Oscar Nominations 2023: 4 of 9

The next four movies on our list:

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

2 nominations

• Sound
• Visual Effects

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Shea Whigham, Henry Czerny, Pom Klementieff, Cary Elwes

It seems crazy to say this, but these two nominations – for the seventh movie in the series – are this franchise's first ever nominations. In any case, Dead Reckoning was fun. It's also complete nonsense. As I left the theatre I asked myself: did a bot write this? Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised. McQuarrie's film was very very silly, but it's not without its charms. There is, however, a paradox in PG-13 films like this one. They purportedly shield young people (under 13) from seeing too much violence. At the same time, their plots are about saving the entire world from succumbing to violent destruction. And yet, they irresponsibly show the most brutal, horrible physical violence as if it has no consequences at all. You can get your face slammed into a stone wall and come right back to fight some more, and you can get your hand stabbed into a table and not bleed a drop. So while PG-13 films such as this (and the ones cranked out by Marvel Studios) purport to be opposed to violence, they make the world more and more violent by pretending that terrible violence does no harm.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Visual Effects

My rating: #50 out of 73

The Creator (創造者)

2 nominations

• Sound
• Visual Effects

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney, Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson, Amar Chadha-Patel, Marc Menchaca, Robbie Tann, Ralph Ineson, Michael Esper

I was into this! The Creator is a smart movie about AI. It's the complete tonal opposite of Kogonada's After Yang, but it has a similar heart to that movie (which, if you haven't seen... what are you doing?). The acting in The Creator is very, very good, and I liked its politics. For me, too, the film is smart enough that it invites me to think about the stories we tell ourselves to justify the genocidal violence we commit or allow our governments to commit in our name. Many of us are probably thinking about genocide right now, and this is a film about the ways governments (and we ourselves) make sense of those atrocities. My favorite performance in The Creator was Amar Chadha Patel's. He's a really excellent actor, and he does amazing work with his two parts. But the best thing about the movie – and the Academy noticed this, clearly, is the insanely cool light-scanning murder device with which the film begins. It's just an insanely cool idea that's executed beautifully by The Creator's visual effects team.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #27 out of 73

Rustin

1 nomination

• Actor: Colman Domingo

Director: George C. Wolfe

Cast: Domingo, Gus Halper, Johnny Ramey, Aml Ameen, Lilli Kay, CCH Pounder, Chris Rock, Glynn Turman, Michael Potts, Audra McDonald, Jeffrey Wright

This movie is so bad. I've already written about it a little bit here, but it's really the script that is just so embarrassing. This movie has the kind of energy that expects that no one has heard about Bayard Rustin before and that this is some kind of hidden gem of a story, and so it gives us a kind of shallow, hagiographic presentation of this man who was, in fact, very important to the history of our country. I know why movies like this need to get made, I guess, but I really don't understand why they can't be better movies. This is almost unwatchable. There's no reason that a movie about Bayard Rustin needs to be a cartoon. Rustin is, however, filled with a who's who of Black American movie actors, and the cameos are somewhat fun. I am singling out the terrible script because I continue to find Dustin Lance Black's treatment of homosexuality onscreen to be truly offensive. I understand that he has an LGBT-rights framework for his thinking about queerness, and so we will always get these stories about queerness as it contends with the law. But he does this thing where he frames homosexuality as "true love" and some kind of magical, wonderful thing in the middle of a horrible world, and this frame always makes homosexuality into a kind of guilty pleasure that is indulged in by his film's protagonists. They're always partially (or mostly) ashamed of their homosexual desires, and Black frames that as an internal struggle with containing pleasure and desire – rather than as a restriction placed on pleasure and desire from outside. It's very frustrating to me. So, predictably, in Rustin homosexuality will ruin your life, and it's insidious and makes you make bad decisions. It should be protected by the law, of course, because love is love is love, but queer desire will fuck you up. It's just so gross. This is not what I want from gay history. One more thing on Colman Domingo, though. I love him. I am happy for him. I'm glad everyone is going to know who he is now, and I'm glad he's going to get more work.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #68 out of 73

May December

1 nomination

• Original Screenplay: Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Charles Melton, Chris Tenzis, Andrea Frankle, Gabriel Chung, Mikenzie Taylor, Elizabeth Yu, Piper Curda, Cory Michael Smith, D.W. Moffett, Kelvin Han Yee

