Everything Everywhere All at Once is also nominated for a shitload of Oscars and I'll be tickled if it wins Best Picture, Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actress (either Jamie Lee Curtis or Stephanie Hsu), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan) and Best Director (the Daniels). This movie has a lot of momentum going into the ceremony and a total of 11 nominations, but it remains to be seen whether or not it captured the hearts of academy voters as much as it did mine. A brief reminder: The Color Purple--which I also loved--was nominated for 11 Academy Awards in 1986 and didn't win any.
And speaking of The Color Purple, which was directed by Steven Spielberg, his semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans is currently up for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Michelle Williams), Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch), Best Original Screenplay (Spielberg and Tony Kushner), Best Original Score (John Williams), and Best Production Design. Not having seen The Fabelmans (and with little interest in doing so), I can only say that it's up against some pretty stiff competition this year and the buzz hasn't been particularly compelling.
All Quiet on the Western Front is another Best Picture nominee that is unlikely to win. We caught it on Netflix a couple of weeks ago and it's an impeccably made German adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 classic. Uncompromisingly bleak and brutal, the movie follows a dreamy-eyed young man after he joins up with the German army at the onset of World War I. Over the course of the movie, his ideals of valor and heroism are quashed as he is consumed by the bloody realities of war. It's an outstanding anti-war film that reminds me a little of the 2020 Oscar-nominated British film 1917 (it didn't win either).
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, another movie we watched on Netflix, has received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (Rian Johnson) but I found the movie, like its predecessor (Knives Out) to be terribly overrated. All Quiet on the Western Front is also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and I'd expect it to easily triumph over this. I believe it's often the case, however, that the movie that takes home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay usually ends up winning for Best Picture. Often the case but not always. I think both awards will come down to either Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I have seen, or The Banshees of Inisherin, which I haven't. Banshees played for about 5 minutes in my neck of the woods and was gone before I knew it had been there. However, I've heard great things about the movie and am a big fan of its director, Martin McDonagh. In fact, I predict Best Director will go to McDonagh. Or maybe the Daniels. But not Spielberg. Not Todd Field (for Tar). Not Ruben Ostland (for Triangle of Sadness, although that film won the Palm d'Or at Cannes).
One last note about Rian Johnson, the aforementioned Knives Out mastermind. In 2005, he made a remarkably assured directorial debut with his high school neo-noir Brick, which featured Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hard-boiled teen searching for a missing girl while fumbling his way through a maze of corruption and murder. After Brick, Johnson went on to direct Looper (with Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi before unveiling the highly lucrative Knives Out franchise. Oh, and he's also responsible for Peacock's Columbo-esque hit, Poker Face, a familiar, exceedingly thin concept series that many viewers seem--inexplicably--to love (star Natasha Lyonne is amusingly world-weary, and lovable in a faintly unsanitary way, so maybe the appeal isn't all that inexplicable after all). This is my verbose way of saying that I wish Rian Johnson would get back to his roots and do something provocative and really interesting, like he did in Brick, before Hollywood started throwing trunkfuls of cash at him.
Best Actor looks like a pretty tight race: Colin Farrell (Banshees), Austin Butler (Elvis), Brendan Fraser (The Whale), Paul Mescal (Aftersun), Bill Nighy (Living). All the performances have been highly praised, although some have since been re-appraised in certain quarters (sorry, Brendan). Anyway, I missed seeing all these films too. I'm not even certain that Living and Aftersun played in our area. The Whale may have shown up briefly on a screen or two before vanishing, and we've already discussed Banshees. Which brings me to Elvis, which was everywhere all at once, but never a movie that I was going to see. I just couldn't with the real-life Elvis, you see (although my mom could). My feeling is that Colin Farrell should win this but it will probably go to Austin Butler. Don't put money on that, though.
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (Tar), Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere), Ana de Armas (Blonde), Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie), Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans). I've seen three of the performances in this category so can speak with some authority (however slight) here. Right now, I'm giving Yeoh a slight edge...just because--although Blanchett, arguably, delivers the better performance. I would love, love, love it if Ana de Armas took home the Oscar for Blonde. She won't, but it's so delicious to imagine a de Armas win, and the faces of the haters who attempted to weaponize their malice and derail the film. I said it before and I'll say it again: the movie is based on a work of fiction. Fiction! By no less an esteemed American author than Joyce Carol Oates. For some reason, a few were either too dumb, or too invested in keeping the Marilyn myth alive, to admit that the movie is fiction, hysterically taking to social media and branding Blonde an attempt to smear Marilyn's good name. Whatever. Andrea Riseborough's controversial nomination was such an ugly debacle that I almost wish she'd win just to spite her detractors. But she won't win, either. Nor will Williams.
Supporting Actress is also a tough call this year, sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation that the Academy created themselves. Both Jamie Lee Curtis and Angela Bassett seem to be obvious favorites but are their actual performances better than those of the other contenders: Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin), Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere), Hong Chau (The Whale)? Since I've only seen Everything Everywhere, I don't know. Does the performance really matter anymore? Did it ever? For Supporting Actor, I'm going with gut instinct and guessing Brendan Gleeson will take home the gold although I loved Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere. Judd Hirsch (The Fabelmans) could be a sentimental upset, and I have no idea about Brian Tyree Henry (Causeway) or Barry Keoghan (Banshees).
The rest of the nominees are in categories where I couldn't even guess who the winners will be. But I do have a question: why are there separate categories for Best International Feature Film (formerly Best Foreign Language Film) and Best Picture? All Quiet on the Western Front is nominated in each category, and Parasite won both in 2020. It just seems logical that they'd combine the two categories and have one single Best Picture no matter what the language.
And then there is the ghastly Red Carpet. Why, in the name of all that is holy, just why? Okay, on an intellectual level, I know why--there's a huge audience (sadly, much of it gay) for this swill--but dear God, this is the kind of thing that brokered the rise of Andy Cohen and Real Housewives, Kardashiana via TMZ. I hate this shitshow more than a dental visit. More than undergoing a colonoscopy (although there is a kinship). There are truly no words. The Red Carpet Ass-kissing is one of the main reasons (well, one among many) I stopped watching the Oscars in the first place.
To be honest, I don't anticipate being glued to the television set for the duration of the Oscar's telecast. In fact, I just received a Blu-ray set of Shinya Tsukamoto's Solid Metal Nightmares, best described as a calamitous compost of cyberpunk, avant-garde, body horror and sci-fi films from Japan. Chief in its infamy among these movies is Tetsuo: The Iron Man, although I can say with some certainty that no film in this collection was ever nominated for an Oscar. Nor, however, are they likely to put me to sleep.
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