Oscar Nominations 2023: 1 of 9

Every year I post about each of the films nominated for Oscars—this year there are 38 features plus 15 short films. Usually, I see all of them except for the documentaries (I am just not that interested in documentary film; I'm not sure why), but this year I'm also going to do myself a favor and skip the live-action short films. As a group they tend to be terrible every single year, and then for some reason the worst one usually manages to win. 

This year there is a lot for me to appreciate; many of my favorite films of the year got at least one nomination (Oppenheimer, Past Lives, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall). I am not sure I understand the incredible amount of love the Academy has for what I thought were total snooze-fests (Killers of the Flower Moon and Poor Things), but who knows; other people have different tastes than I do. 

I guess it's worth saying one more thing about Barbie, since that movie is taking up most of the social media oxygen at the moment. I'll just say one thing flatly: if you seriously think Barbie missed out on a Best Director nomination, it is my humble opinion that you need to see more movies. Is it true that more women should be nominated for Best Director? It absolutely is. But it's not the director of Barbie who was overlooked in this category: it was Carla Simón, Erige Sehiri, Chie Hayakawa, Léa Mysius, Manuela Martelli, and especially Celine Song. Each of these women made amazing movies this year, and the only reason we're not talking about them is that our own viewing preferences skew white and corporate and American, and not enough people have seen their movies. I would encourage everyone to watch more films directed by women. There were many great ones this year, especially: my top 11 for 2023 includes 6 films directed by women.

That's just what I liked, though. The more complicated issue is how nominees are selected in the first place. Each voter selects five names. But only one of those names gets a vote. So let's say my top 5 directors were Cord Jefferson, Justine Triet, Christopher Nolan, Celine Song, and Carla Simón. That would be my list this year, but then I'd need to rank them. If I rank them (1) Simón, (2) Triet, (3) Song, (4) Jefferson, and (5) Nolan, then my vote would end up counting for Justine Triet and no one else. Here is why: the way they count the votes is to stack them all by who you vote for #1. My vote for Carla Simón would have been eliminated after the first round because she didn't get enough number 1 votes; then my vote would have been moved to the Triet pile, which just got bigger. And now my vote doesn't count at all for any of the names that are lower on my list. This means that the ranking actually matters during the vote, and names at the top matter way more. What happened with Barbie, then, is that not enough of the voters in the Directing branch put Gerwig at the top of their ballots. Which, I think, makes sense. The directing isn't what is most sensational about Barbie.

The problem for me every year is that the Academy concentrates their nominations on 5 or 6 movies and don't see more movies or spread the wealth better. This is, I think, the exact opposite issue from the complaint that Barbie only got 8 nominations instead of 10. I would have preferred fewer nominations for Barbie and more solo call-outs for excellent work in only one category, like the wonderful lone nomination for El Conde's cinematography! Nominations like that show that that branch is actually watching things (unlike this year's production design and costume design nominations – which are identical: zzzz). 

I will go film by film discussing each movie individually rather than discussing categories, beginning with the movies most beloved by the Academy this year. If the nominee has been nominated for Oscars previously, they will be listed next to their name in parentheses). This year's nominees:

Oppenheimer

13 nominations

• Picture
• Director: Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk)
• Actor: Cillian Murphy
• Adapted Screenplay: Christopher Nolan (Inception, Memento)
• Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder, Chaplin)
• Supporting Actress: Emily Blunt
• Film Editing: Jennifer Lame
• Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema (Dunkirk)
• Production Design: Ruth De Jong & Claire Kaufman
• Original Score: Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Black Panther)
• Costume Design: Ellen Mirojnick
• Sound
• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Nolan

Cast: Murphy, Blunt, Downey, Alden Ehrenreich, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Tom Conti, Matt Damon, Jason Clarke, Josh Hartnett, David Krumholtz, Trond Fausa, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek

