95th Academy Awards: If I Had a Ballot

Episode XCV
THE ACADEMY AWARDS

CHAOS REIGNS!

It has been YEARS since the precursors have all gone their own way in awarding various performances/films with little to no consensus favorites winning in the acting categories, for instance. To wit, this is the first time in years that no one performance has steamrolled through the Globes, Critics Choice, BAFTA, SAG, and Oscar. If there is any consensus this year it is solely in picture, which feels like the securest thing going into the evening this year.

Call me crazy, but I like the prolonged Oscar season for purely selfish reasons: it gives me time to space out my viewing of the nominated films across a month-and-a-half instead a mad rush to get it all done. Of course, that does mean that feel good pieces of fluff can generate power to take down artistic triumphs, but that has always been the danger of this voting body.

What can I say? I’m addicted to the glamour of it all. Or as Liza Minnelli once sang at the show, “Oscar – everybody loves an Oscar!”

In looking at the crop this year, I must say it falls squarely in the largely good category. This is not always the case, but it is especially a sigh of relief that the Academy seemed to exhibit large amounts of good taste. And I think a lot of the credit goes to the diversifying voting body and international members who brought in more outré choices and grassroots campaigns/passion upending bigger names.

Of course, that tossed the Academy into an internal review process, but since when has boldly pushing for awards nominations and wins been seen as vulgar in the eyes of this voting body? How quickly they forget the times of the studio era, Miramix in the 1990s and 2000s, and various actors near breathless squeals of delight as they collected precursors on their way to the main stage. (Or the ones who negged their way into the “Academy Award winner” honorific.) The Oscars have always had a history of sketchy politics, luck, and “who you know” mystique to them.

For the first time in forever the Oscar season has been, dare I say it, exciting. (And film Twitter continues to be exhausting and filled with bad faith.)

PICTURE
The Nominees: All Quiet on the Western Front; Avatar: The Way of Water; The Banshees of Inisherin; Elvis; Everything Everywhere All at Once; The Fabelmans; Tár; Top Gun: Maverick; Triangle of Sadness; Women Talking

The nominees are ranked in a preferential ballot. Here is how I would rank the nominees:

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
2. Tár
3. Banshees of Inisherin
4. The Fabelmans
5. Women Talking
6. Triangle of Sadness
7. All Quiet on the Western Front
8. Elvis
9. Top Gun: Maverick
10. Avatar: The Way of Water

I was no fan of Avatar, so it should come as no shock that I am also not a fan of Avatar: The Way of Water. At least there is no pronounced “white savior” trope this time, but the problems I had with James Cameron’s megalomaniac previous outing recur here: thinly written characters, dull plot, self-indulgent runtime all wrapped up in some truly stunning visual spectacle. I will say this for it, I praise Cameron for consistently lighting and blocking his spectacle in a manner that is clear to read, understand, and see where everything is and what is going on. But I mostly rolled my eyes and checked the clock for how much was left to get through as retcons piled up and thinly sketched story loudly proclaimed its good liberal politics. To borrow an infamous bit of shade from a departed legend: great special effects, beautiful whales.

You know, the original Top Gun was never my cup of tea, so I approached having to watch this long-delayed sequel with a certain amount of indifference. But Top Gun: Maverick does right by the “resurrecting IP decades later” phenomenon by building from the first film and making us understand and care about the new crop of torchbearers. Yes, plenty of it is also a Tom Cruise star vehicle complete with everything that entails (both good and bad), but you cannot claim that the movie is anything other than kinetically engaging piece of jingoism and homoeroticism, just like its Reagan-era predecessor. So much of the film is solidly made popcorn entertainment that when Val Kilmer’s cameo comes around it carries with it an emotional resonance that makes the rest of the film seem by-the-numbers in comparison.

