Oscars | DAVID DUNN

Mar 11 2024

J. Robert Oscarheimer

It’s not usual that I’m happy with how the Academy Awards play out. This year, I’m happy with the Academy Awards for a number of reasons. One: Jimmy Kimmel was great as the Oscars host, as he always is. With his first year of hosting being the same year as the infamous Moonlight-La La Land Best Picture mixup in 2017, I’m sure every year after that seemed like a cakewalk for the late-night talk show host. He was just as charismatic and clever as he’s always been, and he did a great job making sure the show stayed fresh and kept up its momentum — even when he was facing scathing remarks from twice-impeached charlatan Donald Trump on “Truth” Social. My favorite rebuttal from Kimmel: “Isn’t it past your jail time?”

Two: The bits were actually funny this year and didn’t overstay their welcome. One of my favorite moments was when Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt were ribbing each other for their “Barbenheimer” rivalry, with Ryan pointing out Barbie dominating the box office while Emily observed all the honors Oppenheimer racked up this awards season. John Mulvaney hilariously ribbed Madame Web during his presentation for Best Sound, quoting the infamous “He was in the Amazon with my mom” line. But my favorite bit was when John Cena “streaked” across the stage to present the Best Costume Design category with only the envelope covering his Magic Johnson. Hey, at least you can’t say he didn’t wear his best suit (just as long as birthday suits count).

And lastly, the winners were largely justified this year. There was no obviously outrageous moment like Jamie Lee Curtis winning Best Supporting Actress, or Denis Villeneuve not being nominated for Dune, or Chadwick Boseman losing Best Actor for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Sure there were a few snubs here or there, but for the most part, I can see why most of the winners won this year. It’s very rare that the Academy is on the mark this much. And I’m going to savor every minute of it, because I already know this euphoria will be very short-lived.

Even my predictions went pretty well this year. As per usual, I didn’t get every category right this year, with the most obvious misses coming from those accursed short categories. But before we get to that, let’s start with…

Best Picture: Oppenheimer won the Academy Awards’ most coveted honor of the night, as it deserved to. Not only is it a compelling character drama taking a deep dive into the psyche of one of the most complex men in American history, but it is simultaneously also a cautionary tale on nuclear proliferation and what Oppenheimer’s achievements may mean for the future of the human race. Given the fact that it swept the SAG Awards, the PGAs, the DGAs and every other awards ceremony under the sun, I think it was a foregone conclusion that Best Picture was Oppenheimer’s to lose.

Still, I don’t want to minimize Christoper Nolan’s or Emma Thomas’ achievements. Oppenheimer is not only the best film from 2023, but one of the finest Best Picture winners to emerge from the past several years. I’m glad the Academy got this category right and gave it to Oppenheimer as it justly deserved. Now if only it could denuclearize the rest of the world.

Best Director: Just as he had won Best Picture, so too had Christopher Nolan won Best Director for Oppenheimer. Again, I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said here other than he obviously deserved it. Not only was his work on Oppenheimer the very best out of the entire year, but he’s also been largely snubbed by the Academy for pretty much his entire career. The first time he was nominated was in 2018 for Dunkirk, and considering he’s mounted even more significant cinematic achievements with the likes of Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar, it’s kind of stupid that Oppenheimer marks only his second nomination — or his first win, for that matter.

Regardless, he couldn’t have won for a better film, and I couldn’t have been happier when they called Christopher Nolan’s name for Best Director. His Oscar win has been very much overdue.

Best Actor: No surprise here either: Cillian Murphy’s turn as J. Robert Oppenheimer was filled with both humanity and horror, and Cillian did a masterful job bringing the Father of the Atomic Bomb to life. What makes this win even more significant is the fact that this is also Cillian’s first nomination, let alone his first win. It’s baffling to me that such a committed actor has taken this long to be recognized by the Academy, but better late than never I guess. He did a phenomenal job in the lead role of Oppenheimer and absolutely deserved to win. I couldn’t have been happier for him.

That being said, I am sad that Cillian did have to win Best Actor at the expense of Paul Giamatti, who gave an equally gifted performance as Mr. Hunham in The Holdovers. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have been mad if Giamatti did win instead of Cillian, even if I wouldn’t necessarily have agreed with it. But let’s at least be grateful that one noteworthy performance lost to an equally talented performance. That’s the best way to lose at the Academy Awards.

Best Actress: It was a battle of the “stones” for Best Actress this year, with Killers Of The Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone squaring off against Poor Things’ Emma Stone. And Emma clinched it, if ever so slightly.

Knowing that she had previously won Best Actress for the likes of La La Land in 2017, I mistakenly thought that would work to her detriment considering the fact that she’s already an Oscar winner. I obviously underestimated the weight of her BAFTA win, a mistake I desperately need to learn from going forward with the Academy Awards.

Best Supporting Actor: Again, no surprise here: Robert Downey Jr. was just as compelling as Lewis Strauss as Cillian Murphy was in Oppenheimer, so it makes sense that he also won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. It’s so heartwarming to see Robert Downey Jr. go from struggling with addiction abuse in the 2000s to getting clean to becoming part of one of most successful franchises in cinematic history, only to turn around with arguably one of the best performances of his career in Oppenheimer. I worried for a while that he was going to be typecast after the success of The Avengers, but Oppenheimer proves he’s still got phenomenal acting chops — you just have to give him a role that he can truly thrive in. Congratulations to Robert Downey Jr. and his incredible achievement. The only way his win could have been even better is if he ended his speech by saying “I am Iron Man.”

Best Supporting Actress: Da’Vine Joy Randolph obviously gave the best performance out of all of the supporting actress nominees in The Holdovers, so she was the clear winner by a long mile. Da’Vine’s win is one of those Oscar moments that fills me with so much hope and joy, because she is clearly not as big of a name as her fellow nominees, yet won regardless due to the merit of her performance. She didn’t win by being a nepo baby (*cough cough*, JAMIE LEE CURTIS, *cough cough*) — she won by genuinely being the best actress. I couldn’t be happier for the win and hope that the Academy will follow suit in this voting methodology going forward. Perhaps they could start by taking away Jamie Lee Curtis’ Oscar and giving it to Stephanie Hsu instead.

