Remembering Them Well: Reviewing the Ten Best Picture Musicals!

Hello!  The intent of this article was to have it published on the same weekend the 2025 Oscars were broadcast which, as you may have noticed, was almost two weeks ago at this point.  My schedule got thrown off by the recent passing of our oldest cat, Cooper.  He was a good boy, and the source of a lot of other delays you never knew about, due to his penchant for lying on my chest the second after placing my laptop into position.  This article is dedicated to him.

Anyway, I still had a lot of fun putting this together, so I couldn’t stand not publishing it anyway, even if it is a bit stale at this point.  Let’s just pretend it’s March 2nd, 2025 or so!

There may be no genre so closely tied to “old Hollywood” than the musical.  Who doesn’t marvel at the wonder of movies like SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, THE BAND WAGON or BRIGADOON to this day?  Give your jaw from dropping to the floor watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers delight the audience?  Even as the genre transitioned from the 60’s to the 70’s, movies like CABARET and ALL THAT JAZZ continued to move the format forward into the New Hollywood world.  No style of film appeared to have more prestige than the musical.

It may surprise you, then, that not very many of them have been deemed Best Picture by the Motion Picture Academy.  At least, it surprised me.

As of this writing, only 10 musicals have taken home the big prize at the Academy Awards.  The hit rate isn’t as bad as it sounds; that’s 10 out of 97, so somewhere around 10% of the time, your Best Picture will be a musical.  But there’s a ton of super-famous musicals that never made the cut.  In fact, not one of the ones I listed in that opening paragraph ever managed to do it.  If it weren’t for CHICAGO, there wouldn’t have been a musical Best Picture winner since Richard Nixon was in office.  It’s been 23 years since CHICAGO’s big night.

For a while there, it sure seemed like that drought was going to be broken a couple of weeks ago.  Both WICKED and EMILIA PEREZ had brief periods as strong Best Picture frontrunners (and “sort-of musical” A COMPLETE UNKNOWN always lurked as a dark horse contender).  At the end of the day, Best Picture went to ANORA, ultimately the correct choice and no I am not taking questions on this just yet, thanks.  So the musical will have to wait its turn for a little bit longer.

Until that time, I thought I’d take a look at the ten that did win Best Picture and see what they had to offer on either a first-time viewing or a rewatch, if they hold up, and if…well, if it seems like they deserve the legacy.  So I did!  Then I wrote about it!

THE BROADWAY MELODY (1929)

Directed by: Harry Beaumont

Starring: Charles King, Anita Page, Bessie Love

Written by: Sarah Y. Mason (continuity), Norman Houston, James Gleason (dialogue), Earl Baldwin (titles, uncredited)

Released: February 1, 1929 (premiere), June 12, 1929 (national)

Length: 101 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: ALIBI, THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929, IN OLD ARIZONA, THE PATRIOT

Also nominated for: Best Director (Beaumont), Best Actress (Love)

Synopsis: Hank and Queenie, two sisters who have developed a stage act, decide to try their chances in New York City, at the prodding of Hank’s boyfriend, songwriter Eddie.  However, when Eddie begins to fall in love with Queenie, is the sister act in danger of collapsing under the bright lights?

It only took two years for a musical to snag an Academy Award for Best Picture.  It also only took two years for the Academy to provide the Big Prize to a somewhat dubious recipient.  Even in the old days, Best Pictures were really just best guesses!

THE BROADWAY MELODY is admittedly a tough watch nearly a hundred years later.  There’s nothing really objectionable to its simple story of a pair of sisters and their attempts to make it on Broadway with their dual act (you’ll never believe it, but it turns out love and ambition stand in their way).  The issue is that the movie is…well, creaky and boring, not exactly traits you look for when watching a musical.  There are none of the spectacular dance sequences, or soaring ballads that you typically associate with the genre.  The plot is also a little too tethered to reality to be as engaging as later musicals typically are; it’s one of those movies where everyone is actually singing songs in real life, as opposed to broadcasting their feelings to us with music.  

Also, speaking of music, there just isn’t that much of it in BROADWAY MELODY!  There are only seven in all, and they’re spread out unevenly.  We come out hot, with the initial minutes introducing us to the title tune, which is alright!  It gets sung again in the next scene, and then…things just begin to dry up after a while.  We do get a couple of full-blown numbers by the end (the highlight being “Wedding of the Painted Doll”), but overall, it doesn’t really feel like a musical, where music and song is used to craft and shape a story.

There are some pieces of crucial context at play that may help raise THE BROADWAY MELODY’s standing: first, this is just kind of what musicals were like in the first few decades of the format, at least for the most part.  THE BROADWAY MELODY resembles your average stage musical, and I suspect that’s largely by design.  Most film musicals at the time intentionally emulated theatre aesthetics, leading to movies where stars like Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald just turned to the camera and sang right at you.  Ambition was soon to hit the genre; Busby Berkeley would choreograph his first film the year after THE BROADWAY MELODY, changing the film musical forever.  But we weren’t there yet.

The second thing to keep in mind is that THE BROADWAY MELODY was incredibly popular in its day.  It may be hard to believe in the here and now, but think about it.  If you had never seen a musical at all before, wouldn’t this seem that much more magical?  We’re spoiled now, having heard the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, of Lerner and Lowe.  We’ve seen the visual mastery of Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli.  But, in 1929, just seeing audio synced up to video was a modern marvel.  To that end, THE BROADWAY MELODY was the first sound film that received a national distribution.  It’s exceedingly likely this was the first talkie most moviegoers at the time had ever seen.

Given all of that, it really isn’t all that surprising that it was the second ever Best Picture.  It doesn't hurt that its competition was relatively weak, but even if it hadn’t been, THE BROADWAY MELODY probably would have stood a good chance.  Hollywood likes glitz, and tends to reward it when the opportunity presents itself.

THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936)

Directed by: Robert Z. Leonard

Starring: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer

Written by: William Anthony McGuire

Released: March 22, 1936 (premiere), April 8, 1926 (national)

Length: 176 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: ANTHONY ADVERSE, DODSWORTH, LIBELED LADY, MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, ROMEO AND JULIET, SAN FRANCISCO, THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, THREE SMART GIRLS

Also won for: Best Actress (Rainer), Best Art Direction (Seymour Felix)

Also nominated for: Best Director (Leonard), Best Original Story (McGuire), Best Art Direction (Cedric Gibbons, Eddie Imazu, Edwin B. Willis), Best Film Editing (William S. Gray)

Synopsis: Florenz Ziegfeld is a sideshow barker in partnership with a carnival strongman.  Ziegfeld chases greater ambitions after his brief success bottoms out, and he quickly becomes a successful Broadway producer off his dual eyes for talent and marketing gimmicks.  We follow the highs and lows of his career and personal lives, with particular focus on his two marriages.  We’re also provided a look at the numbers that made up his famous “Ziegfeld Follies” shows.

When you scroll through reviews of THE GREAT ZIEGFELD on Letterboxd (which is, as we all know, the only home for objective film criticism), you see a lot of common complaints: it’s boring, it’s overlong, the songs drag…you get the idea.  It seems to be a typical example of an early Oscars whiff, the kind of flick that got rewarded in its day for its fawning portrayal of an early entertainment entrepreneur, only to be eventually buried by the sands of history.  And THE GREAT ZIEGFELD undeniably has some early musical creakiness to it: like THE BROADWAY MELODY, the songs are basically all staged on a stage, under the context of “putting on a show”. 

So it surprises me to say…I think I ultimately liked ZIEGFELD more than the average modern viewer.  Maybe it’s just lowered expectations at play, but I really didn’t hate this.  Yeah, three hours is too much, and it too often leans into cornball schmaltz in order to sell the drama; the ending scene of Ziegfeld croaking in his apartment* after reflecting on his various “Follies”, his last words being “more steps…higher, higher!” all feels like a parody of an old-timey biographical blockbuster.  But ZIEGFELD generally maximizes the many talents at its disposal.  Powell is actually quite engaging as the titular Ziegfeld; he doesn’t have to sing a note, but he does have the arguably tougher job of being the larger-than-life figure at the center of the entire 176-minute behemoth.  His ease on camera with Myrna Loy (who plays second Ziegfeld wife Billie Burke) won’t surprise anyone who’s seen a THIN MAN flick, but the big showcase performance belongs to Luise Rainer, the first Ziegfeld wife, Anna Held.  She pops in a way that nobody else in THE GREAT ZIEGFELD quite does, and the Academy seemed to agree; Rainer would become the first performer to win an acting Oscar for a musical.

*Oh, spoilers, I guess.

Also, the technique behind staging of big numbers has clearly improved tenfold since THE BROADWAY MELODY.  There’s lots of great little numbers throughout, but the show stopping sequence (at least for me) is “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody”, a nearly ten-minute piece of staging where the camera keeps climbing up the ramp of this giant cake structure.  As the structure turns, more performers are revealed: opera soloists, dancers in spats and coat tails, pianists banging on ivories built into the sides of staircases.  It’s 100% excess from start to finish, and it’s great, at about as close as you can get to traveling back in time and watching The Ziegfeld Follies yourself.  Or at least I presume.  I wasn’t there.

