Oscars 2023

This weekend brings the Daylight Savings Time change when we turn our clocks ahead and lose an hour. Many people will feel that they are avoiding losing four more hours by skipping the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday. But I like Oscar season. Making an effort to watch all of the best picture nominees gets me out of my comfort zone, gets me to watch often rewarding films that otherwise I would pass over or be unaware of. This year’s ten films nominated for best picture represent a wide variety of genres and film making styles. Below I rank the films and discuss my reactions to them.

10. Everything Everywhere All at Once. I am used to contemporary music making me feel old and out of it. This is the first year a movie made me feel that way. People of generations younger than mine apparently love this film. I absolutely hated it. Other seniors that I know were also put off by it. The movie revolves around a Chinese American couple with a struggling laundromat, marital problems and daughter difficulties. To make matters worse, there is trouble brewing in the multiverse where their counterparts are living different versions of the characters’ lives. A malevolent spirit, Jobu, is wreaking havoc across the multiverse, and wife and mom Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) must access the strengths of her multiverse counterparts (such as fighting skill) in order to save the day. To me, this film is nonstop frenetic silliness. Everyone is kung foo fighting, so to speak, with ridiculous often gross stunts reminiscent of an episode of the old show Fear Factor. Yeoh is up for best actress, and she does rapidly morph into different personalities, but it is like some improv act where audience members are calling out ideas.

9. Top Gun: Maverick. This film is a well-made action movie. That’s it. I don’t why this type of movie is a contender for best picture.

8. All Quiet on the Western Front. A remake of a much earlier film based on a classic anti-war novel of the same name, this film holds your interest with graphic battle scenes and engaging characters. If you don’t like the pro war movie Top Gun, you can turn to the anti-war movie. Oscar is happy to give you choices. Yet there’s something futile about movies about the futility of war. Despite its filmmaking merits, I felt like I had seen this type of film too many times before, and yet the world and Hollywood war on.

7. Avatar: The Way of Water. Despite the fact that we live in an age of tweets and tic-tocks, Hollywood continues to make long movies. Avatar: The Way of Water is the longest of the Oscar contenders, clocking in at over three hours. This film is the much-anticipated sequel to the 2009 film Avatar. For me, some of the magic is gone in the sequel. First, I struggled to recall the first film. You might want to view the original first, which, of course, means an even greater commitment of time. Second, the new film changes locales. You go from blue human-like beings living in the forest to beings who live by the sea and follow “the way of water.” The sea human-like creatures, rather than being blue, are appropriately aquamarine. In the first film, you gazed in wonder at the strange forest animals. Never saw anything like that in a forest. But the new film focuses on strange creatures of the ocean, a place most of us are less familiar with and a place inhabited by creatures that seem stranger than anything a filmmaker could create. Seeing strange creatures in the ocean somehow seems less shocking.

My biggest problem with the film, though, is the romanticized view of primitive peoples that underlies the portrayal of both the forest and the ocean people. They are noble savages who are just naturally wise and good and respect middle class values. For all the strangeness of filmmaker James Cameron’s cinematic world, it had one thing in common with that of average Americans. You never see anyone reading a book.

That all said, if you make it to hour three, you’re in for some entertaining action sequences.

6. The Banshees of Inisherin. This film is about a feud between two friends on a sparsely populated Irish island. The feud leads to the grotesque, and it doesn’t make much sense until you think – wait, this is an allegory! Once I figured that out, though, the film exhausted its interest for me. The acting is great, and the film does have emotional power, but of the type that leaves you sad rather than satisfied as a moviegoer.

5. Women Talking. This film is a good example of the kind of movie that I would have never watched if not trying to see all the Oscar nominated films. A remote religious community must deal with the fact that, for years, men in the community have drugged and raped women during the night. The women have been kept in a subjugated state; they have not been taught to read and write and have little knowledge of the outside world. Now the women must face what has been done to them and decide between three courses of action: stay and forgive the men, stay and fight the men, or leave the community. A small group of the women are selected to debate the options and decide a course of action for the rest of the women.

