97th Academy Awards: If I Had a Ballot

Just when I had gotten Charlize Theron stating she’d never been stung by jellyfish but watching Nyad made her feel like she had out of my head, we are back here again. Another year, and another batch of Oscar nominees that I would largely label as “pretty good,” all things considered. Granted, I do have one specific bone to pick with the Academy.

You know, the chances of it happening were slim, but I still would have loved to have seen Robert Eggers and Nosferatu appear above the line. But this is essentially a slow welcoming to the club as his films have largely gone unnominated and unrewarded by the Academy. Maybe it will happen one day, or maybe he is doomed to the too esoteric auteur club that will end with him finally getting an Honorary Oscar twenty+ years from now.

One cannot entirely claim the Academy’s long-standing “genre bias” at play here when The Substance is nominated in so many big categories, Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the awards recently, and the likes of The Shape of Water, Dune, Joker, Poor Things, and Avatar have either garnered heaps of nominations and/or wins in major categories. It seems like that is slowly starting to erode, but with asterisks involved. That is a very good thing. (My own feelings about those individual films notwithstanding.)  

In a year where we lost a titan like David Lynch, it is important to think of how his puzzling, dream-like films which straddled genres and styles helped pave the way for broader acceptance for them as valid works of art. If the Academy hadn’t flirted with the likes of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, then we would never have seen a full embrace of The Substance.

 

Best Picture

Nominees: Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Pérez, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance, Wicked

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

1. The Brutalist
2. The Substance
3. Nickel Boys
4. Anora
5. Conclave
6. Dune: Part Two
7. Wicked
8. I’m Still Here
9. A Complete Unknown
10. Emilia Pérez

Normally I present these in reverse order, going from lowest to highest ranked. This year, I’m swapping and just going in the same order as the preferential ballot. Enjoy your reading as I work through the ten nominees.

What if the Great American Novel but as a sweeping cinematic epic? Look no further than The Brutalist, the post-war exploration of the immigrant experience, the lie of the American Dream, and the eternal struggle between ego, artistic vision, and commerce. It never feels its sprawling length and manages to slowly unravel and reveal its themes, character development, and grand vision in slow, steady drips that add up to something powerful. Rather than a declarative, The Brutalist is a series of questions that gather in force and underlined by some of the most gorgeous images in a film released last year. The rhyming imagery of the upside-down Statue of Liberty and the illuminated cross will stick with me for quite some time.

The Substance is something that seems tailor-made for me and my specific tastes, so of course I loved it. The whole thing depends on your willingness to buy into the crazy and to operate along its absurdist wavelength. From there, it becomes an exercise in style, which delivers the substance of the material if you’re open to it. When you get right down to it, not only is it an All About Eve as seen through the prism of a Benny Benassi music video, a body horror riff on Death Becomes Her, and a homage to the likes of Kubrick, Cronenberg, and Lynch, but a whole exercise in how much of a privilege it is to age. You are your younger self in the old body, you two are one. Respect the balance.

The subjective camera throughout Nickel Boys means we are not merely casual observers of this story, but often living, breathing, and surviving it right along with Elwood and Turner. We alternate perspectives, sometimes repeating scenes through their eyes, and witness everything from their line of sight. It sounds experimental and heady, but it is a film experience that truly exemplifies what it means to be “immersive.” One of the most forgettable and powerful films of 2024, for sure.

It goes on for about twenty minutes too long, but Anora is still one of the most riotous and strangely moving films of 2024. Anora is far better when it vibrates on its singular level that operates somewhere between dark screwball comedy and colorful neorealist drama. There is a turn late in the film that feels somewhat like crowd-pleasing and slightly at odds with much of what came before it. Still, Anora sticks the landing in the ending as this modern day Cabiria Ceccarelli has her own climatic emotional payoff. After all of the debauchery and insanity of the previous days and weeks, reality reasserts itself and comes crashing down on her incredibly hard. It also cannot be beat as a testament to its central peformance, a former child star breaking into the mainstream in a BIG way.

