Movie Review: Everything Oscar Round up all at Once
Moving Pictures: Oscars Round-up
By Mo Burford
As I write this, the Academy Awards, the U.S.’s premier awards for film, have announced this year’s nominees. In many ways, this year’s contenders for Best Picture, by far the most competitive and watched category, are very nearly the Platonic ideal: from crowd-pleasers like Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water to art-house darlings like Tár and Triangle of Sadness and everything in between (find the full list of Best Pictures nominees below along with links to my own reviews).
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
THE FABELMANS
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS
WOMEN TALKING
My predictions for Best Picture? It’s a tough call. While Everything Everywhere All at Once leads the pack in the number of nominations (11 in total), this is, historically, an uneven indicator as to whether it will win, and in the last few years, results have actually gone the other direction. So we can’t count out Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelmans, Triangle of Sadness, or even Tár for that matter–though, sadly, I have my doubts about whether a film centered around the world of classical music has a real chance. Meanwhile, I think movies like Avatar, Top Gun, and Elvis, while crowd-pleasers, are long shots.
All that being said, I really hope Everything Everywhere All at Once takes the crown this year. The film was such a wild combination of heart and weirdness, a movie about existence and kung-fu, a multiverse movie about people with hot dogs for fingers that pays homage to Hong Kong cinema. It has, in short, everything. That it managed to execute all that in a single film is just extraordinary.
But I also wouldn’t be sad if most of these movies took the prize–it was that good a year for film.
Most notable for me in this list is the utter lack of Oscar nominations for Nope and Woman King, two of my absolute favorite films of this year that brought together the thrills and action of conventional genre films with real heart and impeccable direction. It is sadly notable too that both of these films are by black directors and have predominantly black casts. This issue is, of course, not new to the Oscars, as this came to a head in 2015 spawning the #OscarsSoWhite conversation. And even though the Oscars has increased and diversified its voting pool since then, who and what gets nominated have changed very little.
I saw so many movies that I loved this year, movies that have stayed with me and that I still think about all the time (I’m looking at you, Banshees of Inisherin). And the great news is that almost all the movies nominated are already available to rent or stream.
I still plan to see the few nominees that I haven’t reviewed yet; and while I didn’t review The Fabelmans the first time around, it’s going to open in The Dalles this Friday, and I plan to see it again on the big screen this weekend, so expect a review shortly. If you’re curious, I also made my own idiosyncratic and incomplete Top Ten Movies of the Year List. So go forth and fall in love with a great movie!
Questions, comments, movie suggestions? Email Mo at movingpicturesccc@gmail.comFor more reviews and to see his up-to-date movie log, follow Mo at Letterboxd.