The best thing THE GREAT ZIEGFELD does is deploying some major talents, playing themselves and showing off what they can do.  The big two are Ray Bolger, who would soon be immortalized as the Scarecrow in THE WIZARD OF OZ, and radio/stage star Fannie Brice.  Bolger is typically great in all his bouncy, flexible, expressive glory*, but Brice was the real revelation for me.  I realized that I’m not sure I had ever been exposed to her before, not even in the Streisand iteration?  She’s phenomenal, and so unlike anybody else that was working at the time (or, frankly, now).  This in and of itself added a lot of value to my ZIEGFELD viewing experience.

*Although it should be mentioned he appears in blackface in one number, if that sort of thing is something you’d like to know ahead of time.

Still, it’s hard to defend it as the Best Picture of 1936, especially when MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, one of maybe a handful of “classic Hollywood” movies the average person could even name, was on the board.  Again, though, it’s important to note that this movie was a fairly big deal at the time, and was even a source of pride for MGM.  And I don’t mean to keep pulling the “novelty” card but…big musical biographies were still kind of a novelty!  Maybe William Powell should have considered hosting SNL and doing some Follies numbers if MGM wanted ZIEGFELD to stand the test of time.  Alas.

GOING MY WAY (1944)

Directed by: Leo McCarey

Starring: Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald, Frank McHugh, James Brown, Gene Lockhart, Jean Heather

Written by: Frank Butler, Frank Cavett

Released: May 3, 1944 (New York premiere), August 16, 1944 (Los Angeles premiere)

Length: 126 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: DOUBLE INDEMNITY, GASLIGHT, SINCE YOU WENT AWAY, WILSON

Also won for: Best Directing (McCarey), Best Actor (Crosby), Best Supporting Actor (Fitzgerald), Best Writing (Screenplay) (Butler, Cavett, based on a story by McCarey), Best Writing (Original Motion Picture Story) (McCarey), Best Music (Song) (“Swingin’ on a Star”, music by James Van Heusen, lyrics by Johnny Burke)

Also nominated for: Best Actor (Fitzgerald; yep, he was nominated twice!), Best Cinematography - Black and White (Lionel Lindon), Best Film Editing (Leroy Stone)

Synopsis: St. Dominic’s Church, led by Father Fitzgibbon, appears to be on its last legs, and is on the verge of foreclosure.  Only their new parish, Father O’Malley, can save them now.  While he does so, he also befriends the young neighborhood toughs, and mentors a runaway, who can sing like an angel.  Is there anything he can’t do?  

The first time I saw GOING MY WAY, I felt a fair bit underwhelmed by it.  Maybe it’s because it’s often portrayed as something it kind of isn’t, which is a musical that’s just perfect for Christmas time.  And, yes, it’s sort of a musical, in the sense that the main character is a singing priest, and music is a presence throughout.  However, just like the first two entries on this list, if you’re expecting a standard musical as we understand it now (big splashy opening song, impressive dance moves, 11:00 number), it’s going to fall short.  It’s also not really a Christmas movie, even by my normally very loose standards.  Yes, Father O’Malley sings “Silent Night”, but it’s so obviously only because they were trying to fit Crosby’s big defining hit into the movie. I think it’s Christmas when GOING MY WAY concludes, but that’s about it!

No, what GOING MY WAY is, is an optimistic feel-good post-war salve.  It’s overly sweet, with its heart definitely on its sleeve.  Crosby’s Father O’Malley is one of those saintly figures, a guy who always knows just what to say or what to do in order to soothe any given conflict.  This is actually possibly why I still don’t fully jive with the film, even on a rewatch: our main character is too on top of things.  Although there’s a lot at stake within the film (the dignity of Father Fitzgibbons, the souls of kids like Tony Scaponi and Carol James, the fate of the church itself), you’re never really worried about the outcome, since O’Malley never misses a beat.  There are plenty of movies from this era with saccharine-sweet mentalities; hell, one of my favorite films of all time is IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.  But, there, George Bailey is a deeply conflicted man, who constantly struggles to do the right thing (even though he always does).  Not Chuck O’Malley; he’ll fix it with a song and a wink.

That all said, I enjoyed GOING MY WAY a great deal more this go-around, if only because I’m able to accept it for what it actually is, as opposed to what it usually gets advertised as.  I think the character of Fitzgibbons is especially strong, and played beautifully by Barry Fitzgerald.  The theme of trying to evaluate when your time has passed, and when it’s appropriate to hold on to old ways, is one that gets only more potent as one goes through life.  Also, as straight-forward as O’Malley is, Crosby plays him so effortlessly, he practically floats through the movie.  It’s also worth noting that GOING MY WAY launched a massively popular song, “Swingin’ on a Star”, which seems extraordinarily relevant for a “musical” film.

At the end of the day, I still prefer this movie’s follow-up, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY.  But maybe I didn’t appreciate the original enough the first time around.  Yeah, it did end up beating DOUBLE INDEMNITY for Best Picture, the clearly superior film.  But, given the state of the world at that time, was there anything really wrong with believing a priest (and a cool one at that!  O’Malley also likes baseball and uptempo piano playing.  Woah!) could save the world just by being nice?

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951)

Directed by: Vincente Minelli

Starring: Gene Kelly, Lesli Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guetary, Nina Foch

Written by: Alan Jay Lerner

Released: October 4, 1951 (New York), November 11, 1951 (nation-wide)

Length: 113 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: DECISION BEFORE DAWN, A PLACE IN THE SUN, QUO VADIS, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE 

Also won for: Best Writing (Story and Screenplay) (Lerner), Best Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture) (Johnny Green, Saul Chaplin), Best Art Direction (Color) (Cedric Gibbons and E. Preston Ames [Art Direction], Edwin B. Willis and F. Keogh Gleason [Set Decoration]), Best Cinematography (Color) (Alfred Gilks, Ballet Photography by John Alton), Best Costume Design (Color) (Orry-Kelly, Waler Plunkett, Irene Sharaff)

Also nominated for: Best Director (Minelli), Best Film Editing (Adrienne Fazan)

Synopsis: Struggling artist, and WWII veteran, Jerry Mulligan has settled in Paris with his friends, former prodigy concert pianist Adam Cook, and French singing sensation Henri Baurel.  Trouble emerges when Jerry falls in love with Henri’s girlfriend, Lise Bouvier.  Who will she choose?  And will she choose in time, or will Jerry end up going with his suitor, the beautiful Milo Roberts?

Now we’re talking.

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS is easily the first musical film in this list to conduct itself as a musical (even if it’s secretly a dance movie).  Songs aplenty!  Beautiful colors!  High drama!  Fun characters!  A romance in the middle of it all!  And at the movie’s center is Gene Kelly, who was likely at his absolute peak as a Hollywood legend in 1951.  Needless to say, he’s spectacular, his ease moving in front of a camera completely unrivaled by perhaps anybody who’s done so before and since.  It struck me watching AMERICAN IN PARIS how spoiled audiences at the time must have been (or, looked at another way, how starved we currently are now).  He was a one-of-one, with no current contemporary.

But the rest of the (surprisingly small) cast is just as great!  Levant is perfect as the wry piano prodigy Adam, and both Guetary and Foch play their roles as respective romantic third wheels just right.  As for Leslie Caron, it is absolutely possible that her opening bit, an introductory series of dances showing off the different sides of Lise’s personality, is one of the finest “first scenes” of a performer’s careers.  There may be others, but, you know…keep ‘em to yourself.

It’s all the more remarkable that AN AMERICAN IN PARIS set the template for MGM dominance when you consider how odd its format really is.  I always forget, for instance, that it’s technically a Gershwin jukebox musical (decades before that term was ever really introduced).  It doesn’t really hurt the movie in any significant way*, but the usage of pre-existing American standards clears the way for Kelly to focus on what really made the film special: its all-in approach to dance, culminating in a still-stunning nearly-twenty minute ballet finale that probably did as much to popularize the art form as anything else.  Kelly’s dancing is the star of the show here, as well it should be.

*And it seems relevant that it was all put together by a guy named Alan Jay Lerner, a name you’ll be seeing a lot of before this article is done.

As you can see from the list above, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS dominated the Academy Awards that year against some pretty stiff competition.  Its win over STREETCAR may irk many (although it feels almost impossible to directly compare such completely opposite pieces of art), but it’s hard to balk at its victories for too long.  AN AMERICAN IN PARIS is ambitious, charming, expertly crafted…the exact kind of movie musical that should be feted.  If they were still being made, I’d feel certain they would be feted in the here and now.

GIGI (1958)

Directed by: Vincente Minelli

Starring: Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jordan, Hermione Gingold, Eva Gabor

Written by: Alan Jay Lerner

Released: May 15, 1958

Length: 115 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: AUNTIE MAME, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, THE DEFIANT ONES, SEPARATE TABLES

Also won for: Best Directing (Minelli), Best Writing (Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium) (Lerner, from the novella by Colette), Best Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture) (Andre Previn), Best Music (Song) (“Gigi”: Music by Frederick Lowe, Lyrics by Lerner), Best Art Direction (Art Direction: William A. Horning and E. Preston Ames; Set Decoration: Henry Grace and F. Keogh Gleason), Best Costume Design (Cecil Beaton), Best Cinematography (Color) (Joseph Ruttenberg), Best Film Editing (Adrienne Fazan)

Synopsis: Gaston Lachaille has become bored with his upper-crust existence, to the bewilderment of his uncle, the Honore Lachaille.  In an attempt to liven things up, the Honore sets Gaston up with a courtesan, Gigi, who must first be taught how to be a lady.  Then, something unexpected happens: Gaston and Gigi genuinely fall in love.