Color me shocked just how much I enjoyed Conclave. I did my time in religious private school and haven’t exactly hankered to willing go back to anything involving that institution. But Conclave was enthralling and messy in equal measure. Essentially the behind-the-curtain machinations involved in electing a new pope, Conclave gives juicy roles to stellar actors and lets them rip. Even better is how Edward Berger blocks, frames, and juxtaposes his actors within scenes. Perhaps what most interested me was the push/pull dynamic of the archaic and the modern found throughout the narrative.

If Dune was all world-building and palace intrigue, then Part Two is a busted fire hydrant of space opera imagery and operatic battle sequences. I maintain that the Dune books would probably be best served as a long-form TV series on a prestige cable network than a film franchise, but this maintains the highly enjoyable, incredibly entertaining aspects of the first film and ups the weird and wow factors. Timothée Chalamet’s performance here is better than his work in A Complete Unknown, and Denis Villeneuve crafts grandiose pop-opera spectacle from the material. Truly, this franchise is shaping up nicely to be something pretty special even if I do have my minor criticisms and qualms about it.

Is Wicked too long? Yes. Does the decision to film it “realistically” cause the colors to wash out and the entire film look curiously flat? Also yes, and this decision undermines the tremendous work of the costume, makeup, hairstyling, and production design departments. But Wicked is also wisely accessible for neophytes to the property. You don’t need to have seen the Broadway show at least once or read the book it’s based on to get involved in the drama. A lot of the reason the film works despite its demerits is thanks to the chemistry between Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. It is more than enough to simply watch these two powerhouse performers sing a strong songbook and display their incredible bag of tricks in a vehicle that can not only contain them, but encourages them to soar.

I’m Still Here does smartly show us the family as it was before the tragedy befalls it, but this is a double-edged sword. The film takes a lugubrious pace and forsakes exploratory measures for biopic trappings. Still, the real story is enthralling, frightening, and maddening enough to hold your interest before you even factor in the central performance of Fernanda Torres, one of the best of the year. The problem is that the script and overall film are more concerned with painting in broad strokes when a finely attuned and measured approach would have been much better. But I always welcome this category branching out to include international films in the above the line categories.

Walk Hard’s blistering satire of these things really should have been the end of it, but here is A Complete Unknown and its armful of Oscar nominations. Thankfully, this is a not a cradle-to-grave biopic, but a specific focus on a brief period in the ever-evolving and flowing career of an American icon. But it is so generically written and conceived that there is nothing illuminated about the central subject or anything beyond middlebrow entertainment. I suppose that’s good enough for the Boomer contingent of the Academy to go crazy about this sort of thing, but these types of films always leave me cold. Also, just a completely bizarro presentation of Johnny Cash here.

Emilia Pérez is yet another in a long line of the Academy embracing the most problematic and empty films about contentious subject matter, and getting ready to pat themselves on the back for doing so. Think of how they swerved on Do the Right Thing for Driving Miss Daisy, and now you are in the ballpark for this deliriously weird yet curiously inert film. All of the trades and advertising of the film announced that “you’ve never seen anything like [this],” which feels more like a threat than a ringing endorsement having now watched it. A tone of condescension envelops the whole thing, but what else could one expect from an old French dude making a film like this while openly talking about how he never bothered going to Mexico, involving the trans community in making it, dubbed Spanish a language of the poor people, and featured a dearth of good songs (it essentially never justifies why it’s a musical). Yeah, it’s a resounding “no” from me.

