Best Picture thoughts, 2021 edition

[dougo]

Ever since movie theaters opened back up last summer, I've been going to quite a lot of weekday matinees (which are mostly empty, which is great for COVID reasons but also because of the lack of distractions). Over the last few months I've been particularly aiming to see all the movies in the Oscar race, and when the nominations were announced, I had already seen eight of the ten Best Picture nominees, and I watched the other two the following week. Overall I managed to see seven of the ten in the theater; I'm certainly glad that it's become so easy to stream movies at home, but there's still nearly always an appreciable difference when seeing it on the big screen. (Which was confirmed again when I saw The Godfather in a theater for the first time this past week!)

Anyway, I've been procrastinating writing up my Best Picture thoughts since then (I really should just jot down some notes right after I see the movies, but I never seem to get into that habit), and meanwhile, I kept on seeing more and more nominated movies... when finally, as of 2:30 this morning, I've now managed to watch every single nominated film! Now I probably won't have time to comment on the other categories before the ceremonies kick off tonight, but maybe I'll do that in a followup post later. But for now, here's my traditional write-up of just the Best Picture nominees, in the order I saw them:

Dune

I am very fond of the David Lynch version of Dune, but I'm happy to see another take on it. This version is suitably epic in all dimensions, less campy without being overly grimdark. Really, I loved it, no notes (except I didn't love the vocalizations on the score), and it was my clear favorite of the nominees, but the fact that this is a Part 1 (it stops pretty abruptly halfway through the story) means I don't think it's suitable for Best Picture. If Part 2 maintains the quality, I expect it will be a strong contender to win as a stand-in for the complete story, a la Return of the King being the only Lord of the Rings movie to win.

Belfast

Roma was my second favorite Best Picture nominee for 2018 (behind Black Panther); Belfast seems like Kenneth Branagh's version of Roma (a black-and-white autobiographical film about his childhood during a time of political unrest), but I was far less impressed. It's not a bad film, it's pretty engaging and watchable, just kinda... meh. The best part was seeing the kid reading a Thor comic book (Branagh directed the first Thor movie in the MCU).

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion made a western, huh. Although, I've seen some people call The Power of the Dog an anti-western, and not just because it was filmed in New Zealand: it challenges the usual archetypes of masculinity and morality, and, fair enough. But I found the way the story was told to be overly confusing, accentuated by the suffocating use of Johnny Greenwood's unsettling score. Ordinarily I like films that are intentionally confusing and unsettling, but this just felt like kind of a mess. It mostly came together by the ending, which is maybe why this is a front-runner in the Best Picture race despite being so inaccessible otherwise. But it didn't quite work for me.

King Richard

A feel-good biopic about the Williams sisters and their tennis-obsessed dad. I'm not a big fan of biopics, and King Richard didn't elevate the form, but it was... fine? Are you sensing a pattern here?

Nightmare Alley

A remake of a 1940s noir film, and/or a new adaptation of the novel it was based on. I liked everything about this except for Bradley Cooper, who just didn't convince me that he could be both a sullen yokel farmhand and a smooth-talking con-man mentalist. I haven't seen the original so I don't know if it had the same problem, but I can imagine a lot of better choices for casting this role today. I thought Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water was underrated, even after it won Best Picture, and I think Nightmare Alley is also a little underrated, but it didn't charm me nearly as much as his previous winner. Given the field, though, I'd be okay with it somehow pulling out another win for del Toro.

Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson is kind of hit-or-miss for me; I loved Magnolia, hated The Master, and the rest are somewhere in between. I guess I'd put Licorice Pizza in the top half; it was a fun '70s hangout, with a bunch of amusing vignettes, but it was a bit too aimless to congeal into something great. No deep commentary or particular emotional resonance. Nothing wrong with a fun hangout movie, though.

Don't Look Up

Ugh, don't get me started. On its face, it's an okay satire of comet-apocalypse disaster movies. But the way McKay and Sirota are insisting that Don't Look Up is a message movie about climate change is something I find deeply counterproductive, not least of all because the (extremely important!) problem of climate change has such different dynamics from a comet hitting Earth in six months. But also, most of the jokes just aren't very funny, the Timothee Chalamet character arc was completely pointless, and the mid-credits epilogue is insultingly dumb slapstick. This had better not win!!

West Side Story

I'm kind of allergic to musicals, so I had never seen the original West Side Story, so I watched that first. And, guess what, I liked it! Incredibly vivid colors, compelling energetic choreography, and most of the songs were comfortably familiar. So why did this need to be remade?? Spielberg's version is not bad, and has the obvious benefit of casting actual Puerto Ricans (without brownface!), but the colors and performances are all a bit less vivid and less exciting. And making the rumble more like an actual action scene rather than an explicitly artificial dance seems like a huge mistake.

Drive My Car

I saw Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy a couple weeks before Drive My Car, and that may have spoiled me a bit. The former is an anthology of three short films, each consisting of very long dialogues where the actors hardly move a muscle or express emotion. And I don't understand Japanese so I was basically reading the whole time. But despite all that, it was very compelling and moving. Drive My Car is fairly similar, but it tells one long three-hour story, while also incorporating excerpts of performances of Beckett and Chekhov plays. The multi-lingual nature of the plays, and the film itself, are fascinating, including a deaf character who performs her stage pieces in Korean Sign Language, but I did feel like I was missing a dimension of the film by not knowing any of the languages. Still, it's compelling and moving, I just think I prefer the more concentrated form in Wheel.

CODA

I had missed this completely when it came out, and then started to hear a little bit of a buzz before the nominations, but a movie about Children Of Deaf Adults felt a bit too much like an afterschool special for me to seek it out. Then when CODA was nominated, I reluctantly watched it on AppleTV+, and, sure enough, it felt a bit too much like an afterschool special. It's a pretty well-done version of that, and I'm glad the deaf community is having a moment (after The Sound of Metal last year, the deaf character in Drive My Car, a deaf character on The Walking Dead in the last few seasons, etc.), but I could see every plot development coming a mile away, and the story played out by the numbers. I'll be disappointed if this wins, but not surprised given its feel-good nature especially compared with The Power of the Dog.

So there you have it. Kind of a meh year; my only real favorite was Dune, but with a big asterisk for not having an ending. Which means I guess I'm rooting for Drive My Car? But really, I just want anything but Don't Look Up to win!

(See also last year's thoughts.)