Looks like last year’s love for The Substance was not a one-off fluke as genre dominated the Oscar nominations this year – Sinners, Frankenstein, Bugonia, Weapons, The Ugly Stepsister (my favorite happy surprise to hear that morning), just to name a few. Although, it does seem like the voting body only watched about three dozen films and nominated all of them accordingly. Still, it does seem incredibly encouraging that the nominated works titled heavily towards genre, foreign films, and major Hollywood productions in addition to the quiet, character-focused films that have become the Academy’s bread-and-butter across the decades. It means it is more representative of the actual highs of the year across various film genres and types of films.
So how do you solve a problem like Wicked: For Good? Easy, Act II is infamously problematic in the stage show so naturally it carried over in the bloated two-parter. Turns out trying to terraform your musical as a retroactive origin story for the beloved 1939 film is not a great way to make audiences adore you. I will not lie, it getting completely frozen out even in the technical categories was a little shocking at first, but the sequel simply didn’t have the cultural cache that the first one did no matter what the box office said. Think of the lukewarm critical reaction to Avatar: Fire and Ash, even if it did sail away to another billion dollars, as a sign that this year simply dominating the box office wasn’t enough to land you at the Oscars.
But the diversification of Oscar’s voting body continues to produce some truly memorable nominations. Sinners breaking the record for most nominations for a single film while simultaneously blessing Academy Award nominee upon the overdue likes of Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan? Makes the heart sing in the pale moonlight. Brazil continues to make appearances in major categories like Picture and Actor. A hefty amount of acting nominations went to foreign language performances (deservedly, in my opinion).
Nominees: Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams
The nominees are ranked using a preferential ballot. Here I how I would rank the nominees:
- Sinners
- One Battle After Another
- Sentimental Value
- The Secret Agent
- Hamnet
- Frankenstein
- Marty Supreme
- Train Dreams
- Bugonia
- F1
Just like last year I am going from best to worst and talking about them in ballot order. Enjoy your reading as I work through the ten nominees.
Nothing has stayed with me quite like the scene where Sammie (Miles Caton), son of a preacher man with a preternatural musical gift, pierces the veil between the past, present, and future while performing. Sinners is Ryan Coogler’s imagination ripping open an arterial vein and splashing everywhere in artful splays. We spend a long time merely witnessing the quotidian Jim Crow minutia, including the horrors and the ways that people still find joy and dignity, before the vampires show up. By the time they do, the layered symbols and metaphors about Black resiliency in the face of oppression, art’s ability and limitation to provide freedom/escape, and the consumptive culture of Whiteness are made manifest. No mainstream film dared more, was more startingly original, or possessed as much to say while operating under the disguise of genre filmmaking.
One Battle After Another is yet another vital work from one of our best working creatives, Paul Thomas Anderson. Built from various ideas and strands in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, Anderson sets about reflecting upon our current cultural moment. As ever, the past is constant conversation with the present and our persistent struggle to progress forward. If Pynchon’s novel was about the burgeoning evils of Nixon and Reagan’s religious ethno-fascism, then Anderson picks up where that left off and creates a rollicking good time. From the first frame until the last we are in the hands of a confident master of his craft populated by actors who are game for anything and everything and persistent feeling that American culture’s longest forever war is the one it has been waging against itself. One Battle and Sinners are the definitive movies of their year and era and could make for a fascinating double-bill for the ways they complement and approach similar ideas from different ends of the spectrum.
For all its heady ideas about the ways generational trauma is passed down or the pangs of artistic creation, Sentimental Value is always best when it deals with two or more characters in a room simply talking, or talking around something in portentous silences. Here we meet Gustav Borg, an alcoholic director looking to make his next passion project, a loosely autobiographical film about his mother and the Nazi occupation of Oslo, and his two estranged adult daughters. One of them has created a simple, solid life as a housewife and mother, the other has inherited his destructive qualities and wild artistic sensibilities. Thrown into the mix is a Hollywood actress initially cast in the lead role of the film-within-a-film before dropping out as she realizes she is merely a proxy for his actress-daughter who refused the part. At times Trier’s direction gets too obvious, and at others he creates memorably poetic images like a close-up of the faces of Gustav, Nina, and Agnes that shift from one to the other continuously in the darkness as the light orbits around them.