 

 Best Director

Nominees: Sean Baker (Anora), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), James Mangold (A Complete Unknown), Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Coralie Fargeat (The Substance)

For me, James Mangold is similar to a Ron Howard – completely lacking in a specific signature but a competent enough technician to maneuver within a variety of genres well enough. His X-Men riff on Shane was great, but I generally find his output (Ford vs Ferrari, Walk the Line) well within the three-star range. He makes excellent TNT original movies, basically. A Complete Unknown is smart enough to not bother with solving the enigma of Bob Dylan during this period, but it doesn’t have any particular or nuanced idea(s) about its subject matter either.

On the same level is Jacques Audiard. (In my mind, they are tied at fourth/fifth, so take your pick where they land.) Whiplash tonal pivots, poor lighting setups, a condescending view of Mexico, a simplistic view of transgender identity as merely being about surgeries, and simplistic, repetitive lyrics mark Emilia Pérez as a “big swing,” but one without a lot of redeeming values. It is about a lot of things, but Audiard views them all in a strangely saccharine lens and leaves the whole thing as a muddled soap opera about very little. Frankly, I would rather have seen the likes of Robert Eggers, Payal Kapadia, RaMell Ross, Walter Salles, Denis Villeneuve, or Mohammad Rasoulof in either of their slots.

The Substance is clearly Coralie Fargeat’s baby from its hyperkinetic visuals to its sardonic humor to its geysers of blood finale. That she manages to make the lurid male gaze as queasy as the various decaying/falling off body parts is not a small feat. She has given herself quite the task and the trickiest needle to thread out of anyone else nominated here, and she pulls it off. Between the searing color scheme and the discombobulating camera lenses, the leaps in tone and ample amounts of flesh on display (in more ways than one), Fargeat is a singular talent. Looks like we got another European weirdo being embraced by the Academy, and I welcome that fact.

I have long been a fan and true believer in Sean Baker’s cinematic world, which is often more empathetic than a typical American film about its various subject matter would otherwise be (poverty, sex work, those living on the margins/fringes). Anora continues that trend and manages a tricky balancing act between being a near screwball comedy in the beginning before getting increasingly darker as it progresses. Like Nights of Cabiria filtered through a New Hollywood prism, he crafts another great journey that ends with reality’s painful catharsis crashing down upon its protagonist. In another year, I’d hurl every single award his way. 

There is what everyone else in this category achieved, and what Brady Corbet achieved. It is nearly impossible to watch this and not wonder how they managed to make it on a $10 million budget. It looks expansive and lush, as if no expense was sparred and money a mere trifle. There is also the way he manages to hold the entire thing together, both artistically and technically. Despite its beefy running time, it never feels long or indulgent but necessary to explore the various contradictions of immigrating and making a way in America. What Corbet pulls off here feels like a remnant of the New Hollywood period where directors were allowed the resources and time to make their big artistic statements, and I mean that as the highest form of praise.   

 

 

Best Actor

Nominees: Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown), Colman Domingo (Sing Sing), Ralph Fiennes (Conclave), Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice)

Did we really need a biopic about Donald Trump’s ascension from insecure Manhattan nepo baby desperate for daddy to love him into the soulless, craven monster we see before us today? I do not think we did, especially right now. What more can be said or dramatized about a man who never met a camera or a recording device he didn’t want to immediately bloviate in front of? At least Sebastian Stan does not rely upon a broad impression but rather a muted comic tone as he slowly fills in and builds up the various tics and vocal mannerisms that punctuate every presser currently. The film as a whole goes too easy on its subject matter, but Stan is regardless highly up to the task.

Ever since the combo of Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name, I have found Timothée Chalamet to be a promising and surprising actor. He followed those films up with Paul Atreides, Laurie, a punkish cannibal, and now Bob Dylan. He leans hard into the sunken-eyed, antisocial insouciance and does his best to craft a readable portrait of the artist, even as the script leaves him as a mere cypher. Chalamet does his own singing, admirable, but he never quite captures the poetry, anger, or strange alchemical qualities found in Dylan’s original recordings. It is better than the karaoke performances of Bohemian Rhapsody, but still not quite up to making anything coherent out a film that snowballs towards Dylan going electric.  