The film has a number of aspects that made me reluctant to watch. First, horrible subject matter: do I really want to watch a film about women who have been continually brutalized by rape? Then there was the title. Is this a film where I’m supposed to feel bad as a man for manplaining? Then there’s the opening in which we are told that the film is the “work of the female imagination.” Is this going to be a didactic feministic film? As soon as the characters – the women – began talking, though, I was hooked. Their debate is engrossing, and you come to love these women for their courage, anger, and convictions. The acting of the assemble cast, including most notably Claire Foy and Rooney Mara, is superb.

My main reservation about this film as an Oscar nominee is that it would work just as well as a stage play. There’s nothing much cinematic about it; it employs little of the range of artistic possibilities open to a movie maker.

4. Triangle of Sadness. This film is probably the quirkiest of the ten films nominated. It is divided into three parts, each with its own title. The first part involves a couple on a date, a man and a woman, both high end fashion models. It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit that is funny at first but then goes on too long. Part two, the couple go on luxury ocean voyage with a group of obnoxious wealthy passengers. Woody Harrelson is hilarious as the drunken ship captain. A storm engulfs the ship. Trigger warning: you will see a seemingly ceaseless sea of vomit and feces. Part three, ship passengers and crew are stranded on a beach. Part three is your reward for making it through the slowness of part one and the funny but excessive grossness of part two. Part three is a very amusing satire on class and gender relationships with a surprise ending.

3. Elvis. I was never a huge fan of Elvis Presley as I came of age when the British rock invasion was pushing his celebrity into the background, and these and other rock stars captured my attention. This movie, though, as we use to say, rocks! This film rises above other well-made film biographies of musicians such as Ray (2004) about Ray Charles and Walk the Line (2005) about Johnny Cash in that the music of Elvis shapes the editing and rhythm of the film. Scenes pulse to the beat, exposition with exclamation. Unfortunately, the movie loses its mojo when it transitions to drugged up, fat Elvis. Tom Hanks, encased in plastic weight and aging make-up, plays manipulative manager Colonel Tom Parker. His voice over narration is meant to give the film and Elvis’ story coherence, but in the end the voice of the victimizer is unwelcome.

2. The Fabelmans. In a movie season where it seems that every film wants to be somehow larger than life, it’s a relief to encounter an emotionally intelligent film about life on a human scale. The Fabelmans is Stephen Spielberg’s semiautobiographical story of his childhood and his discovery of himself as a filmmaker. For his fictional surrogate Sammy Fabelman, film is both a craft to learn and window into his family. When the movie is focused on the family, it comes across as movingly authentic. When it shifts focus to the antisemitism of his school life, particularly, his relationship with the school bully, it seems less so.

1. Ta᷇r. Here is another film that I probably wouldn’t have watched if not for my goal of seeing all the nominated films. As I started to watch this film, about a conductor of classical music played by Cate Blanchett, I thought to myself that this is a niche film that will only appeal to those, like myself, who love classical music. Even I found my interest lacking when we see the conductor being interviewed in a front of an audience, and we hear her pontificate at length about female conductors. Lydia Ta᷇r, though, we soon realize, is a womanizer and this will be her undoing. She goes from her biggest concern being whether her latest record will be released on vinyl to worrying about whether she will professionally and personally lose everything. Despite the fact that modern orchestras try to be more democratic and fairer, Lydia wants to control everything musically and in her personal life. Although the time of the conductor as tyrant is gone, Lydia stills wants stealthily to be what the Italians call maestro absoluto. Her life, though, begins to make a mockery of this desire. The film has the vibe of another high culture film, Black Swan, in that we begin to wonder what is real and what is not.

Cate Blanchett has become like Meryl Streep, an actress from whom we can always expect exceptional performances. Here she brings to life a complex character who is at once sympathetic, repellent, and tragic. Once you get passed the slow beginning, the plot draws you in. The filmmaker, Todd Field, creates a number of unforgettable scenes. This is a film that I will probably watch again and continue to think about. Although it has a lackluster start, this film, I think, is the best of this Oscar season.

Despite the diversity of this year’s film offerings, though, I have to admit that I found this Oscar season a little dispiriting. Perhaps because I found fault with all the films. Perhaps, it’s the times. The economy is healthy, but inflation is high and you must spend more money. The film industry is healthy, but you have to spend more time watching bloated films. Have you seen the cost of eggs! I had to sit watching that film over three hours! Perhaps, in the near spring, I wanted to fall in love with a picture as in previous years. Whatever the reason, I’m ready to return to my comfort zone and continue to binge watch Yellowstone.