Best Picture thoughts, 2022 edition

[dougo]

Once again, it's time for my annual rundown of my thoughts about the Best Picture nominees. I saw a record high number of movies last year, and I managed to see 8 of the 10 nominees before the nominations were announced. Fortunately the other two were still in theaters, so I ended up seeing all 10 on a big screen (but only one in 3D...). In fact, as of this past Monday afternoon, I've now seen every film nominated in all categories (for the second year in a row), but I'll save my picks for another post.

So without further ado, here are the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture of 2022, in the order I saw them:

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Loyal readers may remember that I ranked this at the very bottom of my list. Yes, unlike a large majority of people I know, I downright hated this movie. About a third of the way into it, I had the dawning realization of "oh no, this movie is Not For Me". A little while later, I seriously considered walking out, which is something I've basically never done. I stuck through it, and I'm glad I did just because I wouldn't feel entitled to have an opinion without having seen the whole thing. But my opinion did not improve.

It's hard to put into words exactly why I bounced off EEAAO so hard. Mostly it comes down to the campy, absurdist, cartoonish style of humor, which I found puerile and grating. But the big emotional beats didn't work for me either; they mostly felt cliched and shallow. And something about the combination of these two things put it in another level of nope for me.

Anyway, I don't need to continue complaining because I'm happy that so many people are so wildly adoring of this movie. I can admit that it succeeds in doing what it intends to do, and if you are into what it does, that's worth celebrating.

Top Gun: Maverick

I had never seen the original Top Gun, but I watched it as homework before going to see the sequel. It was... entertaining in a cheesy way, but kinda bad? The sequel was... pretty much the same, if a bit more spectacular. It's a fun ride on a big screen with good sound, but it doesn't rise above a classic popcorn movie. So I don't really understand why a lot of people seriously want this to win Best Picture.

Elvis

Another summer popcorn movie, but even more dumb. Austin Butler is decent at aping Elvis in performances, but not much else about this film works. Symbolic of its need to pointlessly exaggerate well-known historical events is the scene near the end where Sad Fat Elvis shoots not just one television, but three televisions, side-by-side. I'm far from an Elvis fan, but surely he at least deserves better than this.

Triangle of Sadness

From the trailer, I went into this expecting a wacky madcap comedy about the super-rich acting stupid and getting their comeuppance. Which didn't feel like something I needed to see, but it was getting a lot of positive buzz so I figured I'd try it out. It turned out to be much more subdued and subtle than that, at least for the first third of the movie, quietly observing a pair of "hot dummies" as they parlay their influencer lifestyle into berths on a luxury cruise. Then Woody Harrelson shows up as the cruise captain, and it starts to feel a little more traditionally wacky. But then it abruptly launches into a very long scene involving extreme amounts of bodily fluids, which I'm sure many people find uproariously funny, but to me was more of a torturous assault on my psyche than any slasher horror flick. I seriously had to hold my hands over my eyes for an extended period. (But then the sounds kept going...)

The final third of the movie becomes yet another totally different kind of thing, and I guess this is the part that people felt elevated it to Best Picture quality. I enjoyed that part the most as well, but not enough to make up for the preceding trauma. Which I still sometimes have unpleasant flashbacks to. Let's hope those images don't make the showcase montage during the ceremony.

Tár

This had a lot to like, and a lot to appreciate. What I liked was the Kubrickian precision of the visuals, particularly the brutalist interiors and the why-is-she-in-a-lake dream imagery. What I appreciated was Cate Blanchett's performance, which was unfortunately always A Performance in capital letters and never felt like inhabiting an actual human person. Since watching this, I've almost come around to the position that she's performing the role of a character who herself is always self-consciously performing. But if true, I think it's a bad choice, because it still just takes me out of being absorbed in a character study.

What I didn't really like or appreciate was its attempt at both-sidesing the "cancel culture" debate, or maybe just parodying the idea of both-sidesing. Again, either way it just made my eyes roll at the potential discourse of "she may be a monster, but she had some good points". No, not really, she didn't.

