Oscar 2024: Predictions and Preference, Spoilers and Snubs

The 96^th Academy Awards are upon us, and that means it’s time for everyone to pull out their Magic 8-Balls to make their annual Oscar predictions. And with the number of guild awards that occur prior to the Oscars, it is getting so much easier to predict the winners than ever before. The Academy’s switch to ranked choice voting can sometimes create an upset or a surprise on Oscar night, but in most years there’s an air of inevitability about the proceedings.

Of course, every year there are countless masterpieces that are overlooked by the Academy for any one of a number of reasons, and every year there are films that win awards that call into question the whole process of the awards apparatus, but even with all of its faults and flaws, I still love the Oscars and enjoy the journey through cinema it sends me on each and every year.

As studios and theater push for a return to normal after the pandemic closures, due to my own health limitations and disabilities, I wasn’t able to see quite as many of the nominated films this year as usual. Four films were inaccessible to me: Io Capitano, The Boy and the Heron, Robot Dreams, and Godzilla Minus One. But all things considered, this year’s Oscar run was fairly successful.

So, I’ll try to present a brief overview of each category, my thoughts on who will win, any possible spoilers, my preference, and any film that I think should have been nominated and made the final cut.

And now, without further ado…

Best Picture

Much to my chagrin, this year is undoubtedly Oppenheimer’s year to take home the Oscar – it’s one of the safest bets you can make. I’m lukewarm about the film and don’t believe it’s Nolan’s strongest work, presenting the illusion of moral complexity while serving up a crowd-pleasing finale that absolves its protagonist of the guilt the film purports to wrestle with. And the stylistic flourishes and editing juxtapositions, when they work are lovely, but when they don’t work, serve as distractions meant to dress up what is otherwise a standard biopic.

Among the nominees, I much prefer Killers of the Flower Moon – it’s an exceptionally crafted film that is propulsive and heartbreaking at the same time. Three and a half hours fly by because of how expertly the film is structured, shot, scored, and especially performed. And it’s a film that reminds white audiences of our complicity in the horrors which have been done to Native Peoples in this country.

Complicity is also a word I’d use when reflecting on another film I’d be happy to see win, The Zone of Interest. I’m impressed that the Academy nominated a film with such a formalist approach. It’s a challenging film, mainly because the horrifying sound designed that’s juxtaposed opposite scenes of almost serene family life. It’s a film that forces us to examine our own complicity in the horrors of the world that we knowingly turn a blind eye to each and every day.

While I have a clear favorite, I would be very happy if Anatomy of a Fall wins. It’s such a precise and exacting legal thriller that explores the ways any relationship can look strange or suspect when held under a microscope – and the ways any woman who acts in a way that isn’t socially proscribed is automatically labeled as deviant or dangerous.

I do like many of the other films up for Best Picture, and I wouldn’t be heartbroken to see these come through in an upset on Oscar night. Past Lives is a tender and delicate romantic drama about choices made and lives unlived. Barbie is a wonderful comic satire exploring what it means to be a woman under the pressures of patriarchy and coming to find who your truly are. The Holdovers is a charming and deeply moving coming-of-age comedy about three souls who are stuck – emotionally as well as physically stuck together over the holidays. American Fiction is a compelling dramedy exploring race, family, and the expectations placed on Black creatives.

As for the final nominees… I normally love the films or Yorgos Lanthimos, but Poor Things is my least favorite film he’s directed. I like much about the film (its exploration of the ways men attempt to control women and their sexual agency, the performances, the design), but so many of the film’s conflicts are resolved with very little effort and it doesn’t seem to take seriously the real danger that these men actually pose to women. It’s so much of a fantasy that it loses the bite and edge that I’ve come to expect from Lanthimos’s best work.

Maestro is the film that I don’t believe should be on this list of nominees. It’s a film that doesn’t know what kind of story it wants to tell about its subject, it elides important moments in his life, and it falls into the trap of telling us key things have happened without showing us how the characters arrived there. It’s poorly constructed, poorly written, and inconsistent in its stylistic techniques.

There are films that I wish would have made the cut instead of Maestro and Oppenheimer. Origin is an outstanding look at the development of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, and does much of what Oppenheimerattempts to do (visualize the life of the mind, of developing theories and coming to conclusions, joining the past and the present and memories together), but does so seamlessly. I would have also loved to a film like All of Us Strangers make the final list of nominees. It’s such a heartbreaking and tender film with a supernatural tint probably turned off Oscar voters.

Prediction: Oppenheimer
Spoiler: None (though there is the possibility that The Zone of Interest or Anatomy of a Fall could make it through due to the Oscar’s international voters, and Barbie has a slight chance because of people hoping to correct the Greta Gerwig snub)
Preference: Killers of the Flower Moon (though I’ll be happy with The Zone of Interest or Anatomy of a Fall)
Snubs: Swap out Oppenheimer and Maestro for Origin and All of Us Strangers, and this would be an outstanding Best Picture lineup.

Best Director

Once again, Christopher Nolan is practically a shoo-in for Oppenheimer – though I don’t believe this is his strongest work, but instead gives in to his worst tendencies as a filmmaker (needlessly convoluted story and editing structure, the desire to undercut even more intimate moments by going bigger and louder). My preference is still for Martin Scorsese and Killers of the Flower Moon – late-period Scorsese is filled with incredible meditations on the consequences of our violence against others, and here he has such a firm hand on the tone and pacing to make sure that a film this long never drags or even slows down. Jonathan Glazer also has a firm and steady hand with The Zone of Interest, using a surveillance style of filming to keep us at a remove from the performers, just as they keep themselves at a remove from the victims of their atrocities. It’s easy to underestimate the skill it takes to craft a legal thriller as skillfully as Justine Triet does with Anatomy of a Fall, but her work in building the precise rhythms of a nerve-racking trial, while never losing sight of the personal toll is takes on those involved, is incredible. While Yorgos Lanthimos certainly creates a unique and heightened fantasy world in Poor Things, it’s a film that feels far removed from his signature style and plays things far safer any of his previous work.

Of course, one of the big snubs in this category is Greta Gerwig’s direction of Barbie. Her script is incredible, but her directorial choices really bring the film to vibrant life. And Celine Song’s direction in Past Lives is exquisite, taking a very simple, quite story and telling it with such eloquence, grace, and patience. Finally, Ava DuVernay’s work in Origin is some of the best direction of the year – fluidly moving between past and present, memory and fantasy – and it really should have been recognized this year.

Prediction: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Spoiler: None (though the international voters could get Justine Triet and Anatomy of a Fall to make an upset)
Preference: Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon (though I’ll be happy in the unlikely event that The Zone of Interest or Anatomy of a Fall win)
Snubs: I’d love to see them take Nolan and Lanthimos off of this list and replace them with Gerwig for Barbieand DuVernay for Origin.

Best Actor in a Leading Role

We’re three for three with Oppenheimer here, as I’m certain that Cillian Murphy will win for his performance in the titular role. He’s very good and it will be a fine win, but at the end of the day it feels like a safe biopic performance. Paul Giamatti is playing is usual curmudgeonly character in The Holdovers, but there are so many layers and shades to his performance that I truly hope he wins. I’d be equally happy if Jeffrey Wright wins for his more restrained performance in American Fiction, a truly compelling turn playing an author in the midst of an artistic and family crisis. I’m always impressed by Coleman Domingo, and his work as a pioneering Civil Rights leader was excellent in Rustin. I’m less impressed by Bradley Cooper’s performance in Maestro, a performance that relies heavily on makeup for the act of physical transformation, and one that is often mimicry rather than inhabiting the character.

I am sad to see that Leonard DiCaprio wasn’t recognized for his excellent work in Killers of the Flower Moonplaying a ruthless and opportunist redneck who nonetheless loves his Indigenous wife – the contradictions he plays in each scene are really fantastic. And Andrew Scott is phenomenal in All of Us Strangers, playing a writer who has the opportunity to meet with his dead parents and come out to them.

Prediction: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Spoiler: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers (though it’s highly unlikely at this point)
Preference: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers (though I’m find with anyone winning except for Bradley Cooper)
Snubs: Replace Bradley Cooper with Leonardo DiCaprio or Andrew Scott (I’d even be okay with omitting Cillian Murphy from this list, he’s done so much better work in other films)

This is one category where my predictions and preferences line up – at this point, it looks like Lily Gladstone will win for her subtle and heartbreaking work in Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s an outstanding performance that plumbs a powerful depth and range of emotions, and without her performance, the film doesn’t have the weight needed to show us the emotional consequences of the murderers’ actions. Sandra Hüller is also outstanding in Anatomy of a Fall, walking a very fine line in portraying a character with a strong set of ethics and values, whose rigid inflexibility could very well be her undoing. Before watching Nyad, I was skeptical of Annette Bening’s inclusion among the nominees, but her performance as a prickly and insufferable athlete attempting the impossible is truly fantastic. I expected to love Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things, and while I think she’s fine, I also think this is a case where bigger and showier acting isn’t necessarily better acting – though I do think she has the biggest chance to win over Gladstone, based on previous award wins. Carey Mulligan is the best part of Maestro, but the fragmented nature of the film’s structure means she isn’t given enough of a character arc to do more than have a few big acting moments.

I’m most upset that Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor didn’t get nominated for her extraordinary work in Origin. She effortlessly shows us the interior life of a woman working to put the pieces together of an important intellectual discovery, and she navigates joy and pain and hope and heartbreak.

Prediction: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Spoiler: Emma Stone, Poor Things
Prediction: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon (though Sandra Hüller is also fantastic)
Snubs: Take out Carey Mulligan and replace her with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and I would be very happy.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

The Best Supporting Actor category is one of the best set of nominees this year. There are so many ways I’d love to see this end up, but this will most likely be another win for Oppenheimer. Robert Downey, Jr. turned in a solid performance and showed that he could break out of the Marvel bubble, so it’s looking like he’ll be rewarded for this transitional role. I may not have loved Poor Things, but Mark Ruffalo’s performance is so delightfully unhinged that I hope he wins for absolute insanity he brings to the screen. I would also be very happy to see Robert De Niro win for the quite menace he brings to Killers of the Flower Moon, a brilliant late career performance that has his character insinuating himself within the Osage community while manipulating others to commit terrible atrocities. Ryan Gosling provides the comic center of Barbie and is such a wonderful counterpoint to Margot Robbie, giving a lovely insecurity and vulnerability to character who becomes infected by toxic masculinity. And Sterling K. Brown is a nice foil in American Fiction, providing a comic and humane warmth to counterpose Jeffrey Wright’s prickly antagonism.

I was so sad that Charles Melton was left off the list of nominees this year – his performance in May December grounds the film in an emotional reality that is shattering and heartbreaking.

Prediction: Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer
Spoiler: Ryan Gosling, Barbie (though it’s still a longshot)
Preference: Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things (though I’d be happy with most of the nominees winning in this category)
Snubs: I’d be very happy to swap out Robert Downey, Jr. and replace him with Charles Melton.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

One of the other sure-fire winners this year, also my preference, is Da’Vine Joy Randolph for her incredible work in The Holdovers. Her transformation as a grieving mother – the vocal cadence and dialect, the way she physically moves, and the way she inhabits grief – is what holds the film together. It’s beautiful work. Danielle Brooks is also extraordinary in The Color Purple, reprising her performance from the Broadway production and truly standing out amongst an incredible cast of performers. Jodie Foster helps to ground Nyad with a subtle and no-frills performance that nonetheless is anchored to caring for her friend and trying to help her achieve her dream while protecting her life. America Ferrera is lovely in Barbie, giving the film’s key monologue and making it believable and anchored in real, lived experience. The real outlier here is Emily Blunt’s nomination for Oppenheimer – like most women in Christopher Nolan films, she isn’t given much to do except get drunk and show how sad and resolved she can be.

I do wish that Julianne Moore had been nominated in this category for May December – it’s a brilliant performance that shows how someone can use fragility and weakness as a form of power.