I loved this. I saw it in IMAX with what appeared to be everyone in the Physics department at FSU. The acting is wonderful, and I loved the usual Christopher Nolan time puzzle. I have complained for a long time that Nolan's movies are soulless, and I rather expected this one to be that too, but it isn't. I was very moved by it, and found the whole thing fascinating. In fact, I've been loving Christopher Nolan's movies lately. I even loved Tenet. My favorite performances in Oppenheimer were Emily Blunt, Alden Ehrenreich, Trond Fausa, Benny Safdie, and Cillian Murphy, but I think just the amazing list of actors in this pushes Oppenheimer over the edge. It's an actor-fest, a marvel of technical work, and the script is great. I expect this to win a lot of Oscars. I think it's hard to be mad about this, too. Nolan has never won Best Director (it's only his second nomination!) and Cillian Murphy has never been nominated, let alone won. If you look at the list of contributors above, you'll see that this is the first nomination for almost everyone, so giving them Oscars is exciting. It's not like this is the Scorsese team, who have all been nominated 10 times apiece and already have 2 statues at home. These women and men are a new generation of filmmakers who the Academy has never honored before.

Will win: Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Film Editing, Cinematography

Could win: Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Original Score, Sound, Makeup & Hairstyling

My rating: #2 out of 71

Poor Things

11 nominations

• Picture
• Director: Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite)
• Actress: Emma Stone (The Favourite, La La Land, Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance))
• Adapted Screenplay: Tony McNamara (The Favourite)
• Supporting Actor: Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight, Foxcatcher, The Kids Are All Right)
• Film Editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis (The Favourite)
• Cinematography: Robbie Ryan (The Favourite)
• Production Design: Shona Heath & Zsuzsa Mihalek & James Price
• Original Score: Jerskin Fendrix
• Costume Design: Holly Waddington
• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Lanthimos

Cast: Stone, Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Kathryn Hunter, Christopher Abbot, Jerrod Carmichael, Hanna Schygulla, Suzy Bemba, Vicki Pepperdine

I found this movie boring, and all of the awards love it has received is baffling to me. I found the performances in this weird and not very honest, and I think, weirdly, that Stone and Ruffalo were two of the people I liked least – the worst performance was definitely Jerrod Carmichael's. But hey, whatever, people like things that I don't like, and that's how it goes. I really hope I like Lanthimos's next movie better, because I actually do like his work, including the last movie of his that the Academy loved, The Favourite. Still, expect this to win a few Oscars below the line on March 10th, and actually... Emma Stone could win another Oscar. There seems to be a lot of love for her around, so if people decide to vote against the Lily Gladstone avalanche, they'll vote for Stone.

Will win: Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling

Could win: Actress, Production Design

My rating: #60 out of 71

Killers of the Flower Moon

(𐓀𐒻͘𐓂͘𐓄𐒰 𐒹𐒿𐒰𐓆𐒼𐒰 𐓓𐒻͘𐒼𐒰 𐓊'𐒷𐓍𐒷)

10 nominations

• Picture
• Director: Martin Scorsese (The Irishman, The Wolf of Wall Street, Hugo, The Departed, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, GoodFellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull)
• Actress: Lily Gladstone
• Supporting Actor: Robert De Niro (Silver Linings Playbook, Cape Fear, Awakenings, Raging Bull, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, The Godfather: Part II)
• Film Editing: Thelma Schoonmaker (The Irishman, Hugo, The Departed, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, GoodFellas, Raging Bull, Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music)
• Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto (The Irishman, Silence, Brokeback Mountain)
• Production Design: Jack Fisk (The Revenant, There Will Be Blood) & Adam Willis
• Original Score: Robbie Robertson
• Costume Design: Jacqueline West (Dune: Part One, The Revenant, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Quills)
• Original Song – "Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)": Scott George

Director: Scorsese

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Gladstone, De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Scott Shepherd, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, John Lithgow, Tatanka Means, Everett Waller, Talee Redcorn, Yancey Red Corn, Jason Isbell, Brendan Fraser

