Good Oscars evening, everyone! Confession: I did not watch every film nominated for Best Picture this year, nor did I watch enough films that weren’t nominated to have informed opinions about what should have made the cut instead. Of the ten films on the list, I watched seven. The only ones I didn’t get to were Anatomy of a Fall (because it’s foreign and I didn’t really hear about it, but I heard it was overrated anyway), Poor Things (because it looked grotesque, and I’m not a fan of the grotesque), and Killers of the Flower Moon (because look, it’s 3.5 hours long, and yes I know, I’ll get to it…at some point).
However, I will say that as a sometime film critic, I haven’t been this happy with a slate of nominations in a while, and I don’t think I’m alone. While I had definite preferences, I found something to like about all of them. Even Barbie! Sort of!
I’ve already written at length about the odds-on favorite, Oppenheimer, so click here for that if you’re curious to get full thoughts (it’s free too—share away!) I also already wrote at some length about Zone of Interest, so to save time as I throw this together I’m not going to include any new thoughts on that here (click here for that post, which is mostly reserved for paid subscribers). But I have some longer new ramblings about everything else. These mini-reviews aren’t arranged in any particular order, and most of them will be reserved for paid subscribers, including thoughts on my personal favorite, which actually wasn’t Oppenheimer. Which one was it, you ask? Subscribe to find out! Meanwhile, if you’re still just a free subscriber, you can browse some of my other film writing here. As always, thank you for reading.
Oppenheimer
“They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it.”
This, at long last, is the year of Christopher Nolan. And for once, it will be a win everyone can be happy about. Can anyone even name the last five Best Picture winners? I couldn’t without googling, and as soon as I did, I remembered why.
I saw Oppenheimer twice in the theater, which I rarely do, but I’ve always made exceptions for Nolan. Going into this one, I confess I was a bit skeptical. I worried that in attempting to capture all the ins and outs of Oppenheimer’s drama, it would wind up too talky, too cluttered, too on-the-nose. And truth be told, in some moments it is all of those things. Subtle dialogue has never been Nolan’s strong suit. It’s hard not to wince a little as he shoehorns the Bhagavad Gita into an awkward lovemaking scene, because he has to find some way, somewhere to introduce the line. You know, that line.
But Nolan came, Nolan saw, and Nolan has conquered. Oppenheimer is the work of a filmmaker in his prime, a director’s director who understands better than almost any of his peers what “cinema” means. It is also a moment of triumph for Cillian Murphy, who has patiently labored in many supporting roles for Nolan over the years and will now likely take home the Best Actor trophy. Again, few will complain about this, including me, though personally I would actually give top honors to Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers. But Murphy delivers an achingly good performance, the most compelling in a Nolan film since Heath Ledger’s Joker. Hopefully, unlike Ledger, he has many more great years ahead of him.
Barbie
“To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t just about horses, I lost interest.”
Someone once asked the legendary feminist philosopher Susan Haack what she thought about disparate impact and gender discrimination in her discipline. After a pause, she answered very deliberately (I’m lightly paraphrasing this from memory), “When I began my career, it was a distinct disadvantage to be a woman. Today, it is a distinct disadvantage to be a man. It seems to me that we have failed to stop at justice along the way.”
I hadn’t thought about this marvelous quote in a while, until my youngest sister reminded me of it after we got out of Barbie in the theater. My sister is much closer to the target audience of Barbie than I am, so I was unsure to what extent our reactions would converge. To my pleasant surprise, we came out generally in agreement that Greta Gerwig failed to stop at justice along the way to Barbieland.
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