Covering the same time period as last year’s I’m Still Here, complete with a time jump as a coda, The Secret Agent does that film one better by building a tense, complicated portrait of one person’s resistance. This film recalls the heights of the 1970s sweaty paranoid political thrillers and builds out Brazil’s military dictatorship through numerous period details. The Secret Agent is largely a character study of a man trying to find a way out of this quagmire and build a life of safety and security for him and his son. The whole film is an absorbing experience and zips through its 2 hour and 40-minute run time. Clandestine phone calls, secretly recorded meetings, surrealistic nightmares and daydreams, all of it conspires to tell the story of Armando, a former professor stuck in the crosshairs of political turmoil. Beautiful to look at and thematically rich, The Secret Agent is a deeply human story of trying to find the light in the darkness.
It took a while for me to ride the rhythms of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. At times, much like Train Dreams, it is clearly trying for the lyrical and poetic cinema of Terrence Malick while tied to a story of grief. A story that just so happens to involve William Shakespeare and the creation of Hamlet, perhaps the Bard’s most discussed and best-known tragedy. Yet there are moments of transcendent grace and deep human connection sprinkled throughout the film. Powered by the great performances from Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, Hamnet takes its time to allow its various scenes to breathe and build their emotional payoff.
A long simmering passion project for Guillermo del Toro, Frankenstein is the preeminent piece of Gothic literature, a work that developed science-fiction and expanded horror, as filtered with the pop craft maximalism of the Mexican auteur. Awash in Catholic guilt, patriarchy, and grandiose sentiment, Frankenstein wears its regenerated heart on its sleeve. By bifurcating the narrative, half is narrated by creator then by creation, del Toro found a way to deal with the two major themes of the work and give them their due. The first half is the cautionary tale of science and technology run amuck without forethought or consideration for the moral implications while the second is the father/son narrative repeating as we witness the child-like creature’s cruel treatment and abandonment leading towards his vengeance-soaked wintery cat-and-mouse game. Populated by indulgent production design and costuming, Frankenstein is a visual, emotional, and intellectual feast.
I had a harder than anticipated time getting into Marty Supreme’s wavelength. The overall concept works and Josh Safdie certainly has a panache for style and tone yet I found it saggy in spots. The tension breaks in the middle because of too many diversions and side plots that seemingly go nowhere for stretches at a time. Yet on a technical level, and a casting one, Marty Supreme is flawless. The production design, costumes, makeup work, and cinematography are all top notch. There are also a cavalcade of fun one-scene wonders and long working character actors making quick appearances that add to the overall flavor.
Essentially a Terrence Malick pastiche with too much voiceover to really sell its spirituality and visual poetry, Train Dreams is a perfectly enjoyable little movie about one man living through disruptive times and being left behind by technological leaps. I think some of the problem here is that Joel Edgerton is selling already what the narration is repeating so it starts hammering its point home with a sledgehammer when another tool was already adequately doing the job. At once too slavishly enamored with Denis Johnson’s prose and Malick’s cinema to entirely become its own thing, Train Dreams frustrated me as much as it absorbed, moved, and transported me.
I think I have fallen out of whatever wavelength Yorgos Lanthimos was operating on that previously enchanted me with films like Poor Things and The Favourite. Between Kinds of Kindness and Bugonia I have found his misanthropic streak to be turning increasingly distancing and off-putting. Frankly, half of its nominations are outside of my understanding, namely Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Emma Stone does continue to give strong work under Lanthimos’ direction, and I wouldn’t have complained if Jesse Plemmons had made it into Best Actor, but the whole thing feels like it repeats points that it made previously. This is best exemplified by the closing montage which keeps going seemingly because Lanthimos wanted to let Marlene Dietrich’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” play in full.
Every year that is a contingent of voters in the Academy
who usher in a Dad Movie to the Best Picture category, and this year it is F1,
a technically perfect but dull story of a young buck (Damson Idris) and
grizzled vet (Brad Pitt) headbutting each other. Frankly, much of F1 plays like
it is trying to continue to rehabilitate Pitt’s persona post-drunken abuse of his
family by centering the film on his crashed-out bum who gets another shot at
the big time instead of the more interesting Idris as the hot shot driver on
the scene. It seems entranced by the fact that Pitt’s weathered face is still
handsome and his torso is still taunt despite the limitations of his character
while Idris is left on the short end, all frustrated charisma playing second
fiddle. Overly long, expertly made on a technical level, but completely
disengaging from a narrative or character standpoint, F1 is evidence that
Hollywood can still make reliably sturdy blockbusters even if it did not
entirely engage me.
