96th Academy Awards: If I Had a Ballot

 

Never quite thought I would see the day when as iconoclast a filmmaker as Jonathan Glazer would finally get bestowed with a long-deserved Oscar nomination, but the 96^th Academy Award nominations were populated by numerous delightful surprises. We have numerous first-time nominees like beloved character actors Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, Colman Domingo, and pretty much everyone but Jodie Foster in Supporting Actress. (No slight to Foster, but those numerous nominations and wins mean she has been duly rewarded.)

But I guess we need to talk about the big pink plastic elephant in the room. Were Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie snubbed? Eh, not really. Gerwig’s (unhinged) co-writing duties got her a nomination in Adapted Screenplay while Robbie not only produced herself into a billion-dollar earning film but an Oscar nomination for Best Picture as well. The nomination slots are a numbers game and with so many viable candidates, someone is bound to be left off in a respective category.

But what most impresses is that the wealth of good material released in 2023 is well represented here. Sure, we can argue if Maestro is really one of the great cinematic achievements of the year (it is a no for me), but the Academy saw fit to nominate films from living legends in their final years (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Boy and the Heron), European arthouse critical darlings (The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall), small-scale passion projects (Past Lives), and the Barbenheimer of it all, a lighting in a bottle pop cultural phenomenon that happened organically.

If recent years have been a bit of a slog, then this year is actually a gold star. Good job, Academy. Diversifying your ranks is clearly paying off dividends. The Academy has been regularly branching outside of its usual accepted slate of topics and film styles into mutations that are thornier, edgier, less middlebrow, and increasingly nominating foreign talent in major categories we haven’t seen with such regularity since the 1970s and the New Hollywood movement. (Do they get the gold? Different story.)

Sure, we have some clunkers but as a whole, this was a strong batch of contenders that largely did present the best the industry had to offer up to the public. Do I think some of these films deserved more/less nominations than others? Of course, I do. (My left foot for the Academy to finally recognize the brilliance of Todd Haynes, but alas.)

PICTURE
The Nominees: American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor Things, The Zone of Interest

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

1. Killers of the Flower Moon
2. Past Lives
3. The Zone of Interest
4. Barbie
5. Poor Things
6. The Holdovers
7. Anatomy of a Fall
8. Oppenheimer
9. American Fiction
10. Maestro

Maestro was a film that I approached with a slight trepidation. Another biopic about a Great Man/Artist and his long-suffering wife? With forays into black-and-white and old age makeup? It sounded like something readymade for the Academy to “consider.” Maestro is exactly the kind of catnip for a certain segment of the Academy that used to sweep the awards and become immediately forgotten 15 minutes after the credits rolled on the ceremony. There are a few saving graces in this, but it is largely a bum note about a towering artist without much in the way of insight into his process, his personal life, or what his art meant. The quote from Leonard Bernstein at the top of the film feels like a hedged bet, but Maestro doesn’t raise any questions. It whiffs from memory too quickly for that.

American Fiction is a farce about the commodification and flattening of Black narratives into tidy examples of trauma and overcoming, or tragedy in all its heft baring down for the consumption of white liberal guilt. They can nod and talk about how authentic these experiences and voices feel while doing nothing to change the overall circumstances or branching out to find more Black narratives that don’t center grief and violence. American Fiction is something of an autocritique of itself in a way as it pulls too many punches and instead feels like a satire geared towards engaging with and assuaging white liberal guilt itself. The family melodrama operates as a contrast but often overwhelms the satirical moments so the whole is left frustratingly malformed.

Oppenheimer essentially rests on the argument one character makes, “You’re not just self-important, you’re actually important,” and spends three hours of baroque chamber drama underscoring the point. At times, Oppenheimer is a shouty courtroom drama where political bigwigs argue over security clearances and political movements that threaten their power, and at others something approaching a psychological portrait of the man who accidentally recreated the modern world. But this is Christopher Nolan, so Oppenheimer is epic in scale and frustratingly obtuse in emotive power. At once grand and at a glacial remove. I found myself overall agnostic towards it, but some of it is annoyingly literal and some of it is the best blockbuster filmmaking of the year. It is amazing that a film that boils down to people in rooms talking about Big Topics made a billion at the box office, but that also gives me hope for the future of the industry. I may not have loved this, but I don’t have problems with something like this sweeping up industry accolades.