Baz Luhrmann’s frenzied glimpse into the life and legacy of Elvis Presley, a figure whose posthumous presence has outshined his contributions and status as a rebellious figure, is a lot of movie. One of pop cinema’s most earnest maximalists, Luhrmann presents a lot of ideas about Presley, many of them great and worth exploring, but strings them together in a “blink and miss it” manner. Tying it all together is Austin Butler’s truly great performance, one that manages to overcome the show biz biopic blandness that the script frequently sinks into. It is a shame that Tom Hanks’ (uhh) unique performance as Colonel Tom Parker is the anchoring narrator as it keeps its subject at a distance. Still, Luhrmann’s ideas about blues, country, and early rock music as in communion and serving a similar function as hip-hop and electronic pop does today is smart, intriguing, and orients Elvis Presley on an artistic continuum that points straight to our present day.

On one hand, All Quiet on the Western Front is an immaculately made adaptation of a timeless novel, and on the other, it is a bit overly long and a bit too artfully designed as nary a bit of mud is not carefully considered or applied to the soldiers faces. The folding in of historical figures and events warps the final act and does not entirely successfully pull all the various threads together. (Maybe the original book ending should have stayed, after all.) If you want to watch a WWI movie that juxtaposes the trenches against the leaders in massive rooms making life-or-death decisions from safety and opulence, then watch Paths of Glory. Other films have made the anti-war message this one is making, and I am not entirely sure this one is adding anything new, but it is beautifully crafted, engrossing, disturbing, and ultimately moving.

Triangle of Sadness is a film that I am largely positive on even when it deviates into mixed or muddled satirical areas. Yes, it is easy to laugh at these rich and oblivious assholes, and root for the exploited underclass that serves them, but the film gives the underclass the short end of character development. Still, there is a lot to admire here – Dolly De Leon’s commanding performance in the third act, Harris Dickinson finding the vulnerability in his pretty boy model, Ruben Östlund’s bravura set pieces such as the one where the rich guests become violently ill during a storm at sea, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Bravo to the Academy’s younger/international block of voters from continually nominating stuff like this.

104 minutes of Mennonite women discussing how to react and respond to the pervasive sexual assaults they have had to endure in a barn on paper does not sound entirely enthralling, I understand. Women Talking was still one of the most engrossing movies, both intellectually and emotionally, I have watched in some time. Actor-cum-director Sarah Polley has such a deft hand with generating devastating performances from her actors that I am of two minds about the absolute whiffing of their presence in the individual fields. On one hand, who do you signal out amongst the women, and on the other, nothing for Ben Whishaw, the lone man who delivers another in his sensitive, delicately felt and wrought creations, is just so strange. But yes, what you have heard about the color grading in this movie is true, and while I did eventually get used to it, I did not enjoy it. It gets docked a few points for that choice since you cannot spell cinema without cinematography.

The Fabelmans is the vision of one of modern area’s great directors painting in his own mythology by detailing the origins of his love for cinema and many of his obsessive themes. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano have the unenviable task of playing his parents right in front of him, and Gabriel LaBelle as the teenage auteur-in-the-making gives a performance that makes me wish it had landed in the awards conversation in a more profound way than it ended up. Yes, he is that good. Add in vibrant bit parts from the likes Jeannie Berlin, Judd Hirsch, and David Lynch and it all adds up to a nostalgic “print the legend” origin story. Beautiful, charming, sentimental, and a moving exploration of family, art, science, and the ways in which they combine or fracture, The Fabelmans is one I will be thinking about for a while.

Banshees of Inisherin takes a fairly mundane occurrence – a falling out of a friendship – and spins it off into a potent fable about the Irish Civil War in ways that are surprising. Colm and Pádraic’s near juvenile conflict swirls and expands to eventually include everyone else in their little town and becomes increasingly violent. McDonagh reunites two of his repeatedly used players, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, and taps into their chemistry, and offscreen friendship, for potent results, then brings in Kerry Condon, another repeat player, and Barry Keoghan into the mix. It all adds up to an expansive yarn that combines elements that flirt with mythology, history, and personal relationships into a heady brew. It wouldn’t seem out of place if an Irish bloke regaled this story to you over a Guinness in a pub.