Another Vincente Minelli joint!

It’s been long enough that it’s extremely easy (even understandable) to forget now, but GIGI had accomplished an Oscars feat only matched or surpassed by two others in the sixty-plus years since.  It was nominated for nine Oscars, and managed to win all nine of them, from less glitzy ones (Best Art Direction) to two of the biggest (Best Director and Best Picture).  THE LAST EMPEROR would do the same in 1988, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING would do them both two better, winning all 11 of a possible 11 in 2004.  An interesting list, and hallowed company.

Unfortunately, in the modern day, GIGI tends to get painted with a broad brush, with viewers clocking the stated age difference between the title character and her eventual suitor, Gaston Lachaille, and chalking this up as so much pedophilic smut, the type that all old movies must have been actively about.  I mean, look, there’s Maurice Chevalier right at the top singing about how he thanks heaven for little girls!  He wants to fuck young women, and brags about how marriage is for suckers!  Just what was everybody thinking back then???

This surface level analysis misses, of course, the fact that Chevalier’s little prayer eventually gets rejected, with Gaston realizing the Honore represents what he could easily become.  Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack about the ultimate solution being to marry Gigi; the difference between having a teen courtesan and a teen bride is probably socially non-existent in 2025.  But GIGI isn’t set in 2025, it’s set in 1900 France, where high society customs and expectations were sadly different.  Besides, the thematic significance of Gaston choosing to wed instead of jumping from girl to girl until the grave should be obvious.  It’s what the whole movie is about.  This all felt fairly apparent, at least to me.

Anyway.  In 1958, the bigger slight against GIGI was its evident similarity to MY FAIR LADY, the more popular (and, admittedly, superior) Lerner & Loewe show about a girl being groomed to become prim and proper until love intervenes.  In the years after, the two shows would keep entangling themselves; Leslie Caron replaced Audrey Hepburn in the lead role of GIGI as the show jumped from stage to screen, which somewhat mirrors Hepburn famously replacing Julie Andrews in the film version of MY FAIR LADY.  All you needed was Andrews replacing Caron in, like, CAMELOT or something and the circle would have been complete.

Speaking of Caron, she’s the other thing people knock GIGI for.  I see a lot of people knock her as boring, or even actively holding the movie back.  And, look, it’s hard not to imagine the universe where a just-to-about-to-enter-her-absolute-career-prime Hepburn didn’t turn this down; she undoubtedly would have made this an inarguable classic.  But Caron isn’t boring!  I do think I prefer her work in AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, but I still found her to be quite fun in GIGI, a good counterpoint to the ennui-laden performance by Louis Jordan.  I submit the possibility that her performance is perceived less than others due to the script’s ultimate focus on Gaston’s struggle against the purposelessness of French elitism.  That focus made sense to me, but could be jarring to expect a movie called GIGI to ultimately highlight…well, Gigi.

Regardless, I further submit that, for the first time in this project, the star of the show is actually the score, more specifically, the lyrics.  Every song is just drenched in clever lyric after clever lyric, satisfying rhyme after satisfying rhyme.  Chevalier* is heavily featured in my two favorites: an early duet with Jordan (“It’s a Bore”) where the Honore and Gaston debate just how exciting life really is:

*By the way, it delighted me to see a late-career Chevalier performance that begins with him singing directly to the camera, as if nothing had changed in the thirty-plus years since his filmography began.

“Don't you marvel at the power/of the mighty Eiffel Tower/knowing thеre it will remain evеrmore?/Climbing up to the sky/over ninety stories high?”

“How many stories?”

“Ninety!” 

“How many yesterday?”

“Ninety!”

“And tomorrow?”

“Ninety!”

“It's a bore.”

The other, a late-show duet between Chevalier and Hermoine Gilgold, provides two memories of a date that occurred decades before:

“We met at 9”

“We met at 8”

“I was on time”

“No, you were late”

“Ah yes, I remember it well

We dined with friends”

“We dined alone”

“A tenor sang”

“A baritone”

“Ah yes, I remember it well”

It’s fun!  The ear loves to hear it!  The Academy clearly agreed, leading the way for GIGI’s then-unprecedented dominance, something MGM was clearly proud of.  Allegedly, the day after the Oscars, all phone calls to the studio were answered with “Hello, M-GIGI-M!”  This was later mirrored a couple of years ago when calls to the studio behind the 2022 Best Oscar champion were answered with, “Hello, A-EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE-24!”

WEST SIDE STORY (1961)

Directed by: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins

Starring: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, George Chakiris, Rita Moreno, Russ Tamblyn

Written by: Ernest Lehman

Released: October 18, 1951

Length: 152 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: FANNY, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, THE HUSTLER, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG

Also won for: Best Director (Wise & Robbins), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Chakiris), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Moreno), Best Music (Scoring of a Motion Picture) (Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green, Sid Ramin, Irwin Kostal), Best Sound (Gordon E. Sawyer, Fred Hynes), Best Art Direction (Color) (Art Direction - Boris Leven; Set Decoration - Victor A. Gangelin), Best Cinematography (Color) (Daniel L. Fapp), Best Costume Design (Color) (Irene Sharaff), Best Film Editing (Thomas Stanford)

Also nominated for: Best Writing (Story and Screenplay - Based on Material From Another Medium) (Lehman)

Synopsis: If you’ve ever seen Romeo & Juliet, you basically have the idea.  Just replace the Montagues and the Capulets with the Sharks and the Jets.  Oh, you haven’t seen Romeo & Juliet?  Oh, okay.  Two star-crossed lovers from rival New York street gangs must find a way to bring their two groups together–or pay the ultimate price.  You really should see Romeo & Juliet, by the way.

A Robert Wise (co) joint!

It’s very possible that WEST SIDE STORY is my favorite movie.  That possibility is, in part, due to the fact that West Side Story is my favorite musical.

Even if the original show weren’t a tremendous work of art, I would still love it due to its association with a very specific summer in my life.  In 2005, the year before I graduated high school, I took on an internship with the local repertory musical theater.  It wasn’t to perform; they saved those slots for LA and NY actors who were magically always available in the middle of the summer.  No, it was to do unpaid labor*, either in the warehouse, or in the costuming department or, if you were really really lucky, as a part of the stage management team.  This was a cush gig because a) the woman who ran it was super nice, b) you didn’t have to lift heavy things in 100-degree heat and c) you frequently got to know the actors pretty well.  

*The joke would eventually be on them; two summers later, I went back and did the exact same program, but this time for $180 a week!  That constituted the vast majority of the money I ever made in show business.

All this to say, I was able to help stage-manage the week they did West Side Story.  Not only did this serve as my introduction to the Bernstein-Sondheim collaboration, I got to immerse myself in the production for seven days straight (plus a week of rehearsals prior to).  Surround myself with the score.  And Jesus, what a score.  One of the all-time “oops, all legends” batch of music and lyrics, it’s possible that every single song in West Side Story has been immortalized in the general zeitgeist one way or another.  “Maria.”  “I Feel Pretty.”  “Tonight.”  You’d have to be actively dodging popular culture to not know at least one line or melody from any of those.  Hell, even the mambo was used in a GAP commercial back when we were kids.  The orchestrations are gorgeous, the lyrics are witty, the voices are full of character…it’s a perfect show.

Here’s the thing, though.  The 1961 WEST SIDE STORY movie actually improves the stage production.  By a significant amount.

For one, it makes one of the all-time great song swaps in the history of film adaptation.  The jokey and light “Gee, Officer Krupke”, initially serving to cover a costume and set change in the stage version, gets moved to Act 1, where it can be the amusing commentary on the criminal justice system that it is, instead of an awkward comedy number deep into Act II, when shit has already gone down.  In its place goes “Cool”, the best number in the show (and the greatest scene in the film), which now becomes this simmering pot, ready to explode.  It’s genuinely difficult to go back to the stage version’s song order, even if it has a specific function.

For second…there’s a legitimate argument to be made that WEST SIDE STORY is better on color celluloid than the stage..  My wife and I were fortunate enough to see the movie on a big screen last summer, and just having the ability to see stuff like the mambo dance-off (the greatest scene in the film) and the subsequent Tony-Maria ballet on actual film..it’s enough to make you cry.  Every single color on a given character’s costume, or on the wall of a given set, on down to the intermission and overture cards…made to evoke some sort of emotional response from you.  And it does.  That’s the movies, baby!

Lastly, WEST SIDE STORY 1961 gives us Rita Moreno, putting in a performance that resulted in maybe the most earned Oscar in the history of the Academy.  She’s all over this movie; I don’t know if she literally has the most screen-time, but it actively feels like it.  Her single greatest achievement is almost certainly the “America” sequence (the greatest scene in the film).  It’s a terribly difficult number, with choreography and notes that frequently live on the off beats.  She never slips, never reveals to us the complications of the scene.  She’s just perfect.  This isn’t to take away from the tremendous talent surrounding her; George Chakiris is equally effortless, as are the cadre of dancers and characters sharing the scene.  But Moreno just has that…quality, that god-given thing.  She dominates “America”, and does the same in every scene before or since.  If there’s a better Best Supporting Actress winner out there, I’d love to hear it.