This movie is sooooo good. I've already praised its use of the melodramatic form and its brilliant skewering of Hollywood actors, so I'll leave that behind, and I'll spend this space praising the Writers Branch. The screenplay nominations this year are completely spot on. Original Screenplay as a category, especially, honors five excellent scripts, with not a miss on the list. I think the Adapted Screenplay list is a little less strong (Poor Things was included, after all), but even that left off Killers of the Flower Moon in favor of Cord Jefferson's American Fiction script. Great call. But the Original list? Amazing. This is where the Academy shines the brightest, I think. The Writers Branch seems to me the most discerningly intelligent of the branches, and I appreciate them. (Except for their weird rule on what's adapted and what's original. The idea that Barbie is somehow an adapted screenplay is insane.) Anyway, May December is campy and smart and troubling and excellent. I love how the film shifts its perspectives in intriguing ways, and I adored, especially, the scene with Melton and Portman near the end where she says "that's what grownups do". Great stuff. So smart. And honestly this movie should have gotten way more Oscar nominations than this little one. I don't understand what people missed here. I guess Todd Haynes's sensibilities just are not for everyone...

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #19 out of 73

More posts coming soon:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

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

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

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

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.

Safe (1995)

Well... Safe is fucked up and weird. It's so weird to watch this movie about HIV in the moment of COVID-19. I totally respected this, and there's so much good stuff, but Safe was hard to love.

Oscar Nominees 2016: Part 2 of 11

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11.

Bridge of Spies

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Original Screenplay: Ethan Coen (True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo), Joel Coen (True Grit, A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo) & Matt Charman
• Supporting Actor: Mark Rylance
• Original Score: Thomas Newman (Saving Mr. Banks, Skyfall, WALL·E, The Good German, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Finding Nemo, Road to Perdition, American Beauty, Unstrung Heroes, Little Women, The Shawshank Redemption)
• Production Design: Adam Stockhausen (The Grand Budapest Hotel, 12 Years a Slave), Rena DeAngelo & Bernard Henrich
• Sound Mixing

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks, Rylance, Amy Ryan, Sebastian Koch, Austin Sowell, Will Rogers, Scott Shepherd, Mikhail Gorevoy, Alan Alda

First of all, this was an original screenplay? Bridge of Spies is incoherently stuffed full of so much stuff that I would have bet $100 it was an adaptation of some absurd novel. Huh. Oh well. I thought this movie was pretty boring and unsuspenseful, and had a long conversation about it here. But I am a Spielberg hater and everyone knows it, so I guess this shouldn't deter you if you usually like him. Still, the Best Picture nomination is a kind of strange stand-out here. The Academy obviously liked the movie (a screenplay nomination is a big deal), but they ignored Bridge of Spies' director, its lead actor, and its photographer Janusz Kaminski, so it didn't like the movie that much. Thomas Newman deserves his nomination here (his twelfth). He has never won an Oscar and, once again, will not win this year. It's starting to be a very notable situation. I keep hoping he'll write the score for a movie that people can really get behind. I expect almost all of the Academy's love for this film to have evaporated by February 28th. No Oscars for this movie.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #56 out of 61

Carol

6 Nominations

• Actress: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, I'm Not There., Notes on a Scandal, The Aviator, Elizabeth)
• Adapted Screenplay: Phyllis Nagy
• Supporting Actress: Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)
• Cinematography: Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven)
• Original Score: Carter Burwell
• Costume Design: Sandy Powell (Cinderella, Hugo, The Tempest, The Young Victoria, Mrs Henderson Presents, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Shakespeare in Love, Velvet Goldmine, The Wings of the Dove, Orlando)

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Blanchett, Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy, John Magaro, Cory Michael Smith

I didn't write my own review of this because everyone seemed to like it so much and I was sort of soft on it. Besides, Carol is gorgeous – beautifully designed, beautifully acted, exquisitely costumed – and the script is really tight and lovely. For me, though, something was off. I wanted something else from Carol, and the more I think about it the more I just felt sort of weirded out by the idea of "true love" or the idea of these two women being in love. I just didn't buy this relationship as fully as I wanted to buy it. As I puzzle this out, what I've come to believe is that the character of Carol is really much more like the main character in Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley than Todd Haynes (and Cate Blanchett) would like us to believe. If this is so, then Carol herself is not really to be trusted – her actions should be more mysterious. We should be spending much of our time puzzling her out from the perspective of the Therese character. Instead, the film doesn't see Carol as a problematic; Haynes presents her straightforwardly as a woman who knows herself well and is beaten down (but unbroken) by a constraining, difficult society. I wanted more complexity here.