Somehow 158 minutes managed to zip by in Tár, a slow burn that rewards its audience patience and engagement by carefully planting seeds and images and explaining them later. It is a film that seemingly demands repeat viewings to see how it so interestingly resembles a symphonic composition within itself. Plus, it just absorbs with its carefully detailed portrait of an asshole of the high art world by mixing elements of comedy (the opening monologue is a great parodic bit of the self-fellatio involved in New Yorker interviews/profiles) and bristly dramatics (her evisceration of the students during a Julliard scene has stuck with me). We do not root for her downfall but rather wince as we watch her repeatedly and needlessly cause incidental self-harm in her hubristic decisions. Her opening speech about why she likes and how she approaches conducting an orchestra is punctuated by a climax which made me laugh at the majesty of its karmic punishment.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a gonzo experience that bounces off a metric ton of ideas and images yet somehow still manages to cohere into a singular vision. Praise be to the cast and directors for juggling all those metaphoric balls as it provided a unique, singular theatrical experience that I adored. The quotidian becomes a playground in short order as an IRS audit, the immigrant experience, the generational divide, and familial dynamics become the stuff of universe saving fantasy. Into the multiverse goes Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh in the role of her career) to repair the fraught relationships with her husband (Ke Huy Quan) and daughter (Stephanie Hsu) with pitstops along the way into universes where she is a chef with a coworker controlled by a talking racoon, a kung-fu movie star, and one where she is in a lesbian relationship and has hot dog fingers. A heady mixture that enthralls, exhausts, humors, and moves you in equal measure.

 

DIRECTOR
The Nominees: Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin); The Daniels (Everything Everywhere All at Once); Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans); Todd Field (Tár); Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness)

Ruben Östlund is a prime example of the new Academy membership’s penchant for holding a spot for the arthouse continually in this category. I love them and their fanatical devotion to slotting someone like Östlund against industry titans like Spielberg. Having said that, Östlund’s artistic point-of-view largely works for me but when it doesn’t it is a grand miss. Still, I admire his commitment to swinging big. When he manages to make it hit, it is truly a vision to behold.

What a gift the career of Steven Spielberg is for us all. Look at how he went from revamping West Side Story to releasing this deeply personal bit of self-mythology within a year of each other. If Hollywood is a gigantic train set for overgrown children, then here is a maestro making the most dazzling model train set you’ve ever seen. I am also a big fan of the final shot that provides both a resounding chuckle and acknowledgment to one of his cinematic forefathers, John Ford. If so much of Spielberg’s career is an examination of broken families, and a lot of it is, then The Fabelmans is a kinder, gentler vision of understanding and empathy towards his parents from the other side of life.

Ok, Martin McDonagh, maybe I had a mixed/negative reaction to Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri but I think you have won me over with this one. A prolonged allegory about the Irish Civil War could have easily slipped into various traps yet they all feel avoided here as the overall tone is one of tragicomedy. Every character manages to feel like they have an inner life and reactions to the core conflict in authentic ways. It takes a steady hand to keep both the comedy and tragedy in sync and the various symbolic elements as an organic presence within the narrative and world of the film. He manages to do that far more successfully than the “hot button” issues of Three Billboards. Maybe I need to go back and watch In Bruges.

Tár was a delightful surprise for me. Todd Field’s previous films have not been works that I have vibed with. Little Children was particularly groan-worthy despite a great performance from Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson being so ridiculously hot it was nearly painful. But here I was absorbed into this mordant story of Lydia Tár, an EGOT composer/conductor who exhibits the same kind of bad male behavior with a glee that makes it seem like she believes it is her right to bully as she was bullied and misuse her position and power. Field changes tempo and mood like well, a conductor with a precision that is remarkable. He can create moments of humor, tension, or an expansive mood that swirls around continually. I loved how he left moments in that felt extraneous to the narrative proper but helped establish or reenforce character and/or the emotion of the piece.

Spielberg said that the Daniels did awesome work with Everything Everywhere All at Once, and all I can say is game recognizes game. If one of cinema’s towering monuments is going to baton pass in that manner, who are we to argue against it? The proof of his statement is in the completed film which must wrangle kinetic editing, various universes, multiple versions of the same characters, and a lot of ideas into a coherent whole. They pull that trick off and made a marvel of a film, a piece of art that lingers in the mind long after it ends.

