dougo | Oscar 2023 picks and Best Picture thoughts (Reply)

This past Thursday afternoon, I completed the Oscars Death Race, having seen all 53 of the movies nominated this year! (That put me in 137th place on the leaderboard.) Today is Oscar Sunday, so it's my last chance to continue my annual tradition of writing up my picks—that is, who I would vote for on my ballot if I were an Academy member. (I also made predictions for who would win but that's less interesting.)

I also have a tradition of writing up my thoughts for each of the Best Picture nominees. Last year I had seen 8 of the 10 nominees when they were announced; this year I had seen 9, and I had already planned to see the 10th that afternoon, so that worked out well for me! But I never got around to making that post, so I'm combining it here with my picks-for-all-categories post. As usual, I'll cover them in the order I saw them. Below that I'll rank them in order from most to least favorite, along with my rating (out of 10) for each.

Past Lives

I saw this way back in June, and I may have seen too many movies this year because it's already pretty fuzzy in my memory. But I remember liking it a lot. It's billed as a romance, but it's more about romanticizing. Good performances, good cinematography, a nice calming atmosphere. What's not to like?

Oppenheimer

You may have noticed that this was almost at the bottom of my end-of-year ranking (89 of 90). Yeah, sadly this is the second year in a row where the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture is a movie I really really did not like. I was pretty optimistic going in; ordinarily I'm not a big fan of bio-pics, but I considered myself a Christopher Nolan fan (aside from Interstellar, don't get me started on that one) and I was fairly familiar with both the physics discoveries of the 1930s and the story of the Manhattan Project in particular (thanks to, for example, Jimmy Maher's series of blog posts about the interactive fiction game Trinity). But, oh geez, this was a mess.

The first third of the movie, covering the physics discoveries and Oppenheimer's ascendance through academia, is for some reason cut like a trailer, edited at a frantic pace where nothing is allowed to really land, even laugh lines. The middle third was less breathless, moving to New Mexico for the Manhattan Project proper, and this was the most watchable part of the movie for me, but still a bit jumbled from the real story that I know. And the actual test explosion somehow managed to be underwhelming ("there was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!"). Then the final third was the incredibly anticlimactic story of... Congressional hearings? "I have become Death, destroyer of Senate confirmations." Yawn!

There are the usual problems Nolan has with depicting women as rounded characters with stories beyond being important to an important man. Turning that Bhagavad Gita line into a sex scene with gratuitous nudity is absurd. But I also have issues with the whole hand-wringing treatment of the morality of the bomb and its use in the war, or of even doing nuclear physics at all. There are deep political, ethical, and philosophical arguments that could have been presented, but this mostly dodges all that and just takes it for granted that discovering how to split the atom was the most important and worst thing in history. I don't have time to write that essay but needless to say, I disagree.

Barbie

I've always enjoyed Greta Gerwig as an actress; Lady Bird was very good and Little Women was genuinely great. So I had high hopes for this, despite the inevitable dumbing down it would have to go through to satisfy the toymaking conglomerate. Happily it didn't seem to suffer too much from that, but sadly I didn't quite vibe with it the way I had hoped. In particular, the vaunted climactic speech given by America Ferrera seemed painfully bad to me, a millennial whine about "adulting" presented as a feminist rallying cry. "It's literally impossible to be a woman" seems rather insulting to the four billion women who somehow manage to literally exist!

Killers of the Flower Moon

I sympathize with fans of the book who wanted a more faithful adaptation; in particular, it would be interesting to someday see a more in-depth movie about the founding of the FBI. But Scorcese turning every story into an epic doomed-gangsters rise-and-fall film—it is what it is. This one is particularly unsympathetic to the villains here, which is appropriate. But it's still told primarily from their point of view, while Lily Gladstone's character stays a bit more enigmatic and exterior. But, Scorcese is probably not the person to tell that side of the story. Still, it's fun to see him do what he does, and he's still doing it well.

The Holdovers

I was a big fan of Alexander Payne's previous film Downsizing, which I think was unfairly maligned (partly due to a very misleading marketing campaign painting it as a silly comedy). I'm glad that his next film has been so well received—many were calling it a perfect Christmas movie. I'm not sure it will really join that canon, but I did enjoy this warmish tale of a trio of misfits from different generations trying to get along during a lonely winter. It was interesting to see the depiction of Western Massachusetts and Boston in 1970, while recogizing many locations that really haven't changed much in 50+ years.

