The final three films in this year's slate of nominees are:
1 nomination
- Makeup & Hairstyling
Cast: Lea Myren, Ane Dahl Torp, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Flo Fagerli, Isac Calmroth, Malte Gårdinger, Ralph Carlsson, Cecilia Forss, Katarzyna Herman, Adam Lundgren, Willy Ramnek Petri
This is a wacky, funny, and rather disgusting retelling of a story you know very well. The Ugly Stepsister is really, really gross, and I spent a good portion of it just like Flo Fagerli in the image above—with my hands over my eyes hoping I wouldn't have to watch toes being cut off or blood gushing out of eyes. But listen, that's what this is about. It's also a particular brand of feminism that we've seen recently with The Substance, where the desire to skewer beauty standards has led us into true gross-out territory. I'm not sure if it reads to me as feminist, honestly, but whatever. It's good at what it's trying to do, anyway. It definitely grossed me out, and it has an amusing, horny, wicked approach to the Cinderella story. Knowing that it's going to get more and more disgusting also created a particular kind of Hitchcockian dread for me as an audience member, and I spent much of my movie holding my breath and filled with anxiety about the damage that would be inflicted on these poor young women.
Will win: N/A
Could win: N/A
My rating: #77 out of 98
1 nomination
- Original Song - "Dear Me": Diane Warren (The Six Triple Eight, Flamin' Hot, Tell It like a Woman, Four Good Days, The Life Ahead, Breakthrough, RBG, Marshall, The Hunting Ground, Beyond the Lights, Pearl Harbor, Music of the Heart, Armageddon, Con Air, Up Close & Personal, Mannequin)
For your consideration, Diane Warren in Original Song. This is a 92-minute Oscar campaign film. As a film, I'm not really sure how to evaluate it. I guess it's designed as a kind of character study. Warren is sure a quirky figure. And she has, indeed, written some very good pop songs in the last forty years. Some of the big names who get dropped in this movie don't appear, which is a little odd and unfortunate—no Céline, for example, and no Beyoncé (despite both being listed as in the cast in several locations)—but I guess what's even weirder is that the people who do appear (Gloria Estefan, Common, Jennifer Hudson, Toni Braxton, Jerry Bruckheimer), don't have much to say about Warren herself. They just sort of repeat what the rest of us already know about how many hits she's had and how much they wish they'd written the songs themselves. There's a really intriguing moment/scandal, when Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes took one of Warren's songs to #1 and #2 because they had competing versions of the same tune. This happened in 1997/1998 and the film mentions it but then moves on immediately without delving into what was going on with Warren at the time, why she did what she did, what the fallout was, etc. In any case, I think the film just misses a lot of opportunities for us actually to learn about who this woman is. Instead, the movie opts for Oscar campaigning. At the film's end we even get a title card that says she's been nominated for the Oscar 15 times; no mention of the Grammys or Emmys she's actually won. Indeed, no footage from those ceremonies. This movie has its eye on the Oscars. What's so weird to me about all of this is that despite Warren's obvious desire to win an Oscar, she hasn't actually tried very hard to win one, and she hasn't learned how to win one in the last two decades, nor does she seem to be able to analyze the situation. There's an entire, extended sequence about the song she and Gaga wrote for a documentary called The Hunting Ground in which it appears that she thought she was going to *finally* win that year (this was in 2016). Diane Warren: Relentless behaves as if Warren was a real contender that year, but she wasn't. The James Bond movie Spectre had it sewn up, and everyone knew it. No one saw that documentary, and although the performance onstage that year at the Oscars was very powerful, Warren was never going to win that Oscar. Diane Warren is nominated every year, sure. This is her seventeenth nomination, and she's been nominated 11 times in the last 12 years; that's all good and well. But she's only trying to get nominated—not win. The movies she's writing for haven't been memorable since Pearl Harbor in 2001. Not one of the recent nominations is from a movie that was a big deal. For each of them, Warren's nomination is the film's only nomination. If she really wanted to win an Oscar, she'd beg the studios to let her compose a song for a big Oscar-bait blockbuster—one of the Avatars, or a new Spielberg movie, or something directed by Guillermo del Toro. She writes songs for movies no one sees! I'm sure she'll be baffled as to why she didn't win yet again this year.
Will win: N/A
Could win: N/A
My rating: Not ranked (but this is a bad movie)
1 nomination
- Original Song - "Sweet Dreams of Joy": Nicholas Pike (1st time nominee)
This is a meandering documentary that doesn’t know what story it has to tell or whom to follow. I’m actually quite confused by the way it works. Some of the people in the film died over seven years ago, though the film behaves as if they’re still alive—until the final credits when we realize they passed many years ago. But the real issue is that this should probably have been a 20-minute short and it has no business being a 75-minute feature. It repeats itself frequently, and we rarely learn anything new after the film’s opening sequences. It’s directed without intention, as if the filmmakers collected footage for a decade without having any idea what they were going to do with it and then produced this scrapbook of a feature as a way to honor their subjects. Don't bother.
Will win: N/A
Could win: N/A
My rating: Not ranked (but this is a terrible movie)
More Oscar posts:
Final Oscar Predictions
Best Picture – Sinners
Director – Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle after Another
Actor – Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
Actress – Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Adapted Screenplay – One Battle after Another
Original Screenplay – Sinners
Supporting Actor – Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value
Supporting Actress – Amy Madigan, Weapons
Film Editing – F1
Cinematography – Train Dreams
International Feature – The Secret Agent
Documentary Feature – Mr. Nobody against Putin
Production Design – Frankenstein
Original Score – Sinners
Costume Design – Frankenstein
Casting – Marty Supreme
Sound – F1
Animated Feature – K-Pop Demon Hunters
Visual Effects – Avatar: Fire and Ash
Makeup & Hairstyling – Frankenstein
Original Song – "Golden", K-Pop Demon Hunters
Animated Short – Butterfly
Documentary Short – All the Empty Rooms
Live-action Short – A Friend of Dorothy
