Movies |
The Academy Awards: Who will win? And why do I think the likely winner is a tragic mistake?
By
Published: Feb 27, 2023
Category:
Drama
There are 10 nominees for the Best Picture 0f 2022: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Elvis,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “The Fabelmans,” “Tár,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “Women Talking.”
If the awards from the Producers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild — where one film won more awards than any winner in the Guild’s history — are any indication, you may confidently bet on “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
It’s billed as “a sci-fi comedy.” If only. It’s some sort of new form, bouncing from here to there in a dare-you-to-figure-it-out puzzle of multiple universes that present multiple possibilities, with the lives we think of as our own as just one path. There’s just enough confusion in the press between “multiverse” and “metaverse” to benefit Mark Zuckerberg, who has changed Facebook’s name to Meta Platforms and is spending billions on metaverse tech. Yes, a Best Picture Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” will be a vote for movie-making that ignores traditional narrative structure. It will also be, sadly, free advertising for Facebook.
Berry Gordy, founder of Motown, said, “It’s what’s in the grooves that counts.” Which brings me to the film. I watched the preview. It was enough. A few friends were made of hardier stuff. They actually tried to watch it, only to bail, some after ten minutes. Was it because they’re old? Or is it that they remember what films were like until very recently? In any case, they feel the way Martin Scorsese feels about Marvel films:
They seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.
The filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.
In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.
For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.
How many of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture have I seen? Two. “Tár” and “The Fabelmans.” Do I feel like a truant? No. Because among the many movies I saw in 2022 — a dozen recent foreign films, several dozen classics — I saw six films that I would have nominated for Best Picture.
LIVING
As I wrote in my profile of Bill Nighy, my favorite film of 2022 is a film I haven’t seen yet. As some of you know, I have a fractured ankle and wear a “boot” 24 hours a day. And Living” isn’t streaming. Yet. But if Bill Nighy wins the Best Actor award at the Oscars, it will… very soon. To watch the preview, click here.
SHE SAID
This time, Bernstein and Woodward are female, and Harvey Weinstein is Nixon. And this movie is as thrilling as “All the President’s Men.”
My review of the book.
The preview.
The steaming link on Amazon Prime
EMILY THE CRIMINAL
This film is so far above big, expensive, self-important films that I almost want to say it was the best American movie I saw this year. You know Aubrey Plaza because she was in “White Lotus.” Here she’s deep in student debt, with a criminal record that makes it harder for her to get a real job that pays real money. So….
The preview.
The Times review.
The Amazon Prime video link.
TO LESLIE
“To Leslie” opened in October. A third-string NY Times critic called Andrea Riseborough’s performance “deft” and praised “this deceptively simple yet heart-wrenching character study.”
The film grossed just $27,000.
Andrea Riseborough, an actress better known in England than here, has friends. Famous friends. And in the weeks before Oscar nominating season, those friends got loud. Cate Blanchett, a certain Best Actress nominee for “Tar,” included praise for Riseborough when she accepted a Critics Choice award. Kate Winslet said Riseborough gave “the greatest female performance onscreen I have ever seen in my life.” Gwyneth Paltrow posted on Instagram. Howard Stern, who acted with Riseborough in his long ago film “Private Parts,” praised the film on his satellite radio show.
When the nominations for Best Actress were announced, there was Andrea Riseborough.
Studios spend millions promoting stars in awards season. This campaign didn’t cost a dollar. Did Hollywood cry foul? Of course, and the stunned members had a point: if anyone directly called Academy voters to lobby for Riseborough or organized informal screenings, that would be a violation of Oscar rules. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences launched an investigation. Breath was held in two countries. The Academy announced the nomination was legit… but maybe just this once.
My take: “To Leslie” is brilliantly scripted and directed, and that intensifies Riseborough’s performance, which is so gritty and searing I wanted to turn away. I was so thrilled to be watching a real movie that I couldn’t. Simply, “To Leslie” was worth the discomfort, and I was so relieved for her revival I didn’t even bitch about the improbably happy ending.
The trailer will give you some idea what awaits you. Watch here.
To stream the movie on Amazon Prime, click here.
ARMAGEDDON TIME
This film cuts deep because it’s entirely believable: a white kid and his Black friend, on Long Island, in the Reagan years. Anthony Hopkins, who won the Best Actor Oscar in 2021 for “The Father,” deserved a Best Supporting Actor nomination for this.
To stream it on Amazon Prime, click here.
BENEDICTION
A bio-pic of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon during World War I;
At the podcast, you could be eloquent in defense of the nominated movies, my choices, or your own. Here, you can write me: HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com.