Nominees: Chloé Zhao (Hamnet), Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another), Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value), Ryan Coogler (Sinners)
A good director would know when to kill their darlings and edit further so that is why Josh Safdie is the weakest of the group for me. There are stylistic choices that I am still trying to wrap my mind around, especially the discordant soundtrack of 80s new wave/synthpop against its 1950s setting. While I thoroughly enjoyed the needle drops of New Order and Tears for Fears, I wonder why exactly we were going with them instead of a period appropriate soundtrack? Still, Safide does demonstrate a steady hand of emotional tone and the ability to create a living texture to his film. I just enjoyed this film the least of the five.
I feel as though the Chloé Zhao of The Rider or Nomadland, who allowed her films to throb with melancholic ache, at times hits the suffocating tragedy a little too hard here. On the flip side, Zhao also builds out scenes of daily life that allow for levity and other emotional textures aside from the blunt pathos. Hamnet is still quite good especially in the ways that it evokes the cyclical nature of life and death and how the two are perpetually in commune with each other. Whenever Zhao lets her symbolic mind go, as in the liminal space where Hamnet walks after he dies, the film really absorbs and takes on unique colors and shapes. It all leads up to a stunning final twenty minutes where everything firmly locks into place and the spiritual uplift soars through The Globe.
Since discovering him a few years back, I always look forward to whatever Joachim Trier releases. Sentimental Value is no different. At its best when it is leaning into simplicity, Sentimental Value is the absorbing offspring of Ingmar Bergman’s cinema. Less austere and punishing for certain, but just as obsessed with what its characters aren’t saying as what they are and the silences that engulf them. At its occasionally questionable worst, Trier gets a little too fussy spelling out or leaning heavily on his symbols in a manner that threatens the delicacy of what he has created. But there is still a mastery of overall tone, actors, and images here that is beyond commendable. I’m so happy to see Trier finally get this recognition.
Strange that Ryan Coogler’s films have largely been given the spotlight by the Academy but he has less so (he did earn a previous nomination as a producer on Judas and the Black Messiah). Sinners is entirely his vision, his masterpiece, his working of genius. Frankly, he should win simply for the piercing the veil scene alone, a sustained bit of hallucinatory beauty in a film populated with rich visuals, subtext, finely calibrated tonal shifts, and a firm artistic hand routinely molding and shaping the film. From the beginning, Coogler’s skill and vision is clear-eyed and expertly unspooled before us.
I struggled between keeping Picture/Director together or
splitting them or spreading the wealth a bit moo. Well, I
guess we can see where I landed. Paul Thomas Anderson has been owed at least
one Oscar from the Academy for roughly 25 years at this point. Eleven previous
nominations spread across various categories and no wins? Sometimes this voting
body is so deeply unserious. Anderson’s work on One Battle After Another is
beyond worthy given the expert control he exhibits from the first frame straight
on through to the end. As expansive as Thomas Pynchon’s text, which he vaguely
repurposed for his own needs here, Anderson’s film is living text of the American
psyche in this current era and the historical forces that have brought us to
this point being in constant argument and occasional eruptions of violence.
Nominees: Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme), Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), Michael B. Jordan (Sinners), Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent)
The problem with Marty Supreme is that Timothée Chalamet is not inherently likeable in a role that folds that quality into its narrative, but unlike say Uncut Gems, which had Adam Sandler in the lead and is a generally likeable screen presence, we do root for Marty’s humbling. His scheming and silver tongue, his manipulations and bravado are definitely well played by Chalamet, and he does very good and commendable work here, but spending 2.5 hours with him in this mode becomes tedious. Generally, I enjoy Chalamet’s work but the entitlement of this part encourages a smugness that needed an actor who can more easily and readily demonstrate a vulnerability or neurosis that pulls us in to work as a counterbalance.