Best Animated Feature: It was a showdown between The Boy And The Heron and Across The Spider-Verse, and The Boy And The Heron ultimately won much to the dismay of web-heads. Personally, I feel Across The Spider-Verse deserved to win more, and Nimona should have been part of the conversation WAY more than it was. But in its defense, Into The Spider-Verse did already win Best Animated Feature back in 2018, while the last Oscar Hayao Miyazaki won was in 2002 for Spirited Away. The Boy And The Heron is a beautiful, tragic, and spellbinding film either way. If Spider-Verse or Nimona wasn’t going to win it, I’m glad it went to The Boy And The Heron.

No, if we really want to talk about Across The Spider-Verse snubs, we should be looking at other categories it wasn’t nominated in, including Best Original Score, Best Original Song, and Best Visual Effects. Heck, I would have even caved for a Best Picture nomination. Regardless, Beyond The Spider-Verse is still coming out in the next few years, so Spidey will have another shot at the Oscars either way. The Academy better not mess up its mulligan, otherwise Marvel fans will have legitimate reasons to be angry next time.

Best Documentary Feature: 20 Days In Mariupol rightfully won Best Documentary, marking not only the third Academy Award-winner I’ve interviewed after Aaron Sorkin and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, but also the first Ukrainian to win an Oscar (how???). While I’m happy that 20 Days In Mariupol won the Oscar, there is a twinge of sadness attached to it knowing that it came at a cost of over 20,000 Ukrainian lives. I choked up at the moment when director Mstyslav Chernov said he wished this film never needed to be made, and similarly, I wish that I never needed to interview him.

Regardless, Mystyslav set out to make this film as a monument to the lives lost in Ukraine. He more than succeeded in making his monument, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s an accomplishment greater than any Academy Award could ever be.

Best International Feature: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if a Foreign-language film was nominated for Best Picture, it’s a lock for the Best International Feature Oscar. That made The Zone Of Interest winning a foregone conclusion. I just wish I could have seen it prior to Oscar night. It doesn’t help that it wasn’t playing anywhere near me. Here’s a film whose “limited” release was so limited that they should have just labeled it “Eh, we guess it was released.”

Best Original Screenplay: Anatomy Of A Fall won this year’s Best Original Screenplay Oscar as it rightfully should have. I saw the film months ago, and it’s still at the forefront of my mind with its spellbinding and dizzying narrative that masterfully teeters you on the edge of your seat. Did Sandra kill her husband or did she not? All these months later, I still don’t have an answer, and I don’t know if I want one.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Cord Jefferson’s witty and amusing adaptation of Percival Everett’s “Erasure” was as clever as it was insightful in American Fiction, so naturally it made it a perfect fit for this year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Personally, I still wish it could have gone to Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer, but considering how much it cleaned up in the rest of the ceremony this year, I’m okay with giving this one to American Fiction. Most would probably argue that it deserved it more anyway.

Best Cinematography: I remember back in 2014 when Hoyte van Hoytema took over for longtime collaborator Wally Phister when shooting for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Years later, he continues to prove he’s one of the most creative cinematographers working in Hollywood today, with some of his most notable projects including Spectre, Dunkirk, Ad Astra, Tenet, and Nope. Oppenheimer demonstrates some of his finest work to date, so of course he deserved to win. I still don’t know how he pulled off those quantum physics sequences without any use of CGI. If they ever produce a documentary about the filming of Oppenheimer, I’ll be the first one to watch it. Mark my words.

Best Film Editing: From Frances Ha to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Jennifer Lame’s editing prowess has taken her all over Hollywood, which makes it especially baffling how Oppenheimer marks only her first nomination. Whatever. Oppenheimer’s film editing is the very best out of the year, and Jennifer Lame deserved to win regardless of whatever snubbing she experienced beforehand. Guess she and Christopher Nolan have that in common.

Best Production Design: It was clear from the trailers that Poor Things had some of the most striking set designs out of the entire year. As gorgeous as Barbieland looked, it lacked the dreamy and ethereal aesthetic that Poor Things nailed so effectively. It was clear from the outset that Poor Things was going to win Best Production Design. Nothing controversial to report here.

Best Costume Design: This one I got wrong because I vastly overestimated the Academy’s affection for Barbie. At first glance, Barbie seemed like the easy frontrunner, but Poor Things’ costumes were just as distinct, and unlike Barbie, didn’t have a template to base its wardrobe around. You won’t find any of Bella Baxter’s or Duncan Wedderburn’s clothes in any play sets or doll boxes. You will, however, find any of Barbie or Ken’s costumes in any toy aisle you happen to stroll past. Failing to observe its originality was perhaps my greatest oversight in making my Best Costume Design prediction this year.

Best Makeup & Hairstyling: While I flubbed up on predicting Best Costume Design, I did correctly predict that Poor Things would win Best Makeup over the likes of Maestro and Golda. Stitches and disfigured jawlines beat big noses and Helen Mirren erasure. I still don’t know why Oppenheimer was nominated in this category. I genuinely don’t.

Best Musical Score: If Ludwig Goransson didn’t win Best Musical Score for his eerie, ominous, and haunting compositions for Oppenheimer, then the Dolby Theatre truly deserved to be hit with a hydrogen bomb. Thankfully, the Academy picked the right winner in this category. For the record, I’m still fuming that John Williams is nominated for Dial Of Destiny over Daniel Pemberton for Across The Spider-Verse.

Best Original Song: As epic as Barbie’s musical number for “I’m Just Ken” was, it’s clear that Billie Eilish was going to win for her beautiful yet heartbreaking single “What Was I Made For?” Long before the nominees were even announced, the impact of her song was at the forefront of my mind for its emotion, its melancholy piano melody, and its somber and bittersweet tone. It’s a masterclass in excellent songwriting, and the Academy got it right when they picked her as the Best Original Song winner.

What’s most surprising about this category isn’t the fact that she won — it’s the fact that it’s the only Oscar Barbie won, period. Look at the list of winners. Barbie did not win in a single other category besides original song. Not production design. Not costume design. Not writing. Certainly not for Best Picture. The only Oscar it won was for its music.

