more personality and ideas to his Batman films than I did Dunkirk. Figures he'd get in for a film that's his most emotionally distant and perfunctory.
But praise be to the other four nominees! What an astounding group this one, with two actors-turned-directors (Gerwig, Peele) that turned in some of 2017's best films, and two modern masters operating at the top of their craft (Anderson, del Toro). I fully admit my choice in this category has a lot to do with fanboyism and a general sense of glee in watching del Toro finally get his props. You know what? The Shape of Water is also a damn fine film, another modern fairy tale populated by sympathetic monsters, monstrous humans, and an upending of conventions. He deserves it, dammit.
The Nominees: Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name), Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq.)
After turning in one of the greatest performances of his career in Fences, Denzel Washington returns to this year's line-up. Except his work in this film in inferior and in one of the worst films nominated this year. He's perfectly fine in a film that's incapable of supporting an actor of his caliber, and this feels less like nominating based being deserving and more like nominating because it's Denzel Washington.
A similar problem occurs with Gary Oldman, the presumed winner of this thing from the moment pictures and trailers dropped of him in-character as Winston Churchill. Playing a living figurehead, especially one that was as explosive and iconic as Churchill, is catnip to the Academy, and Oldman's win here feels a bit like leaning in towards that (occasionally) bad habit. He's buried underneath layers of fat makeup and unrecognizable, so there's also that going for it, but you do begin to question if his dominance in this year's actor field is a case of worthy performance or voters getting the makeup and spittle confused with great acting. Oh, and he's a long-time actor without an Oscar, so there's a factor of "he's due" at play here. Frankly, he was much better and more deserving in his prior Oscar nomination, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
The two Daniels, Day-Lewis and Kaluuya, give exhaustively committed performances. We've come to expect that kind of thing from Day-Lewis, and he's restrained here to the point where it's hard to remember that he's the same actor from There Will Be Blood and Gangs of New York. As far as swan song's go, what a final performance this one is! But it's Kaluuya that's the real cinematic find. A lot of his performance is reactive, subtle shifts in his eyes or body language, and he's captivating to watch. He's got bigger, better performances in him, and if he keeps delivering at this level he'll win one of these suckers eventually. I look forward to where else he's going to go as an actor.
But the real "star is born" performance for me was Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name. Chalamet's work is equally subtle, look at the mixture of anxiety and desire playing across his face as he watches Armie Hammer's Oliver dance to the Psychedelic Furs. His performance continues on in this way as his voice or body language gives away his sub-conscious desires and thoughts while his exterior is trying to remain placid. Then there's that knockout of an ending scene where he sits in front of the fireplace and absorbs the heartbreak he's just received and Chalamet registers the cyclical nature of it all over his face while the world mundanely continues on behind him.
The Nominees: Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water), France McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Margot Robbie (I, Tonya), Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird), Meryl Streep (The Post)
What a stacked lineup this one is! When the weakest choice is Meryl Streep then you know this was a competitive year. Not only that, but it was Streep in a performance that didn't play out like one of the onerous prestige performance that either dominate all else or come across as gorgons of over-acting. The other four deliver performances that range from career-best to game-changing.
Margot Robbie displays the full scope of her talents: dark comedy, dramatic pathos in passages of domestic abuse, and a commitment to accents and going dark and ugly for her art. She's been a charismatic actress in a variety of other films, and now she's made her bid for serious respect and delivered the goods. It's a game-changing role for her.
While Sally Hawkins and Frances McDormand both deliver career-best work. Hawkins and McDormand are old pros and know a great opportunity when they see one. Hawkins delivers an emotive and dreamy performance with no dialog, and her largely pantomimed work displays a talent for physical acting, maybe even comedy, that has largely gone untapped up until now. In any other year she'd zip to the front of the pack. And McDormand commands the screen even when the script goes off the rail and has her character commit actions that have no consequences. None of the actors can overcome Three Billboards script problems and that handicaps them for me.
