Oscars 2022: Nomination Prediction Results

Jeremy BeckOscars
Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson in Triangle of Sadness

Hey, the Oscars just announced their nominations for the 95th Academy Awards! They were pretty good, except for the ones that were terrible. If you’re a member of the unfortunate class of cinephile who ritualistically follows such matters, you have by now performed the standard series of compulsory reactions: celebrating the precious few overlaps between your own ballot and the Academy’s, bemoaning the collective’s egregious failings of judgment (have I gotten over The LEGO Movie missing in Best Animated Feature in 2014? Reader, I have not), and frantically updating your mental list of favorites to win Best Picture.

In other words, this year was business as usual: a few welcome inclusions, several more head-scratching omissions, and the typical plethora of “Ah well that was inevitable” selections. But for those of you with social lives who are less enmeshed in Academy arcana, let’s quickly run the various categories and how they matched (or didn’t) with my own predictions: Read More

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Oscars 2022: Nomination Predictions

Jeremy BeckOscars
Felix Kammerer in All Quiet on the Western Front

The nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are set to be announced on Tuesday morning, an annual tradition that’s invariably met with a combination of fanatical nitpicking and performative indifference. It is fashionable, almost mandatory, for critics to express their disdain toward Hollywood’s annual self-congratulatory gala, and for good reason: The Oscars don’t matter. Or at least, they can’t change your attitudes about the specific movies you loved, hated, and argued about. They’re a collective approximation of individual tastes, which inherently makes them a fool’s errand.

And yet, the only thing worse than caring about the Oscars is ignoring them. This isn’t because the Academy somehow confers prestige upon their chosen selections—quite the opposite, as winning an Oscar often carries with it a vaguely negative connotation of middlebrow safeness—or even because its picks can influence the types of movies that awards-hungry studios are more (or less) likely to green-light in the future. It’s because they preserve in amber the industry’s extant preferences and expectations. It is always illuminating to look back and remember the Academy’s choices, whether you do so with fondness (“Hey, remember when The Departed won Best Picture?!”) or exasperation (“Ugh, remember when Green Book won Best Picture?”). Read More

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M3gan: Hell Comes to the Dollhouse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amie Donald as M3gan

They say the eyes are windows to the soul, which is why the most expressive anthropomorphic characters in cinema—E.T., Gollum, Wall-E—all sport wide, soulful peepers. But windows work both ways. In M3gan, the sly and spry new horror-comedy directed by Gerard Johnstone, the titular android gazes out into the world through a pair of delicate grey-blue irises, less concerned with comprehending her internal essence than with mapping her external environment. Her vision is rendered like that of an eerily empathetic cyborg—when she sees a person, she instantly analyzes their “Emotional State” and assigns quantitative ratings to various feelings (trust, joy, fear), like a talent scout grading an athlete—but she’s doing more than just gauging behavioral patterns. She is constantly downloading new data and feeding it into her processor, which means she’s learning, judging, evolving.

How, you might wonder, will such a creature ultimately regard our society? Then again, you might not wonder that, because if you’ve seen any previous entry in the child-doll subgenre of horror, you already know. Yet while M3gan’s predictable plotting rarely deviates from its predecessors’ silly and shrieky playbook, it is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable diversion—smart, funny, and even a mite provocative. Read More

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The Whale: Fat’s All, Folks

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brendan Fraser in The Whale

The first time we see Charlie, the protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, he’s masturbating to pornography on his couch. You might think that such a recreational pursuit would grant him enjoyment, but Aronofsky stages the scene with sober, funereal gloom. The lighting, by the cinematographer Matthew Libatique, is dark and muted; the music, by Rob Simonsen, is swollen and sinister. Charlie’s breathing is ragged, and the intensity of his effort presumably stems from his weight—a gargantuan 600 pounds. His obesity, we instantly realize, has plunged him into deep despair, such that even a ritual of pleasure has become a labor of misery.

Aronofsky is no stranger to depicting anguish, and Charlie shares with the director’s other heroes—the feverish addicts of Requiem for a Dream, the haunted dancer of Black Swan, the panicked housewife of mother!—an essential helplessness. Typically, Aronofsky amplifies this level of torment by wielding his own restless energy and rambunctious filmmaking imagination, but The Whale requires a more restrained approach. Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter (who also wrote the screenplay), it’s an intimate chamber drama, set in a single location (Charlie’s Idaho home) and featuring minimal action or excitement. Read More

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Babylon: Putting the Sin in Cinema

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in Babylon

In the Bible, the city of Babylon is referred to as a dwelling place of demons—a haunted, sinful metropolis that is ultimately befallen by evil, disaster, and ruin. That Damien Chazelle has selected it as the title of his new movie, a rampaging epic set in the dawn of Hollywood, is one of the filmmaker’s subtler touches.

I mean this less as criticism than observation—maybe even admiration. The maximalism with which Chazelle has constructed Babylon, a simultaneously nostalgic and seditious homage to cinema’s golden age, is unmistakably a product of courage, even if it is also a signifier of poor taste and bad sense. His heedlessness—the way he has envisioned 1920s Tinseltown as a gluttonous underworld of sex, drugs, and generalized depravity—carries with it a monumental ambition, one that demands the skill of a truly great director. That Chazelle mostly pulls it off is a testament to his talent; that he fails in stretches makes his vanity no less interesting. Read More

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