In its defense, “What Was I Made For?” is arguably the most influential aspect of Barbie. I loved the song long before I even watched the movie, and the best part is you don’t even have to watch the movie to appreciate its message. It doesn’t change the fact that Barbie got absolutely shafted by the Academy this year. Many Barbie fans will be reasonably upset by the many ways it was snubbed at the Oscars this year. Personally, no snub was greater than Greta Gerwig getting robbed in the Best Director category. Oh well. At least she had fun singing “I’m Just Ken” with her cast.

Best Sound: Now here’s one of the few surprises from the night. Oppenheimer’s sweeping and striking sounds of atomic molecules crashing into each other was among the most distinct sound design of the entire year. I thought it was a lock for the Best Sound Oscar, but it turns out the Academy felt differently when The Zone Of Interest won instead.

Like I said, I haven’t seen the movie (who has?), so it’s hard for me to say whose sound design was more deserving. What I will say is that the muffled sounds of children screaming in the chemical showers in the small snippet that played during the ceremony was easily the most disturbing moment from the Academy Awards this year. The clip lasted less than 10 seconds, yet that eerie sound is the one thing I remember most from this weekend. It reminded me a lot of the sound design of Nope, where the muffled sounds of people being digested by a giant alien was one of the most haunting and disturbing sounds I had ever heard in a horror movie. In a way, The Zone Of Interest is a horror movie of its own, only it’s covering real-life horrors as opposed to fictional ones.

So while I haven’t seen enough to declare whether or not it deserved the Oscar over Oppenheimer, I can definitely see why it won. This is likely one of the first Oscar winners I’ll be catching once the title hits streaming services.

Best Visual Effects: I have mixed feelings about Godzilla Minus One winning Best Visual Effects, mainly due to the allegations that its VFX artists were simultaneously overworked and underpaid. What gave me hope was seeing that director Takashi Yamazaki worked alongside his fellow artists as a VFX supervisor, meaning that whatever arduous hours his team was working, he was most likely working right alongside them. Does that make their working circumstances any less problematic? Not really, but at least the director is in the trenches with them. If your crew is drowning in misery, at least have everyone be equally miserable together. That’s all I really ask for.

Also, Takashi and his crew looked really excited to be at the Academy Awards. For crying out loud, he brought a gold Godzilla statue with him, and his team all had their own Godzilla figurines with them. Regardless of whatever their working conditions were, you can tell that they were passionate fans who poured their hearts into this atomic-sized monster epic. As long as they’re happy, I’m happy. And for whatever it’s worth, Godzilla Minus One did have the best visual effects out of the year regardless.

And finally, we come down to those blasted short categories. The only one I got right this year was Wes Anderson winning Best Live Action Short for The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar. The rest were all a bust. Thankfully, Issa Rae and Ramy Youssef at least had the good sense to keep the presentation as blissfully short as their nominees.

That brings my total score this year to 18 out of 23 categories guessed correctly. Not a bad year for me, although I did lose in my own family’s pool. Oh well. At least I got to go to bed before 11 for a change.

– David Dunn

Tagged Academy Awards, Jimmy Kimmel, Oppenheimer, Oscars, Poor Things, The Zone Of Interest

Mar 04 2024

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

2024 Oscar Predictions

It’s not usual that I’m looking forward to the Academy Awards. From one stupid slip-up after another, the Academy has consistently demonstrated that it’s more interested in patting its own back rather than rewarding the most legitimately deserving winner every year. We all remember where we were when Chadwick Boseman lost Best Actor for his last great performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2021, or when Denis Villeneuve wasn’t nominated for Best Director with Dune in 2022, or when Jamie Lee Curtis won Best Supporting Actress over all of her fellow nominees just last year. Let’s face it — we’ve all been conditioned to be let down by the Academy time and time again. That’s probably why I’ve been less disappointed by them in recent years — because my expectations for them have been so low.

And yet, I’m uncharacteristically… hopeful for this year’s Academy Awards. Every year, I pen down one or two movies that I think will win an Oscar even though there is clearly a more deserving nominee in their category. I’m happy to say that this year, it doesn’t seem to be that way. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about this year seems to be who isn’t nominated rather than who is. Despite this, I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this year’s ceremony pans out. Many of the nominees are much overdue for an Oscar, so the fact that they may finally become Oscar winners excites me to no end.

Don’t get me wrong: the Academy Awards still scored some big misses for this year’s ceremony, and I do expect a few upset wins regardless. Let’s break down the Academy Award nominees for 2023 and see who is well on their way to becoming an Oscar winner:

Best Picture: Ah, Best Picture. We meet again. Time and time again, my success with predicting you has been very inconsistent. Sure, I correctly predicted that 12 Years A Slave, Birdman, Nomadland, and Everything Everywhere All At Once would all win Best Picture, but I’ve gotten more Best Picture winners wrong in the past decade than I care to admit. Spotlight, Moonlight, The Shape Of Water, Green Book, Parasite, and CODA were all Best Picture winners that I didn’t see coming, because how on Earth would I? With a selection that erratic, how could you possibly be expected to develop a criteria from a winning pool that’s so blasted inconsistent?

Still, I’ve got a good feeling about Oppenheimer winning Best Picture this year. Not only has it won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the PGA Awards — it’s also one of last year’s most successful films and one of the highest-grossing biopics of all time at $960 million. With a hit that critically and commercially successful, it’s hard to deny its impact on both film and pop culture. My money’s on Oppy.

Best Director: Christopher Nolan won the Director’s Guild Award, which means he’s pretty much a lock to win the Best Directing Oscar for Oppenheimer. About damn time. Despite being one of the most cutting-edge filmmakers of our time, Christopher Nolan has been relentlessly snubbed by the Academy ever since Memento in 2000. From The Dark Knight to Inception to Interstellar, Christopher Nolan has been consistently overlooked in the Best Director category over and over again. He didn’t even get his first nomination until Dunkirk in 2017, which is arguably his worst film. He hasn’t deserved any of the snubbing he’s received the past two decades, so the fact that he may finally win an Oscar is the most exciting thing about this year’s ceremony.