So it goes with the movie itself.  WEST SIDE STORY deservedly triumphed over fairly stiff competition at that year’s Oscars (mostly at the expense of THE HUSTLER, another personal favorite).  I’ve only seen about half of the almost one hundred Best Picture winners, but there are only a few I would rank above WEST SIDE STORY (off the top of my head, only LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI come to mind).  Yes, I’m severely biased, but…when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.

MY FAIR LADY (1964)

Directed by: George Cukor

Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Wilfred Hyde-White, Jeremy Brett

Written by: Alan Jay Lerner

Released: October 21, 1964

Length: 173 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: BECKET, DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, MARY POPPINS, ZORBA THE GREEK

Also won for: Best Directing (Cukor), Best Actor (Harrison), Best Music (Scoring of Music - Adaptation or Treatment) (Andre Previn), Best Sound (George Groves), Best Art Direction (Color) (Art Direction - Gene Allen and Cecil Beaton; Set Decoration - George James Hopkins), Best Cinematography (Color) (Harry Stradling), Best Costume Design (Color) (Beaton)

Also nominated for: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Holloway), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Gladys Cooper), Best Writing (Screenplay - Based on Material From Another Medium) (Lerner, from his My Fair Lady and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion), Best Film Editing (William Ziegler)

Synopsis: Professor Henry Higgins makes a bet: that he can turn poor, crass flower vendor Eliza Doolittle into a classy socialite through the power of proper English. Will he succeed? And what happens if he does?

My Fair Lady walks an incredibly fine line.

I had forgotten how abrasive its main characters can be.  Henry Higgins is an obvious buffoon, a man who uses his clear intellect to craft another human being into someone he considers “proper” and “correct”, mostly just to see if he can.  Eliza Doolittle is a nice girl (just ask her), but she spends the entire first half speaking in a sharp, crass Cockney accent, the kind that all bad actors default to when cast in the local Dickens fair.  Her father, Alfred, is a proud deadbeat, a guy who is only too happy to go to his broke daughter, hat in hand, but makes it clear she’s not to receive any handouts from him.  As for Colonel Pickering, it’s not even clear what he does around here, besides hype up his boy Higgins.  This is all done with clear intent, but without the exact right cast, My Fair Lady could be unwatchable.

When it comes to the 1964 film adaptation, though, all four characters are charming at worst, and totally captivating at best.  This is because…well, they have the exact right cast.  It helps that two of the four are played by their originating actors (Harrison as Higgins, Holloway as Alfred), and Hyde-White is able to hold his own as Pickering.  As for the titular fair lady, despite all the controversy that stemmed from Hepburn getting cast over originating actor Julie Andrews, as well as the fact that Marni Nixon did the singing (both things looming large enough to keep her from being nominated at that year’s Oscars)..I think Hepburn’s pretty fucking great.  

It’s probably largely self-evident, but to be clear: Eliza Doolittle is a fucking tough role, maybe an impossible one.  You have to be able to be two extremes, both a rough street urchin and the classiest woman to ever exist.  Hepburn pulls off both quite comfortably!  The “classy” part shouldn’t be surprising to anybody who’s ever seen a picture of Audrey Hepburn, but I think people sleep on the “Street urchin” aspect of her performance.  Again, Eliza spends the first hour of this screaming and not knowing what a fucking bathtub is.  If you’re not really careful, it can be easy to grow tired of Eliza really fast*.  But you can’t ever really get annoyed with Hepburn.  It’s easier to focus on Eliza’s hopes and desires, and why she would put up with being crafted by a jerk like Higgins (who, again, is so delightfully played by Rex Harrison that you kind of revel in how up his own ass he is).

*I suspect many who have sat through poor community theatre performances of My Fair Lady have.

I am certain that Andrews was the ideal person for Eliza, and if we were in the universe where MY FAIR LADY was meant to be her screen debut, she would have been dead-on perfect.  They also probably wouldn’t have had to dub her voice, either.  But, we’re not, and they did.  Neither the casting nor the dubbing are really Hepburn’s fault, either.  I have no idea how many people are really still fired up about this sixty years later, but it’s a controversy that still seems to hang over the movie to this day, and it’s a shame.

A scan of the 1964 Best Picture nominees reveals a brutal murderer’s row; between this, DR. STRANGELOVE, and MARY POPPINS alone, all masterpieces and cultural reference points in entirely different ways, it’s difficult to say what the worthy Best Picture winner truly is.  But MY FAIR LADY remains a thrilling watch, if only to remind yourself, “oh yeah, this is where that comes from”.  Much like WEST SIDE, I promise you that if you think you’re unfamiliar with anything in MY FAIR LADY, you are very likely mistaken.  If nothing else, the fact that Seth MacFarlane heavily patterned the voice for Stewie after Harrison’s famous speak-singing style has to count for something.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)

Directed by: Robert Wise

Starring: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Charmaine Carr, Peggy Wood, Elanor Parker

Written by: Ernest Lehman

Released: March 2, 1965

Length: 174 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: DARLING, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, SHIP OF FOOLS, A THOUSAND CLOWNS

Also won for: Best Director (Wise), Best Music (Scoring of Music - Adaptation or Treatment) (Irwin Kostal), Best Sound (James Corcoran and Fred Hynes), Best Film Editing (William H. Reynolds)

Also nominated for: Best Actress (Andrews), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Wood), Best Art Direction (Color) (Art Direction - Boris Leven; Set Decoration - Walter M. Scott and Ruby Levitt), Best Cinematography (Color) (Ted. D. McCord), Best Costume Design (Color) (Dorothy Jeakins)

Synopsis: Offbeat nun-to-be Maria has been made the governess of the house of Captain von Trapp, a widower left to raise seven children.  Through the power of song, confidence, and joy, Maria is able to melt the icy heart of Captain von Trapp and establish the family as a singing novelty act.  But, the von Trapps have a bigger issue to deal with: the rise of Nazism in Austria.

Another Robert Wise joint!

THE SOUND OF MUSIC is an intimidating movie to speak on.  It’s such a ubiquitous part of musical history that it’s legitimately hard to imagine a time when it didn’t exist.  It’s been a staple in American households since before I was born, and has managed to become an uncommon holiday tradition for many, despite not being a holiday movie really at all.  What is there to say about a movie you’ve seen countless times?

Well, you’d have to ask that question to somebody else, because I had never actually seen THE SOUND OF MUSIC.

It’s true!  I think I had seen the stage adaptation, and I was obviously familiar with the Rodgers & Hammerstein score, so baked into everyday life that it is (they play “My Favorite Things” countless times on the radio around Christmas despite, again, not being a Christmas song!).   I even hate-watched the Carrie Underwood-starring live broadcast on NBC, years before it was cool to turn your nose at Carrie Underwood.  But I never actually sat down and watched the 1965 original.  

And, look, it largely speaks for itself!  It serves simultaneously as a star vehicle for Andrews (coming off a Best Actress win for MARY POPPINS the year before), as well as a statement on the unacceptability of facism*.  In a lot of ways, it’s the perfect family film: high-class entertainment from perhaps the most beloved star at the time of its making, with a sobering lesson baked into its narrative for both the kids and adults gathered around the movie screen or television set.

*A soft reminder for you all to never let anybody tell you movies never used to be political.

As mentioned, the score is maybe the most well-known of its kind, the song roster chock full of melodies recognizable to just about anybody even vaguely paying attention to anything around them at any point.  BUT!  Even if you had never heard “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” or “The Lonely Goatherd” or “Edelweiss” or “My Favorite Things” or or or or…I think the songs would still have a tremendous impact, considering how steeped in that famous R&H brand of character focus, where every line, every syllable communicates what you need to know about the movie’s central figures (hell, has there been a better introduction to a lead than Maria’s opening title song belt?).  

Another point to THE SOUND OF MUSIC’s legacy: it’s the uncommon three-hour movie that feels like it completely flies by.  Every scene is intentional, with no real fat one could possibly trim, if you were even compelled to.  This, along with a multitude of other factors, is almost certainly why it walked away with five Academy Awards (neck and neck with fellow Best Picture nominee DOCTOR ZHIVAGO).  It’s only a gut feeling, but THE SOUND OF MUSIC certainly feels like easily the movie most recognizable to the average person.  And, again, it’s about how Nazis are scum!  What else could you possibly want?

OLIVER! (1968)

Directed by: Carol Reed

Starring: Ron Moody, Oliver Reed, Mark Lester, Jack Wild, Shani Wallis

Written by: Vernon Harris

Released: September 26, 1968

Length: 153 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: FUNNY GIRL, THE LION IN WINTER, RACHEL RACHEL, ROMEO & JULIET

Also won for: Best Directing (C. Reed), Best Music (Score of a Musical Picture - Original or Adaptation) (Johnny Green), Best Sound (Shepperton Studio Sound Dept), Best Art Direction (Art Direction - John Box and Terence Marsh; Set Decoration - Vernon Dixon and Ken Muggleston)

Also nominated for: Best Actor (Moody), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Wild), Best Writing (Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium) (Harris, based off the Lionel Bart play and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist), Best Costume Design (Phyllis Dalton), Best Film Editing (Ralph Kemplen)

Synopsis: If you’ve ever read Oliver Twist, you know the story of OLIVER!  You haven’t?  Damn, okay.  A boy escapes his cruel orphan and finds himself in a gang of pickpockets in the middle of London.  He must keep his distance from the brutal criminal Bill Sikes if he has any chance of finding himself a decent, warm home.  Hey, that reminds me, have you seen Romeo & Juliet yet?

