Ruminations on Oscar Gold (Part Three)

I’m a little early this year, but then again, I managed to catch all the Best Picture nominees pretty early. And hey, people like numbered lists, so instead of wandering my way through the same points as the last few years with only a little bit of added discourse -- my ideal Best Actress category would have gone a lot differently, for example -- I figured I could rank them all and give some general thoughts.

9) Joker
I like Joaquin Phoenix and I think he does a good job in this movie, but I also wish he had a better movie to work in. This is not a hot take, but it feels like the filmmakers tried to jam an 80’s Martin Scorsese plot into an origin story, and both of them end up wanting. Any moment Bruce Wayne shows up on camera was a moment I was left wondering why they were there besides justifying the title.

All this is also ignoring the paratext of the movie, how director Todd Phillips made this because, to paraphrase, he couldn’t make a Hangover Part Four, and it’s like, I’m sorry you can’t make the movie you wanted but that doesn’t mean you had to make a whole movie complaining about it. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake finding that out before seeing it, but I couldn’t help watching Joker through that lens and the movie was worse for it.

8) Ford Versus Ferrari
This is one of those movies that I call “aggressively average”. Its story is alright, the acting’s alright, its message is a little muddled but one can draw some conclusions from it even if they’re occasionally messy, and that just leads to a film without much that can be said about it. It’s fine.

7) Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
This was another film I knew a bit about before going into it. I knew that Quentin Tarantino’s next film was supposedly about the Charlie Manson killings, and even though the trailers seemed to be leaning away from that (though Manson obviously still makes an appearance), it was something on my mind as I went through the first two acts of the movie. And I really enjoyed the first two acts! It felt a little overindulgent at times, but so did Hateful Eight before it, and I still liked that a lot. But the last act, as flashy as it is (I know a lot of people who will only talk about the flamethrower, for example), felt so disjointed to me that I just have to wonder why the other acts didn’t just get tightened up and end the movie there. Maybe it’d end up too similar to Barton Fink or Hail Caesar! (both by the Coen Brothers) then, but I don’t think that’s bad company to be in.

6) Jojo Rabbit
We’re moving into the “films I liked” portion of the list. And there’s a lot to like. Most of the performances, for example, including Taika Waititi’s portrayal of Hitler that is both necessarily scary while still remaining as goofy as can be expected of the imagination of the ten-year-old main character. It’s a little paint-by-numbers in terms of plot, but still charming in its own way.

5) 1917
I so want to like this movie more. I feel like it hits a lot of my more pretentious buttons, and while it’s those buttons that push it higher than Jojo Rabbit, I also can’t really justify putting it any higher than this. This was the last movie I saw on this list, so I’m still shaking out my feelings as to why, but here’s an honest attempt:

So for those who don’t know, the movie’s shot a lot like Birdman was. That is to say, it uses multiple long takes and stitches them together to create two scenes seemingly happening in real-time. The immediate problem is that, well, I really liked Birdman. I did a whole post about it. And while 1917 is shot the same, it isn’t quite paced the same. A lot of the scenes are stretched out for characters to move around as they talk to each other, and the camera’s slow, methodical approach to following the characters around means this walking and talking has to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it doesn’t quite get there. Compare this to Birdman, which I thought had snappier dialog and a camera that was a bit livelier.

I still recommend it, though. I’m sure it’s going to be somebody’s favorite movie on this list. Just not mine.

4) The Irishman
Okay, so first thing’s first: It’s really hard already to get people to watch this movie given its two-hundred-plus minute runtime. Like, you can like a movie as much as you want, but getting people to spend three and a half hours of their time is a big ask. In some ways, this movie is almost a mirror to Joker. Both that and this film really want to be an eighties Scorcese film, though, of course, this one actually managed to get the director.

I suppose I misspoke a little. The Irishman doesn’t just want to be an eighties Scorcese film, it wants to be the eighties Scorcese film. It wants to use all the elements that made its other films what they were, and there’s a lot of audience superstition in that sort of storytelling. What I find interesting, though, is how it seems to also kill off the same tropes it brings up. It’s based on a true story, but all the surviving characters in that story are either dead or dying. The movie wants us to think it’s the end of an age, and that, I think, is an interesting enough reason to check it out.

3) Little Women
I haven’t read the Louisa May Alcott book, nor have I ever consumed any of its various adaptations, but this still seems like a pretty good one. Sure, there’s a lot of snark I could give it (Timothee Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan keep friendzoning each other in Greta Gerwig movies, Laura Dern is 5’10” and that’s hardly little at all) but it succeeds very well in what it sets out to do, which seems to be revitalizing the characters many other adaptations lacked. Because it’s not just Jo’s story, and it’s not just Amy’s story, it’s all of their stories.

2) Parasite
Boong Joon-Ho is kind of a cult favorite and has been for a while. Snowpiercer is his biggest hit for understandable reasons (*cough* Chris Evans *cough*), but all his movies vary in style and genre. Theme, though, is another story. I don’t want to spoil too much about this movie -- if there’s one thing that people seem to agree on it’s that it’s best if you don’t know what’s coming -- but I can’t recommend it enough. As long as subtitles don’t ruin your experience, check this one out while you can.

1) Marriage Story
This one is probably a little obvious given how highly it ranked on my own personal list a couple weeks ago, but yeah. It’s just a really good movie. I don’t know if it’ll win Best Picture -- Hollywood is incredibly fickle (Green Book? Really?) -- but it’s something I can watch again and again.

-F