It is a bit pithy to state that Anatomy of a Fall can play out like a French riff on Law & Order, but it does feel accessibly familiar in the way that American television institution does. But Anatomy of a Fall is so much more than that at the same time. The best beats and extended passages examine this woman and ask why the public and the justice system are so eager and clear to set her upon the metaphorical pyre. At what point does an artist’s work and their personal life become a feeding ground of misdeeds and confessions to sins? These are the bigger ideas undergirding the film and what make it so engaging in its best moments. Yet it does seem to go on a little too long becoming exhausting by the end in a way that feels both intentional and audience punishing.

Feeling like the leisurely paced character dramadies of Bob Rafelson or Hal Ashby, The Holdovers hits that lovely twinge of melancholy/bittersweet that I enjoy so much. The story is a bit routine – boarding school student gets left behind and looked after by crotchety professor and the duo eventually learn to like and respect each other while letting their guards down – but it hits its marks with precision and finely calibrated emotional textures. We laugh, we cry, and we feel the loneliness begging for connection emanating from these people. The quiet moments of them building a connection are what linger and what really count. I haven’t stopped thinking about a scene where the trio (supporting them is the school cook) toss together a makeshift cherry cordial in a parking lot since I watched it for the ways it balanced comedic effect with real emotional punch.

Yes, there are faults within Poor Things, but oh my god did I love spending time with this whacky, weird, horny movie. The whole thing looks and feels like a storybook fantasy world slowly going to rot as reality keeps creeping in, or strange and kooky terrors lurk around the corner. We meet Bella Baxter, a reanimated corpse with the mind of her infant, who becomes increasingly self-possessed and autonomous in a world that does not want or know what to do with women like this essentially conscripting her to the role of “monster.” Her journey covers the world and is filled with a kindly mad scientist who is increasingly part of his elaborate machinery, animal hybrids, a kindly lab assistant, a childish and controlling Don Juan, and enough scenes of “furious jumping” to make even an AVN winner blush.

I do not know what I expected Barbie to be upon hearing that Greta Gerwig was going to tackle the material, but boy, was I pleasantly surprised by it. In hindsight, I adored Little Women and Lady Bird so much that Barbie being such a treasure was practically a given. Yes, it can at times feel like Feminism 101, but it is a big studio blockbuster released for maximum audience enjoyment in the summer. I highly doubt it would be a complete deconstruction and exploration in avant-garde ways given those limitations, but Gerwig still manages subversive elements and get her jabs in. From the 2001: A Space Odyssey opener to a guffaw inducing closing line, Barbie is pop cinema done to perfection. It grossed a billion, it got sterling reviews, and it clearly pointed a way towards IP-related properties performing well (let creatives do their magic instead of plugging them into an assembly-line). In short, it was smart, tart, and bright pink perfection.   

The Zone of Interest wrestles with the question, “how do you depict an atrocity,” and answers it by keeping it off-screen but overwhelming around. We meet Rudolf Höss and his family in their comfortably middle-class and lovely home, which shares a wall with Auschwitz and the horrors going on just feet away. While we do not see the prisoners being marched into the camps and the brutalities enacted on their bodies, we do hear it and feel its weight and presence. A hellish orange glow from the ovens, characters struggling with the smell, the persistent sounds of barking dogs, screams, shouts, and gunfire counterbalance the family’s frolicking in the garden or the pool. The normalcy of these actions creates sickly knots in your stomach. The juxtaposition demonstrates how the mundanity of life continues on, how some people will deliberately put their head in the sand, but the horrors are ever present and haunting just out the corners of the frame. One of the best films of 2023, and I don’t think I ever want to watch it again.

A bit like Brief Encounter and the Before Trilogy, Past Lives is a tender little movie that sticks with you precisely for the truth and emotional complexity of what is presents. Not only does Celine Song write a great script for her terrific trio of actors to perform, but she frames so much of it in ways that underscores the melancholic dreaminess of the material. Would I have been upset if Greta Lee and Teo Yoo had managed to get nominations in Actress and Actor instead of some of the other nominees? No, I would have not. Past Lives is a film I will definitely revisit in the future for its romanticism and heartache. What can I say? I’m a Cancer.

