And the Oscar goes ’22…

’22 as in, like, the year 2022. Because that’s the year? But it’s also “The Oscar goes to,” as in like… y’know. But also this is the second year I’m doing one of these reflections, so it’s like, The Oscar Goes 2. Is that- does that make sense? Did this joke land? It could also be a Taylor Swift reference I guess? She made a short film this year! Unfortunately, there’s no Oscar for “Most Eviscerated” of the year so Jake Gyllenhaal won’t be in attendance.

Alright, elaborate opening bit aside…

I kind of wasn’t sure if I was going to write about this year’s Oscars because I’ve suddenly been doing a lot of writing. I finally put out a Batman article earlier this week and there should be big things coming around the corner so I don’t really want to choke out the page but also – it’s the Oscars! I watched a lot of movies and a lot of them are ones I have no real intention of writing about elsewhere so, hey, why not turn my entertainment into something product? That’s a good thing to do, right? I have a lot of thoughts about these nominees and why not put them all in writing? I’m primarily going to talk about the Best Picture nominees here but I wanted to also put some thoughts down in a few other categories. So this will be organized in a sort of unorganized way. So, here goes.

Initial Overview

Boy, this is a wild year! This is really the most that I’ve gotten myself on top of the nominee list. I watched a lot of the nominees for the 2020 Oscars a couple of years ago just because 2019 was an insane year for movies and I kind of stumbled into most of them anyways. The only Best Picture nominee I didn’t wind up seeing was The Irishman, because as good as Scorsese is I just didn’t have it in me to watch a three-hour mob movie. This year I watched all of the Best Picture noms and then some. Like, to the point where I started watching the documentary shorts because I realized a bunch of them were on Netflix. Maybe I just had a lot of free time, but I think a big part of it is how much this year has transitioned towards streaming. Streaming was probably the conversation of the year – should movies release in theatres and on streaming simultaneously? In a world of such accessibility, what is the role of the theatre? Theatres aren’t even necessarily safe for everyone. So, there’s a lot of debate and not a lot of easy answers. But, as a result, basically all of these movies are available to stream. The ones that aren’t probably will be in a manner of time. King Richard just got on Crave a couple of days ago, which I think means that all of the Best Picture nominations except for Belfast are available on one platform or another. That accessibility means these Oscars feel a lot more open than ever before. Which is funny to me because I feel like people now, more than ever, I see people saying the Oscars are pretentious. Which, like, they definitely are – but not because they won’t nominated No Way Home for Best Picture. Dune got a Best Picture nom! That’s about as public as you get! No Way Home was fun, but it wasn’t a Best Picture movie by any stretch of the imagination.

That said, I want to highlight a lot of the misses here, because there’s a lot this year that should have been recognized and wasn’t. It’s insane to me that The French Dispatch didn’t get any nods for… anything! It could have easily ran away with Best Screenplay, Cinematography, or Production Design. Even more snubbed was one of my favourites of the year, The Green Knight. I don’t think Dev Patel would run away with a Best Actor nom, but he could have! Production Design is really an insane category for this year but hey, that could go here as well. I just love The Green Knight, and to see nothing from it is kind of sad. Speaking of sad, no Matrix: Resurrections for Visual Effects? The visual effects in that movie are easily better than any of the nominations for that category! Also, Adam Driver put three insane performances into this year, and not a single one of them got nominated! That should be criminal! On that note, I am entirely baffled that Ridley Scott put all the Oscar campaigning into House of Gucci over The Last Duel when The Last Duel was such a superior movie. Matt Damon? Ben Affleck could have easily taken Supporting Actor! And while it’s nominated for a lot, it’s kind of surprising to me that Denis Villeneuve hasn’t been nominated for Best Director for Dune. He really deserves it. But I’m also certain Dune is going to win a lot more, so we’ll see! There are also a few that I didn’t get out to see that, from what I understand, also should have gotten some recognition. I’ve heard a lot of love for Pig, Lamb, and Passing. I’m not sure much Oscar power they had, but I’m also excited to get to Titane, Annette, and Malignant, which are all supposed to be wild, crazy movies.

