Oscar Nominations 2024: 2 of 11

The next three movies on our list; all nominated for Best Picture and one likely and eventual winner:

A Complete Unknown

8 nominations

• Picture
• Director: James Mangold (1st time nominee)
• Actor: Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name)
• Adapted Screenplay: Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence) & Mangold (Logan)
• Supporting Actor: Edward Norton (Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), American History X, Primal Fear)
• Supporting Actress: Monica Barbaro (1st time nominee)
• Costume Design: Arianne Phillips (Once upon a Time... in Hollywood, W./E., Walk the Line)
• Sound
  

Director: Mangold

Cast: Chalamet, Norton, Elle Fanning, Barbaro, Eriko Hatsune, P.J. Byrne, Joe Tippet, Dan Fogler, Scoot McNairy, Boyd Holbrook, Norbert Leo Butz, David Alan Basche

This is an utterly conventional mid-century singer biopic from the director of last year's truly wackadoodle Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The movie works, though, by which I mean it functions in every single way expected of it. It hits all the right beats and it simply refuses to disappoint. Better still, the film is a musical—despite the Golden Globes' usual absurd classifications—every single emotional beat in the film is part of a song, and the movie is positively filled with music. This is a very good thing. It's a musical disguised as something else, and so it allows people who think they hate musicals to reap all of the emotional benefits of watching a musical while pretending they're watching a drama. Even more impressive, all of the principals sing their own songs, and they all do a good job with the music. When the smoke clears, I expect this to win Best Picture. I think this is the least divisive of the movies nominated, and it's a movie that I find impossible to dislike. In fact, it delivers in all of the ways it promises to deliver, and so watching it actually feels satisfying. 

Will win: Picture, Sound

Could win: Director

My rating: #49 out of 93

Conclave

8 nominations

• Picture
• Actor: Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, Schindler's List)
• Adapted Screenplay: Peter Staughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
• Supporting Actress: Isabella Rossellini  (1st time nominee)
• Film Editing: Nick Emerson (1st time nominee)
• Production Design: Suzie Davies (Mr. Turner) & Cynthia Sleiter (1st time nominee)
• Original Score: Volker Bertelmann (All Quiet on the Western Front)
• Costume Design: Lisy Christl (Anonymous)

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msmamati, Jack Koman, Brían F. O'Byrne, Rossellini, Bruno Novelli, Thomas Loibl, Carlos Diehz, Rony Kramer, Sergio Castellito

I was really into this movie, and it's a superb follow-up to Berger's last film, All Quiet on the Western Front. One of my favorite things about Conclave is how well you know the central character, played by Ralph Fiennes, and know him so quickly. We know him so well that when Stanley Tucci's character accuses him of harboring a secret desire to be the pope himself, I immediately felt how much he had misjudged, how wrong he was. And I knew this about this character without doubt. The movie makes us confident in some things and suspicious of others. In this way, the movie constantly surprises its viewers. We see some things coming, but the movie has other surprises in store. I don't see Conclave doing very well on Oscar night, though. It's a very respectable movie that I think will take home the production design Oscar, but it might not win anything at all.

Will win: Production Design

Could win: N/A

My rating: #19 out of 93

Anora

6 nominations

• Picture
• Director: Sean Baker (1st time nominee)
• Actress: Mikey Madison (1st time nominee)
• Original Screenplay: Baker (1st time nominee)
• Supporting Actor: Yura Borisov (1st time nominee)
• Film Editing: Baker (1st time nominee)

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, Borisov, Vache Tovmasyan, Lindsey Normington, Emily Weider, Aleksey Serebryakov, Darya Ekamasova, Paul Weissman

I liked this movie too! I really tend to hate Sean Baker's movies, or at least I go back and forth about them about four or five times during the movie, and I almost always hate the way he ends his movies. I find his gaze toward his characters really unkind and mocking. I think this is true in Anora, too. Baker spends most of the movie making fun of his central characters. They're figures of derision and hilarity—much of the film's comedy is very broad and silly—and this works quite well, even if the gaze toward the characters is cold. But with Anora, Baker really crafts a moving, heartfelt ending that shows a wonderful generosity toward his protagonist. For me, this movie's ending made Anora into something special.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Picture, Original Screenplay, Editing

