Oscars 2024

Unvarnished opinions on a selection of this year’s Academy Award nominees (narrative films). Not for the faint of heart.

Who abandoned Snoopy in the vestibule?

March is when all of last year’s biopics come out of the woodwork to fulfill their intended purposes and follow their Oscar-calling. Hollywood’s biggest award show is a haven for stories of resilience, social virtue, grit for the sake of grit, and lately oversimplifications of feminism. Spoiler alert: Most of these are mid! I want something beyond technical mastery and aspirational moralism, unless it actually hits. Art is a difficult ask, though the voters sure tried this year with a Sandra Hüller double-header and I salute them for that.

For the anti-award show individuals, might I suggest taking the night off to revel in the low-key excellence of James Gray’s TWO LOVERS? I wrote about the film, which features what is imho Joaquin Phoenix’s best performance. He plays an offbeat loner who falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow in what was her last real role before she got caught up with the MCU and the world of vaginal steaming. The movie shows how ambition gets restrained by the demands of family (a Gray specialty) as well as the challenges of romance and relationships for the clinically depressed/those with mental health conditions, something to which I can wholly relate. Life gets rough. At least I can vent through this cinematic opining..

On that note, I’m looking for someone to help edit this newsletter! DM me if you’d like to help spot my typos, reign in my unintentional alliteration, and maybe grab a bite to eat.

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SHORT TAKES

Why wasn’t this True Detective?

• MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING, PART 1: The Tom Cruise renaissance spurred was ill-fated and ill-conceived. The man’s fillers are wearing off. Juvaderm lasts for months, but A.I. is forever.

• THE CREATOR: Unlike M:I, this “man on a mission” film tells us A.I. is good. Its attempt to romanticize the beauty and potential of robots feels premature, and its structure overly schematic, almost as if it were penned by a chatbot. In reality it was cowritten by Chris Weitz, the man who gave us such comedies as American Pie and About a Boy. The humor is in short supply, and even if it were present, there’s no guarantee it wouldn’t be lost on stiff-lipped John David Washington. While covertly championing the benevolence of smart machines, the film paradoxically subverts today's technological ethos by freeing itself from the constraints of green screens. Opting for real locations instead of relying heavily on visual effects, it is unexpectedly quite beautiful to look at.

• GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3: At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, there’s this, my first entry into the MCU. I watched approximately forty minutes on the plane as I was deterred by the gloomy, queasy aesthetics of Knowhere and its associated worlds—the visual look and feel of which I can only describe as excremental and epidermal.

• INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY: I started this after I gave up on the superheroes and regret not having finished it, though I’m sure that’s for the best. Harrison Ford rides a horse in the subway and makes a dad joke. It was a great dad joke.

• ELEMENTAL: I believe a better work of visual entertainment that rests on different tribes of water, earth, fire, air already exists. 

• FLAMIN’ HOT: The existence of this movie makes one wonder what transgressions Ben Affleck committed exactly to piss off the Academy. Following the Moneyball formula, AIR was the sly feel-good movie about capitalism of the year the people have been waiting for.

• MAY DECEMBER: Todd Haynes wields artifice like a weapon and from the rubbles of tabloid story sensationalism erects this complex hall of mirrors from which you can make endless meaning. The Bergman references are smoothly integrated, never overbearing, the performances suggestively stilted, and Charles Melton fucking incredible. Shocking and moving.

• NYAD: Channeling her inner Steve Zahn, Jodie Foster energizes the film with a collegial swagger that complements Benning’s aura of agitated delusion and frozen expression of gastrointestinal distress. The bond between these two besties as portrayed by veteran actors proves steadfast, while the creative direction of the two documentarians who made the movie remains questionable.

• PERFECT DAYS: “ChatGPT, write me a Wim Wenders movie set in Japan.” While it has its moments, this touristic sketch of alienation that reaches the depths of credible yearning. What do you think Wenders loves more about Japan: that people sleep on a tatami mats or that government cares enough about public works to make starchitect-toilets by Tadao Ando and Kengo Kuma? I think he just likes making mixtapes.

• RUSTIN: Colman Domingo and Bayard Rustin, the gay Black Quaker Socialist political activist, whom he plays, are utterly failed by this film’s visual stagnancy.

• SOCIETY OF SNOW: It’s hard not to cry when the score sounds like the music from Lost. Oh, wait..

• THE WONDERFUL LIFE OF HENRY SUGAR: Storytelling verbosity rendered literal with so many moving parts, which no matter how loving crafted and smoothly executed, runs the risk of pretentiousness for me. I’m sorry; I cannot.

And the nominess for best pictures are..