OLIVER! has been handed somewhat of a raw deal in terms of legacy.

As you can see from the above, the 1968 Dickens musical adaptation did very well for itself at the Academy Awards.  However, by the end of the 1960s, the movie musical’s popularity peak had already come and gone, and it wasn’t going to be too long before the New Hollywood movement of the 1970’s would begin thriving.  By OLIVER!’s release, movies like BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE GRADUATE had already started making the old studio system look creaky.  Thus, people have the habit of looking back at OLIVER!’s great Oscar run as the last gasp of an old guard, trying desperately to cling to the past.

On the whole, this isn’t entirely inaccurate; the Academy has never been quick to embrace popular trends.  And when you look at the nominees that year and see seminal works like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and BULLITT only sparingly represented, it’s clear that there was a willful ignorance as to the tide change right around the corner.  But I do think this is an uncharitable way to look at OLIVER!, as it paints it as a tired and old-hat, maybe even actively bad, movie.  

It’s not!  It’s old-fashioned, admittedly, and the British-soaked score and book don’t exactly reinvent the wheel, the way previous Best Picture musical winners like AN AMERICAN IN PARIS and WEST SIDE STORY had.  But there’s such confidence embedded in its presentation, likely stemming from director Carol Reed, who was nearing the end of his decades-long career (he would only release two more movies after this).  There’s also something to be said for taking British pros and letting them go nuts in a family movie.

As it happens, OLIVER! highlights at least two British pros.  The first is the great Oliver Reed*, who gets to sink his teeth into villain Bill Sikes, an antagonist who just gets to be bad the whole time, without any pesky “redemption arc” to speak of.  Reed would go on to make a whole career out of bringing 100% to every role he ever played, no matter the type of movie; he was just as comfortable being evil in a musical as he was in a Ken Russell or David Cronenberg film.  No surprise with Sikes: Reed makes him slightly terrifying without ever turning him charmless.

*Do you think it was confusing for a man named Oliver Reed to be in this movie?  If you were him, and someone referred to Mr. Reed, you’d never know if they meant you or the director, Carol.  Alas, referring to “Oliver” wouldn’t do you any good, either, because you can’t rule out being confused for the film’s titular moppet.  How embarrassing!

However, the real joyous ham, and MVP, of OLIVER! is Ron Moody, who makes a whole meal out of Fagin.  You can feel the movie realizing in real time just how much more compelling Fagin is than anybody else; he and the Artful Dodger basically get the film’s closing beat.  He just owns the screen in every scene, as he dances around during “Pick a Pocket or Two” and quite artfully sells the comic number “Reviewing the Situation”, two songs that could threaten to be completely obnoxious if not performed by somebody who knows what they’re doing.  Fagin would arguably be Moody’s defining role, and one he would revisit on the stage about fifteen years later.

There are other highlights: Shani Wallis gets the most well-known number from the show (”As Long As He Needs Me”), and the choreography for the big “welcome to the city” number (“Consider Yourself”) is joyful in its building excess, reminding me at times of the big Ziegfeld spectacles of decades prior.  One character that kind of gets lost in everything is poor Oliver himself.  It’s not that Mark Lester isn’t good, it’s just that seemingly every other character is larger than life, and gets to be played as such.  Oliver is left to be the “normal” kid at the center of it all, which can be a thankless task.

Still, after all that, it’s impossible to look at OLIVER! and its place in Oscars history and not see it as a last hurrah.  The next Best Picture would be MIDNIGHT COWBOY, a defining beginning to the next chapter of Hollywood history.  Save for one final film, no other musical has won the big prize since 1968.  But, maybe it deserves to be looked at as the type of old-school entertainment that could still be appreciated in its moment, even as the entire structure of how to make a movie was changing around it.

CHICAGO (2002)

Directed by: Rob Marshall

Starring: Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere, Queen Latifah, John C. Reilly

Written by: Bill Condon

Released: December 27, 2002

Length: 113 minutes

Other Best Picture nominees: GANGS OF NEW YORK, THE HOURS, THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS, THE PIANIST

Also won for: Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Zeta-Jones), Best Sound (Michael Minkler, Dominick Tavella, David Lee), Best Art Direction (Art Direction - John Myhre; Set Decoration - Gordon Sim), Best Costume Design (Colleen Atwood), Best Film Editing (Martin Walsh)

Also nominated for: Best Directing (Marshall), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Zellweger), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Reilly), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Latifah), Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) (Condon, based on the Maurine Dallas Watkins play), Best Music (Original Song) (“I Move On” by John Kander and Fred Ebb), Best Cinematography (Dion Beebe)

Synopsis: Show-biz dreamer Roxie Hart is arrested after shooting her lover dead, despite her husband’s best attempts to take the fall.  In the clink, she forms an uneasy alliance with starlet Velma Kelly in an attempt to avoid execution.  Flashy and opportunistic Billy Flynn crafts Roxie into a media sensation, but will her long-sought fame last for long?

It may be impossible to believe for those who weren’t really paying attention at the time, but CHICAGO winning the 2002 Best Picture award was considered a foregone conclusion.

Oh, sure, with twenty years of hindsight, the Rob Marshall adaptation of the current second-longest-running show in Broadway history seems like the 21st century Oscars aberration to end all 21st century Oscars aberrations.  Despite some hopes to the contrary, CHICAGO did not launch a second wave of movie musicals; if anything, they seem like bigger novelties than ever.  Also, there’s an easy argument to be made that it is the least essential of all five Best Picture nominees that year.  CHICAGO hasn’t left much of a cultural impact nearly a quarter-century later.

But, at the time?  Its victory was a matter of if, not when.  Nearly every article you can find from back then gave CHICAGO even odds, a Vegas line that ended up being accurate.  There are a couple of reasons for this: one, never forget this was a Miramax picture.  Four years after SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE snatched the Best Picture statuette from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN’s calloused hands, the Weinstein machine was fully oiled (oh, shut up).  I think, given the then-recent terrorist attacks in New York City, there was a desire in Hollywood to return to olden days, and Miramax was able to play to those emotions at every turn.

Also, not for nothing, but CHICAGO was well-liked at the time!  They’re not perfect metrics by any means, but its Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 87%, and its Cinemascore was a healthy “A-”, indicating support from both critics and audiences.  And it’s worth noting that Chicago is an easy show to like.  It has a legitimate claim as the greatest musical ever written.   It’s a mean, vicious satire that sinks its teeth into America’s unique relationships with fame, crime, and famous crime.  Not a single character is entirely likeable; most of the leads are completely out for themselves, even as they pretend to work together.  But it’s all wrapped in a vaudevillian charm that keeps the show from being fully bilious.  

Crucially, though, Chicago requires literally letter-perfect casting in order to keep this balance.  A whiff of effort from Billy Flynn, and he’s sunk (the Broadway show employed Jerry Orbach in the role, so he most definitely floated).  If you dislike even a hair on Roxie Hart’s head, the show ceases to function (one imagines the originator, Gwen Verdon, has never had an unlikeable hair on her head).  Therein lies the problem with CHICAGO, at least for me.  I didn’t find Renee Zellweger or, tragically, Richard Gere very charming.  Thus, you have a movie about bad people you don’t like screwing each other over.  I can watch the news for that.

Yes, the satire is clear, but it’s also hammered home at every opportunity, perhaps because the movie senses the trouble at its center.  The original staging of “They Both Reached For the Gun”, which envisions Roxie as a ventriloquist dummy and Billy as her puppeteer, with the entire press row nothing more than marionettes, was apparently too subtle.  This leads to a shot of Gere as the marionette master because, get this, he’s pulling the strings!  Pushing these things too far to make sure you get it throws off the entire equilibrium of the show.

There are other quibbles, such as the MTV-style of filming (although, gotta say, I remembered it being fast to the point of incomprehension, which it isn’t), and the decision to split the musical numbers between reality and fantasy, which, again, only feels like it’s pushing the point on you again (the songs are in their mind, man!  It’s just a form of expression!)  There are also things to like: I think John C. Reilly and Catherine Zeta-Jones earned their nomination and win, respectively.  Christine Baranski acquits herself well as the face of the press.  But overall, CHICAGO remains an odd place for this particular story to finish.  Until, of course, WICKED gets the LORD OF THE RINGS treatment next Oscars season.  I’m kidding.  I think.

And The Nominees Are: Breaking Down the Ten 2023 Best Picture Hopefuls

I love the Oscars.  I hate the Oscars.  I like the Oscars.  Do I like like the Oscars?  Guys, stop.  We’re just friends.  I don’t even think of them like that.  Oh my god, stop.  You’re being so stupid right now.

Since childhood, I’ve felt every kind of emotion possible towards the Academy Awards.  The first Oscars broadcast I remember watching live with some sort of concept as to what was actually going on was the 70th Academy Awards, the one where TITANIC completed its year-long Wilt Chamberlain-esque dominance against all of Hollywood by winning eleven trophies.  It was also the one where they trotted out seventy past winners for a special “Family Album” segment, which I sort of remember being awkward even at the time.  Still, an undeniable magic emanated from the ceremony through the television and into my brain.

