Oscar 2023 Coverage Archives : Cinema Cocktail

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.