Will Win: Costume Design

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #31 out of 61

The Big Short

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Adam McKay
• Adapted Screenplay: Charles Randolph
• Supporting Actor: Christian Bale (American Hustle, The Fighter)
• Film Editing: Hank Corwin

Director: McKay

Cast: Bale, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Finn Wittrock, Hamish Linklater, Marisa Tomei, Adepero Oduye, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, John Magaro, Melissa Leo, Billy Magnussen, Max Greenfield

I started off thinking this movie was smug and more flash than substance. In a lot of ways the movie stayed smug, flashy, and insubstantial, but I came around to the way it was working as the movie progressed and really began to enjoy myself. The direction and screenplay are the most fascinating thing about this movie. They both really are excellent: the film takes a Brechtian tack toward its subject matter, addressing its audience directly, historicizing its narrative, teaching us about its difficult subject matter, and then asking us to get emotional not about characters so much as information. It's an extraordinary choice, and McKay commits to this fully. His commitment pays off and The Big Short works marvelously. It's funny and hard hitting and analytical. As I said, it maintains its rather smug tone for most of its running time (Brad Pitt's character is the lone voice of earnestness), but this doesn't seem to have bothered most audiences, and The Big Short surprised everyone by winning the big prize at the Producers Guild Awards on January 23rd. I expect it to win Adapted Screenplay for sure, but support for this movie may swell even more by the time we get to late February, and it may take home Picture and Director, too.
Will Win: Adapted Screenplay

Could Win: Director

My Rating: #13 out of 61

Star Wars: Episode VII - the Force Awakens

5 Nominations

• Film Editing: Maryann Brandon & Mary Jo Markey
• Original Score: John Williams (The Book Thief, Lincoln, War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Catch Me If You Can, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Patriot, Angela's Ashes, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Sleepers, Nixon, Sabrina, Schindler's List, JFK, Home Alone, Born on the Fourth of July, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Accidental Tourist, Empire of the Sun, The Witches of Eastwick, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The River, Return of the Jedi, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, The Towering Inferno, Tom Sawyer, Cinderella Liberty, Images, The Poseidon Adventure, Fiddler on the Roof, The Reivers, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Valley of the Dolls)
• Visual Effects
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Harrison Ford, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong'o, Peter Mayhew, Max von Sydow, Andy Serkis, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels

This was cool, if completely predictable. But the thing is is that The Force Awakens is predictable in all the right ways, in ways that work to tell us that the world makes a kind of sense, that things are getting better, that our memories matter, that dad is looking out for us, that each of us has a heroine hiding inside us waiting to come out and kick the ass of the evil corporation/religion that doesn't care about people's lives and is seeking to destroy everyone in the world. So if The Force Awakens delivers exactly what it is meant to deliver and nothing more, it is hard to fault anyone for that. Anything more ambitious wouldn't have worked to please crowds as much as this film has. And for the record, five nominations is a ton for a Star Wars movie these days and even a Star Trek movie. The prequels to the original trilogy only ever got five nominations total, but then, they sucked, so that makes sense. John Williams has received his umpteenth Oscar nomination for this score, and I have to admit that the score is serviceable and interesting, though it doesn't really manage to transcend the original Star Wars material in too many ways – and not nearly as much as Ludwig Göransson's Creed score does with the original Rocky material.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Film Editing, Original Score, Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #27 out of 61

Not There.

You've probably already heard about how Todd Haynes' new Bob Dylan movie works. In I'm Not There. Bob Dylan is played by six different actors: Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw and... Cate Blanchett.

So the film is basically more of a cinematic exercise than a movie. And I think this is okay because the whole thing is fascinating. I mean, the Richard Gere part is kind of boring, but even that has one of the nicest musical moments in the whole movie.

The acting is great all around. I was particularly fond of Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Cate Blanchett is excellent, although I'm not sure the performance ever really jells completely, by which I mean that everything about her sequences always feels artificial. (The Ledger and Franklin sequences are not hampered by this problem.) The Blanchett stuff is filled with Felliniesque touches; there are lots of cool references to 8½ that feel absolutely perfect for this bizarre dream of a movie.

My favorite sequences, though, are the scenes with Marcus Carl Franklin, who plays Woody Guthrie, the eleven-year-old Bob Dylan, who (as I understand it) represents early Dylan, finding his sound, learning the blues and training himself, and finally, learning to sing about his own time. Franklin is adorable, with a wicked grin and wise eyes. He lights up the screen whenever he's in a scene, and I found myself wishing he would come back later in the film when were focusing mainly on Blanchett and Gere.

Basically, I'm Not There. is not to be missed, especially if you are fond of Fellini. It's difficult, and I'm not sure it works in total, but there are some brilliant, gorgeous, sequences, and it's one of the coolest movies of the year.