The industry loves Colman Domingo, and they should because he is a wonderful talent. If you doubt me, look no further than him securing back-to-back Oscar nominations in this category. I find his work here to be superior to Rustin, but that could also just be a lot of my aversion towards biopics in general. Domingo manages to easily slip in and make himself feel part of the group of inmates so naturally, you don’t seem him straining or acting. It is a tender, delicate performance of an unjustly locked up man struggling to prove his innocence, finding his sense of purpose in the acting group, and then slowly breaks down before recomposing himself. His performance is so naturalistic and lived-in that we are reminded that Domingo is one of the best actors currently working.  

Man, Ralph Fiennes is truly one of the best actors of his generation who elevates even the silliest bits of material he’s given to work with. Naturally, he excels in Conclave as the Cardinal tasked with overseeing the election of the new pope. He finds notes of humor and melancholy within his performance and anchors the entire slow-moving suspense of interpersonal revelations and grievances with his natural gravitas. He gives a great monologue early in the film where he states that doubt is one of the more important aspects of their faith and hopes that this doubt will guide their decision-making process. His weariness and depth of feeling manage to keep the human man visible beneath the vestments. In a career littered with great performances, this has to be one of his best.

Twenty-two years after winning his well-deserved first Oscar for playing a Holocaust survivor and great artist (that time a real person, this time fictional), Adrien Brody is primed to win his second Oscar. And goddamn if he doesn’t deserve it from the first frame to the very last. In the same way that Nomadland was Chloé Zhao and Frances McDormand, The Brutalist is Brady Corbet and Adrien Brody. Bit-by-bit, Brody creates a complicated portrait of a man who wants to create towering achievements that also bring people together. It is a dazzling turn that reminds us of just how rich an actor he can be when given great material.

 

 

Best Actress

Nominees: Cynthia Erivo (Wicked), Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez), Mikey Madison (Anora), Demi Moore (The Substance), Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here)

Oh boy, it is incredibly hard to talk about Karla Sofía Gascón without the revelations and subsequent implosions of her campaign thanks to some incredibly odious tweets, but I am going to try to focus on just the performance here. But her work in Emilia Pérez is often muzzled by a director and script that sees her character in more two-dimensional figures than she clearly does. Gascón plays Emilia both pre- and post-transition, and views her character as more than the reformed sinner that Audiard does. She often plays scenes where the violence and anger from her cartel life are threatening to blow apart her current lifestyle, but everything else lets her down.

All Cynthia Erivo needs to complete her EGOT is an Oscar, and she is tremendous enough in Wicked that in another year she might have pulled it off. With this nomination, she joins Viola Davis as the second Black actress to get nominated twice in the category, and she joins the sisterhood of Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Octavia Spencer, and Angela Bassett to receive more than one nomination including lead and supporting. While the typical Elphaba is a bit like a green-skinned, magical Wednesday Addams, Erivo layers that snark with intelligence and a burgeoning activist bent that makes the Wicked Witch into something deeper and more meaningful. Naturally, her vocals are transcendent especially in “I’m Not That Girl” and “Defying Gravity.”

Fernanda Torres has the most emotionally precise challenge here. One wrong reaction shot and the delicate balance of I’m Still Here would implode. Yet Torres consistently rises to the challenge and manages to capture quicksilver thought behind her eyes. Her ability to express so much without words, often contradictory reactions/impulses to what is going on around her, leaves the entire film as her acting showcase rather than a few big scenes. Yet try as she might, Torres still can’t exactly wrestle the character beyond the limitations of the film around her. It is a thankless task to play a saint, and Torres tries to demonstrate the woman at the center of this true story in all her complicated, spirited glory even when the script is trying to affix a halo and smoothed edges to her.

