The 95th Academy Awards are upon us, for some reason. Jimmy Kimmel will host and some number of millions of people will watch and far more will instead just find out who won on TikTok or Instagram or whathaveyou, which will herald the end of civilization according to a great many articles after the fact. ABC will make like $125 million in advertising revenue from this event, because plenty of people do still watch these things, if not the 40+ million who might have not all that long ago. I will watch because I always watch the Oscars. I like “the movies” as an institution, I like gawking at the train wreck of self-regard and self-seriousness and moral certainty frequently on display, I like the prospect of some weird shit happening on live television, I like knowing that I am participating in something with the rest of the culture, even if the audience is smaller than it has ever been. I like the absurdity of it all, the sincerity of it, the vanity and self-congratulation and the decadence and the whole stupid thing.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Oscar nominations also help me decide what movies to watch from the last year that I otherwise hadn’t or probably wouldn’t have bothered to see. I have now watched eight of the ten films nominated for Best Picture this year, and will offer brief capsule reviews below, in ascending order of Best Picture Worthiness based on my own proprietary formula of determining filmic achievement and greatness. My reviews will spoil plot points of the movies in question, so stop reading if that bothers you, you big baby.
10. Avatar: The Way of Water
Just like everyone else has already said about this movie, it was a spectacular visual feast. Every inch of the enormous screen was filled with something interesting for three hours, as long as you don’t count any of the subtitles. It held my attention for its entire runtime, and I would be happy to watch many, many more hours of even the meandering middle stretch of the movie, which plays like an episode of Planet Earth, as long as you ignore all the tween drama happening between the characters on screen. I liked the look and experience of this movie so much that I went back and saw it a second time, because I wanted my kids to be able to experience it in 3D, on the big screen, with the big sound system and everything.
But holy shit, what a stupid movie. There is about a sitcom’s worth of plot in the whole thing, and considerably less if you take out everything that is just a repeat of the first movie. The second act of Avatar was Jake Sully learning the skills, customs, and ways of a native tribe, the shedding of preconceived notions by all involved, and becoming accepted by the group despite being an outsider. The second act of The Way of Water is Jake Sully and his family learning the skills, customs, and ways of a different native tribe, the shedding of preconceived notions by all involved, and becoming accepted by the group despite being outsiders. It is the same story.
The rest of the plot is plainly ridiculous, even within the logic of the universe of the movie. This evil mega-corporation is terra-forming the beautiful Pandora to make it more habitable for humans so that the humans that show up can hunt whales and extract from them their special brain goo that is, for the humans, some sort of fountain-of-youth juice—which is apparently worth about $80 million per whale. $80 million per whale! For a company that is doing business more than four light years away from Earth! Do you know how many goddamn whales there would have to be to justify the sort of expenses we’re talking about, here? I have no idea, but it’s got to be a lot! Never mind the fact that this company has already essentially achieved human immortality—it is established that you can download a person’s entire consciousness onto a USB drive and then upload it onto an Avatar, who can then go on to make new memories and continue to live life as that person, albeit in a different body. Just work on scaling that technology, you don’t need the whale brain-goo. Stupid movie.
Oh, and the funniest line of the movie is when a giant whale thing says, in the subtitles, that he doesn’t want to talk about a specific memory because “IT’S TOO PAINFUL.” Someday I will have this gif, and I will deploy it every day and in every text conversation until everyone who has known me has sworn off interpersonal communication with me.
This movie made an unthinkable amount of money, just like its predecessor, and just like it's predecessor, no one will ever talk about it again except to say how weird it is that it made all that money and had no meaningful cultural impact outside of my personal gif keyboard. It is a very professionally produced and spectacular fireworks show, and the most anybody ever says about a fireworks show is “wow,” which they say once, at the end, and never think about again.
9. The Fabelmans
Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story is just fine, and probably even wonderful, but I wouldn’t know because I haven’t yet seen it. I despise the trailer, but I suspect I’ll like the movie, because I almost always at least like his movies. All I know for certain is that it’s better than Avatar: The Way of Water, and it is weird that Spielberg cast Michelle Williams to play his mother.