This is another movie that did not work for me and that I thought was quite boring. This is a very frustrating film, and it drove me a little crazy. It's also a thousand years long, for reasons I don't really understand. But the real issue for me – and I've already said this, so I'm sorry for repeating myself – is that this film is only from the perspective of the Osage people at the very beginning and the very end. The remainder is a film made from the emotional and narrative perspective of people who tried to murder them. This is intensely frustrating, and it belies everything that Scorsese and everyone else involved with this movie said was supposed to be happening. (For example, we see the murder of Anna three separate times on screen in Flower Moon; not one of these is from her perspective. It's actually shocking when you think about it. We watch her murder three times from the point of view of her murderers??? What kind of ethical filmmaking choice is that?) This movie was the critical darling of the year, and I thought for a bit it would win the big award and maybe win everything else, too, but I think Killers of the Flower Moon is on the descent. Note its surprise omission from the Adapted Screenplay category! Even Lily Gladstone, who has been the presumptive Best Actress winner for months, may find herself in real competition with Emma Stone. I think Lily Gladstone is rather boring in this movie – the whole movie is boring; it's not her fault, really – but I will be happy for her to win. She's a cool woman, and she's been making good independent movies for years.

Will win: Actress, Original Score

Could win: Picture, Director, Production Design, Costume Design

My rating: #53 out of 71

Barbie

8 nominations

• Picture
• Adapted Screenplay: Greta Gerwig (Little Women, Lady Bird) & Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale)
• Supporting Actor: Ryan Gosling (La La Land, Half Nelson)
• Supporting Actress: America Ferrera
• Production Design: Sarah Greenwood (Darkest Hour, Beauty and the Beast, Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) & Katie Spencer (Darkest Hour, Beauty and the Beast, Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) 
• Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran (Cyrano, Little Women, Darkest Hour, Beauty and the Beast, Mr. Turner, Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) 
• Original Song – "I'm Just Ken": Mark Ronson (A Star Is Born) & Andrew Wyatt (A Star Is Born)
• Original Song – "What Was I Made For?": Billie Eilish (No Time to Die) & Finneas O'Connell (No Time to Die)

Director: Gerwig

Cast: Margot Robbie, Gosling, Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, America Ferrera, Dua Lipa, Simu Liu, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Rhea Perlman, Will Ferrell, Helen Mirren, Ariana Greenblatt, Michael Cera

This is a very funny movie, and I had a great time at it. I still laugh once a week at Issa Rae's delivery of "Oh? Is this The GodFATHer?" I did think the movie didn't really stick its ending, though. I mean, why would anyone choose to be a real human person when one could be a doll and not have to work? No thanks. In many ways, the end of this movie felt to me like an apologia for mainstream culture, and that didn't sit well with me. In any case, the script (it's an original script, despite appearing in the adapted category) is great, and it was really excellent to see America Ferrera's surprise nomination. I'm so pleased about that. She's a jobbing actor who has been working hard for years – as long ago as Josefina López's Real Women Have Curves, the play. There's lots to be excited about here, and the Academy obviously loved this film. This and Oppenheimer and Mario Bros. and Dead Reckoning Part One really saved the box office receipts this year, too, so it deserves props for that as well (even though Mario and Dead Reckoning did not receive any similar affection from the Academy). One more thing: I think the backlash related to Barbie missing out on Best Director and Best Actress nominations may translate into more wins on March 10th, so I expect it to take home a couple more than I would have predicted if this movie had ended up with 10 nominations instead of 8.

Will win: Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Song

Could win: Picture, Costume Design

My rating: #23 out of 71

Maestro

8 nominations

• Picture
• Actor: Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born, American Sniper, American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook)
• Actress: Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman, An Education)
• Original Screenplay: Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born) & Josh Singer (Spotlight)
• Cinematography: Matthew Libatique (A Star Is Born, Black Swan)
  
• Sound
• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Cooper

Cast: Cooper, Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Vincenzo Amato, Sarah Silverman, Maya Hawke, Michael Urie, Sam Nivola, Alexa Swinton, Miriam Shor

This is a very good movie that I think is a little tough to love, and so it isn't much of a surprise to me that people liked it less than (I feel like) they ought to have. There's a way, too, that the movie is very hard on Leonard Bernstein, a man beloved by many in Hollywood, despite the way the movie actually adores him and sympathizes with him. I've already written about how well I think Cooper did with this and how fucking great Carey Mulligan is, so I won't say any more about that. But... I don't think this will be winning any Oscars on March 10th. 7 nominations is a lot, so the Academy definitely respects it, but it's not taking home any gold. The only real category it could win in – Makeup – has really polarized people. The other day one of my students told me he couldn't take the movie seriously because the makeup was too silly (!). I really liked this movie, though, and I think it deserves its nominations and maybe more.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Makeup & Hairstyling