And he couldn’t have gotten it for a better film either. Not only is Oppenheimer one of his very best films, but it is also one of his most intelligent, most thoughtful, most weighty, most consequential, and most haunting films all at the same time. I’ve seen the film four times now, and the ending never fails to send chills down my spine. The fact that I know what to expect and I still react the same way every time is the signs of a brilliant director. I can’t wait to see him accept his Oscar. It’s been much overdue.

Of course, we can’t talk about Best Director without talking about the most obvious snub: Greta Gerwig was absolutely robbed for a nomination despite how creative, compelling, clever, and downright hilarious Barbie was. Need I remind you that I hate Barbies with a passion, yet Greta delivered something so fresh and original with that film that you can’t help but fall in love with it. It is beyond stupid that she was overlooked for Best Director this year when Jonathan Glazer is already nominated for Best International Film for The Zone Of Interest. How many of you even seen the movie? I’ll bet you that 10 of my readers have never even heard of it.

It goes without saying that the Academy typically rewards filmmakers long beyond when they were supposed to. Christopher Nolan is this year’s much-overdue Best Director winner. Hopefully within a few years, so will Greta Gerwig.

Best Actor: This year’s Best Actor race is truly intense because we have two really strong nominees who both deserve to win. On one hand, Paul Giamatti gave a very raw and real performance in The Holdovers as a grumpy history teacher learning to connect with his fellow students. I am not exaggerating when I say that Paul Giamatti gave one of the finest performances of his career for The Holdovers — maybe the finest ever. It’s just so authentic and vivid and grounded that it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Hunham wasn’t a real person. Paul Giamatti just brought so much life to that role, and I can’t imagine another actor playing that part as masterfully as Paul Giamatti did.

But on the other hand, Cillian Murphy gave just as raw and authentic of a performance as the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. And their performances are both so distinct and specific that it’s hard to say which one is objectively better. I’d hate to be one of the voters in this category because if it were up to me, my tiebreaker would come down to a coin toss. It’s that close.

Granted, Cillian does have the traction of awards season on his side. Sure, Paul has already racked up the Golden Globe and the Critic’s Choice Award, but Cillian has also won a Golden Globe, a Satellite Award, a BAFTA, and a SAG award. Usually that many rapid wins in succession indicate a fast track to winning the Oscar. I have to give this one to Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer, but if Paul Giamatti does pull off a surprise upset, it will have been well-deserved.

Best Actress: It all boils down to a battle between the “stones.” Emma Stone won the BAFTA, while Lily Gladstone won the Screen Actor. Both gave incredibly gifted performances in their respective movies. And unfortunately, both the BAFTAs and the SAG Awards are relatively consistent when picking the Best Actress winner. So, who’s going to take home the Oscar?

Well in recent years, the Oscars have seemed to lean a little more in favor of the SAG Award winners moreover the BAFTAs. I know 2020 backfired with Frances McDormand winning Best Actress for Nomadland, but since that was such a strange year in movies anyway, it’s hard to see whether that win was truly based on merit or if it was just of consequence of such a garbage year in movies. Lily Gladstone wasn’t even nominated at the BAFTAs, so there’s no telling how that category would have gone if she was involved.

Because of all of this, I have to go with Lily Gladstone for her deadpan performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon. If she does win, it will have been very well-earned, because her performance was so great that she even outshined her co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. It’s true that Emma Stone is an equally talented actress and gave it her all in Yorgos Lanthimos’ bizarre twist on Frankenstein in Poor Things, but the difficult thing about this category is that both of their performances are so, so different. At the end of the day, it may just come down to personal preference, which is a difficult thing to predict when it comes to Academy voters. This truly could go either way on Oscar night.

And while I do believe Lily Gladstone deserves to win Best Actress, I want to give a special mention to Sandra Huller for her incredibly nuanced performance as a writer stuck at the center of her husband’s death in Anatomy Of A Fall. Her character teeters between the edges of seeming innocent and guilty at various points of the film, and she does a masterful job blurring the lines and keeping the audience on their toes as to her character’s true motivations. I know the competition is between Stone and Gladstone, but truly, it should be a three-way tie between the three of them. Her performance was truly compelling, and she hasn’t gotten the credit she’s deserved all awards season.

We should also not forget how ridiculous it is that Margot Robbie is not nominated for Barbie. Did her co-stars Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera deserve their supporting actor nominations? Absolutely, but not at Margot’s expense and not in her absence. The fact that everyone unanimously decried Margot’s snubbing speaks to how stupid of a decision the Academy made in this year’s Best Actress race. They’ll be answering for that snub for years to come.

Speaking of supporting actors…

Best Supporting Actor: It’s no contest — Robert Downey Jr. deserves to win for playing the sniveling, conniving little politician Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. This is a man who has played several larger-than-life characters over the past several years, including Charlie Chaplin, Paul Avery, Kirk Lazarus, Sherlock Holmes, and oh yeah, IRON FREAKING MAN. Yet for all of the parts he’s played, none have felt quite as sinister or obsessive as his role as Lewis Strauss. I know he’s the biggest name amongst this year’s nominees, but I genuinely believe he deserves to win not because of his notoriety, but because of all of the raw talent he proudly displayed in Oppenheimer.

Special shoutout goes out to Chukwudi Iwuji, who turned out a downright evil and maniacal performance as the High Evolutionary in James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. His performance was every bit as hateful as Robert Downey Jr.’s was, and by all accounts, he deserved to be nominated right alongside him. Once again, the Academy proves that having one of the best villainous performances of the year doesn’t matter to them. As long as that performance is in a Marvel movie, it will not get nominated. Pathetic.

Best Supporting Actress: I’m actually relatively split in this category because I love so many of this year’s nominees. America Ferrera had the year’s best monologue in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, while Emily Blunt’s presence was arguably just as powerful as her on-screen husband’s in Oppenheimer.

But when I stack all of these performances up against one another, one clearly outshines the rest — Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s turn as a grieving mother in The Holdovers was easily the most heart-wrenching and devastating performance out of the entire year. All of this year’s supporting actress nominees gave brilliant performances, but Da’Vine’s felt the most raw, the most real, and the most human of them all. She was a clear standout in the movie, and I hope she prevails on Oscar night despite the tough competition she’s facing.