Anatomy of a Fall

This is my clear favorite of the Best Picture nominees, yet it definitely doesn't feel like a Best Picture. It's fascinating the way this entirely fictional story is convincingly presented as a true-crime documentary, reminiscent of The Staircase (the '00s documentary series, which I watched last year after the very good dramatic series starring Colin Firth) down to its open-ended conclusion without actually settling the truth of what really happened. The depiction of what goes on during French coutroom proceedings is very interesting as well, and entertaining regardless of whether it's accurate (though I think it is?).

Maestro

Oh boy, Bradley Cooper is really going for it. You can't help but admire him while also feeling slightly embarrassed for him. More problematic is the way this focuses on a somewhat narrow slice of Leonard Bernstein's biography; this is not a new thing for biopics, but it's presented as being his life story when it's more just about the melodrama of his marriage. And it's a bit too melodramatic for me to really feel engaged.

Poor Things

Another "oh boy" for this one. I hated Yorgos Lanthimos's earlier movie The Lobster, but then I loved The Favourite, so I guess it was a coin flip whether I'd like this one. But I guess it came up tails, where tails means incredibly annoyed and bothered. Annoyed because Emma Stone spends the first half of the movie being a literal child, which is presented as comedic but I just found it tiresome. And bothered because Mark Ruffalo's character is clearly molesting this literal child in a woman's body, and while the movie isn't presenting him as a good guy, it's more played as mildly distasteful shenanigans by a cad rather than a deeply creepy violation of someone who can't consent. In the second half of the film when she grows up into an actual adult (her high-speed aging is never really explained, but although I've seen it billed as science fiction, it's not the kind of movie that cares at all about science), it gets more bearable, and starts to explore some interesting territory of female agency in turn-of-the-century Europe. I especially enjoyed Jerrod Carmichael's character, he and his dowager friend are a breath of fresh air. But then Charlie from Girls shows up and it falls back into an exploitation story. The ending is pretty well done, I'll give it that, but it doesn't rescue Poor Things from being... a poor film.

American Fiction

This is an odd melding of a satire about racism in the literary publishing world with a family drama and romcom. The satire part of it is funny and biting, though I'm told it's a decade or two outdated in that particular milieu (but it's not like we've solved racism, by any means). But the family drama and romcom aspects feel rather limp and cliché, down to a meet-cute where the woman literally drops her grocery bag and fruit spills out of it. Maybe it's a reference to the repeated can-of-tomatoes scene in Westworld? Doubtful. (Jeffrey Wright starred in that show, but not that scene). Anyway, I enjoyed this as a first directorial effort from comedy writer Cord Jefferson, but I'm a little surprised that it got a Best Picture nomination.

The Zone of Interest

The banality of evil, it is very, very banal. So banal, much banal. Yes, the boringness is the point of the film, but it still makes for a boring film. Ordinarily I have plenty of patience for a slow, quiet, observational film. But the very pointed nature of contrasting it with the audio of Auschwitz gets old pretty quickly. And yes, you're supposed to feel exhausted by the extended unrelentingness of this contrast! I respect this stance. But, that itself gets meta-old. The few interludes in night vision certainly break up the monotony, but I didn't really appreciate them as other than an injection of surreality until reading the backstory explanations after I got home, which is not the best way to experience a film.

Best picture

To sum up, here's my ranking and ratings of the nominees:

Anatomy of a Fall (8)
Past Lives (8)
The Holdovers (7)
Killers of the Flower Moon (7)
American Fiction (7)
Barbie (6)
The Zone of Interest (6)
Maestro (5)
Poor Things (4)
Oppenheimer (4)

Here are my rankings for the other categories:

Best actor

Paul Giamatti - The Holdovers
Bradley Cooper - Maestro
Jeffrey Wright - American Fiction
Colman Domingo - Rustin
Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer

Not much to say here, they were all fine, except Cillian Murphy felt totally wrong for J. Robert Oppenheimer. His performance as a quiet, stoic, enigmatic egghead did not convince me of his leadership skills he had to have had to be the "glue guy" that wrangled nuclear physicists in the Manhattan Project.