Blue Moon is practically a gift-wrapped acting showcase for Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, and he is clearly game from the first frame until the last. In a career filled with strong performances, this might be one of his strongest, and certainly he would make for a worthy winner. From the beginning he invests Hart with an intellectual snobbery and gossipy queen exterior that both attracts and keep us at a distance. As the movie goes on, he reveals layers of vulnerability, rage, frustration, and a deep need for love and to create art. The movie itself is good enough but Hawke is extraordinary.
You know, after decades of trying to prove his Serious Actor™ bona fides, which he very much has the chops for, it is nice to see Leonardo DiCaprio lean into his incredible comedic skills more often as he gets older. He was a useful idiot in Killers of the Flower Moon, a vision of toxic masculinity and greed in The Wolf of Wall Street, and here is a former revolutionary turned pot smoking burnout Girl Dad. With his bathrobe and greasy bun, DiCaprio signals a willingness to get alternately ridiculous with it and build up frustration at the sheer lunacy he has found himself inside of at the same time. He never winks or condescends to the character or to his strange scenarios. Rather, DiCaprio reminds us that he is one of the greatest actors of his generation and at his best when allowing his considerable comedic skills a chance to stretch out and shine.
Without a doubt, Wagner Moura’s work in The Secret Agent is the least flashy of the group. He calls the least amount of attention to himself throughout, which works perfectly for the layered roles and overall tone of the film. A former research professor who gets on the wrong side of monied interests and has to go underground to try and escape Brazil’s military dictatorship, Moura must walk a fine line between being seen and disappearing into his surroundings. His subtle and intelligent work nabbed him Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, a deserved honor and he became the first South American actor to win that award. Moura’s triple role, essentially the man he was before he went into hiding, the false identity, and his adult son in a time jump epilogue, plays a bit like a Hitchcockian hero, a 70s political thriller protagonist, and a stand-in for all the people crushed by the heels of fascists.
I really do hope
that Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler keep making movies together well into
their old age given what they have created together so far. Jordan has long
been nomination worthy, often in Coogler’s films (Creed, Fruitvale Station), so
to see it finally happen for him made me so happy. That it happened when he
played twins so we got to see just how expansive his talent is? All the better.
He makes Smoke and Stack entirely different and distinguishable characters
through vocal mannerisms, body language, the ways they punctuate words or their
lines with head or hand movements. Sinners offers him up the chance to be
dangerous, sexy, tough, tender, resolved, and desperate all at once, and often
in two distinct ways between the twins. What a pair of performances.
Nominees: Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), Emma Stone (Bugonia)
You know, I keep pretending that the Academy doesn’t have a wine mom voting block and getting mildly irritated that I now have to watch something like Nyad, so imagine my reaction seeing that Kate Hudson managed to make it into the top five with Song Sung Blue. In fact, she gives quite a movie star performance that would have snatched up a win if it was the 1950s and Susan Hayward was in the lead. She sings, she gets into a life-altering accident, painkiller addiction, accent work, goofy romantic comedy and campy melodrama all in one role. It feels like a performance and nomination from a bygone era and she might have been win competitive if it was 1995. Frankly, I think Chase Infiniti, Tessa Thompson, or Amanda Seyfried deserved it more.
At this point, I think that Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos need to take a little break from each other, but he continues to provide her with ample opportunities to play weird, obtuse parts that occasionally feel more like prolonged acting exercises than fully fleshed out characters. Bugonia continues that trend but Stone is once more totally game for the curveballs the script throws her way. There is something slightly alien about her big eyes and plenty of Bugonia is simply asking her to utilize them to emote. If there is any ding against the performance, and the film, is that the last act plot twist seems obvious from the beginning as there is a certain simulacrum of human behavior in her characterization. Maybe a different director would have had her play it so the twist that she really is an alien wasn’t so obvious? Either way, that would have led to a richer characterization.
Frankly, Renate Reinsve should have scooped up so many awards for The Worst Person in the World, including an Oscar, for her emotionally intelligent and acute portrait of a woman struggling to define and create herself on the cusp of her 30s that this nomination feels simultaneously earned and overdue. But Reinsve is once again magnificent under the guiding hands of Joachim Trier and delivers another acute and intelligent performance here. Her Nora is a neurotic stage actress with a supportive relationship with her sister, a prickly one with her father, and crippling stage fright/anxiety coupled with an inability to engage in healthy relationships. Trier lets scenes breathe so Reinsve plays the full emotional scope of any given scene to its most satisfying ending, and occupies the vast silences with a confidence and skill that marks her as one of the best actresses currently working. I hope she wins one of these someday.