Best Animated Feature

I’m usually really behind on animation. Like, if you point to a Disney movie made in the last ten years, I probably haven’t actually seen it. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, I just forget about them. But I set myself last week to watch all the animated films nominated this year, and this is a fascinating category to me this season. The question is this – are we awarding the best animation of the year, or the best use of animation this year? If it’s the former, there’s a lot of debate. Raya and the Last Dragon was an extremely pretty movie but it lacked a lot of substance. It really would have been better as a season or two of a show; we spend ten minutes in each location and learn very little about the world or the characters. I like Kelly Marie Tran but that’s about the extent of my attachment. The other Disney nominations are in a much tighter race. I was surprised by just how much I liked Luca, it was the simpler movie but there was a lot of richness in its simplicity. The design was more stylized than a lot of recent Disney animation and it really worked for me. All the world design is gorgeous. But it’s up against Encanto, which has a lot more innate power to it for people. Encanto is all about complex family dynamics, which seems to be what a lot of the movies this year are about. I think it reaches higher than Luca does; Dos Oruguitas is probably going to win Best Original Song. But where Luca successfully does everything it sets out to do, I’m not convinced Encanto is perfect. Some characters kind of get left behind, that sort of thing. So, it’s tight.

And then there’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines. If what we’re looking for is simply the best animation or accomplishments in animation, this would get my vote. I’m in love with everything Lord and Miller are making and producing. The LEGO Movie should have been a shameless cash grab but instead, they turned it into something innovative and heart-wrenching. Into the Spider-Verse is one of my favourite movies and perhaps one of the best-made superhero films ever? It should definitely be in the conversation. Mitchells vs. the Machines isn’t made by Lord and Miller, but they are producing and their fingerprints are all over the movie. It has all the innovative passion that their other animated outings carry. I just love that there are people out there really pushing the boundaries of this format. Where a lot of Disney’s recent movies feel content to stay in the same ballpark, Lord and Miller’s team has been shooting for the fences. Mitchells vs. the Machines doesn’t quite look like any other movie out there. All the while, it hits all the same emotional highs that Luca and Encanto do. And it’s about a girl who really wants to go to film school? What’s not to love?

Yet, it’s not that simple – because then there’s Flee. Flee doesn’t have the prettiest animation of the category, but without a doubt, it’s the best movie in the category. Flee is unique because it’s the only movie ever that’s been nominated for Best Animated Feature, Best Foreign Film, and Best Documentary. And it earns all of those nominations. It’s taken from a series of interviews and depicts one man’s struggles escaping Afghanistan. The movie is animated both out of privacy as well as to artistically depict a lot of Amin’s trauma. It also includes several flashes of real-world newsreels, highlighting the facts of Amin’s life. Flee is maybe one of the most impressive movies of the year. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime and everyone should see it. It definitely is the best animated movie of the year, but I’m curious to see where the Academy will judge it. I haven’t watched the other documentaries, but from what I understand it’s at least a clear winner for that category.

The Acting Nominations

I don’t have a huge dog in this race but there is a lot here to talk about so I figured I would give it a shot. There are some powerful options here, it’s a tight race. Supporting Actor is the only one that really feels like a lock to me; Being the Ricardos was one of Aaron Sorkin’s weaker outings, and I don’t know if anyone in that movie put in a particularly memorable performance, so it’s kind of wild to me that Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, and J.K. Simmons are all nominated. Like, they’re great actors, they all did well! They just weren’t given anything that would make them a standout in these categories. The same goes for a lot of the Supporting Actor nominees. The exception is the reps from The Power of the Dog, especially Kodi Smit-McPhee who does a lot of understated acting. Jesse Plemons is also really good but is less of a presence in the movie. I’m sad to see no recognition of Jared Leto’s performance as Mario, Mario in House of Gucci. Best Actor, however? Different story. I think Benedict Cumberbatch gave maybe the best performance of his career, so he probably deserves it, but also I really want to see Andrew Garfield win this one. I truly think Garfield is one of the most talented actors of this generation, and his work in tick… tick… BOOM proves it. Yet, Denzel Washington takes such a powerful hold of The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Will Smith is really gunning for the gold in King Richard. This category could go in a lot of different directions!