Which leaves us with Saoirse Ronan, far away from both Briony in Atonement and her Irish immigrant in Brooklyn. Lady Bird gives her a bratty, intelligent, fully fleshed-out teenager to play. She's figuring her life's ambitions out as she goes along, drops some of her delusions, and grows into the person she will eventually become. There's also a noticable shift in Ronan's carriage as if she's growing into her gangly body. She's a young actress that's proving to be a dynamo and one of the best of her generation with a range that's envious.
The Nominees: Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project), Woody Harrelson (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water), Christopher Plummer (All the Money in the World), Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)
First of all, where are Michael Stulhbarg, Armie Hammer, Jason Mitchell, Bradley Whitford, or Ray Romano. I know that Romano probably raised several eyebrows while reading it, but I thought he was equally wonderful as Holly Hunter in The Big Sick. It's a pipe dream more than anything, I'm aware of this.
Look, Christopher Plummer is only here because he erased Kevin Spacey at the last minute and managed to deliver a uniformly competent performance in the process. All the Money in the World traffics in his cinematic history and weight to underscore his presence instead of working to invest it with its own significance. Hell, Plummer isn't even the best performance in this film -- what's up Michelle Williams.
Whereas Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, and Richard Jenkins are all about even for me. Uniformly solid and wonderfully character actors getting their chances with meaty material, it's the stuff this category was made for. Rockwell is the favorite to win, but the 180 his character takes is confusing and he can't quite make the abrupt transition work. Not entirely a knock against him, but it is something that hinders my enthusiasm for the part.
But this one was always for Willem Dafoe as far as I am concerned. The Florida Project is a wonderful little movie, and Dafoe gets a low-watt part of a Father Goose circling around the denizens of a cheap motel in the shadow of Disney World. His compassion and protectiveness, his weariness and bone-deep ache simmer throughout as her goes about performing his normal duties. He is a man that's decent that feels forged in hardships and personal pain and tragedy. Dafoe is the through-line of The Florida Project, the very definition of a film's supporting role being it's life support.
The Nominees: Mary J. Blige (Mudbound), Allison Janney (I, Tonya), Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread), Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird), Octavia Spencer (The Shape of Water)
The strongest batch of nominees in any of the four acting categories is this one. First, there's the surprise that is Mary J. Blige's performance in Mudbound. Not only is she unrecognizable at first, but she displays a talent that has hitherto gone untapped by any of her prior acting roles. Color me pleasantly surprised by her work, her getting in, and how much joy it brought me to see these two things.
While Octavia Spencer, uniformly excellent in The Shape of Water and the second black actress to rack up three nominations after Viola Davis, and Lesley Manville, detached, disturbing, and controlling in her still performance in Phantom Thread, are perennially deserving actors, so seeing them here feels right. Manville was passed due for a nomination, and her work in Phantom Thread is so intricate and precise that she nearly dominates Day-Lewis, that's no small feat.
But like everyone else, Supporting Actress really boils down to two variations of matronly figures. Allison Janney is a treasure of an actress, always bringing something extra to every role and capable of great versatility. I, Tonya asks her to play the same small handful of notes over and over again, and she does so masterfully. This is the sight of an actor operating at the top of their craft and with the smarts to know when to go for a laugh that's unexpected or to go full-tilt villainous when we think we're getting a redemption. I ain't mad about her win.
But it was Laurie Metcalf's overworked mother in Lady Bird that touched me the most. While Janney gets a small handful of notes to play with her motherly role, Metcalf gets an entire orchestration. She's equally masterful here, and injects every unintentionally passive-aggressive verbal dig come from an understandable place of love, frustration, and exhaustion. It's not as flashy of a role, but she feels and operates like a real person. If you only know Metcalf from Roseanne, then prepare for a huge surprise as she reaches deep into her soul and makes a recognizably human figure appear on the screen.
The Nominees: Call Me By Your Name, The Disaster Artist, Logan, Molly's Game, Mudbound
Let's get the red-headed step-child out of the way first, and also congratulate Logan on breaking through a huge roadblock for comic book films by getting a major nomination in one of the "above the line" categories. It's one of a small group to make it beyond the tech categories, and it's the first live-action superhero film to get a screenplay nomination. Frankly, the script's somber, elegiac neo-Western riff on the character was a genre-expanding piece of crackerjack pulp entertainment, and one of the better comic book films to come out in a while. I love that it was nominated, and that's basically what it will have to settle for.