Prediction: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Spoiler: None
Preference: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Snubs: Let’s replace Emily Blunt with Julianne Moore, and that would, again, be a great lineup.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The momentum in the Adapted Screenplay race has certainly been heading in American Fiction’s favor, but after finishing the novel, I can see the ways in which the film sands down the book’s prickliness and more incisive humor and delicate handling of themes to produce a crowd-pleasing dramedy that will appeal white liberals without forcing us to truly examine our own complicity in racist power structures. My favorite script in this category is Barbie, a stunning achievement that on the surface shouldn’t work, but manages be a feminist primer poking fun of Barbie while embracing all that Barbie can represent. The adaptation for The Zone of Interest is quite removed from the plot specifics of its source material, but it does have strong thematic ties with the book in exploring the ways individuals choose to ignore atrocity and concern themselves instead with their petty and selfish dramas. Poor Things captures the novel’s broad strokes, but while I was watching it I could feel the narrative elisions keeping the film from fully cohering – in reading the novel, I’m seeing where the cuts occurred and kept the narrative and character arcs from being as fully developed as they should have been. The adaptation of Oppenheimer was a monumental task, one that I still have reservations with as the film does more to lionize and purge Oppenheimer of his guilt than truly have us wrestle with his acts.

Missing from this list is the brilliant adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon, one that shifts the focus of the film from the nascent FBI and the author of the book to the marriage of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart and the victims of the Osage murders.

Prediction: American Fiction
Spoiler: Barbie (this is a little bit of a longshot, but hope springs eternal!)
Preference: Barbie (though I’d be very happy with The Zone of Interest winning)
Snubs: Replace Oppenheimer with Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Original Screenplay

This is another stacked category – if you were to remove Maestro from the list. At this point, it looks like Anatomy of a Fall is the frontrunner, and it’s really the best of a really stellar bunch of scripts – it’s a tightly constructed thriller that doles out information at just the right time, is filled with meaty roles… it’s an outstanding screenplay. May December hits all the right notes in its exploration of the ways the media exploits and sensationalizes tragedy. Past Lives expertly navigates the sorrows of what could have been, placing them alongside the joys of what is. The Holdovers uses familiar tropes and recontextualizes them, crafting a story that could have been told during the New American Cinema movement of the ‘70s. In a field of exceptional nominees, Maestro is the outlier – a script that deliberately elides narrative beats to present snapshots with big acting moments.

I know Wes Anderson has fallen out of favor with the Academy, but it seems impossible that his script for Asteroid City wasn’t nominated, a heartbreaking an incredibly funny film about grief, loss, and the meaning of life.

Prediction: Anatomy of a Fall
Spoiler: The Holdovers
Preference: Anatomy of a Fall (though I’d be okay with any of the scripts winning – except Maestro)
Snubs: Replace Maestro with Asteroid City

Best Cinematography

We’re back to Oppenheimer with the Oscar for Best Cinematography, and while I appreciate the Southwest vistas, the black-and-white senate hearings, and the muted East Coast tones – I find the cinematography here uninteresting, if technically strong. The cinematography for Killers of the Flower Moon is rich and vibrant, the thick darkness swallowing our antagonists, the brilliant colors capturing the life of the Osage people contrasting with the muted palate of the white interlopers – every shot helps tell the story. El Conde’s lush, black-and-white cinematography makes the film feel like a classic horror film, even as the pitch-black humor and mordant political satire places it firmly in the here and now. The cinematography for Poor Things is compelling and off-kilter, though the use of fish-eye lens is applied inconsistently throughout the film – as intriguing as the effect may be. I appreciate the textures and compositions in Maestro’s cinematography, but here’s another case where stylistic approaches to the visual language of the film are applied inconsistently across the film.

Even though the film contains a tremendous amount of artifice, the cinematography in Asteroid City is incredible, with each layer of the film’s intricate framing devices containing its own unique visual look and style.

Prediction: Oppenheimer
Spoiler: Killers of the Flower Moon
Preference: Killers of the Flower Moon (though I’d be very happy to see El Conde win)
Snubs: Swap out Maestro with Asteroid City

Best Editing

As is often the case with Oscar categories, voters tend to confuse most editing with best editing. And we’re most like to see Oppenheimer take home the award because of all the minute edits and cuts between time periods and memories within each scene – regardless of whether the juxtapositions make thematic sense or resonate with each other. I personally think that the editing in Killers of the Flower Moon is exceptional, keeping the pace and tone of the film propulsive and knowing how to manage the rhythm of a film that needs to move quickly, but then slow down and mourn the dead. Anatomy of a Fall’s editing is also guided by an expert’s hand, especially in the ways the courtroom scenes are assembled – moving from defendant to prosecutor to witness to the defendant’s child – it’s masterful. The Holdovers is a solidly assembled comedy, the edit emphasizing comic bits, meaningful reaction shots – going for the laugh or the pathos. Poor Thingshas some wonderfully edited sequences, montages that are hilarious and punctuated with a delightful gag, but it also has sequences that needed stronger shaping.

I’ll return again to the brilliance of Origin and the ways it weaves together past and present, memory and history, as a film that I believe should have been nominated for Best Editing.

Prediction: Oppenheimer
Spoiler: Anatomy of a Fall
Preference: Killers of the Flower Moon (though I’ll be very happy if Anatomy of a Fall wins)
Snubs: Replace Poor Things with Origin

Best Costume Design

The race for Best Costume Design is most likely a race between the toy-inspired accoutrements of Barbie and slightly off-kilter period trappings of Poor Things, but I do think that this is one of the categories that will go in Barbie’s favor. I definitely think it would be a wonderful winner – the contrasts between Barbieland and the real world are perfectly realized in the costuming. My choice is still Killers of the Flower Moon due to the ways they worked with the Osage people in developing period and culturally appropriate costumes, setting them in relief against (and sometimes melding them with) the costuming for the white antagonists, showing the deadly clash of cultures in the way characters dress. Poor Things has strong, memorable costumes that create a unique world and tell us that the story we’re watching is a work of fantasy, unmooring us from reality. Napoleon’s costuming may be more period specific, but the detail work for the film’s extensive cast is truly extraordinary. Oppenheimer also has incredibly detailed period costume designs, and I’m sure a close reading of the film focused on the costumes would reveal more nuances about the costume choices.

Prediction: Barbie
Spoiler: Poor Things (Oppenheimer if the film sweeps everything)
Preference: Killers of the Flower Moon (though I’ll be fine with most of the film’s winning in this category, especially Barbie)
Snubs: I didn’t see anything egregious this year.

Best Production Design

I believe the Award will once again go to Barbie – a film whose production design is so beautifully realized that it’s almost impossible to resist the joy and delight upon entering Barbieland – or the hilarious symmetry of the Mattel offices. In my preferences, I continue to lean toward Killers of the Flower Moon – the period details are vivid and striking, and the film’s production design captures class and racial disparities through the signs of distress on buildings and signifiers of wealth within white and Indigenous homes. The production design in Poor Things adds to the film’s disorienting sensibility, keeping the narrative in its own hermetically sealed world where this parable of gender dynamics can play out. Napoleon uses sets of incredible scope and scale as a way to contrast the petty impotence of the film’s central figure. With Oppenheimer’s production design, it’s easy to overlook the meticulous recreation of the Trinity testing site, Los Alamos, the congressional confirmation hearing – it’s all very solid, work.

I do find it disappointing that Asteroid City and its incredible production design wasn’t nominated – from the delightfully artificial science camp to the crater and the observatory – every meticulously designed element in the film ties together perfectly in a way that allows the characters to have their emotional revelations.

Prediction: Barbie
Spoiler: Poor Things (or, once again, Oppenheimer if there’s a sweep)
Preference: Killers of the Flower Moon
Snubs: Swap out Oppenheimer for Asteroid City

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

From the moment that the first trailer arrived, we knew that Maestro would be winning the award for best makeup – from Bradley Cooper’s nose to the old age makeup, it was a given. Even if there are times when the makeup is less convincing than others. I’d really like to see this award go to Society of the Snow, a film I didn’t love, but one that featured exception makeup and hairstyling work to show how the survivors of a plane crash were weathered and emaciated after weeks in the mountains. Oppenheimer’s makeup and hairstyling are impressively subtle – the old age work is barely perceptible, but combined with the actors’ performances, assists the film beautifully. The makeup and hairstyling in Poor Things is delightful and very fun to watch, contributing to overall tone of the film. Golda’s makeup and hairstyling are transformational, making Helen Mirren look almost exactly like Golda Meir, but it’s the type of makeup transformation that I tend find myself annoyed with in films – I don’t need total accuracy, I just need a good performance.

I don’t think there are any egregious snubs here, but I’d be happy to see Golda off the list and replaced by something with more sci-fi roots like Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.

Prediction: Maestro
Spoiler: Poor Things
Preference: Society of the Snow
Snubs: Again, nothing major, but I really disliked Golda and would have loved to see it replaced by something like Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.

Best International Feature Film

This is one of the few categories in which I haven’t been able to view all of the nominees, so my preference will come from the films I’ve seen. The International Feature Film category is stacked with incredible films – all of the ones I’ve seen are either solid or incredibly strong. I do believe that, with multiple other nominations this year, the winner will be The Zone of Interest, a well-deserved win for an incredible film. I was also quite taken with The Teachers’ Lounge, a gripping workplace thriller about an idealistic teacher trying look out for the well-being of her student while larger systemic issues (and her own naivete) create chaos on campus. Perfect Daysis a beautiful, deceptively simple film about an older man who lives a life of routine, taking pride in his work, and the individuals who interrupt that routine in beautiful and unexpected ways. Society of the Snow tells the story of a Uruguayan ruby team that crashes in the Andres and must survive in a harsh and unforgiving environment – there are wonderfully poetic touches throughout the film, but with such a large cast, the filmmaker don’t do enough to differentiate the individuals and make the losses and meaningful as they should be. I’m really looking forward to Io Capitano, I’ve appreciated the director’s previous films, and this fairy tale the explores Europe’s immigration crisis looks incredible.

I wish we’d have more representation from across the globe in this category – a film like the gorgeous Mami Wata would have been a great substitution for Society of the Snow.

Prediction: The Zone of Interest
Spoiler: Perfect Days
Preference: The Zone of Interest
Snubs: Swap out Society of the Snow with Mami Wata

Best Animated Film

Here’s another category where a few of the titles have been inaccessible to me. I do believe that regardless, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will be the winning film in animation – it’s won most of the awards it’s been up for and it’s a solid sequel, even if the narrative is little more convoluted and messier than its predecessor. Out of the films I’ve seen, I’d prefer to see Nimona win the award – it was such a surprising and delightful film with lovely animation and a wonderful message about moving away from fear and toward acceptance and understanding. I appreciated the exploration of immigrant families in Elemental, but it’s all wrapped up in a standard Pixar story with predictable story beats. I’m really looking forward to both The Boy and the Heron and Robot Dreams, two animated films that are not part of the American animation system and look to be much richer and more thematically resonant than some of the American offerings – especially the Miyazaki film.

Prediction: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Spoiler: The Boy and the Heron
Preference: Nimona
Snubs: I know there are a few animated films that folks were hoping to see on this list, but I haven’t been able to see them yet, so I’ll reserve judgment until then.

Best Documentary – Feature Film

This is a pretty stacked category, and it’s nice to see a category filled with international documentary titles rather than the safe (and frankly boring) American titles that were expected to make it into the category this year. The presumptive winner is 20 Days in Mariupol, a harrowing look at the war in Ukraine – the footage is incredible and difficult to watch, but I’m not as sold on the voice-over narration and some of the early framing, which I think undercuts the dramatic power of the footage that’s been captured. My preference would be Four Daughters, a brilliantly constructed documentary about a woman who lost two daughters to radical Islam, using actors and recreation to uncover her own culpability and the ways she was part of the system that led them to their decisions – it’s an incredibly moving, heartbreaking film. I was also deeply moved by The Eternal Memory, a lovely reflection on aging and Alzheimer’s, following a prominent Chilean couple intimately as they grapple with the changes in their life circumstances. To Kill a Tiger is a riveting and devastating film that follows a father in a small Indian village seeking justice after his daughter was raped – while everyone else in the village wants him to move past the crime. Finally, there’s much that I appreciate in Bobi Wine: The People’s President – it’s a compelling political documentary – but because the filmmakers are so embedded with Bobi and his campaign, there’s much of the story that is missing, and it feels more like a piece of propaganda than a documentary.

I am very sad that one of my favorite documentaries, and one of my favorite films, of the year, The Mother of All Lies, was missing from this lineup. A young filmmaker brings together her family and former neighbors to use models and puppets in order to recreate their past and shed a light on the abuses of their government and her grandmother. It’s an outstanding film.