The actress categories are even more split. As incredible as Judi Dench is, I’m not sure she was given anything really to do in Belfast (why was she chosen over Balfe?), but all the other Supporting Actress nominations are amazing. Ariana DeBose brings a lot to her role in West Side Story, though Aunjanue Ellis is an absolute powerhouse in King Richard. If that movie is getting any wins tonight, they should go to her. That said, Kirsten Dunst is a vital part of The Power of the Dog, and I would love to see a win from her if only to spite all the people who think she was bad in the Spider-Man movies. I think my personal push is for the insane work Jessie Buckley puts into The Lost Daughter, one of the most haunting movies of the year, but I could really see this going any direction. Best Actress is similarly split. I haven’t seen Parallel Mothers or The Eyes of Tammy Faye (which is apparently on Disney+? Has it always been there? Am I blind?), but what I did see was pretty incredible. Olivia Coleman and Kristen Stewart both gave some of the tensest performances of the year in The Lost Daughter and Spenser. Both have this vibe of being horror movies without any actual scares, just incredibly tense movies about womanhood. I don’t know how they missed Best Picture over some of the other nominations. Again, I’m not super sold on Nicole Kidman belonging here, but Coleman and Stewart both have strong potential. I do like the idea of Kristen Stewart coming away from the Twilight memes and taking an Oscar. It’s her and Pattinson’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

Other Considerations

Before we get to the Best Picture nominations, a few broad discussions!

I want to highlight the Best Production Design category because it is stacked. Dune could easily take it, they really built Arrakis into a fleshed-out world and it looks amazing. Nightmare Alley and West Side Story both look phenomenal, really carving out their unique atmospheres and doing a lot to prop up both stories. The Power of the Dog is the wild card pick here – I can definitely see it earning that nom, but I think that movie is going to win a lot of other awards, and its design isn’t quite the thing that is going to stand out. My pick is definitely The Tragedy of Macbeth. More than any other nominations here (except maybe Dune), Macbeth is defined by its design. That movie thrives off of the abstract setwork, and I think you’d have a very different film without it.

In terms of general guesses, I think Dune is going to sweep a lot of the technical categories. It’s really the Mad Max: Fury Road of this year, and everyone knows it. On the flip side, I desperately want West Side Story to get some visual recognition. Cinematography, Directing, it deserves at least one of them. West Side Story was easily the prettiest movie of the year, and I’m so sad Steven Spielberg is saying that he won’t direct any more musicals because that’s kind of all I want to see from him now. I think it would be very funny if Don’t Look Up didn’t win anything. All that said, the category I’m most invested in this year is Original Screenplay. Nothing in that category holds a candle to The Worst Person in the World. Maybe I’m biased because that was possibly my favourite movie from the year, but really, Don’t Look Up? Belfast? The only nominee that comes close is Licorice Pizza and I don’t think it’s going to get the award given how that movie is sitting with people. If The Worst Person in the World takes this win, I win. That’s it, that’s the awards ceremony.

Best Picture

I’m going to run through these in order of what I’m the least interested in to the ones I genuinely think will win. As I explained in 2020, this is less about which movies I genuinely think are the best and more about which deserve the Oscar. But also, that said, it’s about which movies are the best.

Don’t Look Up

This movie is bad!

I have a lot of friends who liked Don’t Look Up and I sympathize but I just had zero patience for this one. Maybe if I didn’t live through two years of this movie I could have more fun with it, but man, I just did not enjoy this experience. Jennifer Lawrence is really good and reminded me of why she was such a Hollywood darling for a minute, and Timothee Chalamet continues to have an incredible year. He’s easily the best part of this movie, and gets the vibe of the movie’s humour more than any of the others seem to. Mostly, I just think satire is supposed to say saying, and Don’t Look Up doesn’t feel like it’s speaking to anyone. It simply yells for two and a half hours about how politicians are incompetent, tech moguls are going to destroy the world, and there’s probably nothing you can do about it. Like, we knew all of that, but hey! It just felt like it had no alternative vision, no counter-argument. The characters yell multiple times that we’re all going to die and so we should just give up, and I just don’t think that’s a constructive way to live. Didn’t enjoy it! This is my Joker of this year, in that I hope it loses everything, and I will laugh. Apologies for those who dug it!