My rating: #17 out of 71

More posts coming soon:

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Society of the Snow, Nyad

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

6. Animated Features

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

8. Animated Short Films

9. Perfect Days, The Teachers' Lounge, Io Capitano

Ballando Ballando (Le Bal) (1983)

I’ve been trying to find a good copy of Ballando Ballando for years and found one last week, so I am finally watching it. Ettore Scola’s film is charming and funny with some very silly, delightful performances. The conceit is a nightclub where we spend nearly fifty years from 1936 to 1983 and we see many different characters over this time, but all the actors are the same. The music changes, the dances change, but there’s no spoken dialogue and we watch the passage of time. It’s a set of cinematic restrictions ripe for farce, and it’s successful and always fun to watch.

This is not really interesting to anyone except me, but now that I've finally seen Portrait of Chieko, The Walls of Malapaga, and Ballando Ballando, the number of Foreign Language / International Feature Oscar nominees I've seen has jumped to 337 out of 347 nominees (that number includes this year's five movies). This leaves me only Io Capitano, Perfect Days, and The Teachers' Lounge from 2023, and then Daens (1992), Memories of a Marriage (1989), Nights and Days (1975), The Deluge (1974), The New Land (1972), Live for Life (1967), and Dear John (1964) from previous years.

Le Mura di Malapaga (1949)

The Walls of Malapaga feels like a fairly standard post-war tragic romance in the vein of the great De Sica movies from this period. Jean Gabin does his gruff lovable-yet-unlovable thing. Isa Miranda is lovely in this, and Louis Page photographs the war-ravaged city of Genoa with heartbreaking care (it's a sound stage, actually, but I believed it).

Also, I had been looking for a copy of this with English subtitles for years and was happy to have finally found one, so I watched it as soon as I found it. You can't find it on YouTube but it's over at Dailymotion:

Le Meraviglie (2014)

The Wonders is marvelous. Rohrwacher’s portrait of a family working the land in traditional ways but getting squeezed by regulations and the modern world makes parallels between lost Etruscan antiquity and ghost stories. This is a beautifully balanced film with some gorgeous performances at its center.

The Beguiled (1971)

The original version of The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel, is deeply, delightfully perverse and much, much queerer than the Sofia Coppola remake, which I liked a lot. But it’s unfortunate that she tamed the rough edges of this strange story. This film insists upon the weirdness. (Coppola apparently thought that this Don Siegel movie was too invested in sensational topics like incest and lesbianism? Sign me up! That’s what made this so fun.)

Also, y'all, Clint Eastwood in the 1970s was a fox.

Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge is genuine nonsense from start to finish. The military unit in this movie is absurdly silly. This is ostensibly somewhat of a comedic film, so I guess that works well enough, but Heartbreak Ridge also has pretensions of being a serious movie about masculinity, the military, war, and the true meaning of discipline or some such bullshit. All of it is so cartoon-like though, it feels impossible to take seriously. 

Of course, one of the central features of Eastwood’s directing career is that he is interested in deconstructing and exploring US American masculinity and military and law enforcement regulations. But unlike a later film like Gran Torino or Flags of Our Fathers or even an earlier movie like Unforgiven, this 1986 nonsense actually believes in those values and questions them only in the most superficial ways. Heartbreak Ridge is a cheap, silly version of Eastwood’s later, more critical work. 

Marsha Mason is luminous in this, and I adored her and Eileen Heckart, but this movie annoyed the hell out of me.

(I saw Heartbreak Ridge because it was the final film from Oscar season 1987 on my list, and I am a completist.)

Best Actor 2023

Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an Academy of one.