Jessie Buckley has made a clean sweep this awards season and her performance in Hamnet is wonderful and highly deserving. She will make a fine winner, I am presuming the pattern will hold, and I am positive this year will be looked back on as one that Oscar watchers wish would end in a tie or that Buckley and Byrne had their films released in separate years. Now back to what she actually accomplishes, which is quite a lot. As Agnes Shakespeare, Buckley plays a woman eternally in spiritual communication with the world around her – a herbalist and falconer who feels witchy and protective in equal measure. Buckley has several scenes of tremendous power such as a birthing scene where she brings back a presumptive stillbirth to wailing life and the deathbed scene as she desperately tries to save Hamnet. Her primal screams are counterbalanced by the fugue state of her face. It is an amazing piece of work that flows with rich inner life and vitality. Strange to think that the two strongest performances in this category are both of mothers moving through intense situations in life and struggling to find catharsis.
Rose Byrne has been so good in so many genres that she feels
both massively underrated and taken for granted. Enter If I Had Legs I’d Kick
You which pivots entirely on her ability to find the right combination of
dramatic chops, comedic skills, and horror heroine all in service of a tense
portrait of a woman flailing as life’s various troubles keep piling up. She is
a woman trying to balance an absent husband, an ill child, a thorny
relationship with both her therapist and her clients, home repairs, and that is
more than enough to break even the strongest person. So much of the film hinges
on Byrne’s face moving through various emotional states, many of them barely
suppressed anxiety or rage while trying to remain calm or personable, and she
nails the assignment. Hers is a portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous
breakdown for the mommy blogger generation. If I had my way, she would be the
one absolutely cleaning up in this category this year.
Nominees: Benicio del Toro (One Battle After Another), Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein), Delroy Lindo (Sinners), Sean Penn (One Battle After Another), Stellan Skarsgård (Sentimental Value)
A few years back, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci essentially did a similar yin-yang dual nomination in The Irishman, with one of them providing low-key, steady support while the other chewed scenery (in character). Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro repeat that act here in One Battle After Another. Benicio del Toro is the quiet, subtle, steady supporting player who reveals depths and layers as the narrative goes on all while never getting too showy with it. He never calls attention to himself but demonstrates a complex portrait of a man who represents a duology – both an exemplar of the community and a political revolutionary in his own right.
In stark contrast, Penn gets to go to eleven as the film’s symbol of fragile toxic masculinity and white nationalist beliefs. His military leader is rotten to the core and makes his various kinks and personal failings everyone else’s problem. He goes big with it, yes, but he always has a handle on who this man is and what his goals are. A late scene where he tortures the potential daughter he never knew existed is a stunner for the outright and very real sense of violence and danger he brings to it. At its best, this performance reminds us of what a consummate actor Penn can be under the right circumstances when he isn’t allowed to indulge in his worst impulses (see Mystic River for that).
After a career’s worth of solid, sturdy, often remarkable work, Delroy Lindo finally got the nomination for his gravelly and tough old bluesman, Delta Slim. If Wumni Mosaku’s Annie is the heart, then Lindo’s Delta Slim is the hard-lived experience of Sinners, a musical legend kept down by the racist hierarchy of his era. It is Lindo who delivers one of the film’s major themes about the Black experience in America (“White folks like the blues just fine, they just don’t like the people who make it.”) with the battle worn wisdom of a man who has had to find numerous little compromises and contortions to survive this long. It is beautiful work that does not call attention to itself so much as make the words sing. After a near miss with Da 5 Bloods, it is nice to see Lindo finally get the recognition he deserves.
Stellan Skarsgård has long been one of those actors who come in, deliver the goods, and elevate whatever piece they are appearing in, no matter how good or bad. Sentimental Value gives him a character worthy of his skills and decades of fine performances as Gustav, the alcoholic absentee director father returning to his childhood home to reunite with his estranged daughters and make a movie. He has brought that curmudgeon quality to several big tentpole films so it is nice to see him use it to create a complex man wrestling with his personal demons. The genius of this film’s performances is largely in the silences, both when the characters are alone and when they’re struggling to interact with each other, and one of the best is the melancholy and isolation of Gustav waking up on the beach hungover after a film festival.