Prediction: 20 Days in Mariupol
Spoiler: Four Daughters
Preference: Four Daughters
Snubs: Replace Bobi Wine with The Mother of All Lies

Best Documentary – Short Subject

I’ve already written extensively about all of the nominees here, but I believe that, due to the Academy’s focus on issues rather than the quality of the filmmaking when it comes to documentaries, they will most likely go for The ABCs of Book Banning.

Best Music – Original Score

After listening to the nominees for Best Original Score, I really do think that the winner should be clear, but I’m pretty certain this will be another win for Oppenheimer, even though the score is essentially just Hans Zimmer-lite (who himself is often just Philip Glass-lite). There are a few nice touches – creating the sound of the atom smashing in music is one – and I appreciate that it isn’t slavish when it comes to period specificity, but this isn’t a particularly memorable score. I do think that Robbie Robertson’s score for Killers of the Flower Moon is exceptional – it’s propulsive and, along with the editing, helps move the film forward. The blending and contrast between traditional Native American music and instrumentation and white Americana and folk music shows the competing forces at work within the community. The score for American Fiction is surprisingly complex – weaving together soft and melodic jazz and moves into dissonance as the film’s protagonist comes to crisis points in the film. Poor Things uses traditional instrumentation from the period to create something strange and uncanny – almost fractured – in keeping with the sideways and fractured world onscreen. The worst score of the list is John Williams’s score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a score which recycles material from Williams’s other (better) scores and fundamentally misunderstands leading characters in the film.

Prediction: Oppenheimer
Spoiler: Killers of the Flower Moon
Preference: Killers of the Flower Moon
Snubs: I’m sure there were some better scores out there to replace Indiana Jones and Oppenheimer, but I’d need to watch some of this year’s films with the score in mind.

Best Music – Original Song

It’s pretty much a given that one of the songs from Barbie will end up winning the race for Best Song, but my money’s on “What Was I Made For?” It’s a song that speaks to the heart of the film, that is heartfelt and deeply moving, and will be a wonderful and well-deserved win for the film. I’d love to see “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from Killers of the Flower Moon win the award – it’s a song from the Osage people about connecting to the past and about remaining and resilience in the face of adversity. As much as the other song from Barbieis its heart and soul, “I’m Just Ken” is an absolute delight, and while it’s a simple song without much substance, it will be fun to watch Ryan Gosling perform it at the awards. “It Never Went Away” from American Symphony is a lovely song that speaks to the resilience of love in the face of adversity, one of the film’s core themes. And finally, we have the obligatory Diane Warren song, “The Fire Inside,” a forgettable pop song from the forgettable Flamin’ Hot.

I’m very sad that “Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven)” from Asteroid City was cut from this list in favor of the obligatory Diane Warren nomination. It’s a much better song that is beautifully incorporated into the film and speaks to its existential anxiety.

Prediction: “What Was I Made For?”
Spoiler: “I’m Just Ken”
Preference: “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)”
Snubs: Cut “The Fire Inside” and add in “Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven)”

Best Sound

While Best Sound often goes to the loudest or biggest sound, I do think that the sound this year will go to The Zone of Interest, whose intricate and horrifying sound design was essential in conveying the horrors of the Holocaust and juxtaposing it with the scenes of idyllic family life. The sound in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is impressive work, melding the action, dialogue, and score into a pulse-pounding adventure mix. I’m not as fond of Maestro’s mix – yes, the orchestra mixing is important, but it doesn’t set it apart from the other nominees. The Creator does serviceable mixing and sound effects work for a subpar sci-fi film, but there’s nothing that really remarkable about what it does. Oppenheimer does have some remarkable sound design, but like all Christopher Nolan films, the ham-fisted dialogue is buried by the punishing sound mix.

Prediction: The Zone of Interest
Spoiler: Oppenheimer
Preference: The Zone of Interest
Snubs: There are plenty of solid films with good sound design that could have made the cut, but The Zone of Interest is heads and tails above them all.

Best Visual Effects

This is the final category in which I’ve missed a nominee – and I’m pretty certain that it’s the film that will win for Best Visual Effects. The story is compelling (they accomplished great effects on a tiny budget, it’s a first nomination, etc.) and it really seems like a well-deserved and timely win for Godzilla Minus One. Out of the films I’ve seen, I keep going back-and-forth on a couple of the nominees, but I’ll finally land on Napoleon. The visual effects are seamless and so well integrated with the production design and costumes that it helps to provide the film’s sense of scale (and Napoleon’s violent rage). I’m also impressed by the mix of practical and digital effects used in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning to convey the breathtaking stunts and death-defying action sequences. And I fully enjoyed the effects used in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 – while they were mostly CGI, they were some of the most effective I’ve seen in a blockbuster in years. The Creator does have some effective, low-budget effect, though the film wasn’t very good and that may have biased me against its nominations.

It would have been nice to see Poor Things get a nomination in this category – the effects work is really a tremendous part of the entire world-building effect.

Prediction: Godzilla Minus One
Spoiler: The Creator
Preference: Napoleon
Snubs: Swap out The Creator with Poor Things

Best Animated Short Film

I’ve already written extensively about the animated short films. I think War Is Over will be the winner – mainly due to the involvement of John and Yoko’s son and the pedigree of the creators behind the film.

Best Live Action Short Film

As before, you can see my thoughts about the live action shorts in my previous post. But here, I believe that Wes Anderson’s establishment as a director will work against him, and I believe that that award will, unfortunately, go to The After.

Oscars 2024: The Oscar Nominated Short Films

Every year when the Oscar nominations roll around, my favorite categories to check are the short film nominees – Best Documentary Short Subject, Best Short Film (Animated), and Best Short Film (Live Action). While these are all titles that made the Academy Awards’ Shortlist earlier in the season, these tend to be some of the most unpredictable nominees of the ceremony. They are also notoriously difficult to predict. I don’t care who is telling they have the answer, with the short films, there are almost always surprises.

This year’s nominees are a mixed bag – there are a few incredibly strong standouts in each category, and even one or two masterpieces among them, but there are a fair number of dreadful choices this year as well.

Best Documentary Short Subject

I really wanted Sheila Nevins’s The ABCs of Book Banning to be a much better than it was. I agree with everything the filmmakers are trying to convey, but the methods they use aren’t effective. By showing the books that have been banned, challenged, or restricted without context for why those challenges have been issued, the filmmakers have done a grave disservice to the viewers. We’re left to interpret the reasons a particular book has been challenged, based on what we know of the content and the author’s identity. But there are times these bans are for reasons that are not immediately obvious. So, while I enjoyed hearing from the students who were touched and moved by these banned books, the structure and omission of essential facts makes the film come across as misleading propaganda – propaganda from a side I happen to agree with, but propaganda, nonetheless.

John Hoffman and Christine Turner’s The Barber of Little Rock is a hopeful and inspiring portrait of one man’s attempt to make changes within his community through education and making the systems of finance more accessible within the Black community. It’s beautifully shot, filled with compelling interviews, and lays out intriguing methods for change within historically oppressed and marginalized communities. As part of Turner’s overall project of documenting Black lives making an impact within their community – through art or activism, through care or compassion – this is a really lovely addition to an already impressive body of short documentaries.

Leo Chiang’s Island in Between is an intriguing short documentary about the Taiwanese islands of Kinmen just two miles off the coast of mainland China, and the tensions residents face in navigating a fraught political situation. Chiang gracefully explores the complexities of Taiwanese feelings about China – from the hopes for reunification to the defiance of any perceived Chinese aggression, any everything in between. The film could have benefited from a slightly tighter structure grounding the disparate threads, but even so, it’s still a compelling work of short nonfiction.

Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’s The Last Repair Shop is a profoundly moving short documentary. It’s especially effective in the ways it moves between student and instrument repair person, looking at the kids who need the repair services, while really digging deep into the histories of those whose labor is often invisible to us. The individual narratives within the film are varied and move from the poignant to the hilarious, and the overall impact is incredibly powerful. The filmmakers’ choices around identifying some musicians and leaving others anonymous in the final recording session is mystifying, blunting the emotional impact of what should be a stirring finale. That’s a minor complaint, but it stands out in a short that is otherwise magnificent.

Sean Wang’s Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó is such a charming and enjoyable little doc. While the subject may not cover wide-ranging, major social issues, it is a poignant look at aging and what it takes for elderly folks to be able to live independently. There’s a liveliness and vivacious energy to the two grandmothers in this film that is a joy to watch, and the editing and camera work match their wry sense of humor. At the same time, the film never loses sight of their sense of mortality and the painful losses they’ve felt. This is a wonderful short documentary.

Prediction: The ABCs of Book Banning
Spoiler: The Last Repair Shop
Preference: The Last Repair Shop (though I’d be happy if The Barber of Little Rock or Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó won as well)

Best Short Film (Animated)

Tal Kantor’s Letter to a Pig is an absolutely stunning animated short. The animation is gorgeous and haunting, a reflection on a what a Holocaust survivor went through o escape the Nazi’s. But the story quickly turns into something darker and more menacing as the film reflects on the ways the oppressed can become oppressors, the ways that the traumas of the past can make us hardened and cruel, passed down through the generations – all told through beautiful and surreal animation.

The use of fabric textures as part of the animation is stunning in Yegane Moghaddam’s Our Uniform. It helps tell the story of enforced clothing restrictions growing up as a girl in Iran. The narrative may be slight, but the exploration of clothing as an extension of identity is beautifully rendered – as are the ways that more patriarchal and restrictive communities and cultures use clothing to restrict and tamp down women and girl’s identities and individuality. This is a very compelling piece of short animation.

Stéphanie Clément’s Pachyderm is a stunning memory film that follows a young woman reflecting on childhood vacations spent with her grandparents. The animation is truly wondrous, and the narrative continues to grow and evolve until we understand the scope of the story and the hidden truths behind the narrator’s childhood fears. It’s an incredibly beautiful and absolutely haunting film.

Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess’s Ninety-Five Senses is a solid animated short that uses multiple animators employing different styles for each segment exploring the body’s senses. The film carries us along its spare narrative by slowly opening itself and revealing more and more about the narrator with each subsequent lesson about the senses. The film makes a significant misstep in attempting to force the audience to have more sympathy for a man who has committed terrible violence on others than those he inflicted that violence upon. It keeps what could have been a truly heartbreaking film about consequences and the mistakes of our past from fully landing.

Dave Mullins’s WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko is a wretched work of nepotism. The trench warfare, the pigeon passing chess moves between enemy lines, the battle… While it’s competently constructed, it all smacks of cheap sentimentality. And when the John and Yoko song comes on – a song that doesn’t fit with anything we’ve just seen – it’s saccharine and emotionally manipulative. None of these elements work together – the World War I setting, the comic beat, the carnage and brutality, especially the song… And yet, because it appeals to Boomer nostalgia and viewer sentimentality, it receives award nominations.

Prediction: War Is Over
Spoiler: None
Preference: Letter to a Pig (though I’d be very happy is Pachyderm or Our Uniform won)

Misan Harriman’s The After is an abysmal short film. Opening with a horrific act of violence is one thing but staging it in such a clumsy and insensitive way shows a profound lack of awareness and understanding of trauma on the part of the filmmaker – an understanding that this film is purportedly attempting to foster. The middle section of the film is where it’s the strongest, dipping in and out of passengers’ lives, all of whom are unaware of the pain that their driver is carrying (though every scene in which he is alone is shot like music video or the “before” scene in a car commercial). But the ending is the real clincher – it once again shows a profound lack of understanding about how people process and move through trauma and grief. This is a wretched film.

Vincent René-Lortie’s Invincible is a solid enough short film, even if the narrative bookends don’t completely work – foreshadowing the ending the way it does may create a sense of doom, but it also undercuts all subsequent sequences in which the protagonist makes any real progress. It also leaves us questioning many of the assumptions the narrative makes – that the protagonist is the one and only kid in this reform program who shows real potential for change, the one with a natural talent for poetry… There’s no real exploration of why he leaves the program, what behavior got him sent to the reform program in the first place – just that he’s a brilliant but troubled kid who wants to leave. It’s beautifully shot and well-performed, but it merely skims the surface.

Lasse Lyskjær Noer’s Knight of Fortune is an incredibly charming short exploring grief and loss, what it means to let go someone you love. The performances in here are all wonderful, and the narrative twist at the film’s midpoint is delightful. This is the type of short that could have easily become too saccharine or mawkish. But it consistently uses droll humor to undercut cheap sentimentality and come to a genuinely moving ending about the need to let go. This is a really wonderful little film.

