What a year, what a year! We’ve got two musicals in the best ten, two foreign films, and not a single dud amongst the top 10 (well, I have my gripes but that’s another story). We’re well out of the writers’ strike or the pandemic, and yet film-makers are presenting films at ridiculously low budgets. We’ve got a running theme of girl-bosses whose realities are slipping away from them. Once again a great year for the Best Actress category. And the races for Best Animated Feature and Best Foreign Film are stunning stunning stunning.
There are some excellent films that are left out, but I don’t feel too badly for it, so I would say the Academy has done a decent job. These include A Different Man, A Real Pain, Queer, Challengers, Furiosa (at least in the technical categories), Nosferatu, Kinds of Kindness and finally Perfect Days. I think, of these, Perfect Days may deserve to be in here, but even the foreign film category is so strong, it got muscled out.
It’s hard to believe it's ten years since I've been doing this. This year, we’ll be handling the major categories here, and we’ll manage all the categories on my blog. It’s an attempt to keep things a little bit more length-friendly over on Founding Fuel.
Best Picture
Sadly, as of writing this article I haven’t managed to get my hands on the Brazilian film I’m Still Here. So I write this without knowing a thing about it. It may well upset the careful analysis.
A Complete Unknown
As always we start in reverse ranked order, with the weakest first, and that honour goes to A Complete Unknown. Years ago, when Ray or Walk the Line was in vogue, this film may have had its place. While it’s not as bad as Bohemian Rhapsody it does suffer from a script writer who isn’t on top of the assignment. It’s also a bio-pic about legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, after an already great bio-pic has been made in I’m Not There. And while I’m Not There understands Dylan’s anxious drool intellectualism, and one-of-a-kind bizarre outlook on society, A Complete Unknown turns him into an indolent teen, who hits the big-time by being in the right place at the right time. At no point does the script give anything to its main actor Timothee Chalamet, anything to make us believe that he has the zinging brilliance to write the lyrics he does. So even though it's made by some hardworking people who had to learn some tough finger-plucking, one questions if this film even needed to be made at all.
Conclave
Second from the bottom is the finely acted and exquisitely window dressed Conclave. A quiet political thriller set around the election of the next Pope, Conclave has a great cast, and some stunning set design and dripping mise-en-scene. Sadly the writing fails it too. These should be men who spend their lives learning how to inspire, and yet the choice we were supposed to first root for, played by Stanley Tucci, gets no dialogue that makes him a compelling choice. His opposition, an Italian conservative, has no compelling concrete point of view either, other than Popes must be Italian and the baddies are a-coming. Kudos to the actors that could bring in something despite the fact that the characters had no flesh on them. Ralph Fiennes, who is the Dean of the proceedings, is the only character written with nuance and he of course is skilled enough to wring nuance from it. However, ultimately it's a film that has an ending that is meant to be a twist, but signals itself as conspicuously as white smoke from a chimney.
Wicked: Part 1
Third from the bottom is the bewitchingly satisfying, irradiantly technicolour and whimsically popular Wicked: Part 1. Based on a Broadway show, based on a book, based on being the prequel to The Wizard of Oz, if A Complete Unknown didn’t understand the assignment, the entire cast and crew, down to the last set dresser, were virtuoso students, putting their best kitten heels forward. Gee-willikins and my oh my, the production design, the vivid costumes, the unbelievably perfect dancing is glitteringly fantastic. The two leads are electrifying, and different to each other in every way, including acting and singing styles. And yet, they are soul sisters. If you haven’t seen this already, do yourself a favour and stop reading this now, and watch it.
Unfortunately it is a Part 1, and being a Part 1, I honestly can’t see how it can compare with some of the others on the list. And coming at a time when realism and neo-expressionism are competing with each other for screen time at the Oscars, this romp through girly fantasy with undertones of xenophobia towards goats isn’t gonna cut it.
Dune: Part 2
Which brings us to Part 2, Dune: Part 2. While it does have a classier brand of filmmaking to wrap itself in, this sprawling sci-fi’s dated take on analog metaphor on a messiah culture isn’t deep enough to shed light on a society that is more complex than it presumes. But gosh, every frame is a spectacle, the sound design is intricate and mammoth and the filmmaking choices are surprisingly daring. Rather than plot, Dune 2 is riveting in its beauty with some wonderful acting turns from some first class actors.
Emilia Perez
Next up is a swing and a miss from Emilia Perez. Wildly ambitious, the film is the sort of thing that would sound good as a concept to a weed-high teenager. Possibly suffering from a crew who had either no buy-in or no clue of what was going on, you have some disastrous moments, including but not limited to Koreans singing in bad English about vaginoplasty.