From there, I entered a years-long period of being super into the Oscars.  All the way through high school, I became an Oscars nerd (girls loved it).  I carried around a little pocket book that listed all the past winners and nominees in every category, as well as a brief write-up of every past ceremony (girls loved it).  I even mastered the art of putting together an Oscars ballot, realizing early on that if you wanted to win a pool, you had better stop voting with your heart and start investing in an Entertainment Weekly or Variety subscription in order to read the tea leaves (girls loved it).  My shining achievement was winning the grand prize at an Oscars party in 2006, which netted me both a DVD copy of the 2003 David Spade movie DICKIE ROBERTS: FORMER CHILD STAR and a box set of special features for the 2005 remake of KING KONG (which I hadn’t seen).

And then, I entered a even-more-years-long period of rebuking the Academy Awards, deciding I had finally seen through their shiny veneer, and assessing it as a ceremony that was more interested in rewarding mediocrity and pleasuring its own phallus rather than actually celebrating art, unlike the then-recent past where they were lavishing awards to CHICAGO and CRASH.  Looking back, it’s obvious I was just walking around with a cognitive disorder that most men in their early twenties suffer from known as Being a Butthead (symptoms include just knowing you’re the smartest and most cultured person in any given room, saying the words “devil’s advocate” more than once a day, and finding any excuse in any conversation to be a chippy little bitch).  But at the time, I really did think the quality of movies had cratered and was in disbelief that the Academy could put on a show every winter and pretend that they hadn’t.

Now, I still feel like the overall state of Hollywood is rather dire and too much mediocre slop is getting regaled with accolades by default.  But, I now can’t really think of the Oscars without thinking of a quote from comedy uber-producer Lorne Michaels in regards to SNL’s unique creative process: “the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30”.  

So it goes with the Academy Awards.  They’re not given out because there’s finally enough great flicks to bring honor to.  They’re given out because it’s almost spring and they just happen every year.  As a result, some years they really got it (what a year 2007 ended up being, eh?) and some years they really do not (quick, the 94th Academy Awards were less than two years ago, what won Best Picture?).  But if you accept them as merely a snapshot as to what we’re guessing might be enduring works in the field, they never become anything less than fascinating, even when they end up being completely incorrect.  Even people who profess to hate the ceremony and not care about them at all seem uniquely obsessed with them, just from a different angle.

As it happens, this year’s crop of Best Picture* nominees feel like a more interesting pool than in years past.  It’s a mix of populist blockbusters, esoteric and challenging films being presented to the mainstream, international crossover hits, and traditional Oscars fare.  It’s a pretty good cross-section of genres and, thus, felt like a good list to work my way through this month.

*Not that Best Picture is the be all and end all of Academy Award nominee pools, it just feels the most straight-forward.  “Here are the ten best movies of the year”, the claim seems to be.  You don’t need to know anything about acting technique or editing processes in order to weigh in.

So…let’s take a look at this crop of ten and see what we have here.  I don’t know that I’m necessarily going to do this every year, but I’m more excited to dig into the Best Picture nominees than I have in literally half a decade or so, and I don’t think I’m alone.  But, are any of them any good?  Read along and find out!

AMERICAN FICTION

DIRECTED BY: Cord Jefferson

WRITTEN BY: Cord Jefferson

STARRING: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Jeffrey Wright), Best Supporting Actor (Sterling K. Brown), Best Adapted Screenplay (Cord Jefferson), Best Original Score (Laura Karpman)

An imperfect first feature, but perhaps the best kind of imperfect first feature.  AMERICAN FICTION is a movie bursting with ideas and creativity, and feels for all the world like a story Jefferson (who has a ton of comedy bonafides, but whose GOOD PLACE work I was personally most familiar with) has been sitting and thinking about for a long time.  Its main story is of a well-regarded, but beleaguered, author (Wright) who is told his work doesn’t sell due to it not being “Black enough” (which means everything you might imagine it to mean).  In a fury, he submits a joke manuscript (under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh) filled with every maddening Black literature trope in the book: street vernacular, drug slinging, gang members in durags.  He then has to deal with the reality of it becoming critically-acclaimed in its own right, and threatens to become his first bona-fide financial hit.   The satire is occasionally brutal, but always honest, to the point where I genuinely fear I’m coming off sounding like one of those goddamn literary judges in this very here sentence.  How’s that for meta?

Where you can feel Jefferson’s voice still forming is in the movie’s awkward marriage between its vicious satirical eye towards the performative activism of…well, essentially every artistic domain, and its desire to also be a relatively straight-forward family drama.  Monk attends a literary seminar back home in Boston, just in time for Mom (Leslie Uggams) to begin developing Alzheimer’s.  His sister Lisa (an underused Tracee Ellis Ross) passes away suddenly and his estranged brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is in town for the funeral.  Monk maybe learns to open his heart when he begins dating the woman down the street.  You get the idea.

AMERICAN FICTION is actually competent on either side of its story’s coin, but you can’t help but wish that it backed up and picked a lane for now.  Still, you have to admire a movie that is willing to take a slightly Oscar bait-y tale and infuse it with a keenly observed indictment in the way well-meaning white people in power infantilize and commodify stories of black trauma in order to assuage guilt (and maybe feel like they did something) at the expense of other types of stories by black voices.

Despite the structural whiplash, Jefferson has created a movie that has guided Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown to their first Academy Award nomination (which feels impossible).  I’m genuinely excited to see what Jefferson comes up with next.

(Plus, this movie features Adam Brody doing what he does best: playing a dirtbag Hollywood producer.  What’s not to love?)

ANATOMY OF A FALL

DIRECTED BY: Justine Triet

WRITTEN BY: Justine Triet, Arthur Harari

STARRING: Sandra Huller, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado-Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Justine Triet), Best Actress (Sandra Huller), Best Original Screenplay (Justine Triet and Arthur Harari), Best Editing (Laurent Senechal)

I have a very specific fear, one that has developed concurrent with the meteoric rise of true crime documentaries, podcasts and television networks.  

My fear is that I will one day wake up or come home and find my wife dead under a bizarre circumstance.  The fear doesn’t stem from the death of a spouse (although I should make clear I also fear that, and would find that devastating), but, rather, the routine investigation that comes after.  I know a lot about myself, and one thing I’ve learned is that I do not hold up well under scrutiny.  Especially when I’m aware that the person scrutinizing thinks I’ve done something I didn’t.  I get squirrely, nervous, agitated.  Suspicious.

I’m nervous that everyone’s going to think I killed my wife, is what I’m saying.

So, yes, I found ANATOMY OF A FALL very nerve-wracking.

It’s a rather exquisitely constructed movie, a film that delivers on its titular promise.  A man mysteriously falls out of an attic window.  His wife stands accused.  Along the way, several isolated moments from their marriage get pulled apart, analyzed, ripped apart.  We also learn about the zany game that is the French judicial system (allegedly; I suspect it’s heightened here for dramatic effect just like American legal dramas).  Their blind son gets pushed to tell “his side of the story”.  A dog gives one of the best goddamn animal performance since Rin Tin fuckin’ Tin.

However, the entire two-and-half-hour film seems to hinge on one crucial, extended sequence: the pivotal argument Sandra and Daniel have the day before his fateful fall (or murder?).  ANATOMY OF A FALL tries to keep it as ambiguous as possible whether Sandra is guilty or innocent; even by the end when the court makes its decision, an argument could be made that they got it wrong.  Thus, this argument (which begins as an orated transcript before transitioning to full-on chamber scene) needs to keep this ambiguity while still giving both characters reasons for their intense anger and unhappiness.  

Mission accomplished.  In a scene that probably runs about ten minutes or so, we get a full picture of a marriage built on resentment and stifled creativity.  He’s mean and obstinate.  She’s cold and seemingly uncaring.  It’s not pleasant (and not the kind of thing I would ever want put in a public record), and it’s certainly damning.  But does it mean she did it?  You’ll have to watch to decide, even though you can’t know for sure.  And that’s the power of ANATOMY OF A FALL.

Oh, and a steel drum cover of 50 Cent plays way more pivotal of a role than you might expect

BARBIE

DIRECTED BY: Greta Gerwig

WRITTEN BY: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach

STARRING: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrara, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, Kate McKinnon, Rhea Perlman

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Supporting Actor (Ryan Gosling), Best Supporting Actress (America Ferrara), Best Adapted Screenplay (Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach), Best Production Design (Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer), Best Costume Design (Jacqueline Durran), Best Original Song (“What Was I Made For?” - Billie Eilish & Finneas O’Connell; “I’m Just Ken” - Mark Ronson & Andrew Wyatt)

BARBIE has unfortunately become a somewhat difficult movie to discuss on online spaces over the past couple of months.  Think it got snubbed at the Oscars (despite it receiving eight nominations, including those for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie)?  Think it’s a groundbreaking and important blockbuster?  Think it’s a man-hating woke disasterpiece*?  Think it’s pretty good, but with some messiness?  Congratulations!  Someone on the Internet probably thinks you’re an idiot.

