Oscars 2023: Final Thoughts

Seven weeks ago I quite proudly announced that I had watched half of the films nominated for best picture before the nominations were revealed, which was probably a record for me. And then, having made such a great start, I basically forgot all about the Oscars. I watched the three best picture nominees I had been planning to catch up on (sorry, Top Gun: Maverick and The Fabelmans), but as for dipping into the best international picture category, or some of the films that have garnered acting nominations, I just couldn’t be bothered. I ended up watching and writing about such lowbrow fare as the latest Marvel and M. Night Shyamalan movies instead.

(OK, that’s actually not entirely true. I have seen all the films nominated for best animated picture. In brief, Seeing Red is pleasant but forgettable, Pinocchio is brilliant, Marcel the Shell With the Shoes On is delightful and original, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is far better than the fifth Shrek sequel has any business being, and The Sea Beast is inept on almost every level. Still, that’s not really arguing against the general “I can’t be bothered with serious movies” vibe that has dominated my viewing in the last two months.)

Part of the issue, of course, is that this year’s Oscar season has been fairly undramatic. Everything Everywhere All At Once is almost certainly going to win, which is both a valid choice and something I’m personally quite pleased about. Attempts to generate a backlash against the film have fizzled out, mostly due the fact that, try as you might, you’re not going to be able to make a weird sci-fi extravaganza with a mostly-Asian cast from a couple of directors whose most notable previous credit was the Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse movie look like anything but an underdog. Barring a last-minute twist, it looks like 2023 will be the rare year in which the Oscars recognize a good, highly original, crowdpleasing movie that has fully earned its success. There’s always room for surprise, of course—I called last year’s Oscar race unexciting and then The Slap happened. But if you’re focusing on the movies, the biggest dilemma going into tonight’s event is whether you want Cate Blanchett or Michelle Yeoh to win best actress (I’m rooting for Yeoh mainly on the grounds that even after her triumph with Everything, Hollywood is unlikely to give her another showcase like this, whereas Blanchett has already won twice).

So, this year’s list of pre-Oscar reviews is on the short side—on top of the films I reviewed when the nominations were announced, this post discusses only the best picture nominees I caught up with, plus one more film that has been shut out of the major categories but which I would have loved to see nominated.

All Quiet on the Western Front – I have to say, I’m puzzled by the acclaim for this movie. It’s not bad, I suppose, but neither is there anything particularly special or exceptional here. Instead, you get an overlong string of war movie clichés with a personality-less main character, and a “war is hell” message that is both obvious and not that well delivered. The battle scenes are impressive, I suppose, but firstly, that’s no longer uncommon in war movies, and WWI movies in particular; and secondly, they’re impressive in what feels like the wrong way. There’s a very thin line between “this battle scene conveys the horror and alienation of a modern battlefield” and “wow! what a badass battle scene conveying the horror and alienation of a modern battlefield! check out that guy being roasted with a flamethrower!” All Quiet doesn’t even seem to be aware that that line exists, much less put any effort into falling on the right side of it. The subplot about diplomats attempting to negotiate a ceasefire feels like it belongs in another movie, and perhaps for that reason the handling of that topic is thin, taken straight out of a middle school history textbook. Especially for a story that has already been adapted twice before, and for a conflict that has received several well-regarded cinematic treatments in recent years, I just don’t see what this version of All Quiet on the Western Front brings to the table that justifies the plaudits it’s received.

Triangle of Sadness – This is a classic case of coming to a movie too late to properly appreciate it. I might have enjoyed Triangle of Sadness more if I hadn’t heard months of breathless elaboration on its outrageousness, specifically the infamous mass vomiting scene or Dolly De Leon’s out of nowhere star turn. As it turns out, the prominence of these elements has been blown far out of proportion. There really isn’t that much vomiting, for example. And De Leon, though excellent in the few scenes she gets, as a below-decks crewmember on a luxury yacht who amasses power and authority over several passengers and higher-ranking crew when they’re marooned and she’s the only one with survival skills, isn’t given nearly enough to do. These elements aside, Triangle of Sadness is a slow, meandering, not terribly funny comedy of the class struggle. It lands some good hits—particularly the way it delineates the gradations within its rich and poor strata; how the influencers who have blagged a free cruise are a different species of rich to the oligarchs who make up most of the passengers; or the way the mostly-white and -Western passenger service crew are treated like shit, but on a completely different level from the people who are actually making the ship run, who are exclusively POC. But like a lot of recent comedies on the general theme of “aren’t the rich terrible?”, it doesn’t have much to say once this point has been established. The most interesting occurrence in the story—the shipwreck and the way it shuffles the power relations between passengers and crew, rich and poor—comes far too late in the movie for its implications to be fully explored.

Women Talking – It feels like a bit of backhanded praise to say that Sarah Polley’s latest adapts its source material, Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel of the same name, perfectly. The book is a somewhat underappreciated masterpiece, its lean prose perfectly capturing the simultaneous smallness and enormity of its central event, a long conversation between a group of Mennonite women trying to decide what to do about the years-long campaign of rape and gaslighting they’ve been subjected to by the men in their community. The community leaders are bringing the rapists back from jail and have demanded that the women forgive them, and the women are trying to decide whether to accept this demand, to stay and fight it, or to leave. Their conversation touches on their fear of the unknown, their anger and awareness that it has no fruitful outlet, and their desire to have a meaningful relationship with God that is not poisoned by the expectation that they submit to abuse. It’s no small thing to have translated such a powerful, painful, complicated story, with all its conflicting personalities and interpersonal strife, from page to screen, but it’s also the sort of work that can end up feeling invisible, as if Polley had done nothing but copy the story from one medium to another. (Not helping matters is the fact that her most prominent directorial choice, an extremely washed-out color grading, is one that I find rather annoying.) So while I definitely feel that I haven’t gotten the kind of impact out of Women Talking that I would if I hadn’t first read and loved the novel, I’m also glad that Polley has brought it to life, where tremendous actresses can embody its characters and situation, and where more people can be exposed to its central tenet, the necessity of women talking about their pain, and finding ways to act in response to it.

Babylon – This one isn’t nominated for any of the big awards, but for my money, it’s well worth the watch, and there are at least two, if not three, best picture nominees that I would happily have kicked off in its favor. It’s not that there aren’t problems here—Babylon is overlong, frequently self-indulgent, and has several plot strands or sequences that could have stood to be cut down or entirely removed—but against that you have some genuinely thrilling and exhilarating moments and scenes, some great performances, especially from Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, and most of all, a great concept. “Here’s the real story that got sanitized and streamlined into Singin’ in the Rain; spoiler, it involves a lot more POC, queer people, and women in positions of power, all of whom got pushed out and some destroyed” is a pretty gangbusters premise, and especially right now it feels worthwhile to have a story about how an artform can be a site for experimentation and the advancement of marginalized people, but as soon as it becomes a real moneymaker, those people are gotten rid of and memory-holed. Of the three Chazelle movies I’ve seen, this one feels like it has the most mature approach to creative labor, neither sugar-coating it like La La Land, nor treating it as something joyless like First Man. Art in Babylon is weird, messy, and exhausting, but also wonderful.

And my final ranking of the best picture nominees I’ve seen, from worst to best:

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