8. Top Gun: Maverick
I loved this movie. This movie rules. It made a whole ton of money and is being credited, in some quarters, with being the salvation of the entire theater-going experience. I didn’t see it in a theater, but I did see it in my brother’s basement with his kickass home theater, and it was still quite awesome. Jennifer Connolly has apparently had only the good cosmetic surgery, and looks even more weirdly youthful than Tom Cruise does in this movie.
This is also a very stupid movie whose entire second act is training for the Death Star trench run from the first Star Wars movie and whose entire third act is just the Death Star trench run from the first Star Wars movie. It looks and sounds awesome, though, and is a much better movie than the first Top Gun. This is a movie wherein a bunch of alphas get told that they can’t do a thing and then go about doing the thing. Is it shameless military propaganda, and the single best recruitment ad the military has ever had? Probably! Who cares!
If there were any justice in this world this stupid and awesome movie would win Best Picture, but the Academy is bullshit, and awards are given on the basis of what the Academy believes the giving of the award says about the Academy, or what people will think about the Academy. What they don’t understand is that no one actually cares about the Academy at all besides those pompous assholes themselves, and they should just give the award to Maverick, and Tom Cruise should fuckin’ bust through the roof of the Dolby Theater and accept the award on a bungee cord before being yoinked on out of there by a passing 747.
7. Women Talking
This is a perfectly fine movie with a handful of truly terrific performances by the various women, and one pretty good performance by the only dude involved. What I like about the movie outweighs what I can’t stand about it, but I am constitutionally incapable of not pointing out the things I don’t like about things, which is perhaps an example of why they kicked all the men out of the room to have their little pow-wow.
This movie is based on a novel which itself was inspired by actual events but feels like it was written for the stage. That’s not a problem, exactly, but most of the movie takes place on one set and consists of nothing but women, you know, talking. The fact that they’re all so well-spoken and seemingly erudite is odd considering they were never taught to read and write. The further fact that the first big set-piece of the movie sounds like an argument between feminist factions in the feminist philosophy class I took in college is also quite off-putting. It is hard to make philosophical questions sound natural coming out of the mouths of people in drama, and I don’t think it quite succeeds, here, though there is plenty of effort made to ground the conversation in the reality of the characters.
There’s also a moment in which a trans character, who is willfully mute, decides to talk to someone upon having their name for themselves properly used. It is wildly out of place, and screams like a big neon sign of moralizing nonsense in the middle of the movie. In a movie about the systemic rape of all the women of a closed community by some large percentage of the men, it is a very weird nod to the alleged importance of genuflecting before someone’s self-identification. Never mind that the movie, though it tries to avoid it, kinda suggests that this character’s rape was the facilitating event that led to transition. It was just weird and out of place and its good intentions do not justify its inclusion.
Also, this movie features not nearly enough of Frances McDormand.
Also also, like all works of art about ideas more than character and story, though it left me with something to chew on for a while afterwards, ultimately it’s more intellectually interesting as an exercise than it is emotionally or psychologically compelling.
6. Elvis
Baz Luhrmann doing Baz Luhrmann things. This is a very weird movie to be nominated for Best Picture. It was a terrific experience and very fun to look at, but I’m not sure it achieved much in the way of telling a compellingly emotional story about the King of Rock. It’s way better than that piece of shit Queen movie they made a few years ago, which was a by-the-numbers biopic with all the heart and imagination of a made-for-VH1 movie. The performance by Austin Butler was very good, and I enjoyed it about as I do any Baz Luhrmann movie, which is quite a bit. I also like Tom Hanks’s very strange performance as narrator and Elvis’s manager. People who complained about the fat suit and the accent are wrong. Hanks is great in this, and using his Colonel Tom Parker as a way in was a good framing device for the story Luhrmann wanted to tell.
