Oscar nominated films for best picture, 2024

It’s Oscar time, and, as usual, I’m ranking the ten films nominated for best picture. My rationale for this exercise is a teacher’s rationale.  It’s good to learn by getting out of your comfort zone, and the Oscar nominees entice me to see movies that I wouldn’t normally see and to make an effort to understand them.  If you’re interested, here are my thoughts.

            At the bottom of my list are 10) Maestro and 9) Past Lives.  Bradley Cooper’s Maestro has the actor directing himself in a film biography of the great conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein.  Playing Bernstein, Cooper is compelling.  When he is embodying the older Bernstein, his profusely sweating, chain smoking visage makes you feel you could get nicotine stains just from watching.  And Cooper can frame a scene with an artist’s touch.  In early scenes, though, of Bernstein courting his future wife, shot in black and white, the couple’s constant giddiness is grating.  A more serious problem is that the film is at odds with itself.  When Bernstein is conducting Mahler (the composer whose revival he is most closely linked to), we see the conductor through the eyes of his wife who has been emotionally battered by Bernstein affairs with men.  Despite her suffering, she looks on at him with a worshipful gaze. Here Bernstein is The Great Artist.  But the film’s conclusion shows the aging Bernstein teaching conducting to a young male college student with a little-too-much of a hands-on approach.  Later we see the two partying.  Then we see him in an interview saying that he keeps summer alive within himself.  This ending is too cynical to fit with what has gone before it.

            Celine Song’s Past Lives tells the story of a boy and girl growing up in Korea and forming an intense attachment.  She moves to the States, though, and disrupts their relationship.  She is drawn toward a new life while he clings to the feelings born of the childhood romance.  When, as a young adult coming to America, he looks her up and  the story reaches its resolution.  There is a poignancy to the film that many will relate to, but the plot is thin, and the characters underdeveloped.  For example, he is briefly shown being in the Korean army.  Why is that scene in the film?  It is unclear.  It doesn’t reveal anything about his character or seem to have any relevance to the plotline.

            Martin Scorsese’s latest film, my pick for number 8 on my list, is a disappointing effort by the old master.  The problem is the source material, the film’s namesake, David Grann’s bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon.  Grann’s true crime story investigates the horrific suffering of the Osage Indians as white Oklahomans subject them to fraud, theft and murder for their oil wealth in the early 20th century.  The book is a compelling, well-told mystery.  But it’s a complex story with a wide cast of characters and some important unanswered questions.  Grann skillfully keeps everything clear to readers by useful explanations and background information, thumbnail sketches of characters, and reminders of who they are as the story progresses, all while keeping the work taut and interesting.  Any film would be hard pressed to translate all this into cinema, but Scorsese compounds problems by shifting the focus from the book’s central character, the chief criminal investigator, Tom White, to an important but secondary character, the Osage Indian, Mollie.  His motives are laudable.  He wants to avoid the common flaw in movies about people of color:  putting the spotlight on the great White Savior.  The result is a film that has elicited praise from the current day Osage and propelled the actress Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie, into an Oscar nomination for best actress, the first for a Native American woman.  But while the film is a political success, artistically it is less so.

            With Mollie as his central character, Scorsese must go outside the book to develop her character and her relationship to her husband, Ernest, play by Leonardo DiCaprio.  Developing that relationship plus explicating the schemes and plots against the Osage expands the film to over three hours and it’s a long three plus hours for the moviegoer.  There is no intermission.  I wonder if the elderly director could make it through without taking a piss.  The scenes of Mollie’s illness go on and on.  If you’re unfamiliar with book, as I was when I first viewed the film, you want her to die just to move the story along.  Without the point of view of the investigator Tom White, it is difficult to tell what’s going on and remember who is who.  It wouldn’t be a Scorsese film without flashes of brilliance like the recreation of the boom town atmosphere fueled by the oil wealth fortune seekers, but this movie must rank below his greatest works.

            My choice for number 7 is the French film Anatomy of a Fall.  When a husband dies from a fall from a remote mountain chalet suspicion falls on the wife.  At the heart of the film is a courtroom drama.  The film is very talky, very stagey, and very French.  It could have been a stage play and lost none of its impact. The story climaxes with the couple’s child taking the stand and finding his inner existentialist.  Not a bad film, but you have to be in the mood to hear a couple discussing their problems at length, and in this sense it is more of an anatomy of a marriage than anything else.

            I wish there was some way that I could avoid discussing my choice for number 6: Barbie.  Anything that I say is going to come across as manplaining. But since I have committed myself to this ranking device as a way to discuss the films, I will proceed. Where angels fear to tread.

            When the doll Barbie suddenly has thoughts of mortality, it propels her from the world of Barbie to the real world.  Ken, who looks to Barbie for the meaning of his existence, follows her into the real world where he is transformed from the generic boyfriend to something like an incel.  In the real world he imbibes the heady brew of patriarchy and when he returns to Barbie land, he threatens to bring the sway of patriarchal notions into it.  You see, in Barbie land, women are Supreme Court Justices and Nobel Prize winning authors.  Here’s where I became confused. Wait, I thought, women are Supreme Court Justices and Nobel Prize winners in the patriarchal world.

            Then I found my way to my own feeble understanding.  A character sarcastically refers to men explaining to women why The Godfather is a great film.  It occurred to me that whatever its other merits or demerits, The Godfather is a guy film.  There is reason that despite seeing it many times I can be walking through a room, see it on, sit down and instantly connect with it emotionally.  A man proves himself to his father and eliminates all his enemies in one fell swoop.  It’s a boy’s fantasy life.  Something similar seemed to be going on for women with this film.  Where I was experiencing something as merely clever, women like my younger sister were experiencing the film as mythopoetic, invoking something magical and formative from childhood.  It may be generational, though.  My wife grew up before the introduction of Barbie.  She had a brand of doll called Pitiful Pearl.  I guess it was a doll you could feel superior to.  She had a ho-hum reaction to the film.