Lo and behold, Killers of the Flower Moon, one of Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating passion projects that was rumored to come out last year but instead managed to bless us in 2023. Like several other recent Scorsese films, Killers finds the auteur in a funereal mood, more somber and less frantic than he was a decade ago in the likes of The Wolf of Wall Street or Hugo. The lugubrious and reflective tone matches that of films like Silence and The Irishman, but I would argue is even better than those two films. Powered by a collection of well-known faces, character actors, and unknown up-and-comers, Killers of the Flower Moon gives voice and space for Indigenous artists to demonstrate their abilities within a high-dollar production. At once an elegy, a eulogy, an indictment, and a space to open even further historical corrections and artistic explorations, Killers of the Flower Moon is a late-career masterpiece from one of the industry’s titans. Scorsese is in his autumnal phase and only spending time on projects he has something to say in or has been chasing for years, and we are blessed that he is managing to make them in his final years.

DIRECTOR
The Nominees: Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall), Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon), Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer), Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)

Not really an egregious choice in this bunch, but would I be upset if Celine Song or Todd Haynes had made the cut? Nope, but that is another discussion. Aside from The Dark Knight trilogy, I have run more cold than hot on Christopher Nolan’s films. He is often a director more concerned with puzzle pieces and stating his themes in clunky dialog than engaging in psychological insight or the viewer’s emotions. Once you have solved the ‘mystery’ of The Prestige or Memento, watching them again becomes an exercise is noticing how anemic they are outside of their puzzle box structure. Some of Oppenheimer is the best filmmaking of Nolan’s career, like the hallucinations that accompany Oppenheimer during his ‘victory’ speech, and some of it is once again his epic-scale chamber piece cinema. He will probably win that elusive Oscar for his career to date, but I think what Greta Gerwig, Song, and Haynes accomplished are far worthier of a nomination in this category.

Justine Triet is everything when it comes to Anatomy of a Fall as director and co-writer. Her authorial control and intent are everywhere with distinct artistic fingerprints visible. Triet keeps the entire thing chugging along in ways that are both absorbing and exhausting. We feel as tired and flailed open as Sandra does on the witness stand by the end of the courtroom section, and we get harrowing glimpses of the volatile marriage at the heart of the matter. Triet does not go for big, showy shots and keeps the entire film on a tight leash. This is the kind of deceptively simplistic moviemaking that this category is starting to nominate and reward more often, and I appreciate it.  

Welcome to the club, Jonathan Glazer! I’m so happy that you are finally here. After crafting some of the greatest modern films in the genres like crime (Sexy Beast), psychological thriller (Birth), and science-fiction (Under the Skin), he turns his exacting vision to the Holocaust with The Zone of Interest. His intelligence as a filmmaker is in how he crafts sequences and characters but refuses to judge or explain them, leaving the audience with something to chew on after the credits roll. The Zone of Interest keeps the horrors technically offscreen, yet you see, hear, and feel them. Jewish prisoners wash their bloody boots, work as servants in the home, and the persistent sounds of trains, furnaces, gunshots, and shouting create a tension between domestic splendor and the horrors happening just outside their walls.

Yorgos Lanthimos creates a believably absurd world in Poor Things, which is an achievement in and of itself when you watch the film. Grounded somewhere in the vicinity of the Victorian-era London, Poor Things feels like it swallowed up the works of Terry Gilliam, Karel Zeman, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein then spit out the results for 141 minutes. The fact that the absurdity and thematic concerns are even coherent is no small miracle, but Lanthimos manages to make the fantastical near-reality of the film feel like a logical cinematic world. Lanthimos is one of the strangest auteurs currently working and I largely enjoy spending time with his esoteric and eccentric visions.

I am not upset about a pop filmmaker of such skill and commit to the cinematic experience as Nolan sweeping and finally getting his golden statute, but c’mon, Martin Scorsese has exactly ONE directing Oscar in a career filled with some of the best movies of their genres, decades, and hell, of all-time. Killers of the Flower Moon continues this late-period passion project streak he has been on for the past decade or so. His work is that of a master working his craft to not only illuminate a shamefully underreported piece of American history, but to provide an elegy for the events and a film that complicates the audience’s participation and interaction with the material. What Oppenheimer/Nolan do not quite accomplish, Scorsese and Flowers demonstrate with aplomb. Here is one of the greatest artists in their medium making a late-career masterpiece. Give him another Oscar before it’s too late.