Best Animated Feature: In previous years, it’s been very clear who the Oscar frontrunner is in the Best Animated Feature category, whether you’re talking about Soul in 2020, Encanto in 2021, or Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio just last year. 2024 isn’t as clear cut, with Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, The Boy And The Heron, Nimona, Robot Dreams, and Elemental all scoring nominations. I don’t remember the last time that the animated feature race was this close, and that really speaks to what an outstanding year in animation we had. It was such a great year that we couldn’t even nominate all of the animated films that deserved to be, including Suzume, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Regardless of however it plays out on Oscar night, let’s be grateful that we have such a stacked and competitive category this year, because moments like these don’t come around very often.

As far as this year’s animated feature race goes, it’s a toss-up between Across The Spider-Verse and The Boy And The Heron, both equally ingenious and captivating films in their own way. I personally prefer Spider-Verse not just for its stunning animation and breathtaking visual feats, but also because its story is just as complex and builds upon the Spider-Man mythos in ways I never would have imagined. But The Boy And The Heron equally deserves praise for being as mature and thought-provoking as it is. Sure, it may not be the most exciting or the most sensible film out of the nominees, but what it lacks in coherency it more than makes up for with its philosophical questions and its gorgeous animation that paints this beautiful and twisted world to life. The Oscar really can go to either film on Oscar night, but I’m betting on The Boy And The Heron just because it’s the most unique out of all of the nominees. And in this race, uniqueness can make all of the difference.

While on the subject, I want to give a special shoutout to Nimona for being just as impressive a visual and narrative feat as those movies are, yet consistently getting shoved to the side because of… what exactly? It’s LGBT-adjacent themes? By every account, Nimona deserves to be taken as seriously, if not more so, than Spider-Verse and The Boy And The Heron, but its biggest win this awards season was for Best Writing at the Annie Awards. It deserves to get recognized for so much more than merely its writing, and the fact that it may go home with nothing will go down as one of the biggest snubs in Oscar history. Regardless of whoever wins, you are loved very deeply Nimona. Never forget you are a hero in everybody’s eyes.

Best Documentary Feature: Besides already winning the BAFTA and the DGA Award, no film this year has been more horrifying or haunting than 20 Days In Mariupol. I didn’t see the film in time last year, but if I had, I would have named it my second-favorite film of 2023. It’s that riveting and powerful.

I’ll have more to say on 20 Days In Mariupol later this week, but for now, all I have to say is that you should watch this movie as soon as you can. It’s easily one of the best films I’ve seen last year and demonstrates that the Academy should consider more documentaries for Best Picture.

Best International Feature: I say the same thing every year — if an International film is nominated for Best Picture, it’s a lock for the Best International Feature Oscar. But in this case, this year’s eventual Oscar-winner is a double-whammy. Not only is The Zone Of Interest nominated for Best Picture, but Jonathan Glazer is also nominated for Best Director. The last time that happened was in 2021 when Ryusuke Hamaguchi was nominated for Drive My Car, and sure enough, he won the International Feature Oscar as expected. The same thing will happen this year with The Zone Of Interest. Do not bet against it.

An honorable mention goes out to Takashi Yamazaki’s terrifying monster epic Godzilla Minus One, which takes the atomic behemoth back to his roots as a horrifying metaphor for war and nuclear destruction. Sure it’s a big-budget blockbuster that the Academy doesn’t typically go for, but it could and should have made an exception for Godzilla Minus One. Honestly, I would have even pushed for it being nominated for Best Picture. But the Academy didn’t even have the good sense to nominate The Iron Claw for anything this year, so good luck trying to appeal to the Academy’s lack of common sense.

Best Original Screenplay: In a bizarre turn of events this Oscar season, the Writer’s Guild of America set its awards date after the Academy Awards. The Oscars take place on March 10, while the WGA Awards are taking place a full month afterward on April 14. I have no idea why they would do this. Sure, the WGAs play it close to the Academy’s airdate, but that’s usually within a span of a couple of weeks — not an entire month after the Oscars take place. Because of this, we’ll have to make our best writing predictions without the Writer’s Guild this year. Disappointing, but it isn’t the first time I’ve made my predictions without the WGA. Maybe this time it’ll finally be an even playing field.

This year’s race boils down to two nominees: David Hemingson’s The Holdovers and Justin Triet’s Anatomy Of A Fall. I love them both for very different reasons, The Holdovers for its quirky sense of humor and emotional honesty and Anatomy Of A Fall for its tense and spellbinding narrative that keeps you on your toes all the way through. The worst thing about this category is that regardless of whoever wins, someone else will have undeservedly lost. That makes me irrevocably sad about this year’s Best Original Screenplay nominees.

If we’re going with the quote-unquote “best” original screenplay, it’s The Holdovers hands-down. Not only does it do an incredible job drawing you in and getting you sucked into the lives of these people staying inside this depressing little boarding school, but it does an incredible job humanizing these characters and getting you to root for them despite their circumstances. It’s a masterful dramatic balancing act, and David Hemingson’s entire writing prowess is proudly on display.

But the one thing to understand about the Academy is that they don’t always go for the “Best” in any category (as evidenced from Jamie Lee Curtis’ Best Supporting Actress win for Everything Everywhere All At Once last year). Instead, they often go for the flashiest nominee — the one that will often grab the most headlines and garner the most attention. Judging by that criteria, Anatomy Of A Fall is mesmerizing in its investigative aspect, keeping you guessing throughout until the film finishes on its jaw-dropping conclusion. The Holdovers is obviously the better screenplay, but Anatomy Of A Fall is undoubtedly the smarter one. Intelligence might top emotion in this Oscar race, so I’m going to go with Justine Triet’s Anatomy Of A Fall.

Best Adapted Screenplay: My first thought gravitated toward Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer, but then I thought about the film’s technical elements — how the score, cinematography, and masterful editing brought this intelligent and introspective script all together. Is it some of Christopher Nolan’s finest writing to date? Absolutely, but I think it’s even more impressive from a directorial standpoint. I don’t believe another filmmaker could direct Christopher Nolan’s scripts and make it work as brilliantly as he does. That’s one of his greatest strengths as a filmmaker — he stands on his own as an independent storyteller.

