Best Picture thoughts, 2024 edition

[dougo]

Last year, I had seen 9 of the 10 nominees for Best Picture when the Oscar nominations were announced. The year before, I had seen 8 of 10. This year, I had only seen 7 of 10, a disappointing trend! But, I actually saw one more that same day, and had plans to see another one the next week, so I don't feel so bad. It took me another couple weeks to get around to seeing the last one, and then another couple weeks to get around to writing up my thoughts on them all, but here we are now!

According to the tradition I started in 2016(!), these are in the order that I saw them:

Dune: Part Two

When Part One was nominated, I predicted that Part Two would win Best Picture as the conclusion of the story, much like Return of the King did for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Turns out this didn't quite conclude the story, and it will become a trilogy next year. But I also thought Part Two was a bit weaker than Part One. Great visuals and sound, great performances from Zendaya and Rebecca Ferguson, and I was especially convinced by Timothee Chalamet's portrayal of Paul transforming from an uncertain princeling into a charismatic leader (who will compromise his integrity for power). I just felt like Oscar Isaac's likable noble presence was missing, and the scenes on the Harkonnen planet were mostly kind of a bummer. Still, it (spoiler!) ended up being my favorite of the Best Picture nominees this year, and I'm glad it made the cut.

The Substance

The premise is potentially interesting: akin to Severance, the protagonist feels dissatisfied with life and pursues an experimental treatment that creates a fresher, more innocent version of herself, but instead of them sharing a body, the new version has a body half her age, and they only share... their blood? and an apartment?... in a somewhat confusing and contrived arrangement where only one of them is alive at a time and they alternate weeks. Things go predictably wrong, and there's not a lot else to the story or characters. I was mostly put off by the hyper-stylization of the cinematography and editing; I sometimes love this sort of thing when it's done by the Coen Brothers or David Lynch, but most of the time I just roll my eyes at the extreme close-ups of mouths and amplified sounds of bodily fluids. I respect that this movie is Cronenbergian body horror that managed to get more nominations than any of the classics it was inspired by, but it didn't work for me, especially its last act where it accelerates into extreme gross-out campy horror with gushing blood everywhere. I get that it's satire of our image-obsessed culture and the way it treats women and coerces them into going to extremes to meet unrealistic standards, but that is not particularly new ground, and I would have preferred a story that was more, ahem, fleshed out.

Anora

I enjoyed this raunchy romp, a fun hang with nervous undertones (though thankfully not approaching the nailbiting tension of Uncut Gems). Its depiction of the side effects of rich people behaving badly is spot on, while still being handled with a light enough touch to almost be a romcom (almost). I was pretty surprised that it was being pegged for Best Picture, though, because it didn't seem particularly deep or trenchant, even compared to Sean Baker's previous Red Rocket (I still haven't gotten around to seeing The Florida Project but I remember that getting raves as well). I'm even more surprised that it seems to be the frontrunner? Though maybe just barely? But I wouldn't be mad at all if it won.

Emilia Pérez

I saw this before hearing about any of the controversies that have piled up onto this movie. But I still came out of my viewing thinking wow, that was a total trainwreck! I have an inbuilt bias against musicals, of course, compounded by the fact that I didn't know it was going to be a musical going in, so I felt a big cringe once they started singing. But I never stopped cringing... And Zoë Saldaña's lawyer character, ostensibly the protagonist you're supposed to root for, starts out explaining how she knows her clients are murderous gangsters but she gets them off anyway, la-de-da, and this moral dissonance is never resolved. In fact, by the end of the movie, her gangster client is in fact revered as a holy martyr, despite having killed hundreds of people and disappeared their bodies (which is a real thing that grieving families are still dealing with in Mexico to this day). And the controversies are mostly not even about this! The gangster is trans, and her depiction has trans advocates angry; Selena Gomez's poor Mexican accent has Hispanic speakers angry; and the gangster actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, has become a controversy machine all by herself on social media. All this while the Academy is having to deal with the fact that this movie got 13 nominations! It'll be an interesting ceremony...

Conclave

Another very fun watch. It simmers along with intrigue and plot twists, like an Agatha Christie story without the murder. There is some philosophical musing about religion, doubt, and faith, but thankfully it doesn't dwell on it or proselytize. At times the plot contrivances seem a little soap-operatic, but it's saved by great performances, costumes, set design, cinematography, and score. I could easily predict the ending, and even almost predicted the final strange twist, but I still found it to be a satisfying, well-rounded moviegoing experience. A close second for me after Dune.