Politically, I agree with everything that Nazrin Choudhury’s Red, White and Blue is trying to say – and the film is even very well-acted and decently shot and constructed. But this is a film that is so clearly constructed as a piece of propaganda that, when the “shocking” twist happens toward the end of the film, it left such a sour taste in my mouth. This is blatant emotional manipulation, a commercial for abortion rights in a time when all rights are being stripped away, using the crassest possible tools to shock people into supporting the cause. And as others have said, we need to be telling the stories of ordinary women who are being denied abortions, not just sensationalizing the issue by highlighting the most extreme cases. This is an exploitive film that does nothing to truly further the cause.

Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a masterful and inventive adaptation of literature, incorporating prose into the performers’ dialogue and performances, utilizing the trapping of the proscenium stage with set pieces that roll into place, emphasizing the artifice of the production, the tools and tricks of filmmaking and theatrical staging. And the artifice only heightens the emotional power of the central narrative, a redemption story told through multiple narrative digressions buried within narrative digressions. It all moves so fast that by the time we realize what Anderson is doing, it’s too late and we find ourselves caught off-guard by the emotional power and resonance of the story. This is a beautiful, wondrous little film.

Prediction: The After
Spoiler: I’d love to see The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar win, but I don’t think the Academy voters will give Wes Anderson an award for a category they feel is for beginning filmmakers, so I think, unfortunately, the spoiler will be something like Red, White and Blue.
Preference: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

While you can find some of the films on various streaming platforms right now, all of the short films are available as part of the 19th Annual Oscar Nominated Short Film releases, presented by ShortsTV. You can find a theater playing the programs near you at http://www.shorts.tv/theoscarshorts.

The animated shorts program also include two highly commended shorts, Wild Summon and I’m Hip.

Karni Arieli and Saul Freed’s Wild Summon is an incredibly inventive and truly harrowing animated short. Personifying the life cycle of wild salmon by transforming them into human figures swimming through creeks and streams, making their way to the ocean and back to their spawning grounds, underscores how difficult their lives are and how horrific human treatment of animals can truly be. The blend of live-action and animation is stunning and leaves us reflecting on questions of intelligence and suffering within the animal kingdom.

John Musker’s I’m Hip is a perfectly pleasant music/comedic short taking aim at those who wear their sense of being cool and hip on their sleeve – the insufferable pretentiousness that can be found in college dorms, coffee shops, or anywhere men are eager to over-explain things to anyone eager to listen. It’s all pretty surface-level satire, and the joke begins to wear thin after first minute and a half. But it’s fun for the most part.

2024 Online Sundance Film Festival: Day Two

I began my second day of the online edition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival by finishing out the animated short film package I had started on the first day and continuing on with four more feature films touching on themes of grief and connection, technology and authenticity. After getting a little waylaid my first day with a broken projector and household errands, day two allowed me to finally feel like the festival was finally under way.

Starting off with the four feature films…

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is a far richer and much more moving film than I first expected. It understands the ways in which mental health, grief, and generational trauma can intersect and manifest within people in vastly different ways – sometimes in ways that can cause jealousy or bitterness to creep into relationships. Revisiting the past to begin healing the present (or at least to begin making things better for the next generation) is a beautiful, subtle thread that runs throughout. Connection and reconnection are shown to be the way to find your way through your pain, no matter how raw or how unremarkable it may seem. And the ways that the film captures real places, letting us sit with a past that has been erased or papered over, is incredibly powerful. All this, and it still manages to be an incredibly funny film with great performances from the entire cast.

Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead is a masterfully constructed, slow-burn of a horror film. I love the way it uses the narrative trappings of the zombie genre to explore grief, loss, and what it means to let go of (or try to hold onto) those you love. Told in three intersecting stories, all three narrative strands are exceptionally compelling, each dealing with different periods in the loss of a loved one. There’s a subtlety to all the performances that keeps the film emotionally grounded – especially helpful when the dead are literally coming back to life onscreen. The score is equally subtle, creating a quiet eeriness that works hand-in-hand with the unsettling visuals – low light and obstructed views keep us wary and afraid that something in lurking in the hidden spaces on screen. And yet, in the midst of the film’s disturbing beauty is a hope that keeps it from ever tipping into absolute despair.

Sam and Andy Suchero’s Love Me, the story of a weather buoy and a satellite falling in love, ended up being one of the most divisive films at this year’s Sundance, and I can totally understand why this wouldn’t work for everyone. But I was completely onboard from the film’s opening few seconds as the filmmakers show us the history of the Earth (the Big Bang through humanity obliterating ourselves) in hilarious Timelapse stop motion. The mix of techniques – computer animation, internet clips, live actors – creates a truly unique viewing experience as the film interrogates personal authenticity in an age where everything is posed and edited for public presentation. And by overlaying our own anxieties onto the technology we create, the film asks intriguing questions about the ethical responsibilities we have toward artificial intelligence and the information we send out into the world that will outlive us all.

Jazmin Jones’s Seeking Mavis Beacon is an exceptional documentary exploring the ways tech companies exploit the images and likenesses of Black bodies for profit without fairly compensating individuals, while at the same time acknowledging that these products end up providing much-needed representation for Black children. The film takes on the form of a detective story as Jones and her creative partner attempt to track down the model for the Mavis Beacon typing software, but their investigation has them exploring the nature of privacy, the gendered and racialized development of voice assistants, and what it means to ease yourself digitally. The filmmakers practice incredible transparency throughout the filmmaking process, and the use of archival material is outstanding. This is a film with so much on its mind that it can feel a bit muddled by the end, but anchoring the narrative in the participants and their personal journey keeps this more experimental documentary grounded.

Finally, some quick takes on the animated shorts…

- - Daniel Zvereff’s Drago is comprised of gorgeous, hand drawn animation that conveys such a depth of emotion with each brushstroke we see, each shudder of the frame. It’s a simple, but deeply moving story of refugees relocating and building a new life for themselves – even if it isn’t the life they had planned.
  - I can appreciate the craft and the surreal imagery at play in Kerstin Zemp and Bianca Caderas’s Matta and Matto. I can even appreciate the central idea that we long for human connection so much that we’re willing to sacrifice just about anything to make those connections. But the film is a thinly veiled COVID/anti-mask/anti-precaution metaphor. As someone who is medically vulnerable, who continues to be as high risk, who cannot just go out drop all my precautions because I face the very real possibility of death or further disability, I find this kind of patronizing filmmaking and propaganda to be incredibly frustrating and deeply offensive – no matter the skill or craft on display.
  - Maks Rzontkowski’s Martyr’s Guidebook has a playful and cheeky tone throughout as it examines the ways we’re encouraged to sacrifice and martyr ourselves, to help others at the expense of our own needs so we can be a “good” person. The animation has a low-res, computer-generated quality mixed with the color saturation and image softness of 1960s Eastern European animation – making this work of magical realism feel like a fable from another time.
  - Catapreta’s Dona Beatriz Ñsîmba Vita makes fascinating use of surrealism to retell a historical narrative, looking at the ways revolutionary leaders sacrifice themselves for their people. I appreciated the ghostly imagery used to depict the white oppressors and the solidity given to Dona Beatriz and her copies. I do think the film is missing some of the connective tissue that would help it hit on a deeper level.
  - I love the mix of stop-motion and painted animation in Alisi Telengut’s Baigal Nuur – Lake Baikal, retelling of the formation of Lake Baikal. And pairing the gorgeous imagery with words from an endangered Mongolian dialect adds to the film’s beauty and poignancy.
  - I normally have problems with animated shorts that are tests of animation software – seeing how far you can push it until it breaks down. Takeshi Murata and Christopher Rutledge’s Larry worked a bit better for me than most because of the extreme anxiety these animation loops create – we want to see Larry be able to waddle down the hall without breaking down or getting held back by an infinite number of his doubles. But he’s forever stuck.
  - Flóra Anna Buda’s 27 is an outstanding short exploring the feelings of malaise for young adults living in a capitalist economy in which there are few economic prospects. The film captures the rich inner life of a young woman – her fears and anxieties, her fantasies and insecurities. And the animation is stunning.

2024 Online Sundance Film Festival: Day One

This is my third year attending the Sundance Film Festival online. The first year they made their offerings available virtually I was beginning to address the health issues that would later necessitate that I attend Sundance, or indeed, any festival or film screening, remotely for the foreseeable future. But I started attending religiously during its second online year, and even in these past two years with slightly limited remote viewing options, it’s still the best virtual festival around for those of us with medical vulnerabilities and disabilities that keep us from other festivals. As most festivals across the country are closing or limiting their virtual offerings, Sundance still offers virtual screenings for all of their competition titles, short films, and a handful of other titles that the either the filmmakers or the distributors want to ensure receive the widest exposure possible.

Despite some technical difficulties on this first day of the online festival – of course my projector bulb would explode at the start of Sundance! – I was able to get my viewing schedule back on track with offerings from the NEXT section, the World Dramatic Competition, a Premiere, and the start of my look at short films at the festival. NEXT has often been one of the most intriguing sections at Sundance, narratively daring work that pushes the boundaries of what cinema is capable. I discover some of my favorite films each year in the World Dramatic section, so the titles here are always ones that I look forward to seeing. And premieres are often the buzzier films of the festival – big name directors or stars launching or attempting to sell their films for the first time.

Jack Begert’s Little Death (from the NEXT section) has an incredibly fascinating structure. The film is a narrative diptych exploring addiction, the pursuit of authenticity, and interpersonal relationships through two tonally disparate sections. In the first story, a screenwriter’s inability to face his own role in his growing unhappiness (not to mention his misogyny and his constant grievances) keep him locked away from any possibility of change. In the second story, two young adults caught up in unexpected violence discover the possibility for second chances through empathy and connection. One story uses surreal touches (including computer and AI-generated animation) to place us inside the character’s neurotic headspace. The other story is far more grounded and naturalistic, albeit with touches of comedy and absurdism. The two pieces may not fully fit together, but it’s certainly an intriguing experience.

Daniel Hoesl and Juliane Niemann’s Veni Vidi Vici (from the World Competition) is a ruthlessly dark comedy about the ways in which the wealthy are able to prey upon society. The film is filled with absolutely striking visual compositions – brilliant and eye-catching color (or the absence of it), the use of static frames and precise staging to suggest the film’s varying levels of power and hierarchy. Because the narrative is so firmly situated from the point of view of the rich family, we’re never given the victim’s perspective, and the film is missing some of the pointed class critique that it seems to be attempting. When it comes to examining systems that enable the wealthy to maintain their power, it’s just scratching the surface. Still, there are some pointed jabs at the ways the wealthy attempt to shape society and pass their own warped and twisted family values (mainly their entitlement) on to their children. It’s a very enjoyable, if deeply flawed satire.

Josh Margolin’s Thelma is an absolutely charming action/comedy about a 93-year-old woman determined to retrieve the $10,000 scammers stole from her. From the pitch-perfect score and the brilliant editing rhythms to the delightful ways action movie tropes are reimagined for the nonagenarian set, the film is such a lovely viewing experience. June Squibb is magnificent in the titular role, exuding a fierce, prickly independence that is contrasted by the warmth and kindness she can show her grandson (and strangers on the street she is certain she’s met before). The film also manages to provide a thoughtful meditation on aging (and the limitations that come with it) without ever getting maudlin. What a wonderful film.

From the shorter side of things, today I caught Phoebe Jane Hart’s Bug Diner, a clever and funny, crude and yet tender work of short animation. The animation is wonderful, the pacing and quick cuts are fantastic. However, once the main joke of the film is revealed, the short quickly overstays its welcome, but it’s still thoroughly entertaining.

Oscars 2023 – Directing, Other Feature Films, and Best Picture Nominees

Here we are, the home stretch for our Oscar viewing and predictions. And here we come to, not only Best Picture, but Best Director and the three other feature length categories – Best International Film, Best Animated Feature Film, and Best Documentary Feature Film.

When determining my preferences in each of these categories, I often look for the film that not only has something to say about the human condition and can speak into our present moment while standing the test of time, but I also look for films that embody the unique vision of their creators – be it a comically bleak view of human relationships or a mythic outlook on the nature of family.

And while many of these categories can be predicted based on the momentum of awards that have come before, there’s always room here for a surprise or two – and there are always categories (like Best Documentary Feature) that don’t have the same consensus as some of the others. It’s all part of what makes awards season so much fun!