ACTOR
The Nominees: Bradley Cooper (Maestro), Colman Domingo (Rustin), Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers), Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction)

Poor Bradley Cooper, dozens of nominations and not a single win to be found. I wonder if down the line they’ll either toss him one in a weak year, or hand him either an Honorary Oscar or the Thalberg Award. Maestro and his work in it seemed primed at the start of the season to finally snag him the award – oft-nominated actor who had yet to win stars in, writes, and directs a biopic about Leonard Bernstein and disguises himself under piles of transformative makeup = Oscar. Then we actually saw the thing and Cooper is all surface here. The fake nose, cigarettes, and vocal mannerisms do the work for him. Frankly, he should have won in this category for A Star Is Born and his boozy, lived-in performance. Everyone else in the category is miles better and all within fractions of inches within striking distance of each other in my mind, which hasn’t been the case for me for several years now.

After spending time as one of Nolan’s company of actors, he had major supporting roles in The Dark Knight trilogy and appeared in Inception and Dunkirk, Cillian Murphy finally gets a crack at a leading role. It is a herculean task, no less, as J. Robert Oppenheimer is in nearly every minute of screen time and often tasked with emoting silently directly into the camera. Murphy does wonders with the part even as Nolan’s permanent remove leaves him often emotionally remote in the frame. Oppenheimer is another byzantine epic but Murphy operates as its nucleus with consummate skill and aplomb. His wordless, emotive reactions haunt far more than the words detailing the aftermath of the atomic bomb ever could.

Colman Domingo’s been around for years and is finely getting the acknowledgement from the industry that so many of his peers got much sooner. Not only is this a “welcome to the club” nomination, but it comes on the heels of a recent Emmy win and a broader recognition of his writerly talents (a 2023 Best Play Tony nomination). Domingo breathes life into Rustin’s creaky biopic joints and jolts various scenes to such vibrant life that the film containing them can barely keep up. Everything good and watchable in Rustin resides entirely in Domingo strutting his actorly chops in the kind of showy lead role that he has too long been denied.

The first time I remember seeing Jeffrey Wright and thinking, “damn, this guy is good” was during 2003’s Angels in America. No less a feat considering his costars including bona fide movie stars and venerated thespians like Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, and Emma Thompson. So, it makes me happy to see Wright finally get a nomination/induction into the club. For all the problems with the script and direction, it is Wright who understands and navigates the sweet and sour modes of the film with a bone deep connection. He reveals and shows us so much about this man, sometimes without much in the way of dialog besides an irritable grunt. His intelligence as a performer is on full display as is his penchant for nuance. I hope this leads to another nomination and eventual win for him.

The Holdovers feels like a film and role tailormade for Paul Giamatti’s gifts. A cantankerous man who is hiding worlds of hurt and feelings of failure just beneath his caustic disregard and disdain – it is a type that Giamatti has made a well-respected career out of, and with damn good reason. He’s just one hell of an actor and knows just when to go big and when to dial it back. He shows us the loneliness of this man and how he manages to warm up when meeting a younger version of himself in Dominic Sessa’s bright-but-troubled pupil. This feels like a role and performance that would make sense to reward Giamatti for given that it gives him a lot to do and exemplifies the best of what is capable of showing us.

 

ACTRESS
The Nominees: Annette Bening (Nyad), Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon), Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), Carey Mulligan (Maestro), Emma Stone (Poor Things)

Much like Cooper, Carey Mulligan seems to rest upon a “thing” and let it do a majority of the work for her. In her case, it is a transatlantic accent and a near constant cigarette that seems to do a majority of the character work. We have no true insights into Felicia Montealegre’s psyche and why she did what she did in the relationship with Leonard. Mulligan strikes the poses asked of her, but Maestro keeps her curiously muted far too often when we know how incendiary (Promising Young Woman) and delicate (An Education) she can be as an actress. Much like Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, Mulligan feels like the beneficiary of a beloved staple, the long-suffering wife of a great man, getting the rubberstamped nomination and because of her industry standing/previous body of work.

Nyad is your generic underdog sports movie, but one empowered and salvaged by two performances from two great talents. What is most interesting about the film is that Diana Nyad remains an idiosyncratic personality with her bulldog determination to reach her goal largely empowered by previous failures. She remains emotionally stable, so Bening’s role is essentially physical and demonstrating the immense toll taken upon the body (and mind). Bening excels at playing flinty women and making us see beneath the protective exterior, which she does here but there is also a secondary layer of flintiness beneath the first. But perhaps the best trick she pulls off is making the roughly 30-year friendship between Diana and Bonnie, the emotional tether of the film, feel relatable and true. Bening is one of the great industry veterans without an Oscar, and as much as I want her to have one... maybe not this one.

