Last Minute Oscar Thoughts

Look, blame it on the war. I had very honorable intentions of dedicating March to Oscar catch-up, and then to writing a comprehensive ranking of my favorite and least-favorite nominees. But then on February 28th, in one of the first of many Iranian missile attacks, I slipped down the stairs on my way to the building shelter and emerged extremely sore of butt. So I’ve decamped to relatives whose shelter access is more horizontal, and their movie tastes do not, as it turns out, run to Oscar-bait (I did watch the new 28 Years Later movie, and it is just as good as the first; so it’s by no means all bad).

And so, as we approach this evening’s Oscar ceremony, I have watched a mere four of the ten nominated movies, and I’m not even sure I’m particularly equipped to write meaningfully about them—March was also supposed to be Two Towers month, and so far I’ve written a grand total of four essays. So this post is going to be more in the way of scattered observations that previous years’, and I invite those of you who have watched other Oscar movies to offer your own opinions in the comments.

Of the four movies I’ve watched, the first out the boat is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. del Toro has become an Oscar regular since winning best picture with The Shape of Water in 2018, and though it pains me to say this as an early fan of his work, it’s getting increasingly hard to justify his presence on the ballot. Not that Frankenstein is bad, exactly. Like all of del Toro’s films it is gorgeous to look at, full of lush and phantasmagorical set design and costumes. But Frankenstein is one of the most adapted properties in the world, and del Toro himself has cribbed from it repeatedly in his previous movies. So the fact that Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) reanimates body parts which move with alarming grotesqueness, dismembered torsos and limbs suddenly sparking to seemingly agonized life, doesn’t register as much as it might otherwise have done. This leaves one more time to notice the movie’s adaptation choices, which are… questionable.

Despite billing the film as a “faithful” adaptation, del Toro makes vast changes to the original story and characters, while foregrounding a lot of conclusions that book nerds have reached about the book in forty or fifty years of discussion, many of which are more like distillations of the text. The fact that it is possible to conceive of Victor Frankenstein as a neglectful parent, for example, does not mean that Frankenstein is explicitly a novel about child abuse, and yet this is how del Toro crafts his movie. The result gives Isaac a lot of scenery to chew on as a sort of proto-techbro, convinced that his genius makes up for any moral transgression (Jacob Elordi’s Creature, meanwhile, is less noticeable, perhaps because the film seems terrified of having him do anything remotely monstrous). But even he can’t wring a believable character out of a film that asks him to react to other characters telling him that “You’re the monster, Victor”.

With Frankenstein dismissed, our journey through the best picture nominees immediately runs into a wall. I would be perfectly happy for any of the other three movies I’ve watched—Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler), One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson), and Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie)—to take the prize. These are three very different movies, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but each one gave me almost the opposite feeling that I had while watching Frankenstein—that rather than telling me exactly how I was supposed to feel and react, these movies were going to work their hardest to carry me along with them and make me feel things.

Sinners would be the underdog on the ballot if it weren’t already a runaway box office success and pop culture phenomenon. But it is, nevertheless, a vampire musical about people of color in the deep south, so if nothing else one should pause to acknowledge the magnitude of its achievement. Coogler proved himself a master worldbuilder with the Black Panther movies, and he marshals similar resources here, using cinematography, music, and production design to craft a semi-realistic, semi-fantastical version of 1932 Mississippi, and people it with many different groups and individuals, who all collide on a single night at a roadside juke joint: twin brothers (Michael B. Jordan) who have come home after years working for Al Capone, Chinese-American grocers who serve white and black clientele in separate stores on different sides of the same street, a broke-down, alcoholic blues musician, a preacher railing against the devil music, a white woman desperate to connect with her black heritage. Hell, off to the side, there’s even a troupe of Native American vampire hunters.

Sinners luxuriates in introducing us to this world (including some absolutely magnificent musical scenes), and as a result the actual vampire part of the story can feel a bit perfunctory and even rushed. It’s practically a guarantee that the movie will win best original screenplay this evening—this is traditionally how the Oscars rewards movies that are worthy of best picture but a little too weird to actually win it—but the screenplay may be where the movie is weakest. Most viewers, for example, have taken the vampires’ attempt to enter the juke joint and claim ownership of the young musical prodigy (Miles Caton) whose talent will help them relive their lost past as a Get Out-style metaphor of whiteness attempting to consume black culture. But to me there seemed to be something more subtle and more benevolent trying to work its way through the story, and straining to do this while also delivering vampire slaying action and servicing several different character arcs. Sinners works despite this messiness, but it is its more languorous, meandering first half that makes it a great movie.