Best actress

Sandra Hüller - Anatomy of a Fall
Lily Gladstone - Killers of the Flower Moon
Carey Mulligan - Maestro
Emma Stone - Poor Things
Annette Bening - Nyad

Hüller's and Gladstone's performances were subtle and reserved while the other three were flashy and larger than life but not quite convincing. I'm giving Hüller the edge because of how much it really felt like I was watching a true crime documentary, but I would be happy if Gladstone wins.

Best supporting actress

Jodie Foster - Nyad
Da'Vine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers
Danielle Brooks - The Color Purple
America Ferrera - Barbie
Emily Blunt - Oppenheimer

It was a delight to see Jodie Foster as the prickly, horny genius detective in True Detective: Night Country and even more of a delight to see her display her acting range as the amiable supportive friend in Nyad. Hoping to keep seeing her on my TV and movie screens! Randolph seems to be the overwhelming favorite and I thought she was fine but I don't remember any specific scene in The Holdovers where she wowed me. Maybe the clip they show will remind me.

Best supporting actor

Robert Downey Jr - Oppenheimer
Robert De Niro - Killers of the Flower Moon
Sterling K. Brown - American Fiction
Mark Ruffalo - Poor Things
Ryan Gosling - Barbie

I will begrudgingly admit that Downey's performance was great, as he melted into his character in a way that De Niro never quite does for me anymore. It still didn't make me care about his character's storyline.

Best director

Anatomy of a Fall - Justine Triet
Killers of the Flower Moon - Martin Scorsese
The Zone of Interest - Jonathan Glazer
Poor Things - Yorgos Lanthimos
Oppenheimer - Christopher Nolan

Like I said last year, I don't really understand how to judge directing, so this just mirrors my ranking for the movies as a whole.

Best adapted screenplay

American Fiction
The Zone of Interest
Barbie
Poor Things
Oppenheimer

American Fiction was my clear favorite here. I'm giving The Zone of Interest the edge over Barbie because I think changing the fictional characters from the novel back into the real historical family they were based on was the right choice, as was getting rid of the love triangle and other novelistic aspects. Also that Barbie speech was a real dud for me. But the other two had even more dud writing! Weak category!

Best original screenplay

Anatomy of a Fall
Past Lives
The Holdovers
May December
Maestro

I enjoyed May December, but more for the performances, cinematography, and the rather arresting score than anything in the dialog or storytelling. Plus this is a strong category.

Best original song

Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People) - Killers of the Flower Moon (Scott George)
It Never Went Away - American Symphony (Jon Batiste, Dan Wilson)
I'm Just Ken - Barbie (Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt)
What Was I Made For? - Barbie (Billie Eilish, Finneas O'Connell)
The Fire Inside - Flamin' Hot (Diane Warren)

This categoory is notoriously full of schmaltz, and this year is no exception. Ugh.

Best original score

Oppenheimer - Ludwig Göransson
Killers of the Flower Moon - Robbie Robertson
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - John Williams
American Fiction - Laura Karpman
Poor Things - Jerskin Fendrix

Göransson is good at making stirring music, as is everyone else in this category. No real complaints here.

Best international feature

The Teachers' Lounge - Germany (9)
Perfect Days - Japan (7)
Io Capitano - Italy (7)
Society of the Snow - Spain (6)
The Zone of Interest - United Kingdom (6)

A very strong category. The Teachers' Lounge blew me away with how absorbed I was in the story and action from start to finish. It's a puzzle to figure out exactly what happened and why, but it also works on several metaphorical levels as a study of society and truth.

I'm a big Wim Wenders fan (Until the End of the World is one of my all-time favorites), and Perfect Days is quite charming and meditative, but it didn't quite connect with me the way I was hoping. I partially blame the fact that all the needle drops are Boomer classics rather than the post-punk aesthetic I usually associate with Wenders.

Io Capitano is a harrowing road movie across northern Africa, with great performances and beautiful visuals. Some of the events seem rather implausible, but the story works on almost a dream-logic or fairytale level (besides the surreal actual dream sequences).

I would not have expected there to be a need to remake Alive with more fidelity to the true story behind it, but Society of the Snow does justice to the survivors. I was taken out of the story a few times, though, from the overly-explicit depiction of the plane crash itself to the not-totally-convincing depiction of the brutal cold they endured. And there were a lot of characters who were hard for me to keep straight.