Damn, Demi Moore really goes for it and lets it loose throughout The Substance as Elisabeth Sparkle, fading fitness guru desperate to cling to and extended her winnowing 15 minutes of fame. Moore not only gets to reveal dramatic depths that her previous films merely hinted at, but goes for broke during scenes of extended comedy (a scene involving French cooking) and blood-soaked body terror (take your pick, really). She manages to make us understand her character’s life before the central plot point is introduced, and why it would hold such narcotic power over her. Even better are the numerous scenes where she slowly turns into a recluse and judges herself harsher than anyone else ever could. Yes, the makeup scene is justifiably talked about. It and Moore’s entire gonzo, ultra-committed performance are just that good.

Yet Mikey Madison in Anora gives the kind of performance that is just begging for anointing from the industry. Not because she is false or flashy, but because she precisely calibrates this tough-talking Brooklynite and makes us believe that she is this person. From the first frame until the last Madison demonstrates an understanding and control of this character that is what the Oscar is entirely about. I always thought she was bound for great things after seeing her in Better Things, but I did not think it would arrive so soon. You root for her, you’re enthralled by her, and you come to understand her fully. With one notable exception, I would be happy with any of the nominees winning, but Madison earns my vote.

 

 

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees: Yora Borisov (Anora), Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice)

I am so used to seeing Edward Norton play assholes and villains, smarmy and dangerous types that to see him tackle Pete Seeger, all-around good dude and pioneering folk musician, is a strange sight. But he is Norton, one of the better actors of his generation, so he fills in the performance with his typical smarts and skill even if the script envisions him as a naïve idealist. He is the supportive mentor that is cast aside as Dylan ascends to the stratosphere and left behind by both his protegee and the wider culture amassing around him. It would be great to one day see Norton win an Oscar, but this isn’t it for me. Frankly, I would have preferred it if any of the Conclave actors (John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, or Sergio Castellitto) or Dennis Quaid (who should’ve been on his second nomination) had occupied this slot.

Jeremy Strong has been building a solid career for so long that an Oscar nomination seemed inevitable at some point. And he manages to craft Roy Cohn not as an irredeemable monster, but as a Henry Higgins who loses control of his creation, gets discarded, and demonstrates the intense self-loathing that caused him to make the world worse for everyone else around him while crafting a monster. This is essentially Strong’s bread-and-butter as an actor: showing the tortured humanity of grandiose assholes. The fact that we nearly feel pangs of sympathy for Cohn as he dies of AIDS, ignored and tossed aside by the apprentice he raised to dominance is a testament to Strong’s capabilities as an actor.

Well, Kieran Culkin is essentially slumming it since he’s really a co-lead in A Real Pain, but no matter about the politics of Oscar campaigning. We both begin and end with his character sitting alone in an airport, but the difference between his looks tells us that he has gone a complete emotional journey. His Benjy is a charismatic yet exhausting jumble of manias that puncture through in aggressive bursts between strangely sweet interludes. Culkin makes this character immediately recognizable, all magnetic “look at me” posturing interrupted by torrents of stormy moods. At once funny, violate, charming, and off-putting, he delivers a recognizably human and real symphony of a person trying to overcome and process their neuroses and mania. 

Yora Borisov as Igor in Anora is a strong contender for “the man that you are” recognition. A soulful hoodlum who quickly gains respect for the mouthy, tough dame that he’s been tasked to hold onto until a quickie divorce can be completed, Borisov gives a largely silent and reactive performance. When he does speak, his scenes are either deeply humorous or exquisitely detailed studies of human behavior. A late in the film heart-to-heart with Anora is by turns funny, empathetic, and seductive. Where Baker gives him blank spaces or silence, Borisov fills them in with a strangely sweet weariness. What a find.

I am so happy to see Guy Pearce finally get this moment after years of just doing great work in a variety of roles while going undervalued. Pearce creates a portrait of a monied and powerful man that is by turns mesmerizing and frightening. He routinely must straddle the line between being the main character’s patron in The Brutalist and deeply patronizing at the same time, sometimes obliviously and others completely maliciously. The balancing act is incredibly tricky as Pearce must be both accommodating while also brutally enacting the barriers and obstacles towards full acceptance within American society. It is a performance of remarkable depth that commands attention.  

