Yesterday, we
looked at some of the lower-profile below-the line fields in this year’s
Oscars. This morning, we’re staying in the technical areas but progressing to
some categories that carry a bit more weight. Of course, the Academy initially
planned on announcing the winners for two of these fields during commercial
breaks, but then they reversed course, no doubt because they remembered that
the Manifesto prizes these categories.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
NOMINEES
Cold War—Lukasz Zal
The Favourite—Robbie Ryan
Never Look Away—Caleb Deschanel
Roma—Alfonso Cuarón
A Star Is Born—Matthew Libatique Read More
Welcome to Oscars Week! If you’re less than excited about
Sunday’s annual cinematic gala, you might well be a producer for the show!
Suffice it to say that it’s been a rough month for the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts & Sciences, as they introduced one dubious revision to the
telecast after another—no live song performances; no prior year’s winners as
presenters; shunting the announcements for four categories to commercial
breaks—only to walk back each change in the face of virulent criticism from the
moviegoing public. (And let’s not forget the risible “Best Popular Film”
category that was introduced in August before being mercifully scrapped a month
later.) Enthusiasm for the ceremony may vary, but this parade of failures has
left the sour impression that the people who care least about the Oscars happen
to be in charge of running this year’s Oscars.
For my part, I no longer view the Oscars as hugely
important. But I still think they have value, both as a historical
record—literally, what were they thinking?—and as an opportunity to honor a
bunch of movies that are, by and large, pretty good. Sure, I disagree with the
Academy’s chosen winners more often than not, but that disagreement doesn’t automatically
render their selections terrible. Besides, the arguments are part of the fun.
And so, over the next week, we’ll be running through our
predictions and preferences in all 21 features categories (sorry, I don’t weigh
in on the shorts because I know absolutely nothing about them). Today, we’re
ripping through eight below-the-line fields that I dismissively dub “the odds
and ends”, which is just a way to distinguish them from the five other crafts categories that I’m more
passionate about. If you happen to care deeply about sound mixing or costume
design, I apologize if I’ve insulted you. Also, get over it. Read More
Yesterday, the Manifesto unveiled its list of the
10 best movies of 2018. Today, per annual tradition, we’re expanding that
list and ranking every single movie of the year, or at least every single one
that we saw. This is a deeply silly exercise, but it’s also a fun one, designed
to inspire frivolous debates and indignant arguments, which are of course what
the internet does best.
It’s also meant to be something of a service. For each title,
in addition to embedding a hyperlink to my full review (where applicable), I’ll
include a parenthetical identifying the movie’s director, its Rotten Tomatoes
and Metacritic scores (to see whether I conform with or diverge from the
critical consensus), and—most usefully—a notification if it’s currently
available on a particular streaming service. The idea is that you can continually
refer back to this list over the coming years when you’re craving something to
watch and you’re too lazy to Google the latest Indiewire poll. You’re welcome. Read More
There may not have been a ton of great movies released in
2018, but 2018 was still a great year for movies. It was one of the most
fertile cinematic years that I can remember, full of challenging, fascinating
films that were far from perfect but were resolutely good and—more
important—interesting. Even as the industry continues to undergo seismic
change, the movies themselves remain a vibrant cultural center, a thriving
bazaar where viewers can converse, promote, argue, and discover.
It was also a year full of exciting and diverse voices,
varied not only in terms of race and gender, but also with respect to age,
style, and even mode of distribution. Black directors made themselves heard,
and loudly, from the stirring adventure of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther to the fiery agitprop
of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman to the scalding
satire of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You to the youthful anger
of George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give to the piercing
melancholy of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Women,
too, continued to assert themselves as equals in a marketplace that has treated
them as inferiors for far too long; Kay Cannon’s Blockers made us laugh, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider made us cry, and Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? made us do both, while Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here made us tremble
in fear and awe. Read More
Last year, the documentary RBG attempted to honor the extraordinary life of Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, charting her path from able young mind to Harvard Law student to U.S.
Supreme Court Justice to feminist icon to internet meme. It was a
well-intentioned effort that suffered from the usual pitfalls of cinematic
hagiography, struggling to compress 85 years of the life of one of the most
important legal figures in modern American history into a tidy 98 minutes. On the Basis of Sex, the new Ginsburg
biopic from Mimi Leder, takes a narrower approach, homing in on two key periods
in its subject’s life: her challenges as one of the few female students at
Harvard, and her early labors as a litigator striving for women’s equality. Where
RBG’s impact was glancing—to borrow
from Supreme Court terminology, it felt more like a syllabus than a full
opinion—Leder’s film lands a blow with something resembling force.
If the boxing metaphor seems peculiar, bear in mind that,
despite trafficking in bookish disciplines and legal arcana, On the Basis of Sex is essentially a
sports movie. Its heroine, played with poise and pluck by Felicity Jones, is
the proverbial underdog, fighting to rise through the ranks and topple an
entrenched dynasty. Its villains, most notably personified by Sam Waterston as
Harvard’s dean of students, are pillars of the establishment, wielding their
superior resources—money, power, connections—to extend their unbroken streak of
competitive dominance. There are triumphs and setbacks, eager rookies and cagey
veterans, strategic coaching maneuvers and breezy montages. There is even a Big
Game, with a climactic moment designed to be as suspenseful as the final jump
shot in Hoosiers. Read More