Best Directing

Martin McDonagh’s work in The Banshees of Inisherin sees the filmmaker and playwright returning to Ireland and showing restraint and control over both his camerawork and stylistic flourishes to settle into an unsettling fable reminiscent of his stage work, filled with careful (and gorgeous) visual compositions. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert bring the frenetic energy and nonstop pace of their music video work and manage to blend the action and science fiction spectacle with a deeply moving family drama that has more emotional resonance than you’d expect from the premise (and some of the more outlandish sequences). Directors everywhere are plumbing the depths of their childhood to craft their memory films, and Steven Spielberg shows considerable vulnerability in exploring his parents’ divorce alongside his burgeoning love of cinema in The Fabelmans – a master filmmaker at the top of his game. While he may have started with intimate chamber dramas, with Todd Field’s direction in TÁR, the filmmaker expands on his storytelling prowess to craft a densely layered, richly conceived exploration of power and consequence for the abuse of power. Ruben Östlund has made a career out of confrontational, discomfiting cinema, and with his first English-language feature film, Triangle of Sadness, he expands upon this by forcing his audience to confront our assumptions about class, power, wealth, and privilege – and the ways this can all shift due to circumstance.

Prediction: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Spoiler: Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans
Preference: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once (though this is another category where I’d be happy with any of the nominees winning)

Best International Feature Film

Edward Berger’s adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front manages to show the horrors of war without ever letting us off the hook by making the violence exciting or thrilling or heroic – it’s a brutal and grueling anti-war film. In Argentina, 1985, director Santiago Mitre has crafted a predictable and crowd-pleasing courtroom thriller about the civilian legal team who brought the country’s former military dictators to justice. An overly manipulative coming-of-age drama, Lukas Dhont’s Close tells the story of two boys with a wonderfully close friendship who find classmates and school pressures attempting to drive them apart. Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski tells the story of EO, a heartbreaking and gorgeous series of vignettes about the titular donkey as he makes his way through Europe and intersects with human kindness and cruelty. The only film this Oscar season I wasn’t able to see was Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl, but from those who have seen it, I have heard that this story of a young girl sent to live with distant relatives is absolutely beautiful.

Prediction: All Quiet on the Western Front
Spoiler: Argentina, 1985
Preference: EO

Best Animated Feature Film

Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Pinocchio is stunning – and it’s one of the few interpretations of the work that refuses the original’s neat and tidy message to allow for a powerful indictment of conformity and the way this conformity empowers fascism. With Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Dean Fleischer Camp has crafted a lovely blend of stop-motion animation and live action that explores the beauty and life-affirming power of community. The latest film in the Shrek franchise, Joel Crawford’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish unexpectedly explores mortality and aging – though it does dip into the frenetic action so common to today’s animated features. Director Chris Williams crafts a compelling fantasy world in The Sea Beast, and the film’s message of tolerance and understanding is lovely – even if it does follow some of your standard family film beats to get there. Turning Red is a delightful comedy about identity and adolescence, and Domee Shi infuses her film with joy, humor, pathos, and cultural specificity that grounds the film in a very real and lived experience – in spite of the story’s fantastical elements.

Prediction: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Spoiler: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Preference: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Best Documentary Feature Film

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes is a gorgeously shot eco-documentary about brothers who rescue injured black kites – the message is timely, and the visuals are beautiful, but I found the film to be unfocused. At first glance, the exhilarating artist biopic All the Beauty and the Bloodshed seems far afield from Laura Poitras’s usual political documentaries, but the more you sit with the film and Nan Goldin’s activism, the more you see how perfectly suited filmmaker and subject are to one another. Taking the footage and photography of Katia and Maurice Krafft, Sara Dosa has created a stunning rumination on love and scientific discovery in the beautiful and heartfelt portrait Fire of Love. A House Made of Splinters is a heartbreaking work of cinéma vérité, and director Simon Lereng Wilmont patiently observes orphans and troubled children who have lost their families due to violence in eastern Ukraine or due to parental neglect. A taut documentary thriller profiling Putin’s political rival, Daniel Roher’s Navalny is a thoroughly compelling portrait of the titular politician’s career and life in exile, but it barely touches the more complicated aspects of his political life and alliances.

Prediction: Navalny
Spoiler: All That Breathes
Preference: Fire of Love (though I’d be very happy if All the Beauty or A House Made of Splinters won)

Best Picture

I was struck by the way the filmmakers behind All Quiet on the Western Front managed to craft a truly anti-war film – it is harrowing and stomach-churning from the opening shots, contrasting the idealism of the young characters with the grim realities of war while never allowing us vicarious thrills or excitement through the violence onscreen. Avatar: The Way of Water may be filled with gorgeous visuals, but the story at its center is predictable and trite, the dialogue stiff and repetitive, the gender politics regressive and exasperating, and the use of real-life Indigenous cultures as inspiration thoughtless and condescending. The bitterness of a friendship coming to an end in The Banshees of Inisherin has ripples for the entire community, and this mournful dirge of a comic fable has deep emotional resonances for our own fractious time. History told through a funhouse mirror, Elvis is a hyperactive musical biopic told by an unreliable narrator that explore the price of fame and the way it can chip away at your sense of self. Anchored on the premise of exploring all the lives we could have led but didn’t (in order to save the universe!), Everything Everywhere All at Once is an absolute delight from beginning to end – action film, sci-fi mindbender, heartfelt family drama – and makes incredible strides for Asian representation in cinema. Steven Spielberg’s memories of family and his love of cinema make The Fabelmans a true love letter to the craft of movie making and an honest portrait of what it’s like to life your life as an artist, to stand outside of events as you observe and collect experiences to transform into art. With TÁR, we have an extremely compelling character portrait (anchored by a phenomenal performance) exploring the ways someone with power delights in wielding it over others, watching her delusions and self-justifications for the destructive choices she makes, and seeing her wrestle with the potential consequences for her actions. An extremely well-crafted action film, Top Gun: Maverick is perfectly calibrated to hit the right plot points at key moments, to tug on our heart strings with nostalgia… and it’s also a toxic male fairy tale that pretends to reflect on aging and mortality but really rewards men who refuse to know their limits or gracefully pass their mantle on to the next generation. While Triangle of Sadness certainly has moments where it’s interested in skewering the wealthy, it’s more pointedly a razor-sharp satire about power dynamics and the ways those can shift based on circumstances, work culture, prejudice, or even a twist of fate. And finally, Women Talking is a gripping series of conversations between women in an isolated religious community who have all been raped by the men in their midst and must decide on whether to leave or stay – the performances are rich and powerful, the story urgent and timely.

Prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Spoiler: The Banshees of Inisherin
Preference: Everything Everywhere All at Once (though I’d be happy if Banshees, Fabelmans, TÁR, Triangle, or Women Talking won – it’s an incredible slate of nominees this year!)

Oscars 2023: The Music, Writing, and Acting Nominees

Now we come to the section of our Oscar ballots where we start to get into some of the more “prestigious” nominees – and the nominees with a bit more glitz and glamor. With music nominees, we have both your classical film composers and your more recent pop and rock musicians who have taken to scoring film. And of course, in the original song category, we have popular musicians, movie songwriters, and even occasionally musical composers trying their hands at composing catchy ballads and dance numbers for the big screen. In both cases, I’m interested in seeing how the composers and songwriters use their medium to help support the narrative and mood of the film – rather than just swooning over the song or score that I find the most pleasant.

The writing awards encompass both original and adapted screenplay, and they can often be seen as the consolation prize for films that the Academy wants to recognize but aren’t going to award with Best Picture. With original screenplay, I’m looking for a film that has depth and substance, that has well-rounded characters and rich thematic resonance. With adapted screenplay, I’m looking for all of those elements, but I’m also looking to see how well it takes its source material and translates it to a new medium, a sequel, or a remake of the original work.

Finally, with the acting categories, we have the movie stars that often draw people to watching the Oscars in the first place – especially since they’re decked out in all of their awards season finery. While I know that the bigger and the more histrionic the performance, the more likely they are to win the award, I tend to gravitate to smaller and more intimate performances, performances with more subtlety and nuance.

As far as predictions go, we’ve had a number of precursors lean heavily in favor of some of the nominees, so there are some nominees who are very likely to win, but there are others who are tossups and we will have to make our best educated guesses based on how Oscar voters have behaved in the past.

Best Music (Original Score)

Volker Bertelmann’s score for All Quiet on the Western Front is harsh and unnerving, keeping the audience on edge and uncomfortable throughout the horrific scenes of war and violence. The haunting, slightly out-of-tune melody that anchors the Manny and Nellie theme in Babylon provides a melancholy contrast to the blaring jazz-infused energy of Justin Hurwitz’s score, capturing the energy and excitement of early Hollywood, as well as the film industry’s rotten and exploitive foundations. Carter Burwell’s melancholy, dark and foreboding strains serve as the musical foundation of The Banshees of Inisherin’s bittersweet black comedy, never overpowering the film and giving it a universality that extends beyond its Irish setting. Capturing the epic scope of a multiverse adventure, while remaining grounded in the family drama at the film’s center, Son Lux’s score for Everything Everywhere All at Once is a masterful blending of the grandiose and the intimate and is just as playful and moving and as the film which contains it. John Williams is one of the titans of movie music, and his score for The Fabelmans is lovely and captures the emotions of growing up and watching your parents divorce, as well as the joy of discovering what it is you’re called to do with your life.

Prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Spoiler: Babylon
Preference: Babylon (though I’ll be very happy if Banshees or Everything Everywhere wins)

Best Music (Original Song)

“Lift Me Up,” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, is definitely an earworm of a song – catchy, pleasing to listen to, and it musically captures the right emotion for the end of the film, but the lyrics are too generic to fully match everything that came before. Everything Everywhere All at Once’s “This Is a Life” perfectly encapsulates the film’s themes and ideas about family and possibility, its whimsical and adventurous mood and tone, and yet it works as a song that can stand on its own as well. In film that is filled with wonderful musical numbers, RRR’s “Naatu Naatu” is an absolute treat that serves as a potent (and delightful) showdown between our heroes and colonial arrogance – not to mention the fact that the song’s rhythm becomes an integral way for the two protagonists to communicate with one another. Tell It like a Woman is the worst film I’ve seen this Oscar season (maybe the worst film I’ve seen in the last few years), and the song that’s been nominated from it, “Applause,” is a milquetoast anthem filled with bland self-affirmations that don’t connect to any of the themes in the film – plus we have to listen to the song a full three times over the course of 20 minutes. Finally, “Hold My Hand” is a perfectly fine power ballad, but once again, there’s nothing about the song or its lyrics that connect to the themes or narrative in Top Gun: Maverick.

Prediction: “Naatu Naatu”
Spoiler: “Lift Me Up”
Preference: “This Is a Life” (though I’ll be very happy if “Naatu Naatu” wins)

Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, and Ian Stokell’s adapation of All Quiet on the Western Front is the first German adaptation of the novel, and most of the changes to the source material drive home the disparity between the ruling classes starting the wars and the lower classes sent off to die. Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Knives Out, Glass Onion, is a delightful murder mystery that once again skewers wealth and those with power in society, taking Benoit Blanc and playing with this character audiences grew to love in the first film, only to reveal that nothing happens in this film series without a good reason. In Living, Kazuo Ishiguro’s adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Ishiguro transplants the original from post-war Japan to post-war Britain and crafts a sweet and faithful narrative, though it misses much of emotional heft by trying to condense it by 45 minutes – and there aren’t enough new ideas brought to the adaptation to justify merely changing the cultural context. The writing team behind Top Gun: Maverick has engineered a taut, effective blockbuster working off of the DNA of the original film, but every time there’s a chance to dig deeper into character and his mortality, the writers take the easy way out and veer off into the male fairy tale of ageless virility and strength. Finally, Sarah Polley’s adaptation of the novel Women Talking is exquisite, taking a book that in form consists of meeting notes and transforming it into something cinematic and heartbreaking and deeply moving.