ELIAS ANTON, Of an Age

BRADLEY COOPER, Maestro

CILLIAN MURPHY, Oppenheimer

ANDREW SCOTT, All of Us Strangers

YOO TEO, Past Lives

Also loved:

Zac Efron, The Iron Claw

Thom Green, Of an Age

Barry Keoghan, Saltburn

Ezra Miller, The Flash

Enzo Vogrincic, La Sociedad de la Nieve (Society of the Snow)

Yakusho Kōji, Perfect Days

Apologies to:

Casey Affleck (Dreamin' Wild), Gael García Bernal (Cassandro), Deniz Celiloğlu (About Dry Grasses), Felipe Ramírez Espitia (A Male), Paul Kircher (Winter Boy), Paul Mescal (Foe), Mads Mikkelsen (The Promised Land), Jonathan Tucker (Palm Trees and Power Lines), Callum Turner (The Boys in the Boat), and Jeremy Allen White (Fremont), whose films I haven't seen yet.

Related:

My Best Actor Picks from previous years (2004-2022)

My Best Actress Picks for 2023

My Best Supporting Actress Picks for 2023

My Best Supporting Actor Picks for 2023

An Oscar Nomination Preview

Oscar nominations arrive bright and early this Tuesday morning. It's probably my favorite day of the year—like my own Christmas morning. And I don't usually like to make too many predictions about the nominations because, actually, the thing that I love the most about Oscar nomination morning is the surprises. Often on the day of the actual Oscars awards ceremony, there aren't too many surprises, but on the morning of the nominations? Surprises galore! Witness last year the surprise nomination for the very deserving Paul Mescal in Aftersun and the totally out of left field surprise nomination for the brilliant Andrea Riseborough in To Leslie.

Hi, Paul

Anyhow, I thought it might be fun to rundown what I think I know about who is going to be nominated. As far as I can tell, things are very confused at the moment, and since the Screen Actors Guild nominees don't match up very well with earlier critics' prizes and the nominees for the Golden Globes, we might be in for some serious surprises come Tuesday morning.

Best Actor

The SAG nominees are:

• Bradley Cooper, Maestro
• Colman Domingo, Rustin
• Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
• Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
• Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction

This is a pretty good list. The Golden Globes had all of these gentlemen on their list of twelve (!), some of those have a very low chance of being nominated, like, say, Matt Damon in Air or Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid but from their list you could add these two actual possibilities:

• Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon
• Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers

I think Murphy, Cooper, Giamatti, and Wright are locks right now. I also think it's a little crazy that Colman Domingo keeps making these lists; Rustin is a legitimately terrible movie. I tend to think Andrew Scott will get in over Colman Domingo, but who knows. Maybe it's just because I like his movie so much better.

Best Actress

If you think I'm too boring to be nominated, think again

The SAG nominees are:

• Annette Bening, Nyad
• Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
• Carey Mulligan, Maestro
• Margot Robbie, Barbie
• Emma Stone, Poor Things

From the Golden Globes, add to this list:

• Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall
• Greta Lee, Past Lives
• Natalie Portman, May December

Here's where things get confusing. I think Gladstone, Stone, and Mulligan are the locks here. Poor Things is actually on the rise. I also tend to think that Robbie will get in; she's been nominated twice before, including a supporting nomination for Bombshell (does anyone even remember that movie?). SAG did not like May December, but will the Academy feel the same way? I think Greta Lee is probably out of the running here. But I actually feel like Annette Bening is not going to make the final list. Diana Nyad is a difficult character who is hard to like, and I feel like Jodie Foster steals the show from her. Here's what I predict: the Academy members are all watching The Zone of Interest right now, and they're loving it, and so they're remembering how good Sandra Hüller is in Anatomy of a Fall while they're looking for ways to also honor The Zone of Interest. Hüller squeezes in as a nominee.

