Preliminary Oscar Thoughts

Of the ten films nominated for this year’s best picture Oscar, I’ve watched six. I’m pretty interested in the remaining four, as well as some of the films that have gotten downballot nominations, so I’m going to try to catch up with them, and get back to you all at some point before the ceremony in March. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on the best picture nominees I’ve watched, plus one more that I think should have made it onto that ballot and is instead going to have to be satisfied with a screenplay nomination.

Based on the films I’ve already watched, my verdict is that this is a respectable but unexciting selection. That tracks with my general movie-watching in 2023, which hasn’t yielded a lot of all-time favorites. That most likely means that I was watching the wrong movies, but there’s a certain type of film that tends to be seen as award material, and of the films in that category that I’ve watched in the last year, very few have truly lit a fire under me. I don’t think it’s just my preoccupations as a viewer and critic that have caused me, in my reviews of the nominees below, to keep coming back to the complaint that these are films with individual elements of greatness that don’t come together into much of a whole. I guess we’ll see if further viewing will change my overall impression.

Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet) – A man falls to his death in his home. His wife claims it was suicide. The local prosecutor insists it was murder. In the absence of any concrete evidence, her trial becomes a referendum on their marriage—is she a narcissist who expected him to deal with all the unpleasantness in their life, including caring for their visually-impaired son? Or was he an embittered failure who couldn’t cope with being married to a more successful woman? This is a movie of great parts—chiefly, Sandra Hüller’s enigmatic, impossible to pin down central performance, but also the infuriating banality of the courtroom scenes, and Milo Machado Graner’s captivating turn as the increasingly desperate boy caught in the middle of this tragedy. But I still struggled to see the point. Anatomy of Fall seems to be arguing that if we could only figure out who’s at fault in this failed marriage, we’d also know who’s at fault for the death that ended it. When clearly, these are entirely different questions. The whole time I was watching, I kept thinking that this case should never have gone to trial.

Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig) – Like a lot of people, I think, I adored Barbie when I watched it in the summer, but find that it has faded in my mind since then. I still appreciate all the many things it does well: Margot Robbie’s delightful, layered, criminally snubbed performance, Ryan Gosling’s instantly iconic Ken, the wonderfully tactile production design, and the entire zany premise. (Also, the songs.) It’s a toy movie, yes, but it’s a movie about a toy that has been embroiled in feminist issues since its creation, and the film both acknowledges this and builds upon those controversies a conversation about what the experience of womanhood actually means. All that being said, the further I get from Barbie, the more what lingers about it is how 101 its feminist conversation actually is, and as a result the film has gotten smaller in my mind. (On the other hand, the fact that Gerwig and Robbie made a whole movie about the poisonous allure of patriarchy only to watch their male lead get nominated while they were snubbed suggests that Hollywood still needs those 101-level lessons.)

The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne) – When CODA won best picture a few years ago, we all sighed a little at the Oscars’ irrepressible fondness for heartwarming stories. The Holdovers is the sort of heartwarming I can get on board with—the kind that is shot through with a great deal of acid. So yes, it’s a story about two lonely people thrust together who unexpectedly forge a meaningful bond. But it’s also a story that never lets you forget that these two people are assholes and losers, and that their friendship, even if it gives them tools to overcome their problems, doesn’t change this fundamental fact about them. It’s also a movie with a powerful awareness of class—Paul Giamatti’s boarding school teacher is a bully and a tyrant, but he’s ultimately at the beck and call of the rich, entitled boys he teaches; Dominic Sessa’s rich kid has privilege, but it is only exacerbating his loneliness and isolation; and Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s promising son died in Vietnam, where none of the boys who go to the school that is the film’s setting will end up. That combination of genuine connection and the undeniable fact of how wealth separates us from each other, as well as some great performances and genuinely funny humor, are why The Holdovers is, for the moment, my choice for best picture.

Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese) – Telling the story of a famous campaign of murder against Native Americans without ever giving a Native American perspective is certainly A Choice. It’s one of several baffling choices made by this movie, including the outsized focus on Leonardo DiCaprio’s craven blank of a character, the non-mystery mystery storytelling, and the sudden lurch into procedural in the film’s final hour. (The lack of a screenplay nomination is a rare case of the Oscars getting that category right—if Killers works at all, it is in spite of its screenplay, not because of it.) One can almost sense what the film is aiming for, stressing the extreme dehumanization that the white characters commit on their Native friends and neighbors, whom they can never see as more than cash cows and victims. But the film itself sometimes seems to perform the same dehumanization. Lily Gladstone is as excellent as advertised, and I hope she does win best actress. But I still never felt like I had any idea why she made the choices she made, or what she thought was going on at any point in the film’s story. It’s a tribute to Scorsese’s abilities as a director, and to the strong cast, that despite its flaws Killers remains compelling and watchable throughout its overlong run, but nevertheless it is still a lumpen mess that doesn’t come together into much.

Maestro (dir. Bradley Cooper) – A stylish—not to say mannered—movie, featuring two stylish—again, not to say mannered—performances, about a man whose worthiness of a biopic the film never really tries to sell. I have a feeling that there’s a deep generational gulf between people for whom Leonard Bernstein was an iconic figure, and slightly younger ones who are only vaguely familiar with his name. As someone in the latter group, I found Maestro‘s awe of the man a bit perplexing, and its conviction that I would be engrossed by the ups and downs of his decades-long lavender marriage rather misplaced. Like a lot of films on this list, there are some great components here. Some of the set-pieces, such as the theatrical flourishes in the film’s first half, or the non-stop parade of luminaries of the mid-century New York art world, are delightful. And, mannered or not, Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan trading bon mots in plummy, mid-atlantic accents is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. But when the credits rolled, I still had no idea what all that flurry of visual, auditory, and thespian splendor was for.

May December (dir. Todd Haynes) – Of the subset of movies that tend to get nominated for Oscars, and which were clearly in the conversation leading up to the nominations, this is the one that feels most unfairly snubbed—in particular, there are several people I would have tossed off the best supporting categories in favor of Julianne Moore and Charles Melton. Despite (or perhaps because) of its campy flourishes, this is a sharp, gutting examination of how a heinous crime is repeatedly narrativized—by its perpetrator, by a community that is not equipped to recognize it for what it is, by friends and neighbors who would rather pretend that it was all OK than have to take a stand, and by the prurient gaze of the media and entertainment industry—in a way that leaves its actual victims unable to move on, or even articulate what has been done to them. The best screenplay nomination is well-earned, but this is a film that deserved a lot more love from the Oscars.

Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan) – I’ve already written quite a lot about this movie. So in brief, I still think it’s a fairly middlebrow effort hobbled by the biopic format. But it also does a lot of things very well, and it’s not as if “middlebrow” and “best picture winner” are separate circles on the venn diagram. And, for all that I question a lot of its choices, there’s no denying that it comes together into a cohesive whole in a way that so many other films on this list have not. Though there are films I’d prefer to see win (and probably will be more of as I make my way through the nominees I haven’t yet watched), I’m not horrified by the idea of Oppenheimer taking the gold, as I strongly suspect that it will.