My rating: #44 out of 93

More 2024 posts:

1. Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Wicked

3. The Substance, Dune: Part Two, Nosferatu

4. I'm Still Here, Sing Sing, The Wild Robot

5. Nickel Boys, The Apprentice, A Real Pain

6. Flow, September 5, Maria

7. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, The Girl with the Needle, Gladiator II

8. Inside Out 2, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Memoir of a Snail

9. Animated Short Films

10. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Alien: Romulus, Better Man

11. A Different Man, Elton John: Never Too Late, The Six Triple Eight

Anora (2024)

Anora is easily Sean Baker’s best film. This is very funny; the editing is great. the performances are excellent, and the physical comedy is top-notch. Best of all, Baker sticks the landing. He’s terrible with endings, but this one works very well. Anora ends with empathy and care. 

Still, I kind of can't believe this won the Palme d'Or. This is a filmmaker who almost uniformly shows contempt for his characters, despite coaxing brilliant performances out of his actors. And yet, I was stunned by this film’s last few moments. They don’t make the movie into something great or anything like that—it's a rather silly farce with a stellar ending—but I was still stunned; I didn’t know Baker had it in him. 

It's worth saying, too, that the supporting performance by Mark Eydelshteyn is wonderful.

Red Rocket

It's baffling. Sean Baker makes films about the working poor – Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket are about people living on the margins of the economy. But his films are filled with contempt for their subjects.

Red Rocket is the best of these movies. I honestly enjoyed this film for most of its running time. Baker conceals his lack of empathy for the characters for most of the movie – we feel as though some of them might succeed (at least on their own terms), I hoped for them to succeed. But Baker doesn't believe they can succeed. He throws new plot developments at them that destroy their hopes and make them look foolish. I was really with this movie, and then (just like with The Florida Project) Red Rocket's end demonstrates that Baker thinks the people in the stories he tells are just some sort of comic fun.

But let me shut up about Sean Baker, because the real story here is that Simon Rex is fucking fantastic in this movie. He honestly and truly deserves an Academy Award nomination. It's a flat-out brilliant performance.

Oscar Nominations 2018: Part 6 of 12

Back to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5.

My Best of 2017.

Logan

1 Nomination

• Adapted Screenplay: Scott Frank (Out of Sight) & Michael Green & James Mangold
  

Director: Mangold

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Dafne Keen, Patrick Stewart, Stephen Merchant, Boyd Holbrook, Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal, Quincy Fouse, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Richard E. Grant

The absolute best X-men movie we've ever had. I cannot believe this got an Oscar nomination, but goddammit it deserves this. The strongest component of Logan is, of course, its script, which is smart and poignant and (actually) quite moving. But the quality that makes Logan stand out from other X-men movies specifically and other superhero movies in general is that this superhero movie is rated R. The R rating made Logan into what it is. We've never seen Wolverine's claws wreak the bloody havoc they wreak in this movie. We've never seen the pain that Logan feels, the agony he experiences as bullets rip through his flesh, before. Mangold's willingness to do this, to go there – as well as Fox's willingness to allow this – elevates the level of the film to the level of something important. This isn't a stupid action movie where no one gets hurt. In this film, people are bodies. They get wounded, they hurt, they break apart. It's not only an ethical move for a superhero movie, it also makes for great storytelling. This is one of my favorite movies of the year.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #16 out of 81

The Big Sick

1 Nomination

• Original Screenplay: Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani

Director: Michael Showalter

Cast: Nanjiani, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Zoe Kazan, Adeel Akhtar, Anupam Kher, Zenobia Shroff, Bo Burnham, Aidy Bryant, Kurt Braunohler, David Alan Grier

This is funny and romantic and I really liked it. I am really happy it got this nomination, too, because the entire enterprise is cute and very funny. Holly Hunter is also excellent in the movie. I can recommend this to everyone. I don't think there's anyone who won't like this movie. It isn't going to win the Oscar, but this nomination is great news for Nanjiani's career.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #23 out of 81