            For me, the film was just a lot of male stereotypes that I couldn’t connect to.  Fair enough, I guess, considering the innumerable films that women have sat through subjected to only female stereotypes.  Nevertheless, I can’t see this film as being in the same league as other nominated films with broader and deeper cultural appeal.

            My older son went through a phase where he was fascinated by werewolves, vampires, and the like.  Invariably, he would begin to spook himself and ask, “Are they real?”  I would tell him, “No.  The real monsters are in the human heart.”  I thought about these exchanges when I was watching my number 5 selection:  The Zone of Interest.  Commandant Höss and his wife (who are based on real people) appear on the surface to be a middle-class German couple with marital difficulties.  But this is WWII, and they are really monsters.  They live outside the walls of Auschwitz.  On one side of the wall, the Commandant is building the machinery of mass extermination; on the other side, she is building her dream home.  She is in love with her house and gardens.  An equestrian, he is in love with his horse.  What is unique about director Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust story is the horror is not visually center stage.  We only are aware of it in the background smoke emerging from crematory chimneys and the sound of gun shots and screams. For the viewer, it becomes unnerving, almost unbearable, made more so by the obliviousness of Höss and his wife.  Reviewers evoke the phrase “the banality of evil,” the expression coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt writing about Adolf Eichmann, another bureaucrat of genocide like Höss.  At the end, Höss seems to have a psychosomatic reaction to his own depravity in a building as dark and empty as his soul.

            The film is cerebral and symbolic and requires the viewer already possess more than a causal knowledge of the Holocaust.  Yet banality is banality.  This film will not fall within everyone’s zone of interest.  Still, when most movies pass through us like beer at Oktoberfest, we can value a film that leaves us mulling over its message well after its conclusion.

            This year was a good one for great adult movies.  Last year found me struggling to pick an Oscar worthy film and puzzled when the worst of the lot, a puerile piece of fluff called Everything Everywhere All at Once was chosen as best picture.  This year, I would be happy if any of my final four films was chosen as best picture.

            If I had to pick the film that I found the most emotionally satisfying, I would pick The Holdovers.  Paul Giamatti plays a strict teacher who holds his private school students in mocking contempt and is upset when he must chaperone a group of them, the holdovers, who will not be returning home for the Christmas holiday.  Dominic Sessa plays the troubled and troublesome student who ends up being the teacher’s sole charge, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays the kitchen help, a woman living a life of quiet grief and now stuck with the other two over the holiday break.  The acting here is wonderful, at times comic, at times heart rendering.  Both Giamatti and Randolph are up for Academy Awards.  You get so involved with the characters that you want to follow their lives after the film ends.

            Yet it’s not a big screen film if you’re looking for something that uses all the resources of cinema.

            Neither is my next selection, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction.  This film is the one that I laughed out loud the most when watching.  A satire, it’s also the smartest observer of contemporary life.  Jeffrey Wright (up for best actor) is pitch perfect as the serious Black novelist frustrated by America’s love affair with stereotypic Black gangsterism.  No one seems to get the novel that he writes as a joke, and their misunderstandings are hilarious.

            Finally, my last two films, films that can only be fully appreciated when watched on a big screen. 

            Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray.  The story is a bizarre take on the Frankenstein tale.  Lanthimos’ genius is in translating the book into the style of Steam Punk (kind of Victorian science fiction) and creating a cinematic world that is overwhelmingly immersive, so much so that one reviewer remarked that the real world seemed pretty drab after he left the theater.  Emma Stone plays a pregnant Victorian woman.  After a suicide attempt leaves her brain dead, a maverick scientist (played by Willian Dafoe with his full creep on) transplants the baby’s brain into the adult woman and then revives her to live another life, learning to live all over again, only this time with an adult body and free from Victorian constraints on women and on sexuality.  The film is a paean to the insatiable human desire to know – both carnally and intellectually.  Gray’s amusing book is much more subtle, with conflicting views on what happened and its significance.  But Lanthimos’ movie is a hell of a lot of fun.

            The odds-on favorite to win best picture is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It’s a work that does so many things well that it’s a master class in filmmaking.  In a way Nolan was faced with the same task as Scorsese in undertaking his film project:  translate a big, complex book unto the screen (although Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus is almost twice as long as Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon).  Where Scorsese falls short, Nolan triumphs.  The film is skillfully edited so that complexity doesn’t leave the viewer perplexed.  Like a great work of literature, the film unfolds on a number levels, in this case, the mythic, the political, the scientific, the personal.  At the heart of the film is Cillian Murphy’s performance as Oppenheimer.  A truly amazing actor, he stands just 5’7”, yet in the show Peaky Blinders you believe that he is the character in the show’s theme song: “the tall, dark man with the red right hand.”  In Oppenheimer, he is the slightly built, charismatic scientific genius.

            The film has its peak impact in a large theatre where you are encompassed by the sound track that both takes you inside Oppenheimer’s mind and recreates the booming sound of his history altering weapon of mass destruction.  Similarly, only the big screen can do justice to the visuals of the big bomb.  Here is a case where the artistic creation seems truer to the reality than the documentary footage. 

            Exploiting all the potentials of cinema, Oppenheimer is a masterpiece, and the finest film of the year.