I’ve seen and reviewed all ten movies nominated for Best Picture this year, and from worst to best, here are my rankings with links to each individual review:
10. F1
9. Frankenstein
8. Train Dreams
7. Sinners
6. The Secret Agent
5. Marty Supreme
4. Sentimental Value
3. Hamnet
2. One Battle After Another
1. Bugonia
A noticeable pattern was the surprising pervasiveness of arthouse aesthetics. Other than Marty Supreme and F1, these ten movies feature little in the way of “normal” stories; viewers hoping for familiar characters and formulaic plots will be disappointed. I was happy to see this, but an abundance of risks also means a subset of misses, and there are several big misses on this list. Train Dreams, Sinners, and Frankenstein, especially, bite off more, structurally, than they can chew, leaving themselves open to the most dangerous question for character-deficient cinema: who cares?
Thematically, the films are diverse, but I detect one curious through-line: the hidden emotions of men. The drama of every film on this list except for Sinners, Marty Supreme, and One Battle After Another hinges on a late discovery that a previously inward male character (or monster) has untold depths of feeling. Is this an attempt at image rehabilitation post-#metoo? An attempt to rouse a generation of jaded, isolative young men? Is it, now that Trump and his boorish minions are back on television daily, a form of wish fulfillment?
The op-ed writers can sort that out. I’ll conclude, meanwhile, by hailing the best film of the year: Bugonia. By all accounts, it has no chance of winning the prize, but that might be because it hits too close to home for Hollywood: the maniacal anti-aging regimen of Emma Stone’s character, for example, could be Stone’s actual, real-life routine. One Battle After Another, the odds-on favorite and a good film in its own right, casts all of us as dormant revolutionaries, and maybe we are. But only Bugonia knows that it’s not just the economy and government that have been plundered; it’s our minds, too, which is why the world will watch the Oscars today with—like every gathering of the rich and famous now—an unshakeable skepticism, a tremendous disconnectedness, a kind of hatred, even. The bees are leaving; people are laying face-down, lifeless; someone must be to blame. And our celebrities, beaming for the cameras, sparkling on the red carpet, are giving exactly the wrong performance.
—-Jim Andersen