*Although this take isn’t as prevalent as people seem to want to think, it’s always been a criticism I’ve found fascinating, since it’s an instant confession that the critic in question either didn’t see the movie, or went into it with that opinion ready to go and worked backwards.  BARBIE is man-teasing, perhaps, but it definitely and obviously isn’t hating.  Much of the movie’s power actually comes from its observation that the answer to female subjugation is not male subjugation.

Such is life for a movie that has undeniably spoken to the masses in a way I’m not sure anybody thought possible prior to its release.  And, why shouldn’t it have?  Although the claims of it being the first original blockbuster of a generation is a little disingenuous (it is based off of a popular toy, after all), it is the first in a while to be as audacious and colorful and funny as it is.  It has a great cast, some of whom feel like they’re being properly cast in a movie for the first time (Kate McKinnon as “Weird Barbie” comes immediately to mind).  The songs are bright, colorful, and clever.  The sets are tactile and gorgeous.  It’s even got something to say about the world.  BARBIE was just a good goddamn time at the movies.

I have my quibbles about it.  For instance, I’m not convinced “beach you off” is as funny as the movie clearly believes.  I also thought America Ferrara’s big speech reads better on the pge than it does on the screen, if only because it makes too literal the theses that the rest of the movie had been doing a remarkable job communicating thematically up to that point, one of the only times BARBIE seemed to be courting clapping over anything else.

But then…I don’t think movies need to be perfect in order to be effective and resonate.  BARBIE is a big blockbuster with a brain.  Isn’t this what we’ve been clamoring for for years?  I don’t think it’s going to win the big prize this weekend (and there are better movies amongst its competition), but it absolutely deserves to be in the conversation.  It’s a win.  Can’t wait for four toy-based movies that are doomed to fail over the next couple of summers!

THE HOLDOVERS

DIRECTED BY: Alexander Payne

WRITTEN BY: David Hemingson

STARRING: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Paul Giamatti), Best Supporting Actress (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Best Original Screenplay (David Hemingson), Best Editing (Kevin Tent)

The most straight-forward heart-warming crowd-pleaser amongst the ten, I could tell THE HOLDOVERS was working for me when I realized I wasn’t all that bothered by watching a blatant Christmas movie very out of season, something that usually drives me crazy.

I suspect for many, Alexander Payne’s latest starts clicking immediately, as the old-school 70’s blue Ratings Board notice appears, followed by retro production company logos appearing on the screen.  This is a film that is unabashedly trying to fit itself into the New Hollywood aesthetic, complete with somewhat grainy film stock, a mellow soundtrack and, most importantly, character-based storytelling.  I actually kinda thought literally busting out the old logos was pushing the aesthetic close to 70’s movie kabuki, and I immediately worried this was going to be more of a stunt than anything else.

I shouldn’t have been concerned.  THE HOLDOVERS is so committed to telling the kind of story that the New Hollywood movement was known for making.  It focuses on a set of losers, and allows them to have flaws and contradictory feelings.  It really gets going when it focuses down from a story about a set of prep school students left behind on campus for the holidays (the literal “holdovers”) to a story of just one holdover, Angus Tully (Sessa), and the bond he begins to form with his cranky classics professor Paul Hunham (Giamatti) and the school’s kitchen manager Mary Lamb (Randolph).  

THE HOLDOVERS is a movie about people who have been left behind in one way or another, and have essentially resigned themselves from ever forging connections with others, from moving on from their disappointing pasts and futures.  But, as what so often happens during the Christmas season (whose aesthetic this movie wears like a friggin’ glove; how perfect a setting is snowy Massachusetts for something like this?), an opportunity for renewal and hope and revival.  All three of our main characters have been diverted from the idea of ever having something resembling a normal family unit.  But maybe they can be the family they make, not the one they have.

It’s all well-worn territory in Hollywood filmmaking, true.  But when it’s approached not with treacly manipulation but with such sincerity as it is here, who can complain?  

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

DIRECTED BY: Martin Scorsese

WRITTEN BY: Martin Scorsese, Eric Roth

STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Actress (Lily Gladstone), Best Supporting Actor (Robert DeNiro), Best Cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto), Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), Best Production Design (Jack Fisk and Adam Willis), Best Costume Design (Jacqueline West), Best Original Score (Robbie Robertson), Best Original Song (“Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” - Scott George) 

This is the only one I get to cheat a little bit on.  I already wrote a whole-ass article about this one in November, and my generally positive thoughts haven’t changed in the weeks and months since.  The details of this true story are still infuriatingly evil, Scorsese grapples with the tricky question of “whose story is this to tell, really?” about as well as anybody can (despite many people still feeling otherwise), and DiCaprio still has a stupid grimace on his face for the entire three and a half hours.  

When I reflect back on it, however, what strikes me about KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is its simplicity.  Compared to the other 180-minute star-studded epic in this group, Scorsese keeps his flourishes to a relative minimum, with most of the bold stylistic choices kept to the beginning (I still love the presentation of the opening exposition as a 20’s newsreel) and the ending, one of the most purposeful auteur cameos I can think of, and easily the most singular and memorable moment in a movie full of ‘em.  Does it still make me pine for a cadre of indigenous storytellers in Hollywood to tackle this kind of content in the future?  Of course!  But this version is pretty goddamn good.  Scorsese’s still got it at 81 years old.  What a miracle.

MAESTRO

DIRECTED BY: Bradley Cooper

WRITTEN BY: Bradley Cooper, Josh Singer

STARRING: Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer, Sarah Silverman

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Bradley Cooper), Best Actress (Carey Mulligan), Best Original Screenplay (Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer), Best Cinematography (Matthew Libatique), Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Kau Hiro, Kay Gerogiou and Lori McCoy-Bell), Best Sound (Steven A. Morrow, Richard King, Jason Ruder, Tom Ozanich, and Dean Zupancic)

There’s exactly one scene where MAESTRO functions as intended, where the movie’s actual subject successfully transforms into its intended subject.  We watch Leonard Bernstein teach a conducting class, walking an aspiring student through a fermata he is struggling to transition his orchestra out of.  Bradley Cooper as Bernstein is easygoing, warm, knowledgeable, direct but not mean.  Most crucially, you actually learn something about music!  The student’s trouble is audible, and Bernstein’s solution is clear even to those who don’t know the first thing about classical music.  It’s actually quite wonderful.

Naturally, we then cut to Bernstein dancing with this student in a club as Tears for Fears blares on the soundtrack.  The movie ends about ninety seconds later.  Thanks for nothing, MAESTRO.

Yeah, I fucking hated this.  Despite all my efforts to keep my biases in check, I suspected that this was going to happen; it’s the lone Best Picture nominee that feels perfunctory, like it got in simply by checking all the right boxes on a list (even the “Holocaust” nominee this year feels different from others of its ilk).  It’s a biopic with a beloved actor desperate for an Academy Award that touches on themes such as art, cancer, being gay, and being an asshole.  What’s not to love?

I don’t mean to, nor even really want, to speak ill of either Bernstein or Cooper.  Bernstein is one of the great mythic figures of the twentieth century, whose mind (like all the great ones) was a series of contradictions.  Even after a bad time at the movies, I’m eager to re-engage with his work and dig into his life.  And I harbor no true hate for my man Brad!  I’ve liked him for over twenty years now, going all the way back to his time on Alias. (remember Alias?)  I think he has an eye for direction, and I even think the screenplay he co-wrote here is really onto something.  There are a ton of rich themes permeating the story of the Leonard Bernstein-Felicia Montealegre marriage.  Having to share your life and trust with a man who can seldom be himself, a man who has the very soul of music flowing through him, one of the true artists to have ever lived, yet can’t seem to truly connect with many around him….there’s a lot there.

But there’s no room for MAESTRO to really engage with any of those things, outside of lip service.  Because Cooper’s quixotic search for a Best Actor trophy has taken all the oxygen.  Look how much he’s acting here!  He’s acting his ass off!  Holy fuck, he doesn’t even look like Bradley Cooper (because he’s in prosthetics and makeup the entire time)!  How is doing it?  All the while, Carey Mulligan is right beside him doing twice the work with half the effort.

Never mind other things that stuck in my craw: the arbitrary usage of black-and-white for the first forty-five minutes, the even more-arbitrary usage of Bernstein’s music throughout, the fact that you don’t even get much of a sense of why he was special, outside of people constantly saying he is.  Part of me just wants Bradley Cooper to just get his stupid Oscar so he can rid himself of the same cognitive disease that is currently afflicting Amy Adams and threatened to claim Leonardo DiCaprio.  Actually, that reminds me: if Cooper loses this weekend, how do you think he feels about raw animal meat?

OPPENHEIMER

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

WRITTEN BY: Christopher Nolan

STARRING: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Actor (Cillian Murphy), Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Supporting Actress (Emily Blunt), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Adapted Screenplay (Christopher Nolan), Best Original Score (Ludwig Goransson), Best Cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema), Best Production Design (Ruth De Jong, Claire Kaufman), Best Costume Design (Ellen Mirojnick), Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Luisa Abel), Best Film Editing (Jennifer Lame), Best Sound (Gary Rizzo, Richard King, Willie D. Burton and Kevin O’Connell)

I struggle with Christopher Nolan.