 

ACTOR
The Nominees: Austin Butler (Elvis); Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin); Brendan Fraser (The Whale); Paul Mescal (Aftersun); Bill Nighy (Living)

The years have not been entirely kind to Elvis Presley as a pop cultural artifact as they have distilled him down to a lip snarl, hip thrust, and mumbled speaking voice. The threat of performing a caricature was tremendous, yet Austin Butler not only finds the “real” in Baz Luhrmann’s artifice, but also situates the vulnerability and soul of the hillbilly mama’s boy in the venerated icon. Butler often manages to flip between awkward inexperience before taking the stage to seeming like a man possessed of sexual swagger and confidence. These schisms are evident throughout his performance as he traces Presley’s youthful rock star straight through to bloated and remote demigod.

The Whale is a tough sit as the script and acting performances from Brendan Fraser and Hong Chau feel at odds with Darren Aronofsky’s visceral, cynical direction. At times the script’s leaden symbolism, ported over without much adaptation from the stage play, is too much, but Fraser manages to routinely find the expressive, empathetic heart of the material. He is in service of a more humane reading of the character and his plight than the film around him. Fraser is clearly burrowing into the material and trying to demonstrate to us where these indulgences and vices are coming from, where this urge to forsake help and kill himself originate.

Paul Mescal’s nearly emotionally opaque work in Aftersun as the film is a quiet storm. He slowly builds up the emotional maelstrom swirling within his young father in bits and pieces, never overdoing it when a pained smile or something flashing behind the eyes would do instead. His emotional calibration and acuity with lacing mundane things with something more are a sign of even greater things to come. I haven’t stopped thinking about the scene where he is brushing his teeth while talking to his daughter in the next room. His voice takes a jolly cadence while his eyes are pained, and then he spits on the mirror. The near violence of the act combined with the happy-go-lucky intonations is a jarring contrast. I can’t wait to watch this guy develop more if he is already capable of this.

How has Bill Nighy appeared in that many movies that managed to land on Oscar’s radar while never getting close to a nomination before? That is wild to me. Well, the universe has righted itself as he garnered his first nomination for Living, and it is well earned. He plays a largely unremarkable stiff upper-lipped British gentlemen whose life gets unmoored by a terminal cancer diagnosis. We spend so much time with him that we cannot help but find his overall niceness and gentleness lovable. Nighy makes a meal of the part while playing it all on an even keel. I am quite fond of his drunkenly singing “The Rowan Tree,” a song that repeats in a devastating scene of him in a swing on the playground he made as a last hurrah for his time as a public servant, and the numerous confession scenes he has with Aimee Lou Wood’s Mrs. Harris, a former colleague turned confidant.

Colin Farrell in cozy sweaters and moving his eyebrows around like they have a life of their own is everything I didn’t know I needed for an Oscar winner. Martin McDonagh gives his muse a ridiculously plum role that allows him to demonstrate his flair with comedy but also his ability to sustain your attention and the camera in silence while communicating so much. Farrell expertly takes us on the journey from the dull but decent Pádraic in the beginning to dark avenger in the finale and makes it all believable and understandable. Yet again, he has been so great in so many films, and so many varied kinds of parts, that it is wild to me that this is his first nomination, but it is deserved. I wasn’t very far into the movie when I went, “oh, I’d vote for him in a heartbeat.” The ending only reinforced my urge to hurl an Oscar at him through the screen.   

 

ACTRESS
The Nominees: Cate Blanchett (Tár); Ana de Armas (Blonde); Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie); Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans); Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

It is nice to see an actress normally so at home in quiet, emotionally devastating independent films do something looser and more eccentric. Granted, I love Michelle Williams in stuff like Blue Valentine where her gifts for minute, highly specified character work gets a chance to shine, but there is something charming about watching her shake loose as Spielberg’s mother. A lot can be written about the big emotional scenes, but I loved most a scene where we watch her realization that her son knows about her affair with a family friend. She climbs into his closet and watches the discarded bits of footage from a home movie and silently, slowly loses her smile as panic, fear, and heartache come rushing up to the surface.