Best Supporting Actor

The Screen Actors Guild gave us an unhinged list of nominees that left out the two critical favorites:

• Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction
• Willem Dafoe, Poor Things
• Robert DeNiro, Killers of the Flower Moon
• Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
• Ryan Gosling, Barbie

The Golden Globe list subbed out Brown and added in the two favorites:

• Charles Melton, May December
• Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things 

Sorry, Charlie

It seems that the Screen Actors Guild simply did not care for May December, which I guess makes sense. They don't seem to get its camp or its melodramatic critique, and indeed, much of that critique is leveled at actors and their own self-importance, so perhaps SAG's dislike of the film is to be expected. Anyway, I think that means Melton will not be making a showing here. As for Ruffalo, here's a bit of trivia for you: in five of the last six years, two actors from the same film have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Last year it was The Banshees of Inisherin, the year before it was The Power of the Dog, before that it was Judas and the Black Messiah, The Irishman, and Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri. This means, it seems to me, that both Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe are in. Downey and Gosling are also in. And, I really, really hate to say it, but I also think DeNiro is in. Gross. Brown and Melton are both much better than DeNiro, and their films are also much better than Killers of the Flower Moon.

Best Supporting Actress

The Golden Globe list was:

• Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer [LOCK]
• Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple
• Jodie Foster, Nyad [LOCK]
• Julianne Moore, May December
• Rosamund Pike, Saltburn
• Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers [LOCK]

Don't worry, darling, I don't need a nomination. I'm rich.

The Screen Actors Guild disliked May December, so they left off Julianne Moore and also left off the very deserving Rosamund Pike, substituting instead Penélope Cruz, who gives a totally unhinged performance in Ferrari that I rather enjoyed. Will Danielle Brooks make it in? I don't think she's locked—the movie is terrible—but she's a bright spot in that film, so perhaps she will get nominated. As for the fifth slot... I think this is a complete wild card, and I wouldn't be surprised if it went to someone completely out of left field like, say, Sandra Hüller for The Zone of Interest or América Ferrera for Barbie.

Not giving Rosamund Pike a nomination would really be a crime. But I expect the Academy to fuck that up.

Best Director

Watch: this'll do well on Tuesday, too.

You have probably noticed that I think The Zone of Interest is going to do very well on Tuesday morning. I actually think Jonathan Glazer is going to get nominated for Best Director for this movie. There's precedent for this if you look at the last few years. Last year, amid the usual suspects for Best Director appeared Ruben Östlund and Triangle of Sadness, a movie which only got three nominations overall (a low count) but wound up with nominations for Best Director and Best Picture The year before that the same thing happened with Hamaguchi Ryūsuke's Drive My Car, and the year before that it was Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round, skip a year and you'll find Paweł Pawlikowski for Cold War in that slot. All of this is to say, there is a voting bloc that chooses a very well respected film director who isn't based in the U.S. and gives him (it's always him) a nomination. This year, I think we're looking at Glazer.

For Tuesday morning, of the films that are in the conversation (unlike, say, Of an Age or Afire or Alcarràs), I'll be rooting for my favorites of the year, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall, American Fiction, All of Us Strangers, and The Boy and the Heron (will Joe Hisaishi finally get an original score nomination???). I'm also gonna be rooting for May December, just out of spite, because it's very, very good, and I wish more people appreciated its strange melodramatic vibe.

Best Actress 2023

Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an Academy of one.

BAISHŌ CHIEKO, Plan 75

SANDRA HÜLLER, Anatomie d'une Chute (Anatomy of a Fall)

ALINE KÜPPENHEIM, 1976 (Chile '76)

CAREY MULLIGAN, Maestro

NATALIE PORTMAN, May December

Also loved:

Andō Sakura, Monster (怪物)

Lubna Azabal, Le Bleu du Caftan (The Blue Caftan)

Annette Bening, Nyad

Lily Gladstone, The Unknown Country

Joanna Scanlon, After Love

Apologies to:

Jessie Buckley (Fingernails), Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Shayda), Anne Hathaway (Eileen), Sally Hawkins (The Lost King), Eve Hewson (Flora and Son), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (You Hurt My Feelings), Joely Mbundu (Tori and Lokita), Rosy McEwen (Blue Jean), Laura Paredes (Trenque Lauquen), Saoirse Ronan (Foe), Sydney Sweeney (Reality), Teyana Taylor, (A Thousand and One), Michelle Williams (Showing Up), and Anaita Wali Zada (Fremont), whose movies I have not yet seen.

Related:

My Best Actress Picks from previous years (2004-2022)

My Best Actor Picks for 2023

My Best Supporting Actress Picks for 2023

My Best Supporting Actor Picks for 2023

Best Supporting Actor 2023

Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an Academy of one.

