Oscar Night 2024: “Great Men” vs. the Field
The movies were a gift this year. Returning to the theater and learning my seven-year-old daughter loves Indiana Jones, Porco Rosso, and any hero with bravado has been a heart song.
The Oscar slate of nominees also satisfied. After writing these micro-reviews I usually come away with a theme for the selection. I can’t shy away from seeing the tension between the “Great Man” biopics that still lord over Hollywood, and the many different permutations of underrepresented voices that get their chance in the spotlight due to the expanded ten-pictures field.
It’s a shame a “Great Man” will most likely run away with it all but here’s hoping for a CODA-like upset.
From least favorite to favorite with one bonus inclusion:
Maestro — Didn’t have the juice. You are probably catching on that I am so so tired of broad “Great Man” biopics. I am so tired.
This one fails differently than Oppenheimer as it never justifies why the modern audience needs to care about Lenny in this moment.
What it got right was focusing on his marriage to Felicia Montealegre, but did it? I could have used 40% less Bradley Cooper and some combination of more Felicia and more Moonlight-like reality-breaking dance numbers.
I am completely convinced that actors overvalue how much audiences care about their ability to impersonate a conductor, musician, painter, or another artist, etc.
Oppenheimer — Really? This is your frontrunner?
It felt like a master filmmaker made a “Great Man” biopic but had never seen another “Great Man” biopic before and fell into almost every pitfall. Overly long, too broad in scope (nailed the WHOLE Wikipedia entry), and had a poor, and confounding narrative construction for juggling the timelines. So many scenes of Oppenheimer walking into an establishing shot to deliver some dialogue, we get it the “Great Man” is at Princeton now, and now the desert, and then onto Washington!
Unlike Maestro, it did get right the urgency of the retelling, which is that thanks to Oppenheimer we are always a hair away from destruction for the most likely reason being the vanity of men (or some singular man).
I would watch the version of this movie that is just the Trinity test set in the desert on repeat.
Poor Things — Another choice. I am a fan of Zorgos and his weird film concepts that keep production/set designers in business. In this one, I kept questioning whether the story, a pretty down-the-middle “female coming of age” while dealing with a cruel world, justified the over-the-top and belabored trappings.
At least it was an acting showcase (I miss these). Emma Stone’s performance and otherworldly pluckiness kept it from slipping into the unwatchable. “Furious Jumping” is permanently in the everyday vernacular.
This was good enough for the big show. Other notes I had were putting prosthetics on Willem Dafoe’s natural goblin face should be a crime. Mark Ruffalo ate it up in every scene but it is a shame he can’t win in a loaded supporting actor field.
And that dance scene!
Anatomy of a Fall — A good drama. Thin compared to the pack but I found the straightforwardness of a courtroom suspense flick refreshing. The most biting of the slate in expressing the ugly truths about relationships and gender dynamics.
The Zone of Interest — Oof. Is nazism as a “banal reality show” better than film-forward directing focused on acting and traditional characterization?
I don’t know and I don’t know how many more World War movies I have in me. The recent trend of using the gravity of World Wars to justify new filmmaking/unique narrative constructions (Zone, 1917, Dunkirk) is starting to wear me out.
But that ending. Oof.
Past Lives — When Harry Met Sally’s Antimatter. It should be higher on the list, but it admittedly took a good thirty minutes before it “spun up” and had to lurch forward using flashbacks and montages as a crutch. Besides that, it has as close to a perfect second half of a movie as you could write or deliver for a romantic non-comedy.
I always call movies the “empathy machine”, and this has it, but I also find philosophy and general melancholy exhilarating and am enthralled when a movie can deliver all three. Extremely promising debut from a writer/director, just hoping that the autobiographical elements aren’t the only bullet she has in the chamber.
A movie gets bonus points whenever New York City gets a casting credit.
Barbie — Good and deserved the hype. Taking a magnifying glass to it, it was better as a chase movie and had a sloppy second act before sticking the landing. A little similar in vibes to Poor Things, with me questioning whether the message/satire went far enough, but I thought the balancing act was better done here with more genuine comedic opportunities filling in the gaps.
Satire is supposed to be funny and biting and Barbie delivered.
Killers of the Flower Moon — Is it a good movie if you had to break the fourth wall to get the ending right? Thought a lot about this one.
Checks a lot of boxes. A great director that is still at the top of their game. A largely forgotten chapter of history that has obvious current resonance. Perma A-list stars and newer breakout performances. Genuine drama.
I was left bothered by the depiction of DiCaprio’s character, which I recognize may have been intentional. Can evil be that much of a doofus? Scorcese having to come on stage to tell us explicitly that our world is still consuming whole the “Mollie Burkharts” out there and this film is trying to be better, but ultimately no different is what stuck with me.
American Fiction — A great black movie.
I kid, I kid. Separated itself from some of the other underrepresented voices entries (Barbie, Poor Things) by taking a subtle and extremely mature critical lens to the satire they were delivering. The layers of generations, the split endings, and the final scene with his ill-chosen literary nemesis discussing the fallacy of “wasted potential” as a poor and ultimately self-defeating heuristic for judging his peers got this to the top of the pile.
*Bonus Review* Boy and the Heron — Miyazaki, and his career, is the only filmmaker on this list that humans will still be talking about a hundred years from now. It is a a crime to leave The Boy and the Heron, a humble retrospective of Miyazaki’s career and pending mortality/legacy off of the best picture slate. Even saying that, not even a top 5 Miyazaki.
Visually, emotionally, personally, and practically the best movie-watching experience I had this year. As someone smarter than me said, “We cannot restrain this old man from directing another beautiful film about grief featuring the freakiest little guys.”
Holdovers — We need more sad boys (and moms). If the rest of the slate showed tension in Hollywood between the stories they want to tell (Great Men vs. Other Voices), Holdovers felt like Hollywood got something right and made the first bird of the next era vs. the last dinosaur of the prior.
Meaning, that if we want movies like Barbie that demand thinking differently about decades of stifling gender-specific tropes, vapor-thin women and toxically robust men, then space should exist for the sad boys.
And here comes the sad boys. Holdovers certainly is pushing an aesthetic, but it was charming and it was great seeing the most courageous moment in movies this year coming from a stinky, lazy-eyed, alcoholic, never-ran professor, and the most touching romance being the two weeks he got to spend with a brilliant asshole teenager.
My take is controversial because I know this isn’t the first movie Hollywood has made about forlorn teenage boys and stifling boarding schools, it’s a story as old as fiction, but I was continuously surprised how well the movie sidestepped obvious pitfalls while making something new. Da’Vine Joy Randolph embodied this as any lesser movie would have sorted her and Paul Giamatti into a romance of the undesirables where she can save the sad white man, but instead we got a B-Plot focused solely on her getting home to see her expecting sister for Christmas that was real and on-it’s-face heartbreaking and perfect.
Top 5 Christmas movie of all time. When we think about men and the baked-in “masculinity” that surrounds everything (and whether we are “Ken-ough”), remember to not “compound the misery by ruining the boy[s].”
Kids are beautiful and frustrating and beautiful.