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.

The Uncomfortable Conversations Within KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Martin Scorsese is the reason you’re reading this right now.

I don’t mean that literally; he’s not funding me or anything (at least not yet, I guess we’ll see how this goes).  But I do have him specifically to thank for my renewed interest to write about the moving pictures the past couple of years.

Like all things good and bad, it started with an idea.

In late 2019, back when I was young and foolish, I really, really wanted to weigh in on the newly-brewing “Scorsese vs. Marvel” controversy that was permeating the atmosphere.  However, there was a palpable roadblock in the way of me doing so in any sincerity.  You see, to give you an idea of where my movie tastes sat at the beginning of my thirties, I had seen the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe up to that point, but had failed to see even one Martin Scorsese movie.  Thus, I didn’t exactly feel qualified to levy an opinion in one way or another.  I definitely had a sense that people wringing their hands over Marty being mean to Marvel were being wildly over-defensive.  But I couldn’t prove it.  How could I?

So I decided to watch every Martin Scorsese movie.

By the time I started putting pen to paper (or, I guess, fingertip to keyboard), the Great Scorsese Film Festival had turned into a pandemic project.  It’s one that I still look back on with a lot of fondness, if only because it eventually provided me the unique perspective of someone who had seen every MCU movie and every Scorsese movie*.  It’s not that I thought everything he ever made was a masterpiece (massive thumbs-downs for me on NEW YORK, NEW YORK, as well as CAPE FEAR and SHUTTER ISLAND).  But many are, and I picked up probably five new favorite movies from the project.  At the very least, the sheer variety and totality of his work, especially in his first two decades, belied the common argument that “all he makes are mob movies!”

*With that perspective in mind, I can definitively state that Marvel fans need to chill.  I wrote a whole post-mortem once the project was done that summarizes my thoughts, and they haven’t changed much over the past three years, so I’ll just link to that instead of rehashing them here.

I think about that project a lot, not just because it was the rare one I saw to completion, but because I remember feeling kind of…sad by the end.  I was sad that I had let an esteemed director’s work pass me by completely up until that moment.  There are people I knew that had seen most of his work in a theater, and had grown up with his movies, providing them the cinematic language that unlocked their love of film going forward.  I refuse to say I had blown it; for the most part, everything one watches has value as long as you can get something productive out of it.  However, I was a little annoyed at my previous lack of curiosity.

What helped curb that sense of melancholy, though, was the knowledge that Scorsese was determined to make at least one more movie before the lights go off.  That movie was KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, an adaptation of the 2017 non-fiction book by David Grann.  By the end of 2020, it wasn’t at all clear when it was going to premiere, or (more to the point) where it would even premiere; it felt like there was an outside chance that movie theaters wouldn’t even exist within another year.  And, not to be morbid, but Scorsese wasn’t a spring chicken.  Who knew if he would even be around long enough to start and finish the production?

Thank god he’s still here, for a variety of reasons.  But mostly, thank god he’s still here to finish up his 26th narrative feature film just in time for streamers and tech companies to start realizing, “hey, maybe we should release movies into movie theaters again” and canceled their limited release/streaming premiere in favor of a big fat rollout.  This provided me not only the opportunity to see a Scorsese movie in a genuine movie theater, but to revisit one of my favorite writing projects I ever did, hopefully not for the last time.

So…let’s break down KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON!  Is it a masterpiece?  A disappointing misfire?  Somewhere in between?  And more importantly, how do we feel about the choice of narrative perspective?  Well, I guess I can’t fully answer that last one, but I can tell you how I feel.  Let’s do this!

———

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON tells the true story of the murders occurring within the Osage Native American community in the 1920’s and early 1930’s in Osage County, Oklahoma.  It likely won’t strike you as coincidental that these murders begin happening soon after an discovery of an oil deposit on native land make the Osage people the richest people per capita in the world.  Congress quickly passes a law stating that all full or half-Osage people must have an assigned white guardian to help them manage their finances and newfound wealth, which, again, ya gotta figure is coincidental.