This is not a struggle I take lightly.  I want very desperately to be a full-fledged fan of his work.  His movies are literate, exciting, and almost uniformly well-cast.  He has a love for the integrity of both the act of making films as well as watching them, almost to a fault.  He as a man is not nearly as pretentious as his reputation often portends; a quick review of his favorite films reveals a palette that leans grand, meticulous and popular.  I’m fairly certain most people have heard of a majority of the films he loves.  He’s not that esoteric!  This is not a bad thing at all!  It’s imperative there be a high-level filmmaker that is accessible on this level.

I just…don’t ever get that jazzed about his actual movies.  There was only one time I ever felt like I was floating on air after walking out of a theater screening a Nolan film and that was THE DARK KNIGHT and, even then, it was likely the hype talking (I was with a group of friends and had gone out of town in order to see it in IMAX.  Pretty serious stuff).  I never felt that way about the Batman sequel ever again.

For all the other Nolan films post-MEMENTO, I find myself just saying, “it was good, I really did like it” over and over, usually as a closer after spending a couple minutes talking about what I didn’t like about it.

So it goes with OPPENHEIMER, a movie that is frequently thrilling and haunting; how could it not be, given the subject matter.  It looks gorgeous, and shares a similar “Cavalcade of Stars” quality to its supporting cast as KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.  It has its moments of tension, especially impressive when considering most people know where this is all going.  The Trinity test sequence is pretty gripping, even when you know nobody goes up in flames as a result of it.

It’s also a somewhat misunderstood movie.  Contrary to some people’s hand-wringing about it, the movie doesn’t come close to providing a loving portrayal of its titular subject matter; yes, it shows him wrestling with the unique guilt of following your natural passion all the way to creating the ultimate doomsday device.  But depicting guilt isn’t the same thing as asking us to sympathize.  A character in the movie even says this directly to him, albeit in relation to a different topic: “you don’t get to commit sin and then ask us to all feel sorry for you when there are consequences”.  And for those who thought it would have been more respectful to Japanese culture to show the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki getting annihilated by a bomb, let’s just say we disagree.

On the other hand, OPPENHEIMER doesn’t wind up feeling like the whole of its parts.  In particular, I feel like Robert Downey Jr.’s role as Lewis Strauss is overly complicated.  His perspective in the film is peppered throughout the film in black and white, much like the bits of Guy Pearce narrative in MEMENTO.  I suspect (although do not know for sure) that this was broken up in order to keep the last hour of the movie from being bogged down in a lot of hearings and interviews and talks of security clearance revocations.  However, given that the bomb gets dropped right around the end of hour two, guess what ends up happening?  It’s unclear to me if this aspect of the story added much to the movie’s overall power at all.

Is it Nolan’s best work?  It’s possible.  It was certainly fortuitous to become part of the summer’s biggest phenomenon, as it likely pushed a different type of audience towards it; it’s possible this is the first “movie for adults” a lot of younger folks had the opportunity to see.  It’s an important moment in one’s life!  I just wish the movie had been more streamlined (note: this isn’t the same as saying it’s too long).

OPPENHEIMER was good, I really did like it.  It was.  Really!  I did.  Seriously.

PAST LIVES

DIRECTED BY: Celine Song

WRITTEN BY: Celine Song

STARRING: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Original Screenplay (Celine Song)

Having grown up in the era of the “sweet protagonist wants nothing more than to get with the free-wheeling girl of his dreams, if only she weren’t engaged to the biggest asshole on the planet” movie (see: THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and THE WEDDING SINGER, to name just two), I often wondered if the formula would benefit from some rejiggering.  What if, as so often in life, the other guy was actually a nice normal guy, and our two leads realize some things just aren’t meant to be?

Well, I finally got it with PAST LIVES, and it turns out it’s fucking devastating.

The one movie of the ten that feels like it could easily translate to the stage, PAST LIVES is just a sweet, melancholy meditation on the seemingly-little connections we make as we move around this planet that turn out to become lifelong “what if”s.  Effortlessly romantic, the story of Nora (Lee) and Hae Sung (Yoo) is told more or less in three parts: their fun courtship as twelve-year olds in Korea, their reconnection over Skype in their mid-twenties, and their in-person meetup in New York in their thirties.  She’s married now, and settled in a country and city she’s calling her own.  To Hae Sung’s devastation, her white husband (Magaro) is a nice, supportive man (and, to the movie’s immense credit, a fully realized human being).

The honest concept of life being a train ride, with an infinite number of tracks it could possibly go on, but with the subsequent sacrifice of the ones you don’t follow…it’s a difficult one.  Life rarely places you where you imagined it, which doesn’t make reality bad or unpreferable.  But we’re prone to wondering..what if one little thing had gone differently.  Would I be happier?  Would I be where I’m magically supposed to be?  It’s why the movie’s concept of the “past lives” (specially, the idea of in-yun) is so potent and so sweet and so heartbreaking, especially when Hae Sung approaches the concept in a completely different light.  

A small little movie that seems like kind of an Oscars afterthought, if I’m being honest (it only has two nominations), I still admire it for its honest portrayal of complex emotions that I’m willing to bet are very universal, regardless of one’s culture.  

POOR THINGS

DIRECTED BY: Yorgos Lanthimos

WRITTEN BY: Tony McNamara

STARRING: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos), Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo), Best Adapted Screenplay (Tony McNamara), Best Original Score (Jerskin Fendrix), Best Production Design (James Price, Shonda Heath & Zsuzsa Mihalek), Best Cinematography (Robbie Ryan), Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier, and Josh Weston), Best Costume Design (Holly Waddington), Best Film Editing (Yorgos Mavropsaridis)

It is here that I will provide my one and only real hot take prediction regarding tomorrow night: I have this gut feeling that Emma Stone is going to win Best Actress over Lily Gladstone, if only because that would be the outcome most perfectly calibrated to cause the biggest shitstorm on Monday morning.

Remember, everybody, “Best ____” on Oscar night usually means “Most ____”.  And it is undeniable Emma Stone is doing the most acting, especially when compared against the way more understated performance from Gladstone in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.  Look at her walking around funny and making little animal sounds!  She’s really going for it!  When you also consider that this year’s Oscars isn’t predicted to have a bunch of other surprise winners or losers, and also that Stone has won it before and the last time she won, she also managed to be tangentially connected to a bigger controversy….it’s all just too perfect.  I feel fairly strongly about this.

That aside, I actually loved POOR THINGS, and I was a little concerned that I wasn’t going to.  It maybe shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise; I loved THE FAVORITE, although the enduring memory from that was an all-time Olivia Colman performance more than anything else.  I’m not typically a fan of the type of whimsical hyper-stylization that Lanthimos likes to indulge in, as I kinda find it to be a crutch to obscure an inability to tell a narrative.  But POOR THINGS’s story-telling remains crystal clear, even if I had trouble parsing out the meaning of every detail (why was Dafoe burping up bubbles, exactly?).  People seem split on Ruffalo in this, but I actually really enjoyed seeing him go full cartoon character after spending the last ten years playing a theoretical one over in the MCU.  And despite my sort-of swipe at her earlier, I really do think Emma Stone is good in this pseudo-riff on the story of Frankenstein’s monster.  Her original talents as a comic performer (a muscle I feel she gets to flex less and less as time goes on) especially come into play here.

It also has as much on its mind in regards to the way men sexualize and infantilize women as BARBIE does, making the two movies a weirdly perfect double feature.  Sure, POOR THINGS depicts four thousand times as much fornicating (a fact that, admittedly, some critics point to as a undercut of the movie’s feminist ambitions), but nevertheless, it points to an interesting undercurrent of popular themes in Hollywood nowadays.  And the relative success of both with audiences suggests an undercurrent of wanting to see those themes explored.  It’s kinda cool!

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Glazer

WRITTEN BY: Jonathan Glazer

STARRING: Christian Friedel, Sandra Huller

ALSO NOMINATED FOR: Best Director (Jonathan Glazer), Best Adapted Screenplay (Jonathan Glazer), Best International Feature Film, Best Sound (Tarn Willers, Johnnie Burn)

A profoundly difficult movie to talk about, especially when it’s not guaranteed that the person you’re speaking to has seen it or not.  I highly suspect THE ZONE OF INTEREST is even more of a chilling gut punch if you manage to walk into it completely cold.  If you don’t know what its thing is, I recommend ceasing reading further and just go see it, though it should be warned: it’s not a date night movie.

For those who have seen it, or at least now what it’s about…what is there to say?  It’s a Holocaust movie that winds up being the most chilling and effective because of its refusal to actually depict the Holocaust.  It mostly shows us team meetings, reveals of blueprints, of domestic squabbles between our primary German family, living right next door to the infamous Auschwitz death camp.  Of work transfers.  Promotions.  Evil, as it turns out, lives within bureaucracy and structure. 

THE ZONE OF INTEREST strips itself of any sort of narrative comforts we’re used to when it comes to mainstream depictions of the Holocaust.  There are no arcs to speak of, no swelling moments of hope and triumph in the face of human atrocity.  It’s almost boring, at least if it weren’t for the horrifying sound design that feels specifically calculated to trigger a panic attack within you.  You quickly become hyper-vigilant of any variants in noise; is that thumping coming from the house or next door?  The question as to whether this is something that can sustain interest for more than a few minutes is a fair one (and there are some people who have made it clear that this was actually more of a bore than anything else), but it’s hard not to look at this as perhaps the only true Holocaust movie.  Evil has no three-act structure.  For most, it’s just going to work.