Emma Stone does some truly bizarro stuff in Poor Things that is as daring and adventurous as it is comical and enthralling. Her reanimated heroine goes from herky-jerky bodily movements, seemingly a lack of total motor control on her limbs or face, to elegant poise. Not only does she have an accent, but she has to speak in a kind of pidgin English that also smooths out and matures as her character gains more worldly experience. Her face pulling and tossing her body around the frame stands in stark contrast to the typical mode of acting in a Lanthimos film, but it works for the character and her journey. By the end, Stone has to complete her trajectory to a typical Lanthimos heroine and she does so with consummate skill. In another year, I’d hurl the Oscar at her. (And this reminds me of just how anemic the role/performance she actually won for was when she’s doing something like this.)

Sandra Hüller is half of Anatomy of a Fall’s greatness. Justine Triet is the author of the work through and through, but without Hüller I don’t think it would have been quite as riveting. She feels so comfortably at home and at ease in this woman who is filled with sharp edges and operates at a slight remove from everyone else. Hüller and her emotional expressiveness are finely calibrated at any given moment to play a moment for complete truth and impact. It also impressive watching her swap between languages at a start/stop pace. Her frustrations with French leap into fluid English, and at times one gets the sense that maybe this flowing use of language is a manipulation tactic to toss everyone else off-balance and get the upper-hand. She makes for an engaging and complicated individual, giving flashes of her titanic ambition and a persistent enigmatic quality that keeps her both charismatic and at a remove. In any other year, she’d get my vote.

In a category that can often nominate and award that “most” acting, Lily Gladstone is here to show us what an actor can accomplish with stillness. She does not shout and scenery-chew, she does not get reams of monologues to perform, but instead must operate nearly like a silent actor. She communicates and projects so much with the slightest smiles or flash of thought behind her eyes. Yes, she does get the sick in bed scenes, but what we remember most are the haunting looks she gives as she slowly realizes the trap that is being placed around her and desperately looks for a way out of it. It is the quietness of her work that lingers and torments in a way that the immediate rush of Carey Mulligan doing an accent, for instance, does not. I wanted her to win immediately after stepping out of the theater back in November, and this feeling was only reinforced after my recent second viewing.

SUPPORTING ACTOR
The Nominees: Sterling K. Brown (American Fiction), Robert de Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon), Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer), Ryan Gosling (Barbie), Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things)

Pour one out for the young bucks who got glossed over this year, Dominic Sessa and Charles Melton. But now we get to my complicated feelings about Mark Ruffalo getting the supporting nomination for Poor Things. I love Ruffalo in his more muted, less shouty performances in films like The Kids Are Alright, You Can Count on Me, and In the Cut, and less so with his nominated ones for Spotlight and this one. When it comes down to it, I liked the subtler and mildly stranger work that Willem Dafoe was doing as the mad scientist creator than Ruffalo’s caddish villain who chews a lot of scenery. He’s good, but I just liked Dafoe better. Also, props to Ramy Youssef and Christopher Abbott for their compelling work as well.

Two things about Sterling K. Brown: what a wonderful actor he is, and my god, is he unnaturally hot. American Fiction acknowledges the latter while giving him plenty of minor key moments to demonstrate the former. Here he is the main character’s recently out sibling, reorienting his life and navigating his complicated family relationships after his marriage and career blew up. Brown doesn’t engage in big showy acting but rather in detailed personal tics and line readings that throb with layered emotional meanings. Some of the most enjoyable moments were his razzing his older brother or their quiet moments of connection.

Congratulations to Robert Downe Jr. on winning an Oscar on your third time at bat. It comes after years of turmoil and rebooting your career by becoming the face of the dominate blockbuster franchise between 2008 and 2019. And now here you are, reminding everyone of what a great actor you actually are and just what you are capable of doing with a juicy part. Long gone is the snarky charm of Tony Stark and instead is an icy, venomous performance that is the best work you’ve done since Tropic Thunder. Bravo sir, more of this please.

After all these decades and numerous characters with Scorsese that have entered the lexicon, Robert de Niro delivers one of his stillest performances in a very long time. That very stillness is what makes his work so terrifying. This is his John Huston in Chinatown late-career villain turn that will go down as one of the high watermarks of his legacy. From the jump, we know that de Niro’s Machiavellian charmer is but one of many folks behind the Osage massacres, but he also manages to make us understand why he was considered so ingrained to the community and could powerfully deflect away from himself. If Killers had come out in another year, I would have been all about letting it sweep the awards circuit as a final hurrah for a group of consummate, medium redefining artists turning in a late-career masterpiece.  

