Final Oscar Thoughts

2024 will be the first year in which I have watched all of the Oscar best picture nominees before the ceremony. That in itself is a commentary on the quality of this year’s ballot. It’s easier to catch up on the nominees today, with streaming windows becoming ever-narrower, and at-home viewing more convenient, than it was only a few years ago. But even so there are usually at least one or two nominees each year that I look at and go “nah, I’m good”. The fact that there was something to appeal to me in every one of this year’s crop—even if I didn’t end up loving all of them—is, I think, a testament to how solid a ballot this is.

On the other hand, “solid” is about as high a compliment as I can pay this year’s crop of best picture nominees. There are films here that I love, but none that I’m genuinely excited by the way I once was by Moonlight or Everything Everywhere All At Once. There’s no one here that I’m really rooting for. Oppenheimer is almost certainly going to win, and probably sweep most of the categories it’s nominated in, and although there are films that I think are more deserving (perhaps especially in the technical categories), I’m not so offended by this as to be preemptively upset. There also isn’t really an Oscar villain this year—even Maestro, the closest contender for that role, isn’t bad so much as pointless.

Downballot, too, everything seems fairly sensible. I still wish that Past Lives and May December had gotten more recognition, including in the acting categories, but overall the spread of movies nominated on this ballot seems to be a fairly sensible one, with no obvious snubs. That is to say, of the type of movies that tend to get nominated for an Oscar, there are no glaring oversights, such as The Woman King being ignored last year, or Nope failing to get even a single technical nomination. The winners in the acting categories seem like foregone conclusions, and for the most part these seem fair, except for best supporting actor: Sterling K. Brown, Ryan Gosling, and Mark Ruffalo all give such delightful, scene-stealing performances that it’s a shame the award is clearly going to go to Robert Downey Jr. for giving the academy its first opportunity to recognize him after fifteen years of keeping Hollywood afloat as a superhero. But Downey is quite solid in Oppenheimer (and unlike Emily Blunt in that movie, he is at least playing a role with some distinctiveness) so I can’t complain too hard about him getting an award he has clearly wanted for a long time.

Below are the last reviews of the best picture nominees I hadn’t covered in my first two Oscar posts.

American Fiction (dir. Cord Jefferson) – The trailers for this film make it look like a satirical comedy about a little-read black author of literary fiction who finds unexpected fame and fortune when he writes a deliberately trashy and provocative novel about violent, hardscrabble life in the ghetto. The actual movie is more of a family drama about an adult son who moves back home to deal with various family crises—his mother’s deteriorating mental state, his brother spinning out after a coming out late in life—while reexamining his past. The two stories are woven together without ever quite managing to feel organically connected. There are long stretches where the conceit that Geoffrey Wright’s Monk has written a runaway bestseller in a style that he holds in contempt fades away almost entirely. And frankly, the film might be better for that. The dysfunctional family antics are so well-drawn and engaging that they don’t really need the more explosive premise to work—in particular, Sterling K. Brown nearly steals the entire movie, as his character speedruns a journey of sexual awakening, producing some of the film’s funniest moments. There might, in fact, be a meta-statement in the fact that the middle class family dramedy aspect of American Fiction feels so much more lived-in and convincing than the racial satire. If nothing else, it reflects the fact that the film struggles to update its source material, a Percival Everett novel published in 2001, to the present day. It’s not just that playing ghetto is no longer a surefire method for black artists to achieve fame and fortune, but that the film’s failure to engage with class—to acknowledge that it’s not that stories like the one Monk has written don’t exist, but that as a middle class black man he may not be the right person to tell them—ends up diluting its commentary (this article, meanwhile, suggests that Erasure is actually much more cognizant of class than a film made twenty years after it). The film tries to return to that commentary in its final scenes, but by that point I was much more interested in the more conventional story it had left by the wayside.

Poor Things (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) – Funny, deranged, and lewd, this adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel is the most exhilarating and delightful film on the ballot, even if its pleasures sometimes feel only skin deep. A cross between Frankenstein and My Fair Lady, it features a magnificent central performance by Emma Stone, as a being possessed of both pure rationality—able to keenly dissect the polite fictions and profound hypocrisies of the film’s Victorian setting, especially when it comes to gender roles—and enormous, lascivious appetites, who sets out into the world to explore her desires and learn about humanity. Much attention has been paid to the film’s frequent and frank sex scenes, but they feel to me like a specific case of the core trait of this entire movie, its profound love of excess. This is glimpsed in the phantasmagorical production design, which turns realistic elements of furniture and costume up several notches, and adds to them fantastical touches such as gondolas sailing in the skies of Lisbon and an enormous, half-ruined castle where tourists in Alexandria can gaze down on the suffering poor. And in the supporting performances by actors who seems to have cheerfully pulled out all the stops—Willem Defoe is predictably deranged as a mad scientist whose psychopathy conceals the faintest sliver of a heart, but it’s Mark Ruffalo who is a revelation, as the dissipated man of the world who expects to toy with Stone’s Bella for a short while, and finds himself undone by her adventuring spirit and total commitment to exploring her pleasures. If there’s a complaint to be made here, it’s that all this wonder is in service of something fairly simple, Bella’s realization that she needs intellectual and sexual autonomy, along the way learning a bit about inequality and dabbling in socialism and lesbianism. Still, that’s not an unworthy message, and the process of getting to it is both magnificently realized and a hell of a lot of fun.

The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer) – Of all the films on the best picture ballot, this is probably the one that most rewards being seen in a movie theater rather than on streaming. Or maybe I should make that an anti-recommendation. Given its horrific subject matter, the ways in which The Zone of Interest seeks to overpower its viewers’ sensations—through an insistent and disorienting soundscape, a disturbing soundtrack, and camerawork that veers unexpectedly from studiously naturalistic to phantasmagorical—might be too much to take in a theatrical setting. The film follows the lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who live on a charming estate that borders the camp. Idyllic interludes such as a pool party for the Höss children’s friends, or a celebration of Höss’s birthday, are set against a backdrop of shouts, screams, and gunfire from the camp, and periodically the scene turns hellish as the gas chambers and crematoria are brought into use. Though the film gets some mileage out of the ironic contrast between the nightmarish setting and the seeming normality and pleasantness of the Höss family—the parents’ obvious love and kindness towards their children, the adorable family dog who follows everyone around in hopes of treats and cuddles—it also quickly establishes that these people are not merely oblivious or in denial. Hedwig Höss boasts to her friends of getting the pick of exterminated Jews’ clothing and property; her older son plays with extracted gold teeth; and she and her mother debate whether the latter’s former employer is somewhere over the fence. It eventually becomes clear that part of the appeal of this position is the way it has enabled the Hösses to live at a standard they could never have dreamed of, playing the lord and lady of the manor with stolen wealth and forced labor, and telling each other that they are making a good life for their children. The cost of this lifestyle is a creeping psychic and physical damage that the adult Hösses are so accustomed to that they don’t even comprehend it, even as everyone around them, including their children, slowly loses their mind, and as the film’s tone crosses the line into the realm of horror.

And finally, my ranking of the year’s best picture nominees, from best to worst.

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