That being said, I do think any director could pick up Cord Jefferson’s screenplay for American Fiction and do just as good of a job. I don’t mean that as a slight toward his directing — I mean that his writing is so strong that it makes it hard for another filmmaker to come in and mess it up. It really could go either way, but considering how much potential Oppenheimer has to winning in other categories, adapted screenplay is really American Fiction’s best chance to win an Oscar, so that’s the one I’m going with.

Best Cinematography: Unbelievably enough, Hoyte van Hoytema has never won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, so he’s more than deserving in winning it for Oppenheimer now. Not only has he also been historically overlooked by the Academy like Christopher Nolan (his only other nomination was with 2017’s Dunkirk), but he’s also done incredible work on other movies that have often gone unrecognized. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Her. Interstellar. Spectre. Tenet. Nope. Time and time again, he’s demonstrated that he can pull off some of the most creative shots ever put to film, and that’s just as true with Oppenheimer as it is with his other works. My jaw dropped when I learned that the quantum physics sequences depicting atoms and molecules were practically shot instead of generated through CGI, and the rest of the film’s cinematography is just as masterful as those sequences. Whether it was the Trinity Test or that horrifying sequence at the Los Alamos gymnasium, every single scene is dripping with Oppenheimer’s guilt and the unbearable atomic weight he bears on his shoulders. No film was simultaneously as haunting or as striking this year as Oppenheimer. If Hoyte van Hoytema doesn’t win it despite his cinematic mastery, it will be a grave, grave injustice.

Best Film Editing: I know it seems like I’m just fanboying at this point, but there’s truly something to be said about an editor who can make a film about a bunch of guys talking in a room compelling, riveting, and interesting all at once. That’s Jennifer Lane’s great accomplishment with Oppenheimer, and it’s also why she deserves to win. Granted, there are several reasons why the movie is amazing, from the performances to the writing to the cinematography to the music to Christopher Nolan’s outstanding direction. But Jennifer Lane masterfully brought it all together and made the film clear and concise despite how much was going on. Oppenheimer’s editing is the very best of the year, point blank, period.

Then again, Laurent Senechal’s editing for Anatomy Of A Fall was similarly masterful and expertly kept audiences in the dark whether Sandra was truly guilty or innocent. I don’t expect there to be an upset win in this category, but if there is, it does deserve to go to Anatomy Of A Fall. I’m good either way just as long as Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t win.

Best Production Design: On first glance, my temptation was to put down Barbie for Best Production Design. But then I asked myself “What made Barbie’s production design so outstanding outside of Barbieland?” I’ll give you that it’s genuinely impressive and does look like any little girl’s Barbieland playset in the real world. But it’s only three locations: Barbie’s home, Ken’s beach, and Weird Barbie’s home, so it was simple for the set designers to knock it out of the park since their sets were so well contained.

Compare that to the expansive, dreamy, and surreal production design of Poor Things. Not only is it much bigger and grander than Barbieland is, but it’s all filled with very evocative imagery that’s as peculiar as it is elusive. It is a cursed fantasy if I’ve ever seen one, and I can’t imagine Poor Things losing to Barbie. Oh well. At least pink still looks good on you, girl.

Best Costume Design: If there’s any Oscar Barbie deserves to win, it’s costume design. Not only does every piece of clothing look like an outfit you could find in Barbie’s closet, but the catalog is so massive that I’m shocked Mattel didn’t make it themselves. Sure Poor Things also has some fine costume work as well, but most scenes have you drawn toward the intense and intoxicating scenery, not whatever Emma Stone is wearing. Barbie’s wardrobe is much more dazzling and deserves the Oscar more. It’s just. So. FABULOUS!

Best Makeup & Hairstyling: Yeah, Bradley Cooper has a big nose in Maestro. Big deal (literally!). I’m not as interested in resurrecting prominent composers as much as I am in bringing your most lividly messed-up vision to life on screen. We haven’t had a good makeup nominee like that for a while, and the last creature makeup to win the Oscar was 2016’s… Suicide Squad. Bleh.

We desperately need a palette-cleanser. That’s why I think Poor Things is going to win it for those horribly grotesque Frankenstein’s monster-esque stitches Willem Dafoe wore throughout filming. Oppenheimer getting nominated in this category is downright laughable.

Best Musical Score: Before we go into my prediction, shame on the Academy for nominating John Williams for Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny over Daniel Pemberton’s phenomenal and captivating score for Across The Spider-Verse. Mind you, I’m not dissing John Williams himself: the guy is obviously a massive music legend, and if we’re looking back, he’s mostly deserved the more than 54 nominations he’s received throughout his illustrious 70-year career.

But of all of his film compositions, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is perhaps the most… phoned in. I’m not saying it’s bad. It has the same melodies, themes, and marches from all of the Indiana Jones movies. And if we’re just looking at nostalgia alone, it was refreshing and nice to hear his iconic score in the theater once again.

The problem is it’s a score that we’ve heard before. In fact, it’s the same score that he was previously nominated for in the original Indiana Jones trilogy. There’s zero interpolation to it, there’s nothing original or novel about it, I’m not even sure he composed new music for Dial Of Destiny. IT’S THE SAME MUSIC. Good music sure, but the same nevertheless.

Compare ALL OF THAT to Daniel Pemberton, who to date has only been nominated once for Trial Of The Chicago 7. His themes in Across The Spider-Verse were energetic, epic, awe-inspiring, fresh, original, dramatic, and exciting. I caught myself humming Miles, Gwen, and Miguel’s themes several times throughout the year, and I can confidently say that it was the second-most streamed film score I listened to all year. For it to not even get a nomination is beyond insulting.

The worst part? This is the second time Daniel Pemberton was snubbed by the Academy, and the second time it was for the same bloody franchise. I don’t remember most of the 2017 Best Original Score nominees, but you know what I do remember? Daniel Pemberton’s music for Into The Spider-Verse. At this point, I’m just preparing myself for Pemberton to get snubbed again whenever Beyond The Spider-Verse comes out. The fact that I have to even prepare myself for that is just plain pathetic.