 

 

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees: Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown), Ariana Grande (Wicked), Felicity Jones (The Brutalist), Isabella Rossellini (Conclave), Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez)

Before we begin: justice for Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and/or Margaret Qualley. There is nothing particularly wrong with Felicity Jones’ work in The Brutalist. She does her job incredibly well and gives rich inner life to this woman, but I just don’t think she gives it enough extra oomph to push it into the next level. Overall, I think this is a much stronger nomination than her first as The Long-Suffering Wife (Jane Hawking) in The Theory of Everything. But I find other non-nominated performances to be richer, more dynamic, and energetic than this one which hits all the marks but doesn’t wow me like it should.

Despite the script routinely shoving her into a two-dimensional space, Monica Barbaro valiantly makes a beautiful, colorful portrait of Joan Baez at this early point in her career. Not only does she do her own singing, no easy feat when you hear how high Baez used to sing, but manages to capture the warmth, strength, and intelligence that we have come to associate with Baez over the decades. It is her that I would pinpoint as the standout performance of A Complete Unknown, and look forward to seeing what else she has in store.

Yes, I loathed Emilia Pérez, but Zoe Saldaña is innocent of any/all crimes! In spite of being sacked with performing a series of incredibly literal, often poorly written songs, she manages to demonstrate her skillset as an actress with considerable aplomb. Granted, this skillset has largely gone unrecognized and underutilized in her series of mega-blockbuster franchise films, so it is nice, if not revelatory, watching her scale back to give fierce, demonstrative life to Rita, a frustrated lawyer who is about to undergo one hell of a telenovela journey. She has essentially managed to be award-worthy in a truly terrible film, and frankly, when the film moves away from her as its center, it often flounders. 

Sure, Isabella Rossellini has a limited amount of screentime in Conclave, but does that really matter to anyone aside from the size queens who measure these things? She glowers and possess the steeliness necessary to make us believe she is this woman. With minimal dialog and time, Rossellini delivers as fully-formed Sister Agnes long before her climatic exposition dump. The supporting categories are built for nominating, if not rewarding, these kinds of scene-stealing roles. Sister Agnes hovers in your imagination even when she is not visible to us quietly keeping important bits of knowledge to herself or exacting a strict sense of decorum and control over the conclave’s preparations.

Much like Saldaña, Ariana Grande is actually a co-lead slumming in supporting for Wicked and is the real standout of their corresponding films. Grande is a physical comedy dynamo, especially in “Popular” as she twirls and flings herself around the room punctuating her song’s comedic beats with a hair flip here or a robe flung open there. You can tell that this was her dream role because she manages to make all of the effort to properly hit those comedic beats and superficial mean girl-turns-good development into something special. She makes Galina/Glinda into a featherlight concoction as airy, delicate, and wonderful as the vibrant pink bubble we first see her arrive in.  

 

Best Screenplay – Adapted

Nominees: A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Emilia Pérez, Nickel Boys, Sing Sing

The script for Emilia Pérez is a hollow series of parochial and liberal posturing towards issues and ideas without exploring, developing, or investigating any of them too deeply. Here is a story about Mexico and a transwoman that plays on surface-level understandings and readings of both subjects/locations. Rather than doing something interesting with them, it limply relies on “audacity” and “big swings” and rapidly reveals itself as having little to say about anything at all.

James Mangold essentially made A Complete Unknown before with Walk the Line, another musician biopic that narrowed its scope and focus down to a specific series of events in their life. We get the same paint-by-numbers screenplay here where various characters loudly express the defining themes of the film. Mainly, this falls into the mouths of its two female characters as one has a back-and-forth with Dylan accusing him of obfuscating or fabulizing his past, while Joan Baez says he is essentially an asshole. Throughout, Dylan is a mere walking cypher that everyone else projects upon. We have seen this thing before in the largely fabricated and experimental I’m Not There, Todd Haynes near Dadaist cinematic portrait.  