It is also interesting to me that this movie came out the same year as Blonde, given that they are substantially the same movie, in terms of the basics of the story. Both films would like to indict the public for the way we use up our stars, for the way we dehumanize them and take from them even as we ostensibly give them so much. That there is always a parasitic facilitator nearby helping to give the American public what it wants does not give us any absolution. Somewhat relatedly, Blonde should have also been nominated.
5. TÁR
This is the other movie on the list I didn’t get to see yet. Why number five? Mostly because I couldn’t really justify putting it any higher up. I suspect that I’m really going to like this movie when it finally comes around to one of the streaming services I already subscribe to.
4. Everything Everywhere All at Once
I bought this movie on disc without having seen it yet because I had a sneaking suspicion that this was one I would want to revisit a few times, and that it would be worth owning for that reason. I was right! I really enjoyed this movie, and I think it will be even better upon rewatch. There is a lot of buzz—this is an inside-Hollywood term for the noise hair clippers make during a really great haircut—around this movie’s chances to win the category, but I kinda don’t see it happening. This is a very weird movie, and it would quite possibly be the strangest movie to ever win Best Picture. With apologies to anyone who insists on asking questions about what the hell is going on in this movie that we’re all watching together for the first time, this is the last movie I would ever want to watch with my mother, who is very much one of those people. No amount of pausing and explaining would make this movie any more legible.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t good, which it very much was. It’s like a cross between a Charlie Kaufman movie and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Turning Red. It’s also the story of a woman going through a mid-life crisis, which isn’t a very common story told in major motion pictures, and is only like half in English. Its main conflict is between mother and daughter, and has big themes of identity and generational trauma and all the rest thrown in. It’s another movie that makes a big stink about the importance of validating someone’s identity in a way that places it firmly in this cultural moment. It’s cute near to the point of cloying at times, and its randomness is too often for its own sake, rather than serving the story. It’s a much messier movie than it needs to be, though I suspect this was also edited into the best possible version of itself, barring some rewrites. It sounds like I’m complaining a lot, I guess, but it was quite good—I just don’t see it as a Best Picture, unless the Academy believes that choosing this one sends the right sort of message, which it just might! This is a good movie that does not transcend itself to become something really, truly great.
3. All Quiet on the Western Front
I guess by default I have to put this movie here at number three. This is a punishing movie to watch, given all the war going on in it, and the obvious pointlessness of all the death, and the general unpleasantness of watching very dirty men fighting and dying and knowing all along that this movie will end and a generation later the whole damn world will do this all over again, but somehow much worse. The performances are all believable, though that may be helped by the fact that it’s in a language I don’t understand. This film was apparently made for just $20 million, which is incredible, as it looks fantastic. It also sounds good—I particularly liked the way this part of the score was deployed throughout:
They will always make more war movies even though we should have already learned all the lessons of the war movies. War movies give otherwise unremarkable people the opportunity to reveal themselves to be remarkable in various ways, for better or worse. This was a very well done one of those war movies.
2. Triangle of Sadness
This movie was too damn long and has a corny-ass M. Night Shyamalan ending but I liked it anyway. It doesn’t care for humans very much—or at least the humans it encounters in the world of this movie—and I often get a kick out of watching other people make art with great contempt for their own characters. This is a very funny movie with a very unfunny title, and the only reason I watched or knew about it at all it is because it was nominated for an Oscar. I’m running out of time to call this a preview.
1. The Banshees of Inisherin
That leaves us with this one last movie, which was a wonderful movie about two friends who go to war with each other even though only one can really explain why, and his explanation is largely unsatisfactory. It is a movie about human failure and obstinance and delusions of grandeur and meaning beyond the meaning we can create with and for each other. It’s a funny and beautiful movie and as it is sort of a movie about war without being a war movie, it gives its main character, an otherwise unremarkable dummy, an opportunity to rather suddenly, when pushed to his extremes, become more remarkable. I think this is the best movie on this list, and I hope it wins. I even suspect it will win, because while Everything Everywhere All At Once might be the consensus correct choice, I think it’s just too damn strange to actually get enough votes.