Does my favorite nomination of Ryan Gosling’s career (to date) involve him playing an animated plastic doll? You bet your ass it does. Gosling gives a comedic masterclass in his Ken, a brain smooth himbo who learns all about horses and the patriarchy after visiting the real world. He prances around like a perfectly sculpted Adonis, gets his Gene Kelly on during “I’m Just Ken,” and comedically cries with the kind of panache that Sally Field has made her meal ticket throughout the latter half of her career. He steals the movie with his charisma and commitment to playing the most unhinged jokes and scenes with a tender sincerity that makes Ken feel like a little kid asking desperately for love and affection. I love when comedy gets recognition, which it so often does not, and would happily bestow the award on one of my favorite working actors.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The Nominees: Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer), Danielle Brooks (The Color Purple), America Ferrera (Barbie), Jodie Foster (Nyad), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers)

It has a nice ring to it: Emily Blunt, Academy Award nominee. It feels like something that has been long in the making, but I frankly liked her better in other films. Imagine if the Academy had been brave enough to nomination her for The Devil Wears Prada? It seems less like she is nominated for her actual work in Oppenheimer, because her role largely consists of long-suffering wife tropes except for one scene at the end, and more for she finally appeared in a movie that got her over the finish line after coming so close numerous other times. Welcome to the club, Emily. Hopefully your next nomination is better.

America Ferrera is someone I have rooted for and enjoyed since Real Women Have Curves and spending time in my dorm room watching Ugly Betty. Her nomination here is largely thanks to a sterling monologue about the cultural pressures and conditions of womanhood and the never-ending traps involved. But she also manages to showcase the layers of hurt and every day suffering involved in Gloria’s changing mother/daughter relationship and career struggles. While the role is at times a little thin, Ferrera does commendable work with it and provides grounded support to the lunacy of Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie, Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, and Ryan Gosling’s Ken.

Much like Anita in West Side Story, Sophia in The Color Purple is a scene-stealing role that is all about guaranteed to put the actress who lands it in awards contention. It gives a talented performer a lot to do and Danielle Brooks does a lot with it. She stomps through “Hello No” with grit forged from a lifetime of hardship and espouses a philosophy that when life hits you hard, you hit back harder. But it is when we see Sophia tragically humbled by a stint in jail that Brooks finds shadings and textures that push her performance beyond the film’s karaoke quality. Her ability to swing between laughter and tears, and the middle ground between the two emotions, is what lasts long after the credits roll. That and her unique spin on the word “respect.”

The recipient of this year’s “lead slumming it in supporting for an easy nomination” is Jodie Foster. Nyad is a two-hander and Foster’s Bonnie is the emotional through line of the film. If Bening’s Diana Nyad is the stubborn, flinty athlete out to prove something, then Bonnie is the conflicted heart who worries about the fallibilities of the human body and the logistics to make the dream work. Foster hasn’t been this relaxed in a character in quite some time, and she manages to appear as a longtime friend of Bening with a lived-in emotional shorthand and in-jokes. It is always nice to see this industry lifer acquit herself in a role that demonstrates her pluck and intelligence, especially at this stage in her esteemed career.  

If Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti are the curmudgeons who learn lessons along the way, then Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Mary Lamb is the stabilizing force in the trio. She holds her own pain – her son attended the prestigious school on a scholarship and graduated just before being killed in Vietnam – and keeps it just under the surface. It always threatens to breakout at any given moment, and does during a Christmas party where she plays records and drinks too much, but Randolph keeps it at a believable level. We have met and know many a Mary in our lives, the women keeping things moving and doing their jobs while carrying hidden burdens. Randolph is an incisive, layered performer here, and I have a hard time picking out someone better from this lineup.

 

SCREENPLAY – ADAPTED
The Nominees: American Fiction, Barbie, Oppenheimer, Poor Things, The Zone of Interest

First of all, let us take a moment of silence for Killers of the Flower Moon missing out here. Christopher Nolan’s films often have various points where their themes are boldly and largely spelled out, as if the audience needed that kind of play block hand holding. Oppenheimer, as a character, is referred to as both “an American Prometheus” and “the sphinxlike guru of the atom bomb.” The scripts in a Nolan film are often puzzle boxes that he demands the audience to ‘solve,’ as if the technical and chilly academia of moviemaking is the most interesting thing about them. That problem carries over to Oppenheimer as the psychological remove leaves the script without deeper insights to plum from its material. And Nolan still cannot write women.