The film’s version of this story focuses on two real-life perpetrators (or, at least, facilitators) of many of the killings: Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro).  Burkhart, a blunt simpleton who seems to love the pursuit of money over all else, is home from the war and dispatched to the care of Hale, who has established himself as the deputy sheriff of a major Osage reservation.  Hale has a job for his nephew.  An Osage family needs a valet.  Why not get yourself set up to drive the Kyle sisters around?  

Burkhart, a man who does what he’s told, gets himself situated with the Kyle family, which puts him in prime position for his uncle’s next thought: he ought to start courting one of the sisters, Mollie (Lilly Gladstone).  She’s available, and the family owns a significant amount of oil headrights.  What better match could there be?  Mollie, a sly and witty woman with an unnatural ability to read the writing on the wall, finds Ernest charming, and the two are soon married.  The first hour of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON carefully and slowly establishes Ernest making Mollie a Burkhart.

The second hour depicts the callous killings of all the ancillary members of Mollie’s first family.  Whether it be an ex-husband who could claim the headrights in the unthinkable event of Mollie’s death, her boisterous and headstrong sister, or her elderly mother, all soon find themselves six feet in the ground under mysterious circumstances.  Obviously, we know what’s going on from the beginning of the movie.  Devastatingly, however, none of this is ever depicted in the film as an ironic mystery, a detective thriller where only we the audience know whodunit.  The Osage people basically know why they’re being systematically slaughtered.  Mollie in particular smells a rat from the jump.  But, y’know….what is she going to do?  Call the police?  Petition the government, the same government that got her into her particular situation in the first place?  White men hold all the power from the jump.  All she can do is stay alive as much and as long as she can.

The third, and unsurprisingly the most satisfying, hour can best be described as “Jesse Plemons Shows Up and Starts Busting Fools”.  It’s in this section that KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON actually does feel not unlike one of Scorsese’s prime mob flicks; the feds show up, and the crime family starts folding like a deck of cards.  I’ll defer detailing the ultimate fate of everybody involved, including Mollie herself, for now in the event you’ve yet to see it, although it does all lead to a thought-provoking and already-much discussed ending that I will be going into in a minute, so ya might as well take the three-and-a-half hours and just go watch it before going much further. 

It’s a brutal, meticulously paced narrative, made all the more infuriating because you know where it’s going from the word “go”, even if you’ve never been made aware of the real world story.  The second you see the old-school silent movie graphic explaining the sudden wealth of the Osage that opens the film, you start doing the “oil + white people + America” math.  It makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience, made all the worse by the fact that what happened is so much more blatant, conspiratorial, and bald-faced than you could ever imagine.

It should be said that KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON boasts an enormous cast of people, including the aforementioned Plemons, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, Elden Henson, Jason Isbell, Gary Basaraba, Pat Healy and Pete Yorn, as well as indigenous actors Cara Jade Myers, Tantoo Cardinal, and Tatanka Means.  Yet everything in the movie seems to come back to the central three actors at its core: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone.  So let’s take a look at them.

I’ve long been an avowed DiCaprio skeptic, although that position might be shifting more towards “DiCaprio agnostic” nowadays.  By virtue of going through Scorsese’s filmography, as well as finally checking out 2019’s ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD after a years-long self-imposed Tarantino timeout following the excruciating HATEFUL EIGHT, I feel like I’m starting to understand why DiCaprio can be stirring when he’s at his very best.  I maintain that THE WOLF OF WALL STREET might be his best performance to date, if only because it taps into his unique cocktail of eternally boyish good looks and black-hearted charmless rat-bastardy.  I still don’t really see what makes him so special to the degree that many of my peers do, some of them legitimately getting visibly frustrated at the prospect of him possibly never winning an Oscar (until he finally won one for 2014’s THE REVENANT, in one of the most blatant examples of a “goddamn, here, now will you shut up?” award win in my memory), but my meter for him is getting more calibrated nowadays.  Sometimes he’s great; sometimes he’s annoying.  Mostly, he’s serviceable.

In KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, he’s on the high end of serviceable.  Although I personally could have done without the constant grimace he puts on his face as Ernest (it felt like a college theater student’s idea on how to play edgy), it’s impossible to deny that when you’re looking for someone to portray a casually evil man who still somehow seems so doe-eyed that you feel like maybe he truly has no idea what he’s doing, DiCaprio’s your man.  The only time DiCaprio’s vague lack of charm* falls flat is in the early scenes between him and Lily Gladstone.  Although the quick courtship makes sense in context (once one of the local white men set their sights on you, survival options were limited), it felt like just one scene where Ernest displays some natural magnetism would have gone a long way for me “buying it”.

*my lawyers have begged me to clarify, “in my opinion”.

DeNiro, on the other hand….man, what a performance.  I’m one of the only people in the world who thinks he might actually be improving with age.  He had a great run in the 70’s as a young and edgy actor, then entered this very prolonged phase where he was between young and old, and maybe wanted to be a comedic actor?  So he began floating around for about twenty years reading cue cards on the SNL stage and singing show tunes in Billy Crystal sequels, while the rest of us were left scratching our heads.

But, now?  As he’s entering his ninth decade of life, he’s sort of slowed down and lost a lot of his energy, and now he’s just doing it.  A lot of the mugging DeNiro face is gone, along with all of the tics and pointing.  It’s the same reason his performance in the last hour or so of THE IRISHMAN was so chillingly effective.  His William Hale here is plainly evil, but in a very manner-of-fact, logical way (aka the most terrifying kind of evil).  It’s one of the best things I’ve seen him do in a while, and the balance between his calm, assured energy and Ernest’s cocky and naive energy tells the whole story of how the worst things in the history of humanity tend to occur.

Lily Gladstone is as great and as intriguing a talent as you’ve heard, although she’s so good that she subsequently became the only element in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON that made me question the choice of perspective the movie made (more on that in a bit).  In three and a half hours, you don’t quite get enough of her.  Of that somewhat limited time, she spends a lot of it having to express grief and horror, which is fine and all; it’s fantastically performed and is frankly warranted by the character’s circumstances.  However, you wish you could have gotten more of the Gladstone we see in the first hour of the movie, where everything about her is internalized.  She gets to be sly and witty, and many things are expressed via facial expression rather than dialogue.  

As for Scorsese himself, his talent for visual storytelling remains unrivaled.  Just as an example from the movie itself, I won’t soon forget one of the most striking images in the entire film: Hale sitting in a movie theater, watching a newsreel unspool about the 1921 Tulsa massacres, another profound dark mark in American history that it seems many would rather forget than learn from.  In a trick borrowed from a shot in Spielberg’s JAWS, the newsreel eventually begins to play out in the reflection of Hale’s glasses, giving the impression he’s sitting there just…absorbing.  Evil recognizes evil and starts taking notes.  

As mentioned, KILLER OF THE FLOWER MOON isn’t a perfect movie.  Although the discourse around “long movies” and the “morality of intermissions” or whatever the fuck people are yammering on about is stupid, the movie does feel long, as it intentionally doesn’t have the propulsion that drives Scorsese’s very best.  And, as all of you are undoubtedly aware, there have been criticisms aimed at the movie, and Scorsese himself, for choosing to tell the story from Ernest and Hale’s perspective (a decision, it should be mentioned, which deviates from the source book), rather than from the Osage people that were victimized by this abominable series of crimes.