MATT BOMER, Maestro

STERLING K. BROWN, American Fiction

ALDEN EHRENREICH, Oppenheimer

MILO MACHADO GRANER, Anatomie d'une Chute (Anatomy of a Fall)

JAMIE BELL, All of Us Strangers

Also loved:

Christopher Abbott, Poor Things

Swann Arlaud, Anatomie d'une Chute (Anatomy of a Fall)

Amar Chadha-Patel, The Creator

Trond Fausa, Oppenheimer

Charles Melton, May December

Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers

Simon Rex, The Sweet East

Benny Safdie, Oppenheimer

Ingvar Sigurðsson, Vanskabte Land (Godland)

Cory Michael Smith, May December

Related:

My Best Supporting Actor Picks from previous years (2004-2022)

My Best Actress Picks for 2023

My Best Actor Picks for 2023

My Best Supporting Actress Picks for 2023

May December

Todd Haynes' May December is such a smart movie. It’s also like this weirdly mysterious gothic potboiler thing that veers into Lee Daniels’ Waterboy territory but—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this—in a good way. It feels very Robert Altman’s 3 Women at times, but then it takes a very sensitive and smart approach to some of the characters, offering them a generous gaze. The other definite intertext here is Mark Robson's Peyton Place: those shots of butterflies emerging reminded me of the flowers blooming in that classic 1957 melodrama. Anyway, this whole thing is just really careful and smart and campy, and I was really into it.

The danger with this film, I think, is that people have been taking it all a bit too sincerely, as if the movie is like some kind of deeply honest exposé of these central characters. But the whole point of offering us the plot of a shallow (but very good) Hollywood actress attempting to get into a character, of seeing these people as a "story" rather than people, is to give May December a particular kind of camp framework, one that makes the whole thing more fun and interesting to me than doing some kind of "real" story.

Another thing I want to note is Haynes's attachment to melodrama as a form. May December is definitely a melodrama (the music—cribbed from The Go-Between—is hilariously rich in this), but Jonathan Goldberg's book Melodrama helps us understand what Haynes is doing with this form: and that is that he is attempting to stage the warring pieces within ourselves, our deeply conflicting desires. What looks like over-the-top dramatics is perhaps better examined as an attempt on the part of the characters to find something real, to figure out their own deeply divided selves. (And us, of course: our own deeply divided selves.)

The more I think about May December the more I like it.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Clean and cold and deeply fucked up. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is a movie about sound. It's bout what we hear, what we know is happening and what we decide to behave as if we can ignore. 

I guess I want to say, though, that The Zone of Interest didn’t really surprise me. It felt rather like a shorter, more colorful version of Haneke’s The White Ribbon to me.

I loved the ending, of course. I just rather felt as if the film hadn't quite earned that amazing trip to the museum. I think it's difficult, too, to watch a movie where you really loathe all of the characters. It's hard to make a movie like that, and it's hard to watch a movie like that. 

Rotting in the Sun (2023)

Sebastián Silva's Rotting in the Sun is hilarious gay meta-cinematic madness. I laughed a lot. But it’s also just a very smart–stupid meditation on life’s meaning, social media, art-making, suicide, the death drive, and faggotry.

Best Supporting Actress 2023

 Here is my top five in alphabetical order. These are the five I would nominate if I were an Academy of one.

EMILY BLUNT, Oppenheimer

JODIE FOSTER, Nyad

SARWAT GILANI, Joyland (جوائے لینڈ)

ROSAMUND PIKE, Saltburn

DA'VINE JOY RANDOLPH, The Holdovers

Also loved:

Erika Alexander, American Fiction

Penélope Cruz, Ferrari

Claire Foy, All of Us Strangers

Isabelle Huppert, Mon Crime (The Crime Is Mine)

Kawai Yūmi, Plan 75

Julianne Moore, May December

Catalina Saavedra, Rotting in the Sun

Related:

My Best Supporting Actress Picks from previous years (2004-2022)

My Best Actress Picks for 2023

My Best Actor Picks for 2023

My Best Supporting Actor Picks for 2023

New Color Purple Same as the Old Color Purple

When The Color Purple uses the songs from the musical it works very well. The best sequences are easily “Miss Celie’s Pants”, “Push da Button”, and “Hell No”. Which makes one wonder why they didn’t use more of this music. So much of Blitz Bazawule’s movie musical is not musical! Why? I just don’t get it. The whole thing just works so much better when the performers are singing. 