Best animated feature

Robot Dreams (9)
The Boy and the Heron (7)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (7)
Elemental (4)
Nimona (4)

I loved, loved, loved Robot Dreams, a seemingly lighthearted wordless cartoon about a lonely anthropomorphic dog who builds a robot companion. But it's elevated by being set in a very specific time and place—a crowded but slightly magical mid-1980s New York City—with incredible levels of accurate detail. It also packs an emotional punch as you get to know the characters and their friendships over a couple hours. It's not a tearjerker per se, just a deep combination of wistfulness and contentment. I wish this were more widely available to see, but it's not fully opening in theaters until May 31. Keep a eye out for it!

I'm a big Miyazaki fan; Princess Mononoke is another of my all-time favorites, and all his other films have a magical quality beyond just elevated kids' stories. The Boy and the Heron is an odd duck, though. The first hour or so is a slow, quiet, semi-autobiographical story of the titular boy moving from city to country life in postwar Japan after his mother dies. Then it goes through the looking glass into a fantastical pastiche of many of the themes and surreal images from his other movies—too many, really, because it comes across as a somewhat incoherent jumble as the characters tour through the fantasy dreamworlds that perhaps have more resonance with Miyazaki's personal experiences than they do for the audience. This is billed as his final film, but I've heard a rumor that he's working on another one, and I hope that one is a more satisfying capstone for his career.

I enjoyed the first Spider-Verse movie; this one was bigger and bolder, but it had real pacing issues, as some dramatic parts were too slow (seemingly intentionally so), and then some action parts would speed by too fast to follow.

I'm not as much of a Pixar fan as most, but Elemental felt pretty lackluster even for them. I respect the writer's attempt to convey his immigrant family experience, but the metaphors of class interaction just didn't make any sense with the physical rules of the fictional world of anthropomorphic fire and water.

I wanted to like Nimona, but I found it quite grating, in a way that reminded me of The Mitchells vs. the Machines from a couple years ago. Just really not the kind of humor or story that I vibe with. And the moral seems to be "monsters are people too, don't be xenophobic", but, this particular monster actually seemed to do some legitimately evil things?

Best documentary feature

Four Daughters (7)
To Kill a Tiger (7)
20 Days in Mariupol (7)
Bobi Wine: The People's President (7)
The Eternal Memory (5)

Another very strong category, but a lot of very heavy topics that make for at times tough watches. I'll say that I understand why 20 Days in Mariupol will and should win, because of its unblinking depiction of the unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. But its many explicit images of people literally dying go perhaps further than necessary and teeter towards exploitation.

Four Daughters is my clear favorite of these, with its blurring of the lines between documentary and performance, serving as a behind-the-scenes documentary about itself. It's also very interesting to watch it after having seen May December, because it's basically a real-life version of that story (though in a very different context). And the reveal of the mystery presented at the start is quite a twist, a bit upsetting but still satisfying as a feat of storytelling.

I wanted to like The Eternal Memory more than I did, with the potential to explore some interesting themes about natural memory loss vs. censorship and its impact on a community. But it spent a little too much time just living with the subject's descent into senility. It's very interesting to watch this in tandem with El Conde, though, as they coincidentally present very different angles into the Pinochet dictatorship in Chilé.

Best costume design

Napoleon
Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
Poor Things

I've seen lots of praise for the costumes in Poor Things but I found their tacky 1980s-ness very jarring and off-putting.

Best make-up and hairstyling

Society of the Snow
Maestro
Golda
Poor Things
Oppenheimer

It's fairly obvious why Maestro and Golda were nominated, with their facial transformations of famous actors into famous historical figures, but neither of them quite worked (compared to Oldman's seamless Churchill prosthetics in The Darkest Hour). I can't say that I remember anything exceptional about the make-up and hairstyling in Poor Things or Oppenheimer, but I guess the nature of these awards is that some well-regarded movies just get nominated in every single category because why not. (EDIT: okay haha I forgot about Willem Dafoe's weird Frankenstein thing in Poor Things.)

Best production design

Napoleon
Barbie
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer
Poor Things

Again, the design in Poor Things was confusing and off-putting to me, though certainly eye-catching at times. Napoleon was a bit uneven as a film overall but it was quite beautiful in a Barry Lyndon kind of way.