Ignoring the giant controversy around this nomination for a second to just focus in on Andrea Riseborough’s performance is hard. It is nearly impossible to separate To Leslie from the gaming of the system that led to this surprise nomination. Not that Riseborough hasn’t been deserving of the honor for a while as she is one of our truly chameleonic actresses currently working, but To Leslie feels like a Sundance 101 film which was made to garner the lead actress prestige/nominations/awards. Riseborough gives her all to the role (accent, alcoholic despair, self-destructive behavior, sobriety redemption) and manages to make a completely routine plot semi-compelling in the process.

Blonde is an atrocious three-hour slog of misery porn which views Marilyn Monroe as a punching bag and inevitable corpse, meanwhile Ana de Armas clearly had a more fully rounded and realized idea of how she wanted to portray the character. She deserved so much better. Her intensity, vulnerability, and emotional range in the part is wide, and a series of sequences have stuck with me including a particularly intense audition and a private dinner with Joe DiMaggio. Ignoring the demerits of the rest of the film, I cannot say I am upset about de Armas’ nomination here.

I responded to a tweet once asking why Cate Blanchett was such a good actress, and I stated it was because she was the love child of Gena Rowlands and Glenda Jackson with an enviable range. Tár only underscores my point. If this film feels like an escapee from the New Hollywood period where female antiheroines were the norm, then it was even easier to imagine the likes of Jackson, Rowlands, or Faye Dunaway delivering a comparable magnum opus. Blanchett delivers a roiling, clenching performance of a person so in love with their own pretentions, skills, and social position that they do not realize the machinations in place to cosmically slap them down. Every few years we see rapturous press detailing X performance as the definitive one of her career, and that happened again this year and it will probably happen again in a few years. This just underscores that she is one of our greatest working actresses.  

Allow me to say something controversial here, but a lot of the other nominees could successfully takeover the parts for each other, except for what Michelle Yeoh is doing in Everything Everywhere All at Once. We know Michelle Yeoh’s dancer grace, poise, and acting talents from 40+ years of work, so to see her convincingly play Evelyn, a woman amid a huge crisis of which an IRS audit is merely symbolic of the rest, and shed all of that is to see an actress use her decades of skills to grand effect. Her look of bewilderment as she executes complicated fight choreography is but one tiny detail in a performance tailor made for her and she delivers. From dowdy laundromat owner to glamorous movie, from passive-aggressive wife and mother to transformed healer, she nails every nuance throughout a film built entirely around her. Without her central performance, the film wouldn’t work.

 

SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Nominees: Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin); Brian Tyree Henry (Causeway); Judd Hirsch (The Fabelmans); Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin); Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Call me crazy but as much as I enjoyed Judd Hirsch’s glorified cameo, a bit of scenery chewing where a veteran actor can walk in, steal the film, then exit while leaving a lasting impression, I completed my viewing of The Fabelmans in awe of Paul Dano’s muted, supportive, long-suffering father figure more. Hirsch’s great-uncle is a colorful blast, and it is easy to see why his shirt tearing, shiva sitting elder walked away with a nomination. After all, not only did he get to do a lot in a short time, but he also got to elucidate on the film’s wider themes as well.

Barry Keoghan being a weird, twitchy little guy in an arthouse film feels like a repeated occurrence in cinema lately, and I have liked him better in other films, like The Green Knight. I found his Dominic a little too mannered in his chipper exterior. Yet I am not mad about this nomination even if the performance didn’t vibe with me as Keoghan seems primed for a long, varied, and interesting career. This nomination feels like a “welcome to the club” signifier and the potential first of many.  

You know what I love about Brian Tyree Henry’s nomination? That it felt like it was a longtime building up to this point where he finally got it after years of turning in solid work in both mainstream (Eternals) and arthouse (If Beale Street Could Talk) films. Causeway is such a minor note of a movie that all its success seemingly rests on the performances, and in that capacity, it is a small-scale knockout. His chemistry with Jennifer Lawrence turns many scenes of mundane activities into enthralling interpersonal drama. I’m also happy about this nomination because he doesn’t need to scream and shout but rather do carefully considered character work to get the point across, and too often Oscar gives into the most acting instead of the best acting.