Wicked: Part 1

At least I knew going in that this was a musical! (Though I remember an early trailer seemed to hide this, weirdly.) I was a fan of the book way back in the '90s, but I never had interest in seeing the musical play, and I kinda wish there had been a straight movie adaptation of the book rather than having been routed through the musical. But of course the original Wizard of Oz movie was a musical too. Anyway, I enjoyed this a bit more than I expected, but it still had plenty of cringe, especially with the subplot about the oppression of the talking-animal teachers (and why does Peter Dinklage still need to use his English accent from Game of Thrones? Nobody else in this film did!). The dazzlingly colored visuals were fun, Ariana Grande's ditzy Good Witch was fun, Jeff Goldblum's smarmily fascist Wizard was fun. Overall it was fine, and I'll be happy to see Part 2, but it didn't convert me into a fan of the musical.

Nickel Boys

I was a big fan of The Underground Railroad, the miniseries based on Colson Whitehead's novel, with beautiful visuals by filmmaker Barry Jenkins. This is another Whitehead adaptation, without the magical realism but with a likewise innovative visual style. In particular, the whole story is told via point-of-view camerawork from the two main characters. It's a bit gimmicky, but I really enjoyed the gimmick, and found it very absorbing. The story is quite harrowing, about a boys' reform school in the segregated 1950s that's basically a plantation for slave labor, so I wouldn't call the film as a whole "enjoyable", but there are many grace notes in the cinematography to counterbalance the bleakness. Certainly an achievement in film, and while it won't come close to winning, I'm glad it's being honored.

A Complete Unknown

I have never been a fan of Bob Dylan or his music, so I was ready to hate this one, but I actually found a lot to like. I hadn't ever really thought about the rise of folk music in the '50s and '60s as being a form of rebellion; I mean, I knew about Woody Guthrie's "this machine kills fascists" guitar, and "This Land is Your Land" as a populist/secular response to "God Bless America", but the idea of folk music as a stylistic rebellion against commercialized pop music never registered to me, having grown up with the later ideals of punk and indie rock as a much more obvious form of rebellion. So this movie helped me to better understand the "Dylan goes electric" controversy, which always seemed to me kind of preposterously prudish.

Back to my dislike of Dylan himself: I was amused to realize that this movie can be viewed as a villain origin story, an innocent young man meets his heroes but realizes he's more into exploring his own personal interest and style rather than conform to the political dogma of his elders. Pete Seeger (portrayed amazingly by Edward Norton) and Johnny Cash become the angel and devil on his shoulders, and in the climactic scene he ends up siding with the Man in Black who urges him to "track mud on the carpet" and ride his motorcycle into the sunset. I liked the Joker movie more than most, as an exploration of a supervillain as unreliable autobiographer playing on your sympathies, and there's a little of that here, both perpetuating and subtly skewering the hagiography of Dylan for his basically anti-social behaviors (including the treatment of his relationships with the women in his life). I suspect none of this was intentional, but it works for me as headcanon. This movie is a dark horse to win, given the split field, and I'm actually kind of rooting for it as the movie these times deserve.

The Brutalist

I expected to like this, a sweeping rags-to-riches tale of an immigrant midcentury architect, but I ended up kind of hating it. Movies about creators are often not about the actual things being created but are about the act of creation more generally (and often thinly-veiled metaphors about movie-making, specifically), and this is a prime example. I have a complicated history with brutalism but I've come to appreciate it, but this movie does nothing to help people appreciate it, in fact just doubles down on the popular misconception that brutalist architecture is literally "brutal" (when in fact the name comes from "béton brut", the French term for unfinished concrete). The architect's rich capitalist antisemitic patron figuratively and literally brutalizes him, and this movie does the same to its audience.

I'm Still Here

The first half of this movie reminded me favorably of Roma, despite being in a different language and on a different continent: a reminiscence of an idyllic childhood in a big middle-class family in the politically-turbulent early-'70s Brazil. But it somewhat suddenly shifts into a horrific (but true) story about imprisonment and torture by the military dictatorship. I think it might have worked better if the first part were either longer or shorter, because this bifurcation ends up being a bit too jarring and awkward. Still, both halves are effective portrayals, and I'm sure the contrast is part of the point.