Prediction: Women Talking
Spoiler: Living
Preference: Women Talking

Best Writing (Original Screenplay)

Martin McDonagh’s screenplay for The Banshees of Inisherin is haunting, poetic, funny, and incredibly sad – telling of the rupture between two friends during the Irish Civil War and yet managing to have deep resonance for our own fractious times. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert tell a multiverse sci-fi tale with their own blend of wit and humor, keeping the life-or-death stakes grounded in a deeply personal story about family and the immigrant experience. While The Fabelmans is ostensibly Steven Spielberg’s memory film, his script with Tony Kushner manages to excavate deep family wounds, explore his love of cinema, and avoid painting it all with a sentimental sheen. TÁR is a richly layered, deeply complex film – not just because of Todd Field’s visual language, but also due to his densely layered script that gives a rich, challenging role to its central performer and is filled with rich symbolism and allusions that only deepen your appreciation for the film the more you consider it. A satire of power and the way power shifts (in relationships as well as in society), Triangle of Sadness is a sharp, hilarious comedy that uncomfortably points out the hypocrisies in our culture and in our own lives.

Prediction: The Banshees of Inisherin
Spoiler: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Preference: The Banshees of Inisherin (though this year I’d be happy to see any of the nominees win)

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Cate Blanchett is stunning in her performance as a composer and conductor facing the consequences of her abuses of power in TÁR, not only conveying the character’s imperious defiance but also her willful self-deception and growing dread. As Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, a fictional retelling of the actress’ life, Ana de Armas walks a tightrope in allowing for a measure of artifice to seep into her performance, yet still convey the psychological toll taken on so many of the women working within the film industry. To Leslie is a story of addiction and recovery, and Andrea Riseborough’s performance hits many of the expected beats and emotional registers, though when the film allows her moments of stillness and quiet, we can see what a magnetic, subtle, and powerful performer she can be. Playing Spielberg’s troubled and unhappy mother in The Fabelmans, Michelle Williams is often too false and performative, though there are some lovely nuances that rise to the surface the further into the film we get. Michelle Yeoh’s performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once gives the cinema veteran so much variety and depth to explore – a meaty mother/daughter relationship, a failing marriage, incredible fight sequences, moody romance, comedy – and she manages to pull off every version of her character with a grace and aplomb that is stunning to see.

Prediction: Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Spoiler: Cate Blanchette, TÁR
Preference: Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best Actor in a Leading Role

In Elvis, Austin Butler manages to bring the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll to life without merely putting on a shallow impersonation, but by making his Elvis Presley a fully realized human being. Colin Farrell’s work in The Banshees of Inisherin is masterful, turning in a performance that is soulful, sad, and hilarious (sometimes all at the same time) as he attempts to repair the rift in a friendship that has ended. With his performance in The Whale as an obese man attempting to reconnect with his daughter, Brendan Fraser gives an openhearted, emotionally vulnerable performance that ends up being much stronger than the movie it’s in. Paul Mescal is stunning in Aftersun portraying a father on holiday with his daughter, showing a loving and troubled, kind but difficult man who can be inscrutable even as his child tries all the harder to understand him. Living features the always wonderful Bill Nighy as an office clerk who attempts to truly start living toward the end of his life, and the slight modulations and the emotional arc he finds within his British reserve is incredibly moving.

Prediction: Brendan Fraser, The Whale
Spoiler: Austin Butler, Elvis
Preference: Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin (though I would be very happy to see Paul Mescal win for Aftersun)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

As the other half of the feud which occupies much of The Banshees of Inisherin, Brendan Gleeson has the task of being less sympathetic and remaining more taciturn throughout the film – yet he still manages to make us care about the depth of longing he conveys and the sadness that has permeated so much of his life. Brian Tyree Henry is the best part of Causeway, bringing depth and subtlety and nuance to a script that is wooden and stiff. While he may not have much by way of screen time, Judd Hirsch’s performance in The Fabelmans is lovely and charming, exuding warmth and compassion. The Banshees of Inisherin’s most heartbreaking character is played by Barry Keoghan with such a deep well of sadness and rage and pain that it can be easy to overlook the actor’s comic timing and the way he manages draw us in with a tossed off line of dialogue or a moment of stillness. As the emotional core at the center of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ke Huy Quan expertly shifts from dowdy husband to suave heartthrob to action hero and finds lovely moments of connection with all of his fellow castmates.

Prediction: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Spoiler: Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin
Preference: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Angela Bassett provides so much of the emotional catharsis necessary in order for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever to work as well as it does – she brings a gravitas to this comic book film and, in her character leading a nation to mourn for the death of their king, she helped us mourn the loss of Chadwick Boseman. While The Whale’s script is mawkish and maudlin, Hong Chau is one of the other performers who manages to come off well, bringing kindness and warmth to her caregiver role, but also a tough-as-nail practicality and bitterness that is rooted in grief and tragedy. As the woman caught between feuding friends who is fed up with the ways their drama is hurting everyone around them, Kerry Condon’s performance in The Banshees of Inisherin expertly hits notes of loss, longing, exasperation, and resignation. Jamie Lee Curtis is fantastic as the IRS agent auditing the central family in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and like all of the cast members, she gets the opportunity to try on multiple roles and bring lovely depth and nuance to her performance in this otherwise over-the-top cinematic extravaganza. The second nominee from Everything Everywhere All at Once, Stephanie Hsu, plays the second half of the film’s mother/daughter pairing that is central to the film’s narrative and emotional stakes, and Hsu is able to convey the sense of loss and sadness that are key to understanding just how dire things can truly get.

Prediction: Angela Basset, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Spoiler: Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Preference: Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Oscars 2023: The Craft and Technical Nominations

When it comes to the Oscar ceremony, there are no categories so routinely snubbed by the telecast than the craft and technical awards. And while I can understand the average moviegoer’s lack of interest in awards that don’t feature their favorite celebrities, the craft and technical awards recognize some of the most foundational aspects to the art of cinema. Without cinematography and editing, we don’t have movies at all. Costumes, makeup and hairstyling, and production design help to build the worlds we inhabit for two hours at a time. And sound and visual effects can allow us to stay fully immersed us in those worlds.

Whenever I think about who I believe should win in these categories, I’m often trying to consider what nominees’ work best serves their film. I know it’s easy to get swept away by beautiful shots of the gorgeous countryside, but I’m always looking to see the ways lighting and shot composition serve the narrative and thematic concerns of the film, or the ways the film’s makeup choices help to tell the story.

It has become a bit easier to predict most of these categories if you pay attention to the guild awards during the leadup to the Oscars – though there can still be some surprises and some difficult calls since the guilds can define their categories a little differently than the Oscars. But given the history of the Oscars and this year’s nominees, I’m still fairly certain in my predictions here.

Best Cinematography

James Friend captures the horror of war in his cinematography for All Quiet on the Western Front, using a desaturated color palate and harsh, unforgiving lighting for the trenches and battle sequences – many of which use a handheld or shoulder-mounted camera to place us within the chaos. With BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Darius Khondji combines moments of documentary realism with absurdist fantasy and surrealism, extravagant parties and harsh barren landscapes – all of which required their own unique visual style and camera techniques (loose and handheld at one moment, flowing long shots the next). Showbiz glitz and glamour – as well as its carnivalesque atmosphere – is breathtakingly captured in Mandy Walker’s cinematography for Elvis, revealing an artificiality and menace below the surface of success and fame. There’s a luminous classicism to Roger Deacon’s work in Empire of Light, a warmth and glow that captures the nostalgic magic of the moviegoing experience, though his lighting of Black characters often leaves them shadowed and obscured next to their white costars. The lead character in TÁR begins the film with an icy and aloof detachment that allows her to feel superior to everyone around her, and Florian Hoffmeister’s cinematography manages to convey that iciness and remove through the cooler color grading, while still making room for the moments of psychological terror she experiences to be conveyed primarily through the interplay of light and shadow.

Prediction: Elvis
Spoiler: All Quiet on the Western Front
Preference: TÁR (though I’d be very happy to see BARDO win)

Best Editing

Mikkel E.G. Nielson’s editing for The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t showy or ostentatious, but it is essential to conveying the rupture between the two friends at the film’s center – especially in scenes where they occupy the same physical space but are rarely in the same frame, relying on the edit to show their growing enmity. The frenetic and dizzying pace of Elvis’s nonstop propulsion couldn’t have been achieved without the meticulous editing of Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond, knowing how to subtly tone the rhythms down when needed, only ramp them back up into overdrive. Paul Rogers’s editing choices in Everything Everywhere All at Once are essential to, not just the mood or tone of the film, but the entire narrative as they masterfully cut between every possible life Evelyn (and the other members of her family) could have lived while still managing to craft a heartfelt, emotionally potent adventure. The subtlety in Monika Willi’s editing for TÁR belies the skill it takes to convey so much of the film’s meaning through assembling its visual language – cutaways to brief reaction shots or observational views that put us at a remove from Lydia and distance us from the myth she makes of her own life. We’re often drawn to notice the editing in action films, and Eddie Hamilton’s work in Top Gun: Maverick is solid and dependable action editing that, unlike so much modern action, allows us to clearly follow the characters in geographical space at every point in the film while still putting us on the edge of our seats.

Prediction: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Spoiler: Top Gun: Maverick
Preference: Everything Everywhere All at Once (though I’d be happy to see Banshees or TÁR win in this category as well)

Best Costume Design

While Mary Zophres’s costume design for Babylon takes real-life inspiration from 1920s Hollywood, she also finds ways to match the film’s “ecstatic truth” by embellishing the costumes to suggest character, as well as the decadence and decay at the heart of the film industry. In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ruth Carter continues to build on the work she began in the first film and expands it to include designs for the kingdom of Talokan, crafting a magnificent visual look for each of the characters onscreen. The costumes in Elvis, designed by Catherine Martin, are all painstaking in their detail, recreating the singer’s iconic looks for the screen and surrounding him with character costumes in a kaleidoscope of color. Shirley Kurata’s costumes for Everything Everywhere All at Once run the gamut from Chinese movie star, Peking opera singer, chef, frustrated laundromat owner, to a universe of people with hot dogs for fingers – and each costume not only evokes the lives left unlived, but perfectly encapsulates who the characters are at each moment in the film. With Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Jenny Beaven’s costume designs fit the more traditional, lavish period costume tropes, and while they may look gorgeous, there’s nothing especially substantial about the designs other than the beauty of the gowns.

Prediction: Elvis
Spoiler: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Preference: Everything Everywhere All at Once (though I’d be equally happy if Babylon won)

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

All Quiet on the Western Front covers its performers in blood and mud, making the horrors of war tangible on the bodies of everyone who appears onscreen. The world of Gotham is a shadowy, grimy underbelly of crime and corruption, and the makeup work in The Batman projects this by giving characters a wan look – but let’s be honest, it’s also nominated because of the special effects makeup and prosthetics used for the Penguin. In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, makeup and hairstyling are used in conjunction with the costuming to build the stunning sci-fi/fantasy worlds of Wakanda and Talokan. Elvis’s makeup team also makes use of a fat-suit and prosthetics to achieve some of their intended effects – and the period styling certainly helped secure its nomination. Perhaps the only reason The Whale was nominated in this category is due to, yet again, a fat-suit and extensive prosthetics for the film’s lead.

Prediction: The Whale
Spoiler: All Quiet on the Western Front
Preference: All Quiet on the Western Front

Best Production Design

The stark horror of the trenches of World War I are meticulously recreated in All Quiet on the Western Front, as are the contrasting luxurious environs for the men who send others off to die. Avatar: The Way of Water borrows heavily from existing Indigenous cultures for much of its new production design, creating a thoughtless hodgepodge of imagery devoid of meaning. Between the lavish Art Deco decadence on display and the early silent film backlots, the production design of Babylon is a rich, layered pleasure to watch throughout. While, once again, there is some historical accuracy in the production design of Elvis (especially in recreating some of the more iconic stage shows), there’s also an aspect of the funhouse mirror that distorts and warps it just so, in keeping with the film’s unreliable narrator. There’s a classical elegance to the designs in The Fabelmans, recreating Spielberg’s childhood homes and schools without a sense of artifice or guile.

Prediction: Babylon
Spoiler: All Quiet on the Western Front
Preference: Babylon

Best Sound

The use of sound in All Quiet on the Western Front is masterful – the din of war overwhelms one moment, followed by an eerie quiet and stillness in the aftermath – and it all comes together seamlessly. Avatar: The Way of Water makes solid use of action movie sound mixing, and over the course of its runtime produces a lovely variety of sonic textures. With jump scares, bombastic chase scenes, and your standard fist fights, The Batman is a unique superhero offering and has an unsettling soundscape to match. The sound in Elvis not only includes the live musical performances that make the film come alive, but it also includes the mixing of contemporary musicians with Elvis’s songs and the dream sequence sounds as we see the story through the eyes of Colonel Tom Parker. Roaring jet engines, air passing by the cockpit, the sound of the pilot’s heart beating in their chests – all of these elements help the sound in Top Gun: Maverick keep us enthralled during the film’s spectacular action sequences.