Granted, even if Daniel Pemberton did get nominated, he’d still probably lose to the same guy who won the 2017 Best Original Score Oscar anyway: Ludwig Gorranson. I mentioned that Across The Spider-Verse was my second most-streamed film soundtrack of the year. Oppenheimer was my first. The mesmerizing themes, incredible strings, and that big, hulking, epic bass that feels like a man spiraling toward nuclear destruction was simultaneously the most captivating and most terrifying thing I’ve listened to all year. There were a lot of reasons why Oppenheimer worked so well, but Ludwig Gorranson’s score was one of the biggest ones. When the cast, the dialogue, and the unraveling plot wasn’t rapturing our attention, it was Ludwig Gorranson’s score peering into the mind of the Father of the Atomic Bomb and what made him tick.

No other film score this year was as impactful, as powerful, and as hypnotizing as Ludwig Gorranson’s music for Oppenheimer. If he doesn’t win, it’ll be an even bigger snub than Daniel Pemberton’s.

Best Original Song: First of all, just what on God’s green earth is “The Fire Inside” doing here? There were several great songs from the year that didn’t get nominated, from “Am I Dreaming?” in Across The Spider-Verse to Lauv’s “Steal The Show” in Elemental. I know a lot of people who really enjoyed Flamin’ Hot, but I have NEVER heard ANYONE say ANYTHING positive about “The Fire Inside.” It’s just such a nothing track that created zero traction in an otherwise strong year for film music. I could think of at least 10 other songs that would be more worthy of a nomination than “The Fire Inside,” so the fact that it got nominated over all the others is beyond irritating.

That being said, the clear frontrunner is Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, and it deserves to be. Not only does it have some of Billie Eilish’s most cutting, devastating lyrics to date, but the simple and melancholic piano melody is so soft and serene that it makes you want to cry. I’m not kidding when I say that I got emotional the first time I listened to it, and I still get emotional every time I listen to it. It’s just that powerful.

I do like that “Wahzhazhe” is nominated for Killers Of The Flower Moon, and seeing Jon Batiste nominated for American Symphony’s “It Never Went Away” was a nice surprise. And sure, “I’m Just Ken” is nominated too, but does anyone really think it’s better than “What Was I Made For?” The only people who probably think so are those misogynistic incels who truly believe Ryan Gosling gave a better performance than Margot Robbie did, and their opinions aren’t worth squat anyway.

The only thing that might get in the way for Billie Eilish’s win is the fact that she previously won Best Original Song for No Time To Die two years ago. Can the Academy Awards REALLY award ANOTHER Best Original Song Oscar so soon after a previous win? Yes it can, and it should.

Best Sound: Fun fact: when I sat down to write my predictions this year, the very first category I predicted was Best Sound. How could I not? Christopher Nolan’s films have a history of performing very well in the sound category, whether you’re talking about The Dark Knight, Inception, or Dunkirk, but few of his films leave an audible impact as powerful as Oppenheimer did. Even before the Trinity Test sequence, you felt the impact of the bomb tests shake the very theater like you were hiding in a bunker until detonation. And when the atomic bomb itself blew up, it felt like an earthquake shaking the ground beneath you. It was the scariest and most terrified I ever felt in a movie theater, and it was all thanks to the masterful sound design at work here.

At the same time, I don’t want to take away credit from the other worthy sound nominees. The Creator had some impressive sound design with its futuristic dystopian setting, and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning had some great tricks at work with the Entity mimicking the voices of Ethan’s comrades. But when I think of the best sound of the year, Oppenheimer was the atomic bomb of sound design. It really is the only pick to make here.

Best Visual Effects: I’m very conflicted in this category between the nominee that deserves to win and the nominee that should win. On one hand, Godzilla Minus One has some of the most terrifying monster destruction ever caught on film that feels equally as monumental as it does massive. Godzilla has never felt larger or more ominous than ever before. When his attack on Japan began, it felt like an atomic bomb went off and shook the very Earth. Godzilla Minus One does have some of the most gargantuan visual effects out of the entire year, and if it does win, it deserves to… kind of.

The problem is what the cost of those visual effects were. While the film was initially praised for pulling off such incredible visual effects at just a meager $15-million budget, we now know why it was able to do that — it’s because they were overworking and underpaying their visual effects artists. Japan’s working conditions for animators are notoriously awful, with artists working long hours for low wages. Apparently visual effects artist’s working conditions aren’t much better, with just 35 artists working on 610 VFX shots for Godzilla Minus One. Because of this, I feel very conflicted about Godzilla Minus One winning the Oscar, because at that point, what are you really rewarding: the visual effects or the horrific working conditions?

Personally I would rather the VFX Oscar go to either Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 or The Creator, two films that were just as visually stunning while exercising more humane working conditions. I don’t know which film is going to win on Oscar night, but right now the momentum is behind Godzilla Minus One. If they do win, I hope the visual effects artists will use the moment to speak against their working conditions and help push toward positive change in Japan. That will mean more than a statuette anyway.

Also, Oppenheimer and Spider-Verse were both robbed in this category and deserved to be nominated for their outstanding visual prowess. I don’t care if their effects were practical or animated: both movies displayed some of the most spectacular visual feats out of the entire year, and the fact neither got nominated shows that the Academy doesn’t value nor respect visual effects that exist outside of a computer screen. Shame on them.

And finally, we come to this year’s short categories, none of which I’ve seen but still have to predict every year regardless. Funny thing is I normally struggle in this category due to how few of the nominees I’ve seen, but this year, my predictions are easy. Not because I’ve seen the nominees, no, but because I know the people who made them. Predicting the category is a pain in the rear every year, so if sheer bias is all I have to go on, and I’m going for it baby.

Besides guessing The ABC’s Of Booking Banning winning Best Documentary Short, I’m also going to predict that The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar and Ninety-Five Senses will win live-action and animated short respectively. Why these nominees? Well for one thing, Wes Anderson has never won an Oscar despite being nominated seven times for the likes of The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel, and Isle of Dogs. For another thing, this is Jared and Jerusha Hess’ first nomination, and I would love to say “From the Academy Award-winning directors of Nacho Libre and Napoleon Dynamite.” Gosh!

That’s all for now, folks. I’ll see y’all on Oscar night. Nobody drop any atomic bombs on the Dolby Theatre in the meantime.