Sing Sing feels like it would be a great one-act play, but is a film that feels strangely half-made. Is it a docudrama about the arts rehabilitation program in the titular prison? Is it a fictional account of the same thing? Well, a little bit of both, actually. The way it tries to democratize its focus across the various incarcerated performers in the troupe begins to thin the various juicy, heady topics that they discuss, including racism, classism, and recidivism. Still, it is such an open-hearted movie that was sculpted from the participation of the various real-life performers playing thinly fictionalized versions of themselves that you find yourself forgiving its overwrought exposition and zealously noble intentions. 

Conclave concerns the election of a new pope, so it naturally centers around the various candidates and their rise and fall before finding someone suitable. It becomes a fascinating spectacle because of its alchemy of solid direction, acting, and a reliable script that trusts its audience to follow along. Yes, I have seen the various memes that compare the Cardinals to the Housewives, Mean Girls, and the like. While this is not wrong, it also downplays that there are deeper questions about where an institution should move and reform to ensure it has a future. Yes, at times a few characters are simplistically drawn into progressive versus conservative, but there is still something rich and engaging going on throughout.

Nickel Boys takes the incident, characters, and themes from its Pulitzer Prize winner and makes them nearly disjointed and displaced. Jettisoning the omniscient narrator from the novel for a subjective experience, sprinkled in with montage and collage-like assembly of footage that strikes tone and mood, Nickel Boys is a marvel of adaptive power. It becomes not only a great way to dramatize the novel’s concept of these two boys as opposing ideological forces, but the ways in which they blur in the surprise twist revelation. For all of these reasons, and it’s just my favorite movie in the category, I would happily hand this award off to RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes.

 

 

Best Screenplay – Original

Nominees: Anora, The Brutalist, A Real Pain, September 5, The Substance

September 5 suffers from an incredibly limited perspective. It does a fine job walking a tightrope of suspense and dramatic reenactment, but provides no air time for ideological nuance or insight. How exactly does one make an apolitical thriller out of the Munich Olympic massacre? It seems to treat the entire ordeal as an excuse to examine the minute-by-minute decisions made in the name of journalism, which would be a fine starting point, but it is declawed and defanged. Too skittish and nervous about approaching its various fascinating thematic threads and pulling on them too toughly. It is perfectly fine, but nothing more.  

A Real Pain is by turns both sensitive and vexing. Writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg’s history as a playwright reveals itself in the nuanced layering of sympathies and frustrations of its two distant cousins reuniting on a Jewish heritage trip through Poland. And let’s be honest here, this was probably a very close eleventh place finisher for a Best Picture nomination. I do enjoy a funny, tender, and quiet character study, so this was entirely within my wheelhouse and Eisenberg’s central premise (that generational trauma travels through everyone until you confront it) is a moving one. Shame that there was no room for him in Best Actor, but he deservedly got a nomination here.

Anora manages its various tonal shifts amid the glimpse of a hardscrabble working-class girl making like a wrecking ball into the oligarchic world. I am not sure that it has quite as much to say as some of Sean Baker’s previous films, though. The edges have surely been sanded off in comparison to Tangerine or The Florida Project, but it is still an energetic and dark comedy. The problem is that the script could do with another round of editing to tighten up some scenes that repeat too often or go on for too long. It is quite strong and very good work, regardless.