I had known Jacob Elordi as a handsome actor from
Euphoria and teen-centric romantic comedies and then I watched Priscilla and
saw something interesting and deeper going on with him. I was already intrigued
by what that could mean when it was announced he had taken over the role of the
Creature in Frankenstein, and I loved everything he was doing in the role. Not
only does he use his impressive physicality, he towers over everyone, but he makes
subtle, fascinating choices to move like a stiff-jointed marble statue come to
life at first and communicate in guttural sounds. He eventually finds even
deeper, more sympathetic layers in the Creature becoming a wounded, haunted,
yet violent hero from Gothic Romance. The Byronic Hero as stitched together
mannequin then blessed with life.
Nominees: Elle Fanning (Sentimental Value), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value), Amy Madigan (Weapons), Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another)
To kick this category off, I must say – no skips, all bangers. Truly, no acting category this year is pound-for-pound as filled with rich, layered, emotionally devastating and complex performances as this one. Which is why it is probably strange to list the Sentimental Value actresses at the bottom of the category, but that is not a patch on their work in the slightest. Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas do consummate, rich work throughout. Lilleaas does not get the showy stuff and instead has to function as the sturdy support to everyone else. The least neurotic Nordic character in the bunch.
Meanwhile, Elle Fanning has been doing strong work since she was a literal toddler and brings a levity to the proceedings in a role that can feel self-reflective. She is a Hollywood actress teaming-up with a respected European filmmaker to make a prestige project before backing out because she gets nervous about her skills in executing the demanding role. Fanning has long projected a combination of ephemerality and darkness lurking just beneath that delicate surface. A happy surprise come nomination morning, Fanning delivers the goods in a surprisingly tricky role that could easily be written off as “just playing herself” if you aren’t paying attention to the skill involved in making it look so smooth.
Teyana Taylor deserved awards consideration for her fantastic work in One Thousand and One so seeing her make the shortlist was quite welcome, no matter how expected it was. Taylor dominates the earliest portion of the film with her intense gaze and potent combination of revolutionary ideals, danger, and sensuality. Even after she leaves the narrative there is the ghost of her haunting the very edges of the frame. Her character is essentially a complete short story inside of a sprawling epic narrative. If nothing else, her work here has made me more interested in what she’ll do next including that prospective Dionne Warwick biopic.
If Sinners has a clear-eyed heart, it is in Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie, a Hoodoo practitioner and source of knowledge about the arcane and supernatural. When we meet her, she is offering her gifts to a child within the community and being greeted by an old lover with a sad, complicated history. Mosaku’s gives Annie a core of strength and intelligence while also projecting warmth and a weariness caused by her life’s various hardships. She projects all of this without having to say a word, it is evident in the way that she occupies and moves through a space or takes hold of a situation. Mosaku is a blossoming talent and I am happy that she got this recognition for her richly rendered work. In many ways, Mosaku is the glue holding together the disparate parts of Sinners together.
A little bit Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby, a little bit
Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and a whole lot of commitment
equals what Amy Madigan brings to the witchy Aunt Gladys in Weapons. She is
largely kept to a barely seen specter until the final portion unleashes her on
the audience, and Madigan delivers the goods. Not only is she laying on the
camp, but she builds something sinister and unnerving lurking just below the
surface. It would be easy for an actress of her stature and talents to merely
go histrionic, but Madigan builds Gladys into something colorful yet
disturbing. Beneath the freight makeup, bright orange wig, and loud clothing is
a measured and dangerous individual.
Nominees: Bugonia, Frankenstein, Hamnet, One Battle After Another, Train Dreams
I have seen Save the Green Planet, the South Korean film that Bugonia is a very loose remake of, and I overall prefer that one. Bugonia keeps the basics of the plot but updates them for America in the present day. One of the major problems here is that we have a plethora of sweaty, mentally unbalanced young men given to conspiratorial thinking, and Bugonia seems deeply uninterested in investigating them in any meaningful way. It tips its hand towards the “surprise” twist that he was right and this woman really is an alien who was manipulating humanity too early. Much of the film is like this, showing too early then hammering the point home repeatedly. Perhaps the thinnest one of the bunch.
