Here we go. Having blitzed past some technical categories large and small, we now get to the good stuff. This morning, we’re looking at Best Supporting Actor and Actress; later today, we’ll turn to the screenplays.
Let’s start with the boring supporting race first.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
NOMINEES Brendan Gleeson—The Banshees of Inisherin Brian Tyree Henry—Causeway Judd Hirsch—The Fabelmans Barry Keoghan—The Banshees of Inisherin Ke Huy Quan—Everything Everywhere All at Once Read More
Our weeklong analysis of the Oscars marches on. Yesterday, we looked at seven below-the-line categories; today, we’re looking at five more technical categories—but, like, the cool ones. (I promise, the sexy stuff is coming soon.) Let’s get to it.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
NOMINEES All Quiet on the Western Front—James Friend Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths—Darius Khondji Elvis—Mandy Walker Empire of Light—Roger Deakins Tár – Florian Hoffmeister
WILL WIN Some of the Academy’s omissions in this category are downright flummoxing. But it’s notable that three of the five nominees exhibit more subtle technique than usual, especially when voters in recent years have favored boisterous showmanship. That means this is likely a race between the two more aggressive contenders: All Quiet on the Western Front and Elvis. The latter is certainly flashier, but the former is more intense and disturbing with its grotesque war imagery. I’ll go with All Quiet. Read More
It’s March 2023, so it must be time to wrap up our coverage of 2022. The Oscars are on Sunday, so per annual tradition, we’ll be spending this week analyzing all of the feature categories. (Sorry, short subjects, maybe next year.) Today, we’re looking at seven different fields that are, shall we say, low-profile.
Get your pools ready! (Do people do Oscar pools?)
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
NOMINEES Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio Marcel the Shell with Shoes On Puss in Boots: The Last Wish The Sea Beast Turning Red
WILL WIN The general rule here is just to pick Pixar. But for whatever reason (perhaps its lack of a theatrical release?), Turning Red never developed the sort of momentum that most of the studio’s releases easily accumulate. In fact, only two of these movies received a meaningful run in theaters, and only Puss in Boots: The Last Wish actually generated a significant sum of money. That might have meant something a few years ago, but the stigma which once attached to streaming services has slowly eroded. Instead, the likely winner is Pinocchio, which somehow shrugged off the weirdness of being the second such adaptation of the year—three months before it aired on Netflix, Robert Zemeckis’ version landed on Disney+ with a thud—and became a critical smash thanks to its stop-motion artistry. Read More
Yesterday, MovieManifesto published its list of the best movies of 2022. Today, per annual tradition, we’re ranking everything else, with a comprehensive list of every movie we watched last year. Except we aren’t really “ranking” them, because rankings are dumb and obnoxious and falsely imply quantitative rigidity in a medium that’s fundamentally fluid and amorphous. Instead, we’re breaking out my beloved concept of tiers, which are somewhat nebulous in their own right but which do a decent job striking the balance between the internet’s demand for comparative metrics and my own distaste toward numerical measures.
Aside from serving as an exercise in nerdy recordkeeping, this piece is meant to serve as a primer for readers who invariably ask themselves that age-old question: Hey, what movie should I watch tonight? That’s why I include which service each film is (currently) streaming on—so that you can use this list as a guide as you mull your evening selection. (On the other hand, I’ve decided to omit the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic data that I’ve typically appended in the past; I might elaborate on this in the future, but for now suffice it to say that those sites are bad and stupid, and I don’t want to promulgate their dubious methodology.) [Update: I did, in fact, elaborate on this.]
Here’s the complete list of all 138 new movies I watched in 2022, broken into sensible, not-at-all random tiers: Read More
Are movies better than they’ve ever been? This isn’t a rhetorical question, nor is it a trolling provocation. Concordant to the annual list-making ritual—the absurd and irresistible exercise of reducing a year’s worth of cinema to a discrete number of worthy titles—is the compulsion to take stock of the industry at large. This is frequently a demonstration of despair: a lament that movies are dying, are childish, aren’t what they used to be. The perpetuity of these vague assessments—that they invariably allude to some unspecified past in the medium’s history, a golden age when Then was indubitably superior to Now—would seem to diminish their accuracy. But critics are creatures of grievance, and there is always some new cataclysmic trend—the decline of originality, the prioritization of commerce over artistry, the lack of visual and narrative audacity—for us to complain about.
2022 was no different, even if the particular breed of doomsaying it invited was a familiar species. Once again, the box office was dispiritingly ruled by franchises, sequels, and spinoffs; of the 12 pictures that grossed $150 million domestically, only one—Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, whose subject matter isn’t exactly novel—wasn’t rooted in existing intellectual property. (Last August, I bemoaned the financial failures of three largely original movies that simultaneously landed in theaters with a collective thud.) Conversely, many bracing and adventurous films—the barreling excitement of Athena, the silky suspense of KIMI, the dastardly twists of Fresh—virtually ignored theaters altogether, instead requiring a subscription (or at least a friend or family member’s password) to a boutique streaming service. Cinema may not be dead, but in terms of production and distribution, it is undoubtedly changing, and that constant state of flux inspires grave uncertainty about the art form’s future. Read More