At roughly the same level of competence is American Fiction. I have not read the source material, but the film that was made from it feels exactly like the type to make white liberals laugh a little too hard without challenging them in a more meaningful way. Plenty of narrative beats had me rolling my eyes, while a few sharply etched and incisive moments of commentary had me frustrated that the script wasn’t thornier, edgier, darker, was too afraid to not pull a punch. In context, "I just think it's essential to listen to Black voices right now" had me rolling on the floor, though. American Fiction needed way more of this and far less of generic familial melodrama, or it needed to more smoothly integrate the two into a universal whole.

I have not read the source material of Poor Things, but the vibe that the movie gives off is it is like a sexually unhinged, squirrely Frankenstein redo. What is even more fascinating is how it is in communication with Barbie in its own weird way. If Barbie is also about a naïve woman learning the ways of the (real) world and choosing her life and adventures outside of the prescribed notions, then so to is Poor Things. Just with scenes of bondage, prostitution, and reanimating corpses. Yet the script relies almost too heavily on comedy without pathos to really push it over the edge. Some of the more optimistic, if not humanist readings in the film are often undercut by mordant humor which leaves the thematic uplift of these moments strangely muted.

What exactly is Barbie adapting? A preexisting toy IP in the vaguest sense of the term? Well, category confusion or not, Barbie is a hilarious, moving little bit of pop cinema with a solid script as its foundation. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach craft a clever metanarrative filled with cultural commentary and references to the movies that inspired them. The whole thing is mildly unhinged in the best possible ways, and a majority of that is thanks to Gerwig’s talents molding and shaping the IP into something surprising and humorous. Barbie can be anything, including a woman with an existential crisis, cellulite, wearing Birkenstocks on the way to her gynecologist appointment.  

The Zone of Interest takes the fictionalized versions of Martin Amis’ novel and transforms them into the historical figures outright. While the novel begins in 1942 and ends in 1948, the film takes place within 1943, except one brief foray into the present, and demonstrates alternately the Third Reich at the height of its power/destruction and just before its cosmically justified removal from power. We mainly follow-in on the banality of the atrocity, the Germans who knew to varying degrees what was happening and did nothing but reap the temporary rewards. The dispassion of Glazer’s camera is reflected in his script as well. After years of crafting some of the most austere, disturbing, and beautifully photographed films with scripts that match their presentational and emotionally conflicted power, Glazer finally has multiple Oscar nominations for his gifts as writer and director.  I wanted to award Glazer somewhere with something and landed on this.

SCREENPLAY – ORIGINAL
The Nominees: Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Maestro, May December, Past Lives

The major problem with Maestro resides entirely with its script that somehow decentralizes Bernstein’s queerness to zero in on his marriage, which may or may not have been performative. Whole heaps of fertile ground are ignored to watch these two bicker and comeback together for a little over two hours. We get no insight in Bernstein the artist or the man, but rather a generic picture of him as destructive asshole and his wife as forgiving and legacy shaping support. But the bulk of this film’s above-the-line nominations feel capitulations to the aging demographic that loved this kind of thing, but I would rather have seen nominations for something like The Boy and the Heron, Fallen Leaves, Asteroid City, Passages, or Showing Up.

Perhaps because it is clearly wearing its influences on its sleeve, The Holdovers can sometimes feel like expertly made karaoke. We know the beats and verses, even the words, of each character’s trajectory and that we will ultimately be given their traumatic baggage as explainer for their present behavior. Just because it is familiar that doesn’t mean it isn’t done incredibly well. But if we are rewarding a screenplay for its originality, then The Holdovers seems like a hazy trip through familiar territory. And I feel a similar way about Anatomy of a Fall, which does indeed play like a French Law & Order. The script does a solid job of leaving just enough wiggle room to cast doubt on both her innocence and her guilt. But it is even better in demonstrating the knotty interpersonal dynamics suddenly being thrust into the public sphere. Where it lost me a little was when it became a generic courtroom drama. I believe that the Academy will want to reward the film somewhere, and will probably do so here, and it is not an unworthy winner, but I just liked other films/scripts in this category a little more.