Brendan Gleeson’s first nomination – what a wild sentence to write for a man who has been in so many great movies and been great in them. It took until 2023 for Gleeson to become an Academy Award nominee. I swear, sometimes this voting body takes for granted our most welcome and interesting character actors, but getting I am into the meat-and-potatoes of this performance going forward. Gleeson’s existential crisis as a man who is closer to the end of his life and reevaluating it all, sometimes with violent consequences. The dourness and myopic squabbling drag seemingly the entire community into its orbit and provides a chance for Gleeson to demonstrate his chops with comedy, drama, and complicated moods that orbit somewhere between the two.

I just really love what Ke Huy Quan is doing throughout Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not only does he play the peacekeeper husband and father, but the skilled martial artist who trains a bewildered Evelyn in the dynamics of universe jumping (and the plot exposition). Like many a millennial, I grew up watching him as Data and Short Round on beat-up VHS tapes so to see him return in such a big way and anchor the film with heart, warmth, and tremendous humor was a reminder of the precociously talented child actor that Hollywood didn’t know what to do with as he aged. Not only has he returned in a big way, but he reminded us all of just what we missed while he was gone. 

 

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Nominees: Angela Bassett (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever); Hong Chau (The Whale); Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin); Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once); Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Good for Jamie Lee Curtis for finally securing an Oscar nomination after decades in the business, but I feel like this spot should have gone to Dolly De Leon in Triangle of Sadness or Nina Hoss in Tár. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Curtis and her comedic chops a lot in this part, from the wig to the disheveled appearance to the broad accent, but is it enough to give her an Oscar nomination? Eh, maybe not. But I do find myself thinking about the tenderness and sisterhood she expresses with Yeoh in the scene discussing their respective divorces.

If the vessel through which Angela Bassett finally become “Academy Award winner Angela Bassett” is a sequel in the ever-sprawling MCU franchise, I am at peace with that. Granted, I think she has done much stronger work elsewhere in her career, and found this performance to be a reliably strong bit of Angela Bassett doing what she does well, but this over the likes of others competing for that spot? Strange. But she does bring a tremendous amount of soul and mourning to numerous quiet scenes like where she takes Shuri out into the bush and describes feeling T’Challa on the wind.

Hong Chau is the prickly yin to Fraser’s martyrdom yang. She plays his best friend, caregiver, and enabler often alternating between spouting off her frustrations then giving in to his self-destructive wants within the same scene. Her best scene is probably one where she stares down Ty Simpkins’ missionary and explains the ties that bind her to Charlie and to Simpkins’ alleged denomination. It has felt like she was on the cusp of an Oscar nomination for a few years now, so it is nice to see her finally snag one after years of good work across various projects.

After discovering Stephanie Hsu in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I was not surprised to see what a consummate actress she was, but I was shocked by her range as a performer here. She is tasked with doing A LOT in playing multiple versions of the same character and making sure the differences between the universes are noticeable. She must not only play the depressive real-world version of Joy, but the nihilistic yet haute couture villainous Jobu Tupaki and manage to not only keep them separate but demonstrate pieces of personality that carryover between the variants. A nearly impossible task for any actor but one that she traverses with a tremendous amount of skill, heart, humor, and depth.

Kerry Condon is perhaps the only sane person within the insular world of the Banshees of Inisherin as she calls out every absurdity and petty grievance around her. Yet she also manages to evince a tenderness and caring, a forced maternal quality towards her brother in the absence of their parents and a stealth braininess that appears in unexpected moments. Condon is a true supporting player, a voice of reason screaming from the sidelines with a rich inner life that could lead its own film in another world. Frankly, I cheered her on every time she put the dumb men around her in their place with an exasperated “feck” and groan.

 

SCREENPLAY – ADAPTED
The Nominees: All Quiet on the Western Front; Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery; Living; Top Gun: Maverick; Women Talking

This category was unusually weak this year. When the nominations were announced I confess to a bewildered eyebrow raise when Top Gun: Maverick was mentioned in this category. Even the film’s most ardent defenders must admit that the script is the film’s weakest element, a hodge-podge of filmic cliches, nostalgia, and two-dimensional characters. Yet the script is also a prime example of big budget Hollywood filmmaking done right in many ways – the characters have coherent motivations and complete arcs; it introduces the new characters and brings back the old ones with alacrity and lays the stakes out clearly. More blockbusters could use this kind of simplicity, to be honest, but I am still baffled by this nomination.