Prediction: Top Gun: Maverick
Spoiler: All Quiet on the Western Front
Preference: All Quiet on the Western Front

Best Visual Effects

The visual effects in All Quiet on the Western Front are a mix of practical and computer-generated effects, seamlessly integrated to create the necessary scale and atmosphere for the film. The groundbreaking computer-generated effects work for Avatar: The Way of Water created some stunning, photorealistic CGI characters and environments. The Batman also used a combination of practical and digital effects to craft incredible action sequences and a moody, noir-infused Gotham city. The visual effects work in Elvis is used to help fill out the environment, add depth to the crowds, and assist in recreating many of the period details. Top Gun: Maverick also uses an impressive mixture of practical and digital effects to achieve its pulse-pounding action sequences, mixing in real aerial photography with digital explosions and digitally compositing the actors with Navy pilots – among other impressive feats.

Prediction: Avatar: The Way of Water
Spoiler: Top Gun: Maverick
Preference: All Quiet on the Western Front (though I must grudgingly admit that I’m very impressed by the effects work in Top Gun, much as I didn’t care for the movie)

Oscars 2023: Oscar Nominated Short Films

While much of the fanfare each Oscar season goes to Best Picture, Best Director, and the various acting categories, some of the most unique and captivating work of the past year in cinema can often be found in the short film categories: Best Documentary Short Film, Best Short Film (Animated), and Best Short Film (Live Action). In past years, the nominated shorts have been a mixed bag, with films that range from bleak and obnoxiously “edgy,” to mawkish and overly message-driven. This year’s crop of nominees are among the strongest contenders I’ve seen in years of watching the Oscar-nominated short films – all worthy nominees and thoroughly engaging works of short cinema.

I always find the short films difficult to predict – I often try to outthink the Academy voters and they end up picking what I think is a left-field choice. Still, I’ll do my best to offer some brief thoughts on the nominees, my prediction for the winner, a possible spoiler, and who I hope will win on Oscar night.

Best Documentary Short Film

Kartiki Gonsalves’s The Elephant Whisperers is a sweet eco-documentary about two workers in an elephant sanctuary who care for baby elephants. The film is beautifully shot and features some heart-tugging footage of the elephants with their custodians.

Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev’s Haulout is a more brutal and pointed ecological documentary that explores the devastating effects of climate change on the animal world. Like the previous film, it’s beautifully shot, but the spare conversation and exquisite sound design make this a haunting cinematic experience.

Jay Rosenblatt’s How Do You Measure a Year? is a deeply personal and profoundly intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s relationship with his daughter from the age of two to 18. Watching this child grow up before your eyes and seeing her growing awareness of the world she lives in is incredibly moving.

Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy’s The Martha Mitchell Effect tells the story of the woman who blew the whistle on Nixon and Watergate, but wasn’t believed until the Nixon tapes were finally made public. It’s an incredibly compelling story – especially in this age where women are routinely ignored and gaslit – and I love the extensive use of archival material throughout the film.

Joshua Seftel’s Stranger at the Gate is an extremely powerful story about one man’s journey from hate and into community. The structure of the film allows for an excruciating amount of tension to build, and the interviews with community members prevents the film from merely being about a white man’s journey toward understanding.

Prediction: The Elephant Whisperers
Spoiler: Stranger at the Gate
Preference: Haulout (though most of these are strong choices)

Best Short Film (Animated)

Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a lovely children’s fable about confronting uncertainty and fear in the world around us. The animation is lovely, the voice-acting gentle and soothing, and while it’s mostly comprised of a series of aphorisms around a loose narrative, I think these are truths we could all stand to hear in this angry and fractured time.

Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s The Flying Sailor is a visually inventive short that uses a variety of animation styles to tell the true story of a sailor who was thrown four kilometers after an explosion in the Halifax Harbor. The integration of styles is stunning and the approach the filmmakers take to visualizing your life flashing before your eyes is compelling, but when compared to some of the other nominees, the film is thematically thin.

João Gonzalez’s Ice Merchants is a beautifully animated short about a father and son who gather ice each day from their cliff-side dwelling and sell it by parachuting down to the village below. The animation is deceptively simple, with elongated line drawings creating a sense of vertigo and disorientation, and there is a subtle grief that compounds the longer you watch the film, until the ending is as overwhelming and powerful and the film’s final visual image.

Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s My Year of Dicks is a charming, playful, and visually delightful short film that follows the misadventures of a teenage girl as she attempts to lose her virginity over one year in the early ‘90s. It’s a painfully honest film about what it’s like to grow up and continually choose the wrong relationships – all of which are rendered in their own animation styles which evoke the nature of each of Pam’s misadventures over the course of this fateful year.

Lachlan Pendragon’s An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It is a stunning, bleak, and very funny existential work of short animation about an office drone who begins to notice terrifying things about the world around him. The metafictional aspects are hilarious and unnerving (complete with Brechtian distancing techniques like showing most of the film through a camera monitor or having the animator’s hands in the background of most shots), and the character’s dilemma is extremely compelling.

Prediction: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
Spoiler: My Year of Dicks
Preference: An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It (though I’d be very happy to see Ice Merchants, My Year of Dicks, or The Boy… win)

Best Short Film (Live Action)

Ross White and Tom Berkeley’s An Irish Goodbye is a sweet and heartwarming comedy about two brothers attempting to fulfill the last wishes of their recently deceased mother. The film is frequently hilarious and manages to avoid sentimentalizing the relationship between the young man and his brother with Down syndrome, though it relies too heavily on montage and puerile humor to hold together as tightly as a film of this length should.

Anders Walter and Pipaluk K. Jørgensen’s Ivalu is a haunting tone poem about abuse, loss, and the facing of an unbearable truth about family and community indifference. The cinematography is exquisite, following Pipaluk through her village and into the surrounding countryside, and the voiceover work is heartbreaking.

Eirik Tveiten’s Night Ride is a charming film about a woman who accidentally steals a tram on her way home one cold winter night – and an incident between passengers she’s forced to confront. The film never loses its light touch, its sense of discovery and playfulness, but nonetheless explores our desire to ignore harassment and assault when we see it occurring, all the while challenging us toward intervention rather than passivity.

Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Pupille is a delightful, anarchic short for children about girls in fascist Italy forced into conformity by the nuns who run their boarding school – and the one little girl who decides to rebel. The film is gleeful, filled with stunning images and magnificent performances, and in an age where mindless conformity (especially in our children) is being prized more and more, it’s a wonderful lesson in standing up to authority.

Cyrus Neshvad’s The Red Suitcase is a tense, gripping short about an Iranian teenage girl who has been flown to Europe by her father in order to marry an older man – and her attempt to flee from him as he waits for her at the airport. This is an incredibly tight film (well paced, beautifully acted) with stakes that are continually raised (through language barriers, the titular red suitcase, an envelope discovered in the trash), showing the plight of girls and women across the world.

Prediction: Le Pupille
Spoiler: The Red Suitcase
Preference: Le Pupille

While you can find some of the films on various streaming platforms right now, all of the short films are available as part of the 18th Annual Oscar Nominated Short Film releases, presented by ShortsTV. You can find a theater playing the programs near you at http://www.shorts.tv/theoscarshorts.

Favorite Films of 2022

Neptune Frost, by Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams | The Pink Cloud, by Iuli Gerbase
Bad Axe, by David Siev | The Banshees on Inisherin, by Martin McDonagh
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul., by Adamma Ebo | TÁR, by Todd Field
Aftersun, by Charlotte Wells | The Eternal Daughter, by Joanna Hogg
Crimes of the Future, by David Cronenberg | White Noise, by Noah Baumbach
After Yang, by Kogonada | Everything Everywhere All At Once, by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan
Glass Onion, by Rian Johnson | Triangle of Sadness, by Ruben Östlund
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, by Mark Gustafson and Guillermo del Toro | Le Pupille, by Alice Rohrwacher
Decision to Leave, by Park Chan-wook | Speak No Evil, by Christian Tafdrup
Nanny, by Nikyatu Jusu | The Wonder, by Sebastián Lelio
Ali & Ava, by Clio Barnard | Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, by Sophie Hyde
Fire of Love, by Sara Dosa | Nope, by Jordan Peele
Happening, by Audrey Diwan | Lingui: The Sacred Bonds, by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
The Princess, by Ed Perkins | Riotsville, USA, by Sierra Pettengill
Hit the Road, by Panah Panahi | Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, by Pawo Choyning Dorji
Girl Picture, by Alli Haapasalo | Hatching, by Hanna Bergholm
Till, by Chinonye Chukwu | The Woman King, by Gina Prince-Bythewood
Emergency, by Carey Williams | Free Chol Soo Lee, by Julie Ha amd Eugene Yi
Both Sides of the Blade, by Claire Denis | Stars at Noon, by Claire Denis
Kimi, by Steven Soderbergh | The Northman, by Robert Eggers

Favorite Films of 2021

Putting together a list of favorite films from the year is always a tricky task. I feel as though I’m constantly scrolling back through my viewing of the past 12 months and trying to figure out which films made a lasting impact – which films continue to move me when I look back on them, which films leave me continuing to ponder their mysteries, which films have me eager return to them.

And these past two years of pandemic viewing has made things even more challenging. On the one hand, there are more avenues than ever to find and discover new films. A number of the films on my list were viewed as part of virtual film festivals or online screening series. But on the other hand, as theaters began reopening and accessible viewing options for new and limited releases has been dwindling, those of us with disabilities or conditions that put us at greater risk from COVID are finding ourselves left behind.

So I tried to be conscious of all these factors while selecting the films for my list this year. I only chose films that, as of the end of 2021, were accessible to individuals who could not attend physical theaters – either through a regular streaming service or a virtual cinema option. This meant leaving off some fantastic films that I was fortunate enough to see via screeners, festivals, and screening series – but I’ll be sharing more about those over the coming year as they’re more readily available to see.

And, as always with these lists, this is an intensely personal grouping of films. These are the works that spoke most directly to me. With the exception of the first film on this list (which is my most personal selection here), I’ve organized the list in pairings that resonated for me. I first saw Justin Chang, film critic at the Los Angles Times, do this several years ago, and it’s a practice that has stuck. I love the way films can end up unintentionally speaking to one another as we watch them during the year, with themes and ideas building on each other as we blithely go about our moviegoing. And I like to try capture that a bit in my own list of favorites.

So, without any further introductions, here are my favorite films of 2021.

11. Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma | Passing

They may explore their themes in very different ways, but Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma and Passing are two films from this past year about the codes and struggles of Black Americans living in a racist and oppressive society. Topaz Jones, Simon Davis, and Jason Sondock’s Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma is a short work of creative non-fiction that places surreal vignettes of absurd comedy alongside compelling interviews with Black activists to create a portrait of the contemporary Black experience. Rebecca Hall’s Passing tells the story of two Black women living in the 1920s, one of whom passes for white and is married to a white man. One film is a joyful delight, the other moody and atmospheric, but both are thoughtful reflections on the ways Black Americans navigate white society and its systemic oppressions.

A still from the film DON'T GO TELLIN' YOUR MOMMA.

Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma (2021) | Directed by Topaz Jones, Simon Davis, Jason Sondock

October 9, 2021

Passing (2021) | Directed by Rebecca Hall

November 28, 2021

Where to Watch Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma

Where to Watch Passing

10. The Lost Daughter | Shiva Baby

Both The Lost Daughter and Shiva Baby create intense, anxiety-inducing cinematic landscapes from which to explore women’s experiences as they navigate the world and the feelings or experiences they’re expected to suppress. In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, a woman’s idyllic vacation is interrupted by brash neighbors, and she’s forced to reflect on the choices she made as a young parent and her conflicted feelings around motherhood. With Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby, a college student runs into her sugar daddy and ex-girlfriend at the shiva she attends with her parents, forcing her to confront family expectations and her own sense of aimlessness. While one film is more clearly a drama and the other comedy, both films ramp up the tension through their use of thriller and horror genre conventions to explore the terrifying burdens society places upon women.

Shiva Baby 2020 | Directed by Emma Seligman

June 6, 2021

A still from the film THE LOST DAUGHTER.