Perhaps the most on-the-nose moment of The Brutalist is one character telling another, “We tolerate you,” but this sequence is one of the rare examples of this happening. Preferring to not hammer its themes and ideas home but rather slowly peel them back in layers, The Brutalist encourages and deserves its Great American Novel-style rapturous praise and comparisons. László Toth’s story becomes both a fulfillment and a repudiation of the American dream, but the American experience as envisioned here demands consistent sacrifice in order to be achieved and be appeased. In all aspects, this is a towering achievement. And much like the buildings designed by its main character, it is one built to last.

The category is called “Original Screenplay,” and I can’t think of a more audacious, frenzied, entertaining, and yes, original screenplay than The Substance. In go All About Eve, Death Becomes Her, and the works of the Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), and out comes this warped satire of aging, beauty standards, and the impossible feats some will go to achieve and maintain them. Coralie Fargeat is the true auteur of this film as she functioned not only as its writer but its director. Her vision is clear, her humor both broad and precise, and her ability to juggle several tones, many of them lurid, is a marvel. Not only that, but she manages to close the thematic loop here with a gag involving the central character’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that had me howling at the end.

 

 

Best Animated Feature

Nominees: Flow, Inside Out 2, Memoir of a Snail, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, The Wild Robot

Inside Out 2 continues the streak of Disney/Pixar sequels feeling less like expansions of their world than loose remakes of the first film. Sure, we get more complex emotions here, but we also get Joy on yet another journey through Riley’s mind before restoring proper order and learning to accept the complexities of emotions and someone’s inner life. Ironically, it shows a distinct lack of imagination on the part of the creative team to essentially retread where they had previously gone before. The visual complexity, especially numerous depictions of Anxiety, does not match with the overly familiar plot beats. If we had a script that was as arresting as Anxiety creating a tornado in Riley’s control room, we would have had something that rivaled the first film.

The gauntlet of misery and hardships endured throughout Memoir of a Snail can give it a repetitive streak, or a strong sense of miserabilism. Yet the film never entirely succumbs to despair as its protagonist keeps moving forward, keeps holding out hope. It is these grace notes that keep the film engaging whenever it threatens to go fully into despondency. This is not unlike Adam Elliot’s previous film, Mary & Max, but I found that film overall stronger. It must be said that Memoir of a Snail does feature great voice work from Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

The return of Feathers McGraw gives Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl its subtitle, and the excuse to go fully into action spectacle towards the end. At times, this tendency can threaten to lose the thread, or at the very least upend the bucolic English humor and slapstick tendencies that marked the franchise up to this point. Sure, the dangers of AI plot is timely, but the real heart of the material is in the central fissure between Wallace and Gromit, who feels largely ignored by his master’s obsession with new inventions and cast aside in his home. Nothing reminds you of just how smart, funny, and touching this series can be than the sight of Gromit in bed reading A Room of One’s Own and Paradise Lost. 

The Wild Robot continues DreamWorks movement away from the rubbery ‘realistic’ approach of their earliest forays into CG animation and into the warm, watercolor-like approach. This approach lets their films have individual personalities and characteristics instead of a dull house style. The plot continues director Chris Saunders preoccupations with a protagonist yearning for connection. Parenting is the primary thematic concern, and The Wild Robot finds some truly touching emotional and visual beats to express the joys and agonies involved in that tall order. Between the heartfelt narrative, gorgeous animation, and stellar voice work (Lupita Nyong’o gives Roz a varied, deep, and complex robotic life), The Wild Robot is not just one of the best animated films of 2024, but one of the best films.

A beautifully rendered poem about the search for found family and resilience in the face of catastrophe, Flow is the animated film of 2024. In its flights of surrealism (the cat and secretarybird wander to the middle of the labyrinth and practically float into the cosmos) and refusal to anthropomorphize its various critters, Flow emerges as a singular work of artistry. It refuses to give us any exposition (just what happened to all of the humans? Why is the world flooding?) but that is not a problem since it narrows its scope down to simple broad strokes about cooperation and mutual aid. Flow proves that when done effectively in a film words are useless. (Yes, that’s a Madonna reference, and what about it?)

See everyone this time next year!