Emilia Perez’s plot (mild spoilers) is a Mexican drug lord, whose escape plan includes his secret desire to become a male to female transgender. Though it is a story of (heavier spoilers) failed redemption, it treats a fair bit of its subject matter with a heavy handed insensitivity. In the annals of history, I sincerely doubt Emilia Perez will be anyone’s favourite film. If you’re wondering why it’s so high on this list, it’s because of what it could have been. Emilia Perez pushes boundaries, of this no one can doubt.
The Substance
Next we have The Substance. The total dialogue of The Substance could be written on a napkin, and I suppose the concept itself is nearly napkin thin. However, it is the sensibilities that elevate the film. The Substance showcases a has-been actress-turned-television aerobics instructor who finds the secret to youth in a drug-like substance, the abuse of which turns grotesque. With music-video editing and body horror pushing out of every orifice The Substance is a hard hitting social commentary. But more oppressing than the body horror is the cold and disjointed unreality of the world inhabited by the Substance. One doesn’t feel a glimmer of warmth in any aspect of it. The horror is not in the horror itself, but the airbrushing of the horror away. And it is in these latex and saccharine environs, where bitter lighting robs all shadow that one finds the true horror: the fact that people really gutted their humanity just for a chance to run on the gopher wheel of unrealistic beauty standards.
Nickel Boys
Nickel Boys is next on the list. Hidden within a coming of age story, set in a bestial segregated junior penitentiary, is a curious and hesitant celebration of life. At first I thought that the first-person camera work was a gimmick—the film, like Hardcore Henry and Enter the Void, is shot largely in the first person, meaning you see the perspective of the character. Nickel Boys is admittedly hard to get into. It somehow chooses to do a sort of memory montage of the early years of its protagonist Elwood, which though interesting, is meandering. I would have preferred to jump straight into the action, or smash the montage into the first minute, and start the action in earnest with him getting into college. Sadly, this aspect delays our entry into the film which is its undoing, because apart from that, it’s quite masterly. And of course, we’ve all gone through some sort of school where there was strictness to the point of injustice, and we’ve made friends despite that, which makes the subject matter extremely universal.
The trouble is the film takes forever to get brilliant (much of its brilliance is saved for the last 10 minutes). And unlike Spotlight, which is slowly ramping till that point, this one has a quick escalation. It’s very possible that the Oscar voter, just like me, has already made up their mind against this by then. And so, though it’s well deserving, and pushes the boundaries of the craft, Nickel Boys doesn’t make it to the top two spots.
The Brutalist
A difficult choice for me is to put my own biases aside and put The Brutalist as second from the top. I think this is going to be the movie chosen by much of the older generation of the academy fraternity, and it may even get the most votes in the first round, but as I have explained before, the Oscars is first-past-the-post voting. Votes are going to be split between The Brutalist and Conclave, and Conclave is going to be one of the last films to be eliminated this year, whereas voters who vote for The Substance are very likely to have Anora as their secondary pick. If this paragraph isn’t making sense to you, head over to my blog, where I’ll go through the other nominees at greater length, and explain this in more detail.
So, The Brutalist. A WW2 Hungarian Jew arrives on America’s shores, and struggles to find employment till a rich Yankee tycoon discovers he’s a Brutalist architect (Brutalism is a minimalist-maximalist style of architecture). Unlike Nickel Boys, the film gets going right off the bat and unlike the slightly more unrelatable Anora (this is her biggest flaw), it’s easy for you to imagine yourself in the protagonist’s shoes. Shot on the wide canvas of Vistavision, giant shots of buildings look marvelous, but something not before tried, is that tight and close up shots look surprisingly modern too. If you’re wondering what I mean by this, there’s a handjob early on in the film which gets not only everyone in focus (standing person crouching person) but also the background characters in a forced perspective. This is just one example, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is Vistavision. By the way, Vistavision is extremely loud, so it takes some hellishly committed acting to film intimacy this way.
Frankly I just don’t care about the AI scandal—AI being used to make the actors’ Hungarian dialogue sound accurate. Editing is part of film making, special effects are part of film making. To expect an actor to speak Hungarian without an accent is absurd, and to use AI as a solution to fix that accent, while retaining the original actor’s voice, seems extremely logical. I don’t think this takes away in any way from a job being well done.
Another thing that’s absurd is that the budget for The Brutalist was a measly $10 mn (half that of the low-budget Nickel Boys, for a much grander scale of film). Add three tremendous acting performances and The Brutalist is well worth the three-and-a-half hour run time, which surprisingly doesn’t seem unnecessary in the same way that The Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon was (All of which had similar run times). Gorgeous and heart-wrenching, The Brutalist would have won Oscars in several years, but is ultimately a conservative pick for winner this year.