The Florida Project

1 Nomination

• Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe (Shadow of the Vampire, Platoon)

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Dafoe, Christopher Rivera, Aiden Malik, Valeria Cotto, Mela Murder, Josie Olivo, Caleb Landry Jones

Ugh. I have already detailed my experience with this film, which I so wanted to be good. But The Florida Project is not good, and I have, frankly, been completely baffled by the love that so many American critics have shown this shallow, meaningless movie. Sean Baker is a filmmaker that deliberately tries to avoid saying anything, and so his movies finally provide no insight into the characters he has created. I felt this with Tangerine and it is true again with The Florida Project. I am an empathetic person, and so I find this entire enterprise incredibly frustrating. It's just all so shallow, and actually it begins to feel sort of hostile after a while. The more that I think about how The Florida Project works, the more I feel as though it is contemptuous of its intriguing characters. But I guess I am supposed to be talking about Willem Dafoe... Dafoe is excellent in this movie, and not only because he is an actor among non-actors doing excellent work (he also has a superb scene with Caleb Landry Jones, who is an actor and is also in Three Billboards). Dafoe's characterization is beautiful and humane and I would be totally pleased if he won the Oscar for this. But fuck this movie.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Supporting Actor

My Rating: #76 out of 81

All the Money in the World

1 Nomination

• Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer (Beginners, The Last Station)

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg, Plummer, Romain Duris, Charlie Plummer, Timothy Hutton

This film is surprisingly slow, and I am not sure I understand what it is trying to do. I think that's because this movie isn't quite sure what it is trying to do. Is this a meditation on wealth and greed, and perhaps on how being totally greedy keeps one from having real feelings toward family or real relationships with those one supposedly loves? Or is this an action-movie-slash-heist-movie about a kidnapping and rescue. As it turns out, All the Money in the World does both of these things halfway, and doesn't do either of them very well. Michelle Williams spends the whole movie doing a kind of Natalie-Portman-in-Jackie accent that – even if it's accurate – sounds stilted and strange and made me doubt her sincerity. Mark Wahlberg is completely and totally miscast, like a bull in a strange china shop. And then there is the Kevin Spacey–Christopher Plummer debacle (or is it a saga?). Plummer is fine in the part, but the ghost of Kevin Spacey, who was fired while the movie was in post-production, haunts this whole enterprise. It would feel like more of a triumph if the movie were any good, but it's mostly not.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #68 out of 81

A Better Title than The Florida Project

I find the title of The Florida Project totally nonsensical. (It is a reference to Walt Disney World, which is what Disney called the park while it was being built.) But Sean Baker apparently is not interested in titles. He titled his previous film – about two sex workers and a cab driver in Los Angeles –Tangerine, a color/fruit that has no apparent connection to the film itself. He has also said in interviews that he doesn't see why filmmakers feel the need to title their works. Ok.

I wasn't super excited for The Florida Project, but the first time I tried to see it here in Florida there was a line outside the door. Screenings of this film have been selling out in my local Orlando theatre, where it has been playing on only one screen for two weeks. In any case, the excitement was contagious, and when I finally got myself a ticket, I was really looking forward to it.

The first forty minutes or so of The Florida Project build the world in which we're going to be living. We follow around six-year old Mooney and her miniature friends as they cause trouble, spit on parked cars, curse at adults, beg strangers for change, share a soft-serve cone between them, and turn off the power of the motel in which she lives with her mother. It's quality world-building that I didn't find that interesting until about the 40-minute mark, at which point I really became enamored with the film's characters and their world.

For the subsequent 50 minutes or so, things start to happen and the film really finds its stride. We begin to see the consequences of the absurd parenting job Mooney's mother is doing, and I began to feel afraid for the little girl at this film's center. Her mother is really not taking care of her, and this gave the film a real tension that truly began to work.