Belfast

This is in a line of movies that were pretty cute, weren’t bad, but really shouldn’t have been nominated for Best Picture. Like, you could cut this category down to five with practically no issue. Belfast is good, but not great. I’m shocked that it got nominated for everything except for Cinematography, because that’s honestly the only category I think it deserves to be in. Branagh makes a really sentimental movie, but it should have focused more on the themes of healing religious/social divides than this conflict of “should we leave Belfast or not?” especially considering that I don’t know if this movie really does a lot to build up Belfast as a location? It was good it just didn’t have a lot of staying power to me.

King Richard

Okay, so to be clear, this was a great and lovely movie. Will Smith is really good in this, but I don’t know if he’s as good as his supporting cast. Who are all excellent! I didn’t know that Jon Bernthal was in this going in, and I do love a nice Jon Bernthal performance, especially one where’s allowed to just be kind of a nice guy! He still has that simmering anger underneath him, but it mostly stems from frustration and it’s not exploding out of him like it does elsewhere. Again, I think Aunjanue Ellis could take the win for this one and it would feel very deserved. I’m not a sports guy so I don’t have a load to say about King Richard, but its place in this list isn’t an indictment of this movie so much as it’s a statement of how good all these other movies are. There’s a lot of power here and it’s really enjoyable!

Nightmare Alley

Guillermo Del Toro doing peak Nolan. If you took The Prestige and Memento and filtered them through Del Toro’s dark fantasy vision, you’d get Nightmare Alley. I did really like this movie but I’m not sold on its place in this list. It could be higher, it could be lower, it might not belong at all. I love everything that Del Toro does, and this movie is an aesthetic delight, but I’m not sure if the story fully lands. Honestly, I’m surprised there weren’t more performance nominations out of this one? Cate Blanchett? Bradley Cooper? There’s a lot of power in those categories already, but who knows. I recommend people check it out, it’s on Disney+ and is a cool dark fantasy thriller, but yeah, I don’t really believe in its place here and I’m kind of surprised to see it in Best Picture.

CODA

I honestly wasn’t expecting to have CODA so high up the list but this movie was so delightful! I cried at least twice? Which feels bizarre because I kind of laughed through the first half of it. Through the first half of it, you get the sense that CODA is going to pull every high-school trope in the book. Ah, comedic family misunderstandings! Ah, eccentric music teacher! Ah, she is embarrassed to sing but comes back and sings in private and is secretly brilliant! But it takes some turns about halfway through and begins to pull some genuine drama and then by the end I’m crying! How dare you, movie! It deserves to get some recognition but it doesn’t really belong in Best Picture. It simply doesn’t hold a candle to some of the top nominations here. I can’t escape the feeling that it’s only in this category because it’s about a deaf family, which feels kind of performative, especially when you have Audible in the documentary short docket, which probably approached the deaf community in a much deeper and impactful light. CODA kind of feels like a standard coming-of-age movie, but about a deaf family – and that’s great! It takes its tropes and makes the most of them, with some really good catharsis. But, yeah, it’s weird that it’s getting the Best Picture attention that it’s been getting. A movie can be very good, and not deserve to win this! Both can be true. I contain multitudes.

Licorice Pizza

I have put off talking in-depth about this movie because boy I do not know what to say. It was a visual delight; this was my first P.T. Anderson movie and it easily convinced me that I need to see everything this guy has made because I do like pretty movies! It was mostly a delightful slice-of-life period movie, existing in a kind of stream of consciousness chapter format. And it did all of that well! I think it’s about the tense place between adolescence and adulthood, and wanting to be fully known. It does all of those things well – but it also does things very wrong. There’s been a lot of discussion about the ways this thing handles race, and it definitely leaves a poor taste, no matter what the actual intent of it was. The core relationship also doesn’t go the way I think it was building towards, and that ending kind of holds back the entire story. Neither of the characters seem to really grow at the end, and I’m left wondering what the point was. Maybe if I rewatched it, it would feel more cohesive. But mostly, it’s left in my mind as that really pretty movie about the 70s that had all the HAIM sisters in it.

