The Oscar nominees for Best Picture are eclectic this year, with films that wouldn’t have had a prayer with the Academy when I was growing up, when the models of excellence were often starchy British imports. After membership was broadened in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite backlash a few years ago, the new Academy developed a different soft spot for hipster baubles that are livelier, but not necessarily any better than the British tea parties that used to gobble up so much attention.
The Academy of yesteryear and today are equally enthralled, however, with message movies, with productions that signify that the virtues of filmmaking are inherently nested in causes. Make money for a studio and look like you’re improving human affairs, and you could wind up with a “Barbie” or an “Oppenheimer.”
I’m not saying that films can’t be important — they can be and they have been to me personally. But movies that fetishize “importance” are usually the least interesting and most pompous, the equivalent of that glad-handing sales person who stays on message at parties. If you believe that art should be wilder, woolier, and less easy to digest, Oscar movies aren’t normally for you. There’s a reason that filmmakers like David Lynch, Spike Lee, and Alfred Hitchcock have never won Best Director Oscars.
Of course, my second favorite movie of the Best Picture nominees this year is a formula buddy odyssey, though its humility sticks out among the surrounding bombast of last year. Of these Best Picture nominees, I liked three, and perceive the others to be a variety of failures ranging from the infuriating to the admirable. Here are the Best Picture nominees ranked in order of my preference from least to most liked, rather than in terms of likelihood to win, as “Oppenheimer” has the statue sewn up.
10. “Barbie” (Greta Gerwig)
I didn’t bother to review this last summer during peak “Barbie” mania, as I merely wanted the damn thing to go away. Is last year’s phenomenon a feminist sermon or a hypocritical toy commercial fashioned by a filmmaker desperate to make money and assure you that she hasn’t sold out? What kind of choice is that to begin with?
9. “Past Lives” (Celine Song)
In sensibility and tone, “Past Lives” is closest to the prestigious British movies that used to dominate vintage awards cycles. Like many Merchant-Ivory productions, the primary point here is to espouse good taste for the indie boutique crowd. Carefully cultivated images, bloodless characterizations, deadly humorlessness, and a vague, pregnant longing prop up a plodding narrative concerned with reunited childhood loves.
8. “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Martin Scorsese)
Mammoth, incoherent, stultifying and frequently absurd, we’re supposed to believe that this film is a master’s supreme achievement. There are moments here and there of profound beauty, but Scorsese exhibits no discipline over his subject matter, allowing his two center-ring stars — Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro — to overact into oblivion. The story of the murder of the Osage is lost in a thick fog of indulgence.
7. “Maestro” (Bradley Cooper)
“Maestro” finds Bradley Cooper as eager to please as Greta Gerwig was with “Barbie.” Mounting a biography of Leonard Bernstein that’s concerned not with his music but almost entirely with his relationship with his wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan), Cooper slips into camp. Did it occur to Cooper that Bernstein’s music informs everything else and vice versa? That lives aren’t neatly compartmentalized into Wikipedia categories? Some scenes do work, especially in the film’s second half when Cooper and Mulligan’s performances get cooking.
6. “American Fiction” (Cord Jefferson)
Cord Jefferson takes Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” a satire of the liberal white establishment’s condescending fetishization of Black trauma, and neuters it into a bland lifestyle reverie. Jefferson pulls his punches at every possible opportunity, though Jeffrey Wright, one of our best working actors, is superb anyway.
5. “Poor Things” (Yorgos Lanthimos)
This steampunk fantasia in the key of “Bride of Frankenstein” is amusing for maybe an hour, with Emma Stone as a reanimated corpse with the naivete of a child and the unself-conscious sex drive of many men’s porno-fed dreams. When Lanthimos is taking the character’s sex drive seriously, and showing how it intimidates everyone around her, especially men, the film is subversive. When Stone must, of course, become a suffragette and espouse the usual life lessons, the film becomes another issues movie for issues season, with Lanthimos’ hectoring visual style serving as a numbing agent.
4. “Anatomy of a Fall” (Justine Triet)
A novel concept — an episode of “Law & Order” mounted with the obsessiveness of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” — is undone by one of the banes of modern movies: overstatement and profound over-length. The relationship here isn’t especially interesting either: She’s a writer who’s bitter because her husband, whom she may have killed, was a whining ne’er-do-well. One of those chilly, formally accomplished, defiantly unlikable European movies that are always released to acclaim in America. The closest this year had to a Ruben Östlund film.
3. “Oppenheimer” (Christopher Nolan)
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s absorbing “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” gets the Christopher Nolan treatment here, as the narrative is split into multiple timelines that confuse basic matters of cause and effect. Why? Because that’s Nolan’s brand, baby, whether or not it’s germane to the subject. For a three-hour film, “Oppenheimer” is irritatingly restless, channel-surfing from one scene to the next. Yet, I admit that my stance on “Oppenheimer” has softened. John Waters was right when he said that it’s a weird feat to turn a movie of talking into an action film. The spectacle of “Oppenheimer,” its kaleidoscopic vision of a world unraveling, is singular in this age of vulgar cultural fragmentizing.
2. “The Holdovers” (Alexander Payne)
This poignant formula character study — think “Sideways Poet’s Society” — gets by on Payne’s careful way with atmosphere and Paul Giamatti’s characteristically irresistible take on an erudite oddball who is, wait for it, more sentimental than he appears to be. Yet, as programmed as the script may feel, there are shards of real turmoil here, especially in the pall that the Vietnam War casts over a tortured Christmas season.
1. “The Zone of Interest” (Jonathan Glazer)
Championing a Holocaust movie for an Oscar is so cliched, but Glazer unravels the trope of the Holocaust as prestige guilt bait, fashioning an austere horror film that actually manages to indict our complacency. The point here, beautifully articulated by a series of sick-joke long takes, is that we can become inured to anything, whether it’s homeless people on the streets or detention camps on our borders or, yes, genocide. Glazer, in an audacious final flourish, even manages to indict his own film, suggesting that it is just another artifact towards contemplating the authentically unimaginable.
The 96th Academy Awards will air on ABC on Sunday, March 10 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.