But then just as the film works its way toward its end, Baker changes the entire tone of the movie. The Florida Project ends with a laughably bad fantasy sequence that is completely incongruent with the rest of the film. All of a sudden, the beautiful care with which the previous parts of the film have been captured is discarded. The final sequence appears to have been shot on a smartphone. And all of a sudden an upbeat film score appears out of nowhere. We're clearly supposed to be in an impossible, fantasy-style sequence that is only being imagined by a character.

But who is doing this imagining? And why would a film that has been documenting the life of an impoverished six-year-old and her mother end with a sequence unrelated to the previous 90 minutes of documentation? The audience with which I saw The Florida Project left the theatre completely baffled. What was that? people were asking. Why did that happen? 

My companion and I decided that what happened was that Sean Baker doesn't really know what he's doing, and the more I think about that the more right I feel. The Florida Project is filled with interesting images and beautiful characterization, but none of this actually adds up to anything. The film ends the way it does because the end doesn't matter to the filmmaker. Baker strings sequences together, but they don't need to go in any particular order, and none of them actually says anything – about the characters or poverty in America or Florida or Kissimmee or Disney World or food or sex work or anything. They're all actually just surfaces.

A good example of what I mean is three sequences in the movie where Mooney's mom Halley (pronounced like Hayley) sells brand-name-knock-off perfume to residents at a Disney hotel. Each of these sequences is filmed in a longshot. We're asked simply to observe her, to watch her sell this perfume. And the sequences are also played for madcap humor, even one in which she is assaulted by a Disney security guard. Because the camera never moves in, the film never asks us to identify with Halley's experience while she does this. We never get a feeling of the stakes of the situation in which she has found herself. Rather than sympathizing with her, the camera sits in judgment of her, or to put it more accurately: the camera is simply there. It has nothing at all to say about what we're watching.

Baker clearly likes Richard Linklater – his influence is all over The Florida Project. I generally find Linklater a bit boring; to my mind he makes films that are more interesting in concept than in reality. But Baker really takes this all even further. It is as though he's making pseudo-documentary cinema. His camera captures the real, the gritty, the unattractive, the mundane. Fine, but what he is shooting is, of course, fictional – a set of fabricated characters and contrived situations that are not captured by his camera but created precisely for his camera – by him. He's devoted to avoiding meaning only so that his films seem more "real".

All I get from this is emptiness. The Florida Project is a film that could have plenty to say but doesn't say anything at all. And one begins to suspect that Baker doesn't have anything to say.

Tangerine

Not to be confused with Tangerines (Mandariniid) (an excellent movie), Tangerine is a film that was apparently shot entirely on an iPhone. (I am actually ignorant, but I have heard that the title Tangerine is apparently a filter (? or a color?) related to the iPhone. I don't know.)

This movie is about two transsexual prostitutes on the streets of Los Angeles, and we follow one of them as she tries to get revenge on a young woman who has been having sex with her boyfriend while she has been in county lockup.

The film also follows a married man who drives a cab and who also has sex with these two prostitutes (and a particular crush on the woman who is so hell-bent on revenge).

This is, of course, an interesting premise, and Karren Karagulian, who plays the cab driver, is really great. But that pretty much sums up all the positive things that I can say about Tangerine. I thought this movie was absolutely terrible. The acting was awful: from the very first minute of the film I knew we were in trouble. I didn't believe the top-billed actress, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, for one second. She spent the entire film commenting on her character – a character she clearly despised even while playing her.

The film's editing, too, doesn't make one lick of sense. We jump back and forth between Razmik, the cab driver, and Alexandra and Sin-dee, the call girls, but the film can't figure out why it jumps between them, and the stories themselves don't work together. The whole idea is supposed to be a kind of vérité / dogme 95 thing, but it is far too contrived for that, jumping from one improbable character that the script despises to the next.

Even worse is the "screenplay", which is not a screenplay at all. Instead, Tangerine appears to be mostly an improvised sort of thing. The film might have benefited from an actual script, and the acting, if scripted, might perhaps have seemed less phony, less forced, more authentic. But as it is, Tangerine feels like something that wants to sell us the idea that it's real. But to the contrary, it felt outrageously fake.