Dune

This is a hard one. Dune is incredible. I have an entire article about how incredible Dune is. The fact that this movie works at all is a testament to Villeneuve and his crew. It might run away with Best Editing sheerly by the fact that it manages to be paced well and function for three hours. Dune is the real populist pick, and I love that it has so much potential in this category. My boy Denis truly went out and made a big-budget blockbuster that brought back the theatre experience and has genuine Oscar potential. That’s incredible! It is also half a movie, however. I think this is going to be a Lord of the Rings situation, and Part Two is going to come in like Return of the King and take everything once that movie comes out. Maybe including Best Picture. But I don’t think this is Denis’s year.

West Side Story

How are people not talking about this one? Steven Spielberg is an expert at this. He’s a master who is still reinventing his craft. As I said before, West Side Story is the most stunning movie of the year. The sheer work that Spielberg is doing with his cinematography and blocking and framing is on a whole separate level. The gym dance? The America sequence? The Rumble? In a year of pretty good movie musicals (excluding Dear Evan Hansen), West Side Story really stands out as a great. It feels like the movie musicals I watched growing up modernized and brought to new life. This movie is truly, deeply stunning and everyone should stop what they’re doing and watch it on the biggest screen they have. The only thing that makes this movie short of perfection is, sadly, its lead performance. I’ve never seen an actor drag a movie down as much as Ansel Elgort drags down West Side Story. He doesn’t have a strong singing voice, especially beside Rachel Zegler, and he really doesn’t carry a lot of charisma. He works in Baby Driver because he’s playing kind of a socially stunted guy, he stands out when he’s supposed to be this charming gang member. And that’s without getting into all the disgusting allegations that have come out about him. Despite Elgort, West Side Story is still 90% of a perfect movie, and I really hope it wins some big visual achievements for its sheer craft.

Drive My Car

These are my top two. These are my picks. One of these will win. My guess is that Drive My Car isn’t going to take this one, but will take International Feature Film – though I won’t complain if that goes to The Worst Person in the World. Drive My Car is an incredible feat, a three-hour meditation on grief and the way we mourn those who are gone. It’s a Japanese movie about a playwright who specializes in Chekov. I just love a movie that functions on multiple levels like this. Drive My Car also explores the internationality of art in a lot of interesting ways, featuring English, Japanese, Korean, as well as Korean Sign Language. It’s a lot about the ways that we communicate and the ways we express ourselves. It has the confidence to wait 40 minutes before dropping it’s opening credits. Drive My Car absolutely rules and I will be pretty happy if it wins either of these categories. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it at this point, but maybe I’ll rewatch it soon and write more about it, I’m not sure. It’s just very good.

The Power of the Dog

If Drive My Car doesn’t win, The Power of the Dog needs to. What a heavy movie. Jane Campion’s masterpiece is the movie of the year. It’s the only movie that I have genuinely felt compelled to rewatch before Oscar season wraps up (not counting the four times I saw Dune in theatres) because it just has that much going on. This is a slow burn with such power simmering underneath it. It’s a movie that starts off one way and you think it’s going to go in a certain direction and then halfway through it begins to peel away its layers and you realize oh, this is a very different kind of movie. It pulls the rug out from underneath you and becomes a film about masculine power and the ways that masculinity is expressed. It’s a movie about performance, about the kind of people we project we are. It’s immaculately crafted, with every minute detail gaining more weight on the second watch. Insignificant things become vitally important. And it's always nice to have more movies that feature how pretty New Zealand is. The Power of the Dog is genuinely incredible, and this is the one that’s going to be sticking with me the most from these nominations. I can’t think of the last time a movie really transformed on me like this, especially with Cumberbatch’s stunning performance. There’s a lot of good movies on this list, but not many of them touch The Power of the Dog.

Concluding Remarks

This is going to be a wild Oscar’s, and I’m very excited. But most of all, these ceremonies are about having fun and enjoying good movies. And dunking on Don’t Look Up. It’s a lot about dunking on Don’t Look Up. If that movie wins Original Screenplay over The Worst Person in the World you will all be hearing from me.