I did both appreciate and like the late reveal of her actual origin story. But I'd rather the film had ended there instead of tacking on the epilogue that didn't quite work.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Like last year's West Side Story, this is another remake of a previous Best Picture winner. I've never seen the 1930 version, and didn't bother doing my homework; I thought I had read the book in high school, but very little of the story felt familiar to me, so much so that I was even a bit surprised that it was told from the German point of view. (Perhaps I conflated it with some other famous WWI novel, but I don't know what that could have been. Probably the particulars just completely left my brain after exams.)

I am certainly familiar with the genre of anti-war war films, going back to the horrifyingly sad last act of the 1979 movie of the musical Hair that my dad took me to as a kid. (Poor Treat Williams!) All Quiet does a fine job of contrasting the protagonists' initial enthusiasm for the war effort (due to recruitment propaganda) with the actual unrelenting horrors of trenches, tanks, flamethrowers, and bloody mud. It also does a fine job of portraying the class divide, as Baron Zemo sits around in well-appointed train cars trying to negotiate an end to the war that won't just lead to another World War in a couple decades (spoiler: he fails).

So yeah, "War is hell" is not exactly a groundbreaking theme for a movie, but aside from the seeming unnecessariness of retelling this story, it's very well-executed with compelling visuals and score.

The Banshees of Inisherin

Finally, a movie that I flat-out enjoyed without reservation! What seems like a simple tale of a somewhat ridiculous dispute between two villagers on a quiet (fictional) island off the Irish coast escalates into both a literal conflagration and a metaphor for the entire concept of conflagrations, against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War conflagrating over on the mainland. It's also about the tension between leisure vs. accomplishment which is a theme I'm always interested in.

I'd like to see this win, as the highest-ranking nominee on my list, but sadly I don't think it can compete with the Big and Flashy of most of the other entries.

The Fabelmans

Okay, Steven Spielberg, we get it, your childhood had some mildly bad things happen but you still became a genius of film. Maybe just pretend to have a little modesty??

Women Talking

I loved Sarah Polley in Go, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter, but I'm embarrassed to say I never got around to watching the acclaimed films she's made as a director. I'm glad I saw this one, which was absorbing and compelling, but I came away with the feeling that the premise was too contrived in order to make an on-the-nose point about the evils of the Patriarchy. It wasn't until later that I learned that the novel this was adapted from was based on real-life atrocities occuring in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, as recently as 2009! Chalk another one up for "truth is stranger than fiction", and also more horrifying, sad, and angrymaking.

Avatar: The Way of Water

I hated Avatar, and was appalled that it was nominated for Best Picture: a corny and awkwardly-animated overlong retelling of a Dances With Wolves story but with tall-cat aliens being colonized via an outlandish virtual-reality conceit.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself actually honestly enjoying this even-longer and kinda-dumber sequel! The transition to the life aquatic won me over, I guess. And after spending so much time with the villains (the humans) that I was starting to wonder if they weren't actually supposed to be the villains, they suddenly started getting their comeuppance in the form of wild waves of death and carnage—a shocking reminder that this was not an edgeless MCU knock-off after all, but an actual grown-up(ish) movie from the maker of Terminator and Aliens.

It still has so many problems as a sci-fi story; for one thing, the diminishment of stakes that results from the idea of digitizing a consciousness and putting it into a new body makes me want to see a total moratorium on sci-fi using this idea. And the two completely different reasons given for the humans wanting to continue colonizing poor Pandora once the market for Unobtanium collapsed are forgotten nearly instantly after they're introduced. But somehow I just didn't mind all these groaners, I was fine just going with the flow. That's the Way of Water, I guess.

Still, it felt more like the first three episodes of a season of television. But you're not going to see a television show on a big screen with 3D goggles any time soon, I suppose. Hooray for movies!