I really enjoyed Knives Out but I found myself a little letdown by Glass Onion. This pervasive sense of indifference to some of the happenings, no matter how entertaining they were, was squarely the fault of a script that is a bit too self-satisfied with its cleverness and cutesy references. The mysteries are patently obvious if you just pay attention, so it all comes down to social critique, and it is here that Glass Onion feels incredibly redundant. Once again, we have a WOC functioning as Benoit Blanc’s sidekick and doing much of the actual sleuthing, a group of rich jerks, and a cathartic ending. It ended and I felt like I had seen this exact film once before and liked it much better the first time around.

The presence of All Quiet on the Western Front launched a million think pieces about whether or not another version of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal novel was needed in 2022, but certain works of art are timeless. All Quiet on the Western Front’s agitprop is such a work of art, even if this adaptation feels like a simplified reading of the text and at times barely resembles it. At what point does it stop being an adaptation and just becomes its own separate entity that merely borrows the title, character names, and some incident? This version pushes the line, with the climatic changes hampering the power of the original while leading to a similar conclusion but is ultimately remains an engrossing (and harrowing) story.

It takes some cajones to look at Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru and think, “I am going to write a remake of that.” But Kazuo Ishiguro did just that with Living, another of his quiet examinations of an unextraordinary emotionally withholding British gentlemen in crisis. While Ishiguro manages at times to keep the poetry of the Kurosawa original and also give it a gentle earnestness that is quite pleasing and a perfect jumping off point for the thoughtful work that Bill Nighy does. If anything undermines Living’s script it is the insistent score that nearly tips numerous moments into gooey sentimentality that plays like bombast to the script’s simplicity.

Sarah Polley, the actor/writer/director that you are. Since debuting with Away from Her, Polley has routinely gone on to remind us of what an intelligent, thoughtful, and sensitive filmmaker she is and Women Talking is no exception. Polley manages to make characters rattling off philosophical ideas and bouncing off secrets, traumas, and exposition into enthralling work. She gives these various players unique quirks and identities so that they never feel like hollow caricatures. The potential exploitative minefield of the subject matter is also sidestepped for emotional catharsis and ruminative exploration. For all of this, plus as an excuse to award the film somehow/someway, I would vote for Women Talking.

SCREENPLAY – ORIGINAL
The Nominees: The Banshees of Inisherin; Everything Everywhere All at Once; The Fabelmans; Tár; Triangle of Sadness

While I overall enjoy The Fabelmans more as a full experience than I do some of the other nominees in this category, I would say that if we are celebrating originality in a screenplay then The Fabelmans is possibly the weakest contender here. Cinema is littered with examples of auteur autobiography, bildungsroman, and shaping their own mythology. It is a very charming screenplay that continually examines the push-and-pull between family and art, but I wouldn’t bless it with this award when other films are doing so much more inventive, outré work.

I will say this for Triangle of Sadness – it is certainly original. Not everything worked for me, specifically a protracted scene where Woody Harrelson’s ship captain and a passenger engage in a prolonged debate about political theory that seemed to boldly spell out its ideas and themes when they were already clearly communicated is a groaner. At times the three-act structure of the screenplay is also a bit heavy-handed, but then it ends on an elliptical note instead of a declarative one and I smiled. If it dares for greatness and if its ambitious reach exceeds is grasp, at least it tried. I look forward to more of Ruben Östlund’s work as he develops.

Martin McDonagh feels more in his milieu with Banshees of Inisherin than he did with Three Billboards, and his theatrical background is evident throughout. There is something inherently magical realist about an Irish parable with the mundane seemingly infused with the faerie world at a moment’s notice. Yes, there is a ‘banshee’ of sorts here, who doesn’t scream but merely sits back and observes, and a level of violence that recalls the Grimms fairy tales, or W. B. Yates’ Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. It also possesses the strange mixture of tragicomedy that feels endemic to the Emerald Isle.