Train Dreams changes surprisingly little of the text from Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name, mainly minor cosmetic changes to occasionally make the main character more sympathetic and more of an observer. Much like the novella, something about Train Dreams’ writing kept me at a cool remove, and I think it was the insistence on sentences that are too in love with their own flowery spirituality that repeats in the slightly unnecessary narration here. Yet I still overall enjoy Train Dreams despite something about it being at a remove for me.
I have not read the source material of Hamnet but assuming since the original author was involved in writing the screenplay, I think it is safe to assume that many of the flaws are repeated from the source material. Much like Shakespeare in Love, Hamnet has the occasionally tendency to play too cutesy with allusions to the Bard’s work. Thankfully, they keep those to a minimum and instead focus in on the ways that art can help heal, process emotional trauma, and provide catharsis. The main thrust of the story is the tale of the death of Hamnet Shakespeare and the disparate ways that his parents process their all-encompassing grief. At times too neat when it needed to be more complex, Hamnet still, in my estimation, earns its tear-inducing finale.
Yes, Guillermo del Toro did make some changes, both big and small, throughout Mary Shelley’s text, but his vision for Frankenstein is surprisingly faithful and earnest to the text. He gives the Creature a chance to say his side of the story while emphasizing that Victor is an unreliable narrator. He strikes a balance between the major themes of the misuse of science and the responsibilities of parenthood/the passing down of generational drama. I find his version of the story to be vital and alive, drunk on the maximalist tendencies of Latin Catholicism while giving ample room for smaller character beats. It is the Frankenstein myth as fracted through del Toro’s love for Gothic Romance, horror, the Romantics, and personal autobiography.
Paul Thomas Anderson states plainly that One Battle After
Another is “loosely adapted” from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland in the credits, and
it does seem that he has taken the overall ideas and some incidents and crafted
them into something new. Pynchon’s novel was about former 60s countercultural figures
crashing out in Reaganite America. Pynchon describes “fascistic Nixon
repression” and the burgeoning war on drugs/police state of the Reagan years in
stark contrast to the community building that provided a counterweight. The
more things change the more they stay the same as Anderson moves the timeline
up a bit to comment on how we live now. While in production before the current
horrors, One Battle After Another is clearly commenting upon and in
conversation with them. The dynamics of Pynchon’s alternate reality prose are
there but they are in service of Anderson’s own artistic vision, which is what
you want from an adaptation.
Nominees: Blue Moon, It Was Just an Accident, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, Sinners
Blue Moon is a great one act play that never quite takes launch as a movie on its own merits. Taking place entirely at Sardi’s after the premiere of Oklahoma!, it finds Lorenz Hart in persistent monologuing and only pausing long enough for another character to either give recriminations, emotional blows, or lean into the voyeuristic aspects of his character. It is largely held together by Ethan Hawke’s performance, but the script tells more than it shows. A little too in love with its reams of dialog, Blue Moon is very enjoyable but perhaps the weakest nominee in the group.
The script, a largely fictional riff on the life of Marty Reisman, Marty Supreme is the weakest aspect of the film overall. The entire thing feels like a Saul Bellow novel, but where a Saul Bellow novel can make room for diversions, subplots that string out for prolonged periods, and vignettes that go nowhere but add to the tone, a film cannot always hold that successfully. The film is at its best when it narrows its focus down to the rags-to-riches daydream and Marty’s ambitious drive and less so when it makes us notice how poorly the female characters are written or the random one-liners that make you go “Huh!?” (One character randomly spouting they’re a vampire from the 1600s is a real head-scratcher.) I preferred it when we zoomed in on an American hustler and less so with prolonged violent confrontations on a farm.
It Was Just an Accident looks at the lasting scars and trauma of living under a tyrannical regime and offers up an ending that is not a bold period but an ellipsis. I must say, I am shocked that this did not appear in categories like Picture or Director as it feels like a strong contender for those international slots. No matter, the script of It Was Just an Accident plays out like an Iranian spin on a Russian novel as characters burn through the stasis of their lives to revisit a painful chapter and the person responsible for it. Small character details build up into something profound, painful, engrossing, and continually absorbing. In another year, this would be a worthy winner.