It says something that One Battle After Another—a movie about political activism, political violence, white supremacy, and anti-immigrant crackdowns—has not been discussed even once on this blog until several hours before we all find out whether it’s going to win best picture. And what it says is: this is a movie that gestures at politics without having any actual politics. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, it weaves together 70s militant activism with 2020s political crises in a way that ultimately feels incoherent. That’s not to say there aren’t powerful political moments in the movie. The gaggle of leering, jeering police officers jostling to get their picture taken with a semi-conscious captured activist (Teyana Taylor), or a middle school principal who permits a troupe of mercenaries who look and talk like real military to interrogate his students, are both moments that cut deep. But when the most impactful sequence in the movie—in which a network arranging shelter and transport for immigrants springs into action in the face of a looming raid—turns out to have been suggested, conceived, and even cast by supporting actor Benicio del Toro, it speaks volumes about Anderson’s ability to meaningfully comment on the issues he gestures at.

All that being said, I can’t deny that there’s genuine power and emotional heft to One Battle After Another, even if it shows up only sporadically. The activist groups the film depicts may seem almost like a parody of 70s leftism, but the film’s depiction of the human wrecks that have been left behind by this activism are genuinely moving—chiefly Leonardo DiCaprio in a surprisingly generous performance as a true believer who now just wants to be a good father. The white supremacist group the Christmas Adventurers may be a heightened parody of bougie private members’ clubs, but there’s something genuinely haunting about this image of elites cavalierly insinuating their poisonous ideas into the corridors of power (in general, One Battle After Another scores more hits when it depicts the ills of the present moment in American politics than when it tries to depict leftist activism). And then there is the simple fact of this movie’s cinematic craft—everyone justly raves about the car chase along an undulating desert road in the film’s climax, but this is merely one example among many of Anderson’s skill as a director. There are moments in One Battle After Another that make me want to throw up my hands in disgust—Taylor’s character, now in her early fifties at the latest, telling her teenage daughter that she must pick up the fight has still got me hopping mad—but on the whole, it is one of the most distinctive and satisfying moviegoing experiences I had last year.

Marty Supreme is a movie that shouldn’t work. It’s a sports movie in which the sports are incidental, the main character may not actually be that good, and the film’s crowning triumph is a pity match that mostly serves to make the hero realize he should be doing something else with his life. It’s a historical drama that blatantly does not give a fuck about historical accuracy, in which characters in 1952 reference DNA or say things like “that does not impinge on my consciousness”. It’s a picaresque in which the title character bounces from one misadventure to the next, cadging, borrowing, hustling and outright stealing money to bankroll his dream of winning the world table tennis championship, while burning every bridge in his path, and which nevertheless expects us to keep watching with delight, rather than turn away cringing. That this works is partly due to Timothy Chalamet’s impressively nuanced performance, which shows us Marty’s charm while also holding him back from us just a little, allowing us to see the desperation and chilly manipulation that lie underneath it all.

For me personally, Marty Supreme also works because it is such a quintessentially Jewish movie, about a specific moment in the Jewish-American experience, the post-war years in which Jews were being offered a chance at the grand American bargain, while also feeling a desperate need to distance themselves from the great tragedy of their people. “I’m the ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat”, Marty boasts in one scene, but like so much of his bluster, there’s genuine fear underpinning that claim, and real danger if he can’t live up to it. Though the circles he moves in gesture at a sophisticated indifference to his Jewishness, antisemitism still lurks just beneath the surface, and it’s up to Marty to discover the genuine strength that will allow him to claim his place in the American century. For all its manipulation, I found myself genuinely moved by the film’s ending.

If the oddsmakers are right, either Sinners or One Battle After Another will take home the best picture trophy this evening. The buzz seems to be leaning towards Coogler’s film, though Anderson’s has swept a lot of the guild awards which seems to give it an edge (though the Oscars’ preferential vote system could shuffle the cards in either direction). I would be happier with either result, though my heart leans more towards Sinners—I’m always happy when a great genre movie gets the recognition it deserves. But, since I can’t offer an opinion on more than half of the nominees this year, feel free to make your pitch for any of the others as the winner in the comments.