Celine Song’s playwright background is all over Past Lives. Numerous reviews have compared her work and dialog to the intimate nature of Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, and that is very much an apt comparison. Past Lives rests entirely on the words being expressed, the feelings obscurely moving throughout these exchanges, and strong actors giving voice and texture to it all. In short, Past Lives’ success and romantic ache rests on its delicate themes and passages of dialog. I am so happy the Academy nominated something that is essentially an exquisite miniature when bombast can often be the name of the game.

May December is another of Todd Haynes’ thorny, artistic explorations of a theme through the prisms of camp and melodrama. This time around, the basic framework of the infamous Mary Kay Letourneau story is used to examine themes of identity and the consumption of true crime, a genre that offers up a disconnect between the “entertainment value” of the material while ignoring the real human suffering it left in its wake. Every single line and interaction in this film is filled with portent and some deeper meaning. This branch often nominates complex, unique work like this, and I love them for it. May December deserved more love from the Academy, especially the actors branch who watched it and probably felt deeply uncomfortable in recognition throughout. For this reason, I’d hurl the one Oscar at it that I could.

ANIMATED FEATURE
The Nominees: The Boy and the Heron, Elemental, Nimona, Robot Dreams, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

This year’s placeholder nomination for Disney/Pixar comes in the form of Elemental, a thinly defined world populated by too many ideas fighting for attention. But this is Disney/Pixar, so the animation is absolutely gorgeous. Gorgeous animation can only take you so far without a compelling narrative and Elemental just has too much going on between the main love story, the infrastructure plotline, a parable about getting along with your fellow man (or elemental-based humanoids), the immigrant journey, and the tension between the immigrant parents and the first-generation child who is partially assimilated and partially not. Why do these have to be humanoid elements? What are they supposed to represent? What is the film trying to say? None of these questions are answered, but the love story did make me cry a little bit.

Robot Dreams is the kind of medium experimentation that this branch typically nominates but rarely rewards. Here we get the emotionally involving story of a Dog and his Robot that get separated and have a complicated journey along the way towards moving on. Robot does indeed dream, including a homage to The Wizard of Oz where dandelions tap dance along the Yellow Brick Road. The simplistic animation belies its emotional heft, yet there was still something that kept me at a remove during certain points. Or maybe that it just got so sad watching Robot get abused and demolished so often that it began to feel too repetitive in such a concise running time. Either way, I’m always happy to watch stuff like this that the branch nominates because for any/all flaws involved, they are still some of the more unique creations in any given year.

The sequel to the 2018 Oscar winner is a tribute to the saying that “more is more.” Across the Spider-Verse gives us more Spider-Men from more universes, more beautiful animation, more kinetic action sequences, and a punishing runtime to tell half a story. That is where the weakness really lies: the pacing in this is lopsided. It takes nearly 85 minutes to get to the actual plot and then follows it up with a protracted chase scene. The entire movie is a wonder to behold, truly a testament to the creative imagination and the boundless nature of the medium, but it can also leave the film feeling self-indulgent. The ending promises that the third film will fulfill the cliffhanger, and hopefully they’ll discover that editing is their friend in the interim.

Written before ND Stevenson transitioned, Nimona’s source material at times does play out like someone reckoning with their “not a girl”-ness and was subtly queer in ways that the movie doesn’t just supersize but embraces wholeheartedly. The nonbinary/trans symbolism of our primary shapeshifting title character? Check. The sweet and complicated love story between knights Ballister and Ambrosius? Check, and this time it not only makes it a central narrative engine but loudly and proudly explicit. It all comes to a head where the inherit yearning for love, connection, and understanding of Nimona becomes a healing moment of one character seeing and reaching out to another. If another film hadn’t come out this year, this would probably be the animated film I was just wild about. As it stands, 2023 will go down as a remarkably solid year for this category based both on what got nominated and what did not.

Hayao Miyazaki’s return from retirement produced The Boy and the Heron, a profound work that becomes more enthralling and emotionally engaging the more into fluid dream-like narrative it goes. Miyazaki is a master surveying his kingdom here and finding so much of his life lacking, so he goes about trying to make peace in his autumnal years. He asks the younger generations to let the past go, to free themselves from the generational trauma and forge their own paths forward. Miyazaki seems to be elucidating these points both in his artistic as well as his personal life. Like pretty much every single Studio Ghibli film, it is stunningly animated and thought-provoking. A late-period masterpiece coming ten years after The Wind Rises, another of Miyazaki’s elegiac explorations.

And that is a wrap on the 2023 Oscars. See everybody in 2025 and thank you for reading!