My introduction to Joachim Trier was The Worst Person in the World and that level of emotional complexity and generosity continues with Sentimental Value, a story about generational trauma and occasionally acting within acting. The four major characters – famous father, estranged daughters, Hollywood actress starring in the dad’s latest film – all get full development and we understand these people down into their marrow. At times the discursions to previous generations or obvious symbolism can get in the way of the poetry and heart of the material, but Sentimental Value is still a densely written work and given soaring, aching life by a strong ensemble of players.
Think that Sinners is simply another vampire story? Think
again as Ryan Coogler once more utilizes mainstream pop cinema to create a
towering work of art about the Black experience. Pulling from historical realities
– juke joints, Jim Crow, discrimination in even perceived liberal enclaves –
and mixing it with folklore (vampires, Hoodoo), Coogler has created one of the
richest, densest horror texts of this decade. In my multiple viewings different
things have called attention to themselves, hints and teases given richer
resonance knowing how they will play out by the time the film is over. I
struggle to think of a more daring, audacious, intelligent, entertaining, and
original screenplay in this category. Maybe even in this year. Sinners has so
many interesting threads that smaller ideas like the Choctaw vampire hunters
have me ready to settle in for a movie, or limited series, entirely about them.
Nominees: Arco, Elio, KPop Demon Hunters, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, Zootopia 2
I wonder what the original version of Elio was like because those insider reports about the various shakeups and creative differences were correct – the final product is entirely generic. Distinctly lacking in personality both in its main character, its creative vision, and its storytelling beats, Elio is a peaen to misfits finding community without much specificity. Disney and Pixar’s “it’s fine” run of films continues apace while the art house nominees in this category continue to run circles around the once dominating studio who seems afraid of its own creative shadow lately.
I never really grasped the beloved nature of Zootopia as a franchise. For me, the first film was a muddled symbol about racial harmony with a heaping dose of copaganda. The sequel does continue the copaganda elements but gives this a breakneck pace and introduces the youths to concepts like gentrification, abuses of power, political scapegoating, and the power of propaganda as a tool. The whole thing is exposition-heavy dialog, a nonstop barrage of visual references (The Shining is perhaps the most out of left field), and a rather generic buddy-cop dynamic that it never quite escapes. I may not get why this franchise routinely makes a billion, but at least I was entertained the entire time and not disgruntled at the prospect of a third film.
Arco is a bit like watching Studio Ghibli make a René Laloux film, and maybe if there wasn’t a gigantic cultural juggernaut in this category it might have continued the artier streak of winners that this category has been on. Imaginative and elegiac, a vibrant hopeful spark in a cold, dark world, Arco’s futuristic tale packs a mighty wallop in a brisk running time. In a future where suburbs are hermetically sealed to protect themselves from wildfires and kids are placed in the care of nanny robots, our young heroine meets a time traveler and goes on an adventure to send him back to the correct time. As the world burns down, Arco argues that the hope of something worth fighting for does not (and the knowledge that hope itself is a powerful resource).
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain tells a story of childhood wonder and discover from the point-of-view of a toddler who thinks they are a god-like figure, which is most toddlers if we’re being honest but this one admits it in the opening narration. From there, we follow through a delicate, emotionally rich story told like a moving Little Golden Book, all vibrant and bold colors and precious designs. The bleeding between Amélie’s imaginative outbursts (a garden exploration turns hallucinatory very quick) and the truth of the story really situates us in her unique perspective so it gives the whole thing the essence of a childhood memory recalled at an older age. Once more, the foreign art house nominee shows how limiting our film industry’s thought that “animation is for kids” can lead to perfectly safe, sanitized works while films like this little French delight show us a kaleidoscopic creative world.
But speaking of
that previously mentioned gigantic cultural juggernaut, KPop Demon Hunters does
exactly what it says on the label and it does it damn well. Perhaps the most
entertaining of the bunch, KPop might have a routine story, but it has
confident filmmaking, a killer soundtrack (“Soda Pop” and “Golden” are both ear
worms), gorgeous animation, and uniquely specific cultural references and
signifiers. The whole thing was one of the most enjoyable viewing experiences I
had doing this yearly challenge. If for no other reasons than it is simply
enchanting, high-energy, and filled with memorable pop songs, KPop Demon
Hunters takes the statue.
See you guys next year!
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