It’s easy to dismiss those levying criticisms toward Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth’s decision to center its narrative around the two white perpetrators as opposed to the indigenous people at the heart of the event as bad-faith arguments from media-illiterates mad about his comments about Marvel.  And, no doubt, there is certainly a faction of those kinds of people taking advantage of a real conversation in order to defend a studio that really needs no defending.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not a real conversation.  It’s also a tricky problem with no real answer or work-around; the knee-jerk solution is for Scorsese and Roth to center the movie explicitly about Mollie Burkhart and her family, which would at the very least get us more Lily Gladstone.  I can’t help but think, though, that this would simply shift us into the timeline where Scorsese gets faced with criticism for telling a story that’s not his to tell.  The next solution down, I suppose, would be for Scorsese to just not make KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON at all, which would mean trading off a major last-of-his-kind filmmaker bringing attention to the Osage murders (a story that absolutely deserves the high-level film treatment) in exchange for avoiding uncomfortable conversations. 

The next possible solution down the list would be for an actual Osage filmmaker to be given the agency, power and funding to tell this story themselves.  And honestly?  I’m all for that.  This doesn’t need to be (and shouldn’t be) the only version of this story that gets committed to celluloid*.  It’s a rich and tragic and important enough narrative that all voices involved deserve a chance to express their perspectives.

*And, in fact, already isn’t: check out 1959’s THE FBI STORY.  

But, until such time as those movies get to emerge, this is the version that we have.  This is the movie Scorsese decided to make.  I’m uncomfortable armchair-quarterbacking how he should have approached it, if only because the way he did approach it is undeniably effective; I find it hard to imagine the kind of person who leaves this movie without being at least a little frustrated.  It’s made all the more potent by the fact that Scorsese, in a remarkably low-key ending, seems to accept that he is complicit in the packaging of a tragedy to be consumed as entertainment.

At the end of the film, in lieu of a series of title cards informing us of our central characters’ real-life fates and conclusions, we time-jump us a bit (could be days, could be years) or so and get presented the end of the story in the style of a live radio broadcast.  A live orchestra dramatically underscores the recitation of William, Ernest and Mollie’s futures after the murders are discovered.  Actors stand in to read boisterous composite exclamations, actors who are decidedly not Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio or Lily Gladstone*.  This is clearly an after-the-fact dramatization of the Osage murders, presented as a true crime story meant to thrill and chill a rapturous audience.  

*It should be noted, though, that one of the actors is Jack White, who looks enough like Johnny Depp these days that I briefly became desperately confused. 

This is an ending that is not without historical precedence, by the way.  An August 3, 1935 episode of the radio show G-Men dramatized this very same story, in presumably much the same way; the pipeline of actual murders to consumable entertainment (and the morality of said pipeline) is a whole article in and of itself.  What that episode of G-Men likely didn’t feature, however, is an appearance by Martin Scorsese himself.

Yes, in the film’s final moment, Scorsese appears onstage and recites the final years of Mollie Kyle.  As it turns out, she was able to remarry and gain some semblance of a life before dying of diabetes in 1937 at the age of 50.  She was able to be buried with her family, although Scorsese informs us that her obituary didn’t mention the murders.

Upon reflection, the point of this is simple: Scorsese feels guilty about all of this, too.  He appears to be aware that there is something kind of wrong about turning this shameful and greedy story into something that can earn other people, including himself, money.  That could very possibly earn other people, including himself, awards.  Even if it raises awareness of a true historical crime I feel comfortable saying most people I know, including myself, hadn’t heard about, people still stand to profit off of its telling.  So the criticism he’s received, including from some members of the Osage tribe?  He’s heard it.  He might even agree.  So he acknowledges it.  He puts himself front and center in it.  He literally faces it.

Does this solve anything?  I suppose it depends on your point of view.  One might view this as a sort of cheat from Scorsese, as if acknowledging what you’re doing while you’re doing it can possibly make anything better.  On the other hand, it could be seen as a kind of creative bravery; he’s clearly not hiding or deflecting from this conversation; if anything, he’s contributing directly to it.

Either way, perhaps the ending isn’t perfect.  Perhaps Scorsese’s decisions aren’t perfect.  Maybe KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON isn’t perfect.

But at least it mentions the murders.