Tár feels like something from another era, and I mean that in the best possible way. Its script feels like a holdout from the New Hollywood 1970s, and again, I mean that in the most flattering manner. Its portrait of the artist as a raging asshole receiving their comeuppance is both timely and timeless. I loved how the script did not spell out simplistically like, uh, certain recent winners in this category have done, but rather rewarded patience and surrendering to the journey it wants to take you on. Color me surprised given my less than flattering responses to Todd Field’s previous film, Little Children, that I loved this as much I did.

When I said earlier that there was more inventive and “out there” work in this category, I was speaking about Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not only a story about intergenerational dynamics, first gen vs immigrant parents, but a genre-hopping exercise between comedy, drama, multiverse madness, and melodrama. I was as invested in watching Evelyn and Waymond fix their marriage as I was the mother/daughter dynamics and kaleidoscopic traversals through the multiverse and the overarching explorations of various philosophical prisms. To be a bit cliché, I laughed, I cried, I had a thrill a minute. If we are awarding originality in a screenplay, then this walks away with my vote.

 

ANIMATED FEATURE
The Nominees: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio; Marcel the Shell with Shoes On; Puss in Boots: The Last Wish; The Sea Beast; Turning Red

Netflix’s The Sea Beast released in July 2022 on the streaming service and was quickly forgotten by… well, seemingly everyone. Smash cut to Oscar nomination morning and a “oh yeah” swept across me as its name was read off. Having finally watched it I can say that it was thoroughly adequate. At two hours, it can drag in spaces and its story is nowhere near as inventive or imaginative as its creature designs or as beautiful as its animation. Overall, I enjoyed it, but I wrongly assumed something like My Father’s Dragon, Wendell & Wild, or Mad God would occupy that fifth slot with the other four so neatly tied-up.

Turning Red runs out of steam and loses the plot on just what its transformation is a symbol of by the end, but everything leading up to that wheel spinning is ridiculously charming. Even a lot of it afterwards was highly charming. As someone who was around the age of these characters in 2002, it felt authentic to its time period and made me laugh aloud several times with various small touches. (Tamagotchi forever.) I liked it better when Turning Red focused on the mother/daughter dynamic and treated menstruation as a common occurrence in a teenage girl’s life (which it is and the pearl clutching reaction to it is stupid and a gross example of conservative moral panic) instead of a kaiju battle between enormous red pandas. 

Starting Marcel the Shell with Shoes On had me wondering if I could handle this level of twee sweetness. What was charming in miniature could cause a sugar coma when stretched to 90 minutes, but something happened as I watched this: an overwhelming emotional response as the darkness and loneliness crept in. That quiet ache added some much-needed spice to the sweetness of the proceedings and provided an emotional sucker punch so that I was a teary-eyed mess by the end. If it seems all too precious for you at first, I implore you to just stick with it because it quietly sneaks up and hugs you after breaking your heart.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the long-delayed sequel to the 2011 spinoff, is a bigger, better, more gorgeously animated film than anything DreamWorks has cooked up in YEARS. Not only is it a goofy, whacky, whimsical adventure story but like much of the best family-friendly entertainment it is laced through with a strong undercurrent of darkness to provide a great contrast. The whole ensemble of characters is great, including a Jimmy Stewart-sounding cricket, a menacing personification of death as a hooded wolf, Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an adoptive Cockney crime family, and Perrito, the tender heart of the whole thing. A film that is practically perfect in every way.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have loved Guillermo del Toro since going to see Hellboy as a lark with my friends in high school. The tantalizing prospect of him doing a stop-motion Pinocchio was regulated to the bin of frustratingly canceled projects of his like his reimagining of Frankenstein or Beauty and the Beast, his foray into the DC universe with Justice League Dark, or the Lovecraftian horror of At the Mountain of Madness. When news broke that Netflix greenlit the long dead stop-motion film, I was elated at the prospect. Guillermo del Toro delivered the goods in smartly transferring the story to fascist Italy under Mussolini by keeping the major set pieces and the overall morality play tone while also twisting them in interesting ways. Naturally, the fantastical creatures are beautiful and creepy in equal measure, but the prologue and epilogue left me emotionally devastated proving once again that there is a lot of heart and soul in his house of horrors. What else could I possibly vote for?

Well, to quote an icon of animation, “eh, that’s all folks!” See you next year.