Far more conventional are the likes of Molly's Game, Aaron Sorkin on full-blast for over two hours, and The Disaster Artist, a satiric/loving portrait of a Hollywood fringe player and star vanity project. Neither one of them deserve to win, and I'm slightly baffled as to how Molly's Game even ended up here other than to venture that the Academy's writer's branch REALLY loves Sorkin. Well, that makes one of us.
Mudbound was one of my favorite movies of last year, and it found a way to make the different narrators in the novel work on the big screen. It deftly handled its various characters by allowing each of them agency and chances to explain/explore their psyche right along with us. We get to know them, get to love them, and root for them to survive in odds that increasingly appear insurmountable or like outside agents are ensuring their defeat.
But Call Me By Your Name took a great novel, trimmed the fat, played up the best aspects, and managed to make it all flow smoothly. It's a remarkable achievement in editorial choices and adaption from a great cinematic artist getting a golden period love-fest, James Ivory. Not only is he due for some recognition, but he earned it by writing one hell of a script.
The Nominees: The Big Sick, Get Out, Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Jordan Peele come on down, you're the recipient of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar! This is my dream anyway. His script is a smart, terrifying, occasionally funny handling of America's race problem, one that tackles not only #BlackLivesMatter but the ever-present scars of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. There are other great scripts in this bunch, but none of them contain as much mastery or intelligence, as much primal terror or twisted humor as Get Out.
There's only one right option here, despite The Big Sick's charming romantic comedy interrupted scenario, Lady Bird's delicate handling of the complications of mother/daughter relationships, and The Shape of Water's modern fairy tale between a river god and a woman that's heavily implied to be a water nymph. The screenplay categories were a bit scattershot this year, but the original's were four strong ones and one that's the worst thing about its movie.
The Nominees: The Boss Baby, The Breadwinner, Coco, Ferdinand, Loving Vincent
Normally a category I can depend on for providing a lively sample of uniformly solid works over the past few years, this year's crop of animated films was thoroughly disappointing. Three out of the five films range from aggressively terrible to unsatisfactory. Loving Vincent was a unique film theory, a series of beautifully rendered images that piggyback off of a great artist's work, in search of a compelling story. Ferdinand is as generic as it can get as it takes a slim children's story and builds upon it with unnecessary pop culture references and the sight of barnyard animals twerking, break-dancing, and dabbing. Then there's The Boss Baby, probably the worst film nominated for an Oscar this year with a premise that's borderline nihilistic, confused messaging, and a two word premise that's been stretched improbably to 97 minutes.
Cartoon Saloon continues to impress after the one-two punch of The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea with their latest film, The Breadwinner. It must be acknowledged that the film has a narrative problem, that is for a film that's all about the healing, transformative power of a story, The Breadwinner is messiest at this level. The story-within-a-story disrupts the flow and is too painfully obvious for its own good, yet the animation and main character, Parvana, keep your interest. Parvana is a real person with flaws, dreams, goals, and she's a protagonist that you want to root for and watch succeed.
Hands down the best film in this category is Coco. Disney and Pixar's last original film before a deluge of sequels and spinoffs come fast and loose, Coco is a perfect little movie about family, forgiveness, and the power of art to harm or heal. Then there's the vast array of vibrant images and imaginative creatures and locations that the story introduces us to, not to mention a couple of jubilant and memorable songs. Everything about Coco works, and it made me incredibly happy to see an animated family that resembled my own taking the lead in one of these films, finally.
Honestly, it feels almost cruel to even mention any other nominees in this category as Coco is so far ahead of the pack that three of the others feel like randomly assembled placeholders for its inevitable victory.
Well, there you go. My choices for what would win at the 90th Academy Awards if I was a member. Hope you enjoyed reading this. See you next year!
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