The real kicker for me, though, was that this film reused so much of Spielberg’s movie (the dumb food-burning humor when Shug arrives, the invented subplot about Shug having a minister father, the near complete erasure of Shug and Celie’s love affair) instead of the far-superior (and closer to the novel) libretto from the musical. Ugh. Well, I’ve written a whole book chapter on this in Love Is Love Is Love, and this version of The Color Purple is much more like Spielberg’s version than Walker’s version or the stage show. And that’s too bad.

Here's a little section from Love Is Love Is Love, so you know what I mean when I tell you how annoyed I was at this movie:

* * *

The concept of god [is] central to The Color Purple. Celie still begins her letters “Dear God,” and the Bible and Heaven make regular appearances. The shift for Celie begins in letter 73, more than halfway through the novel, after she has discovered that Nettie is still alive, that her father was lynched, and that the man she thought was her father is her stepfather. Celie and Shug talk about God, but they have very different ideas about it. Their conversation is far reaching and fascinating. Celie says that “the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown,” but Shug argues that Celie’s god is not only a male god but specifically white and male:

If you wait to find God in church, Celie, she say, that’s who is bound to show up, cause that’s where he live. […] Cause that’s the one that’s in the white folks’ white bible.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it.

How come he look just like them, then? she say. […] How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed?

I never thought bout that. 

It is important to note here that Shug’s critique is one that marks this god as specifically racialized, gendered, and aged by the white people who created him in their image. 

Shug’s personal theory about god is the one that Celie finally adopts, although it takes her a long time to arrive at this position – she struggles with it through several letters. In letter 73, though, Shug tells Celie that “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. […] God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. […] I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.”  It is in this same letter that Shug says the memorable phrase from which the book’s title is taken, that “it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” 

Even more, Shug’s theory of god is one deeply inflected by an ethos of sexual freedom and an emphasis on sexual pleasure. Shug understands desire and sex to be invented by her god, and she says that “God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like.”  Shug’s sexual ethic here emphasizes a free sexual choice that, significantly, doesn’t emphasize a specific sexuality as much as it insists on sexual freedom and sexual pleasure – “go with everything that’s going,” Shug says, and “lik[e] what you like.”

At the same time as her long talk with Shug, Celie stops writing letters to her god, writing instead to her sister Nettie, from whom she has been separated for the many years of the novel. Nettie has gone to Africa as a Christian missionary to a fictional ethnic group called the Olinka, but after their time in Africa, she and her husband Samuel come to see God in the same way that Celie does, as a spirit not tied to a particular image. Celie writes to Nettie until the moving final letter of novel. By this time, Nettie and Celie’s children have returned to Georgia and they have all been reunited, and so instead of writing to her sister, Celie addresses her final letter in this way: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God. / Thank you for bringing my sister Nettie and our children home.”  Celie has come to believe in a god that is everywhere and everything rather than a white patriarch who punishes sexual pleasure and demands obedience, and she is grateful.

* * *

This is as gay as this new movie gets.

All of this – and to my mind these are the central themes of the novel – is cut in Spielberg's film. I go on in the book to detail the changes made for the film and for the musical. Celie and Shug don't even have this conversation about god in the 1985 movie. What's so wonderful about the musical is that it restores this conversation and does so musically with Shug's gorgeous song "The Color Purple". The musical also restores the beautiful sexual relationship that the women have, another thing that was cut for Spielberg's movie.

Well the new Blitz Bazawule movie cuts the conversation yet again (cutting Shug's song, of course), and it cuts the sexual relationship too, for good measure. The musical version did so much work to get back to the themes of the novel from the botched 1985 movie adaptation. The new movie adaptation takes us right back to 1985.