Anora
That brings us to Anora. I suppose I can synopsise it as the day after you get married to Prince Charming, but that’s considerably reductionist. It’s a class story (unfortunately for those of us who don’t watch kitschy reality shows, it’s populated with characters we have no relatability to). It’s a princess dream gone wrong (I suppose The Brutalist is also an American dream gone wrong). It’s also technically a sex comedy (though it feels the furthest thing from any sex comedy you’ve ever seen).
Annie (Anora, but she won’t be called that) is a young sex worker with Russian roots. Though the film never tells you explicitly, she’s likely a second generation immigrant, traumatic childhood, estranged from her parents. Her life is colourful, but anaemic, in typical twenties angst, her boss sucks, her flatmate sucks and her bestie is everything (but in actuality her bestie is superficial). Importantly, love doesn’t exist for her, and intimacy is a transaction.
In swoops a hedonistic, sloppy richling, who is charming in a way that is as diametrically opposite to Richard Gere as possible. Indeed he whisks her away from her banausic life, but he is ultimately terrible for her. The story progresses from there, and I won’t spoil it, but Annie coasts along the rollercoaster, rolling her eyes with an unholstered libertinism. Things happen to Annie. She’s simply not in charge of her own destiny, though she’s fighting like a soaked cat to be in charge of it. And suddenly the film is a screwball comedy. However, more honest and real than most screwball comedies (in that the gangsters can’t bully their way through the cops, because they are limited by the law). Annie meets kindness with vitriol, and when she tries to show kindness herself, she does it in the only way she knows how, transactionally. And suddenly the film turns again and becomes Oscar fare.
On an utterly shoe-string budget of $6 mn, Anora shoots some of her scenes in the manner of a guerrilla shoot covert expose (the actress is really attempting to pick up people in a nightclub, unscripted). And many scenes leaving the camera on, and asking the actors to just go for it. From that it manages to weave something quite moving. And though it’s not the kind of film that I relate to strongly, I understand why it will pick up all the accolades.
The article is already longer than I promised my editor, so I’m going to round up the other main categories quickly, but for a more detailed analysis (how on earth do you have the patience), head on over to my blog, here.
The other main categories
The contenders for Best Actor seem to come down to Timothee Chalomet for portraying Bob Dylan and Adrian Brody for The Brutalist. Timothee is unfortunately outdone by Cate Blanchett in the slightly more inaccessible film I’m Not There (he needed to stick out his neck more, and be more intelligently restless). Thus its going to the wildly passionate, Hungarian accented, bare all his emotions immediately Adrian Brody.
Despite the overwhelming popular opinion that Demi Moore is going to win Best Actress in The Substance, I don’t think she will. She’s not skilled enough. Think of the scene where she’s cooking and she loses it. Put William Dafoe in the same role, and imagine how much more he’d commit to that scene. So Demi stops short, and it’s Mikey Madison (Anora) who comes out of nowhere and gives it her all. There are scenes in which I fear she’ll lose her voice, she gives so much. She’s an extremely specific person, and she has to do some extreme stuff. Including, because of the covert filming style, she would be made to go in two or three times into the same restaurant, over the top, demanding the same people to identify a photograph. Given that she’s a reasonably introverted person (judging from interviews), this is an acting stretch well deserving of accolades.
Best Supporting Actor will easily be Kieran Culkin. This is a little unfair, because he gets nearly as much, if not possibly more screen time than the ‘actor’, Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain. It’s mostly the script that helps him. And he does what he does best. A likable hatable nut, who wears everything on his sleeve and is as personable as he is an asshole. No one else gets even nearly a chance to compete, given their more limited roles in comparison.
[A still from A Real Pain, with Kieran Culkin (left) and Jesse Eisenberg]
Best Supporting Actress will go to Zoe Saldana (Emilia Perez). Once again, she very likely gets more screen time than the titular character. She has a stunning dance number, has to work across languages and (in sharp contrast to Kieran) has to sell the most ludicrously badly written scenes. The only other contender is Ariana Grande for Wicked, who actually does deserve it, if we considered Zoe Saldana as best actress and not supporting actress.
Lastly, Best Director is going to Brady Corbet. The Brutalist is a technical marvel, in sound, production and film blocking. And Brady manages to be an actor’s director, something that rarely coalesces in one director. Some moments are iconic and will be remembered for a long time. He’s got a huge well of expertise and a huge well of emotion.
That’s a wrap. In case you’re curious for further analysis, head on over to the blog, and we’ll get into the details of the other roles, why a small Lithuanian film might topple Pixar/Disney and how everyone is wrong about Best Visual Effects.
[A still from Flow, nominated in the Animated Feature Film category]