Best sound

The Zone of Interest
The Creator
Maestro
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Oppenheimer

Pretty clearly the audio gimmick in The Zone of Interest deserves an acknowledgement here. By contrast, the interludes of theater-shaking noise in Oppenheimer representing his guilt after the war was just overdone and clunky and inappropriately annoying.

Best film editing

Anatomy of a Fall
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Poor Things
Oppenheimer

As I said, the breakneck editing in the first third of Oppenheimer basically ruined it for me. Yet it will probably win because people seem to think Best Editing = the most editing.

Best cinematography

Killers of the Flower Moon
El Conde
Maestro
Poor Things
Oppenheimer

There are some arresting visuals in El Conde, alternately surreal and comical, which is the basic tone of the film as a whole, depicting Pinochet as a centuries-old vampire who can float across the sky. It sort of works and sort of doesn't, but I appreciate the attempt.

Best visual effects

The Creator
Napoleon
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

I mostly enjoyed The Creator as a kind of pulpy sci-fi tale with high production values, though the outright pro-AI propaganda was a bit weird at this particular time in the culture. But there were lots and lots of pretty cool effects.

Best live action short

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (8)
Invincible (6)
Knight of Fortune (5)
Red, White and Blue (4)
The After (4)

It's hard to compete with Wes Anderson, but I found this batch particularly weak. I would have liked to have seen Asteroid City get some recognition, but if this is what it takes to get him an Oscar, so be it.

Best animated short

Ninety-Five Senses (8)
Pachyderme (7)
Our Uniform (7)
Letter to a Pig (7)
War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko (5)

On the contrary, I liked these animated shorts more than I usually do. War is Over seems likely to win, I guess because of the name recognition (produced by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon), but although it starts off pretty well, the ending is comically naive and trivializing. Ninety-Five Senses, on the other hand, starts off amusing and gradually reveals itself to be rather dark yet emotionally satisfying. Which is also true about Pachyderme minus the amusing part. Although I'm not 100% sure I'm interpreting it correctly, but I think that ambiguity is intentional and I respect it for that too. Letter to a Pig starts off touching, but then goes some weird and confusing places and kind of ends with a shrug. I've heard some pretty negative reactions to its metaphorical confusion but it actually didn't bother me. Our Uniform did bother me the way it starts out with a prominent disclaimer about not criticizing religious practices, but it becomes very clear that that's entirely what it's about. I enjoyed its playful animation centered around articles of clothing, but I wish it had stood by its message and not felt the need for the disclaimer.

Best documentary short

Island In Between (8)
The Barber of Little Rock (7)
Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó (6)
The Last Repair Shop (5)
The ABCs of Book Banning (3)

Island In Between touches on the history of Taiwan and China, a topic I knew nearly nothing about until I read another of Jimmy Maher's series of articles, this one about basically the entire history of China under the pretense of the history of the Great Wall, but in particular I was fascinated by the later articles about the early 20th century and the civil war between Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong. I had had no idea that the genesis of modern Taiwan was as the place where Chiang's forces retreated and held on as a tiny remnant of pre-Communist China. Anyway, this short documentary is about a specific island I also had not known anything about, Kinmen, which is part of Taiwan despite being over 100 miles from the main island of Taiwan but is only 6 miles from mainland China. The short doc is a bit too short to cover all the nuances of its history, but gives an overall impression of how its current society has been shaped by its history. It's precarious but hopeful, which jibes with most of what I feel about the world today. We may soon see how that turns out in this particular situation and the world at large; fingers crossed my feelings of hope aren't naive.

The probable winner, The ABCs of Book Banning, struck me as a perhaps well-meaning but pretty misguided attempt at using school children to present a list of books that have been removed from certain libraries at certain times for certain flimsy reasons. Comparing this to Nazi book-burning seems grossly inappropriate, because kids today have unprecedentedly easy access to nearly any book ever written, and that's unlikely to be changed by conservatives clutching pearls about school libraries. But on top of that basic issue with this topic, centering the doc around asking kids why they like certain books feels especially uninteresting and borderline exploitative.

A weird note to finish on, but there you have it, my random thoughts about 53 movies we've chosen to celebrate tonight. Starting in about 10 minutes! Enjoy!