The Lost Daughter 2021 | Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

December 31, 2021

Where to Watch Shiva Baby

Where to Watch The Lost Daughter

9. Bergman Island | Labyrinth of Cinema

Two films that explore the power of art and cinema – the power to reshape our own experiences and even to transform the world – Bergman Island and Labyrinth of Cinema both look back into cinema’s history and craft meta-narratives that are beguiling, delightful, joyous, and deeply moving. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island follows two filmmakers romantically involved spending time on the island Ingmar Bergman called home, and as the narrative folds in on itself, we’re left to reflect on the nature of art, the latitude given to male artists, and the burdens placed on women. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema is a kaleidoscopic journey through the history of Japanese cinema and provides a profound meditation on violence, war, and those who suffer most from nationalism and aggression. Both films leave you with a profound sense of the possibilities of cinematic storytelling and the hope of art to inspire change.

Bergman Island (2021) | Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

December 28, 2021

A still from the film LABYRINTH OF CINEMA.

Labyrinth of Cinema (2019) | Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

June 6, 2021

Where to Watch Bergman Island

Where to Watch Labyrinth of Cinema

8. Delphine’s Prayers | Zola

While Delphine’s Prayers and Zola both explore the nature of sex work, they are also fundamentally studies of storytelling, the dynamics of power, and the way race and gender complicates those dynamics. Rosine Mbakam’s Delphine’s Prayers is a documentary of rigorous and formal simplicity that consists of a series of interviews between the director and Delphine, her long-time friend, about the events that led Delphine into a life of prostitute. In Janicza Bravo’s Zola, two dancers go on a road trip to earn some extra money, but one of the women isn’t prepared for the complications that arise when her new friend brings along a roommate – who might also be the friend’s pimp. The act of storytelling is vital in both of these films – in the one, it produces incredible empathy and connection, in the other, it’s exuberant and playful, with an ironic detachment. But both challenge our limited perceptions and the explore the ways that race and gender become major dynamics within racist and misogynistic societies.

A still from the film DELPHINE'S PRAYERS.

Delphine’s Prayers (2021) | Directed by Rosine Mbakam

December 31, 2021

Zola (2020) | Directed by Janicza Bravo

September 19, 2021

Where to Watch Delphine’s Prayers

Where to Watch Zola

7. The Power of the Dog | Summertime

The Power of the Dog and Summertime both explore loneliness, isolation, and the yearning for connection – albeit in two very different tonal registers and with two very different outcomes. The four characters at the center of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog each make flailing attempts to address their loneliness and sense of isolation, and in doing so, contribute to the film’s tragic final act. Carlos López Estrada’s Summertime features an ensemble of young adult poets, each isolated and longing for community, drawn together one night out of a mutual love for beauty, the spoken word, and the perfect burger. One film is a tragic Western, haunting and spare. The other utilizes the structure of a musical (with spoken word poetry substituted for singing) and is a vibrant delight. However, both films use their respective formats to examine how destructive this unmet desire for connection can be, and how joyous and moving it is to finally find your community, your people… your home.

Summertime (2020) | Directed by Carlos López Estrada

April 13, 2021

A still from the film THE POWER OF THE DOG.

The Power of the Dog (2021) | Directed by Jane Campion

December 23, 2021

Where to Watch Summertime

Where to Watch The Power of the Dog

6. Censor | Spencer

Two isolated women are haunted by the ghosts of their past in both Censor and Spencer, films about women yearning to break free from those pasts, their grief, their loss, from systems that no longer see them as human. In Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor, a British censor views a film that bears a striking resemblance to the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of her sister, and she soon begins to experience a heightened reality influenced by the violent and disturbing images she consumes for work. Pablo Larraín’s Spencer follows Princess Diana as she spends the Christmas holiday at the Queen’s estate and finds her agency ever more restricted and haunted by the past, looking for an escape and a way to break free. Both films tell their stories from their protagonist’s closely subjective points of view, featuring tour de force performances from their leads. While one is clearly a horror film, the other uses tropes from haunted house narratives to explore the terror of losing one’s agency and freedom. And while they end on very different notes, these are two films that explore the very real misogyny and sexism that women everywhere face – be it from colleagues, clients, servants, or spouses.

Censor (2021) | Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond

April 8, 2021

Spencer (2021) | Directed by Pablo Larraín

December 12, 2021

Where to Watch Censor

Where to Watch Spencer

5. The American Sector | The Card Counter

The American Sector and The Card Counter hold mirrors up to American society, showing us what it is that we truly value as a nation, what “victories” we choose to memorialize, what crimes and atrocities we choose to forget, and who pays the price for the sins of our nation. A formally constrained work of non-fiction filmmaking, the filmmakers behind The American Sector, Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens, traveled the country, filming sections of the Berlin Wall and capturing conversations that touch on questions of why and what we memorialize, as well as our efforts to possess history. In Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, a formerly incarcerated military interrogator spends his days living out a purgatory in an endless series of casinos, biding his time, until the possibility for revenge (or potentially redemption) presents itself. These are two films that reflect back to us hard truths about America’s soul at the present moment – all without preaching or laying out their arguments in neat, clean bullet points. These are spare, simple films that ask you to reflect on your own values, that ask you to think deeply about our past, our collective guilt, and the kind of nation we want to build moving forward – tearing down walls and connecting with one another.

A still from the film THE AMERICAN SECTOR.

The American Sector (2020) | Directed by Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens

July 1, 2021

The Card Counter (2021) | Directed by Paul Schrader

September 9, 2021

Where to Watch The American Sector

Where to Watch The Card Counter

4. All Light, Everywhere | A Cop Movie

Works that explore the ethics of their own creation, All Light, Everywhere and A Cop Movie are documentaries that deconstruct their form in order to reveal deeper truths than you’re liable to find in your standard social issue doc. Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere explores surveillance, the history of the camera, and the ways this is all bound up with the history of policing, warfare, and weaponry – all while consistently pulling back to reveal the fundamental gaps in our attempts at so-called objectivity. With Alonso Ruizpalacios’s A Cop Movie, actors are hired to recreate scenes from the lives of two Mexico City police officers, and the film shifts to give us the opportunity to hear the actors’ doubts about playing police officers and to raise questions about telling such stories at a time with so much rampant corruption. Both films are constantly pulling back to reveal the world that many documentaries keep hidden outside the frame – be it the way the filmmakers coach an interview subject on how to enter a room or the training actors undergo so they can play credible police officers. Neither film provides us with easy answers to any of the questions they raise. But both films do cause us to reflect deeply on our relationship to objectivity and help us remember that there are always going to be gaps in our vision.

A Cop Movie (2021) | Directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios

November 8, 2021

A still from the film ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE.

All Light, Everywhere (2021) | Directed by Theo Anthony

October 28, 2021

Where to Watch A Cop Movie

Where to Watch All Light, Everywhere

3. Annette | Titane

Questions of forgiveness and redemption lie at the heart of Annette and Titane, two films which feature selfish and destructive protagonists at their center committing horrific acts and reaching out for connection, forgiveness, and grace. Leos Carax’s rock musical Annette follows the tumultuous relationship between a standup comedian, his opera singer wife, and their young daughter – all leading to tragic consequences. In Julia Ducournau’s French horror film Titane, a young woman (who also happens to be a serial killer) goes on the run and pretends to be the son of a man who’s child disappeared a decade earlier. Both films use heightened aesthetic elements to explore their themes – the use of a puppet in Annette as the daughter highlights the ways adults attempt to control their children, and the body horror in Titane graphically illustrates the ways that we can never truly run from the pain and sorrow we inflict on others. Both films ask whether or not forgiveness is possible – in the face of such wreckage, can we ever truly receive redemption for the wrongs we have done to others? And when others have wronged us, can we release our anger and offer forgiveness in return?

Annette (2021) | Directed by Leos Carax

September 9, 2021

Titane (2021) | Directed by Julia Ducournau

November 13, 2021

Where to Watch Annette

Where to Watch Titane

2. Procession | The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)

Art, cinema, and the very process of crafting the films in question become part of the healing process for the participants in both Procession and The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin). In Robert Greene’s Procession, a group of survivors who had been sexually abused by Catholic priests work with a drama therapist and the filmmaker to film fictionalized recreations and short vignettes that allow them to take back their agency and power. With C. W. Winter and Anders Edström’s The Works and Days, the filmmakers embedded themselves in a rural Japanese community in order to recreate the final year Tayoko Shiojiri had with her husband, providing her with a measure of closure and healing. In both cases, the onscreen participants and performers are active, vital collaborators with the filmmakers, working together to write and craft the sequences and scenes that will be shot for each project. One film has a much more traditional pacing and rhythm, while the other uses its eight hour running time to focus on moments of quiet and stillness. But both films are deeply moving and contain powerful reflections on the ways that community can help us heal (from trauma, from grief) and that the process of creating together can be a beautiful act of catharsis.

Procession (2021) | Directed by Robert Greene

December 24, 2021

A still from the film THE WORKS AND DAYS (OF TAYOKO SHIOJIRI IN THE SHIOTANI BASIN).

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (2020) | Directed by C.W. Winter and Anders Edström

December 17, 2021

Where to Watch Procession

Where to Watch The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)

1. Mogul Mowgli

My choice for favorite film of the year is my most personal selection for this list, a film I saw not long after I was rushed to the emergency room with a life-threatening medical condition and began the long journey to recovery that continues to this day – maybe that’s why I couldn’t find any other film that felt right to pair with it. Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli came to me at just the right moment in my life. A film about a British-Pakistani rapper who develops a rare auto-immune disease just as his career is taking off, this is a film that understands chronic illness and disability in a way that few films ever seem to get right. It understands the anger and the grief and the deep sense of loss when your body stops functioning the way it has always functioned, when you suddenly have to put your life – your dreams and aspirations – on hold. This is a film that understands the ways that loved ones sincerely want to help, but so often come with platitudes, vague encouragements, or bits of advice that run contrary to the health care professionals who are attempting to give you the best (and most realistic) shot at recovery. Tariq’s use of surreal imagery to explore the protagonist’s loss of control over his body is haunting, and it also connects him to a familial legacy that he has been running from most of his life. This is an astonishing work that understands disability, deferred dreams, and the complications of family expectations – a film that has given me much succor during a year of my own disability and dreams deferred.

Mogul Mowgli (2020) | Directed by Bassam Tariq

April 9, 2021

Where to Watch Mogul Mowgli

Honorable Mentions

A list like this is, by its very nature, incomplete. There were too many incredible films to include on the main list, so here are a few honorable mentions:

- - Pig and Riders of Justice* both complicate our relationship with revenge narratives and stories of traditional masculinity, allowing us to truly grieve alongside their protagonists.
  - Ascension and Faya Dayi* are two gorgeous and meditative documentaries that rely more on their poetic imagery to explore their themes than on any talking heads.
  - Attica and In the Same Breath are two essential political documentaries, one on race and its ramifications for today, one on propaganda and the COVID-19 crisis – both are emotionally overwhelming.
  - C’mon C’mon and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy are two lovely films about the imperfect and fumbling ways we attempt to make connection with one another.
  - Deep injustice is explored and exposed in the stunning documentary from the Democratic Republic of the Congo Downstream to Kinshasa and the heartbreaking Iranian film on the death penalty, There Is No Evil*.
  - Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time and Rocks are two more films about the search for connection – and the fears that come with making yourself vulnerable.
  - Steve McQueen produced three (and directed one) incredible documentaries to complement last year’s Small Axe anthology of films, all about the struggle of the Black British community – Uprising, Subnormal: A British Scandal, and Black Power: A British Story of Resistance.
  - One of my favorite music documentaries of the past year is the gleefully delightful The Sparks Brothers.
  - Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is one of the silliest and most delightful comedies I’ve seen in years.
  - The Rescue is a thrilling documentary with incredible re-creations of the daring underwater cave rescue of the Thai soccer team that is unexpectedly moving.
  - The Green Knight is a visually stunning visual feast about learning to lose yourself to find yourself, to willingly sacrifice yourself for others.
  - Some of my favorites from this last year’s Oscar race that were released widely in 2021 include Another Round**, The Father**, Judas and the Black Messiah, and Quo Vadis, Aida?** – all fantastic films.

Notes:
*Films watched during the Seattle International Film Festival. I didn’t take enough notes from these viewings to write a review for these films.
** Films watched during my annual Oscar run. I didn’t take enough notes from these viewings to write a review for these films.