– David Dunn

Tagged 20 Days In Mariupol, Academy Awards, American Fiction, Anatomy Of A Fall, Barbie, Killers Of The Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Oscars, Poor Things, The Boy And The Heron, The Holdovers, The Zone Of Interest

Jan 23 2024

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Awards Coverage

The Barbenheimer Awards (Kinda)

Life is all about accepting the good with the bad, and the Academy Awards are the same way. Every year, they fill us with boundless joy and endless betrayal. They excite us, and they frustrate us. They make us happy, and they make us sad. They give, and they take. I’ve let the Academy Awards drive me insane for well over 10 years now, and I’ve learned the key to not letting them get to you is to just accept that they’re going to make at least one bad decision every year. That’s the key to happiness, my friends: accepting mediocrity.

No year exemplifies the Academy Awards’ inconsistency more than 2024, which has some of the most ballistic nominations I’ve ever seen from the Academy. There are some nominations that make me very excited and eager to see how things will play out on Oscar night. There are other nominations that make me confused as to why they’re even on here. Then there are snubs so stupid and outrageous that I’m tempted to bomb the Dolby Theatre with pixie dust. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

First of all, the good news: Oppenheimer earned a whopping 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup, Best Original Score, and Best Sound. About damn time. As a prominent filmmaker who’s released one mindbending blockbuster hit after another for over 25 years, Christopher Nolan is one of the best filmmakers of our time and is always on the cutting edge of cinematic innovation. It’s outright insane that Oppenheimer marks only his second Best Director nomination, especially since his first nomination was with 2018’s Dunkirk. I don’t think anyone will be surprised when I say that I will be rooting for Oppenheimer big-time on Oscar night. It deserves everything that it’s been nominated for, and I’m excited that Christopher Nolan might finally get the recognition he’s always deserved.

Then we get our first surprise from this year’s Best Picture nominees: Yorgos Lathimos’ beautiful and bizarre experimental drama Poor Things, which earned 11 nominations total. Most of the nominations I’m not surprised at, especially when you see how gorgeous the costuming, production design, makeup, and cinematography is. Emma Stone ain’t no pushover either, so she’ll definitely be one to dethrone in the Best Actress race.

No, what I’m more surprised by is how many nominations it received. Aside from sweeping most of the technical categories, Poor Things also secured a supporting actor nomination for Mark Ruffalo, as well as Best Picture and Director nominations for Yorgos Lanthimos. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I wasn’t expecting it to be the second frontrunner in the Best Picture race. We’ll see how many Oscars it ends up winning the night of the ceremony. It’s very possible that Barbie could snatch up most of the categories Poor Things is nominated in.

After that, we have Martin Scorsese’s phenomenal historical drama Killers Of The Flower Moon, which is easily the coldest and cruelest film to come out from last year. At 10 nominations, Killers Of The Flower Moon is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Costume and Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. I’m grateful that Robbie Robertson got nominated for the movie’s unsettling and uneasy score, especially since he passed away from prostate cancer last year. But the nominee I’m most pining for is Lily Gladstone. Her gripping, passionate performance felt so human and raw, it was hard to imagine that someone actually lived through the things she did. She was a tour de force in the movie and easily outshines the leads above her. She’s my favorite to win Best Actress, but we’ll see if the scales are tipped in her favor later this spring.

Now here comes Barbie, and this one actually really pisses me off. Barbie scored eight nominations total for this year’s ceremony, including Best Picture. Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera secured supporting actor nominations, Noah Baumbach got nominated for adapted screenplay, and the film is an easy frontrunner for costume, production design, and original song.

All of those nominations the Academy got right. What it got wrong was what it chose not to nominate. For one thing, Margot Robbie is noticeably absent from the Best Actress category, which is beyond ridiculous since it’s her performance that makes the entire film work. Going from a generic and artificial Barbie doll and learning to grow and develop into her own person was such a sweet arc, and it’s her performance that gives the character gravity and humanity. I haven’t seen all of the movies nominated under the Best Actress category, but I’m willing to bet that Nyad and Maestro do NOT feature performances as strong as Margot Robbie’s. If Ryan Gosling can get nominated for going shirtless and screaming “I’m just Ken,” Margot damn sure can get nominated for playing the MAIN FREAKING CHARACTER.

Snubbing Margot was bad enough, but snubbing the film’s director is even worse. While Greta Gerwig did get nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, she got shoved to the sidelines when it came to Best Director, which is even more baffling to me. Greta’s creativity, ingenuity, and artistry brought the entire film together and made everything work as cohesively as it did. Barbieland is beautiful. The lore and the world-building is fully fleshed out. The corporate and Kenfluence loomed large. And Barbie’s arc of learning to become a woman and be proud to be one is just captivating and awe-inspiring. Absolutely no one else could have made a Barbie movie work as well as she did, let alone make one PERIOD. The fact that she got snubbed despite directing the most influential film of the year is idiocy to the Kenth degree.

And who took her spot in the Best Director category, you may ask? Why, it’s none other than Justine Triet and Jonathan Glazer, who respectively directed Anatomy Of A Fall and The Zone Of Interest. Both films look really good, with one being about a writer trying to prove her innocence for allegedly murdering her husband and another being a drama about a Nazi family trying to build their dream life next to a concentration camp. But I haven’t seen either movie, and more to the point, I don’t know of many people who have. I appreciate when the Academy branches out and tries to recognize smaller films that some moviegoers might have missed, but not at the expense of a billion-dollar blockbuster hit that broke through gender barriers to tell a story that’s as daring and emotional as it is funny and entertaining. I don’t know who I would replace under the director category to make room for Greta, but let’s start with “anybody except Christopher Nolan” and go from there.

Finally, let’s do a lightning round of “Best Picture nominees I haven’t seen yet.” Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, secured seven nominations, which is one less than Barbie, but at least the Academy had the good sense to nominate its star. The satire of stereotypes, American Fiction, received five nominations, as did Alexander Payne’s newest comedic high school drama, The Holdovers. Perhaps most perplexingly, Celine Song’s heartfelt romantic drama, Past Lives, got only two nominations: one for Best Picture, the other for Best Original Screenplay. I’ve written about my frustrations about Best Picture nominees only getting two nominations before, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole again. What I will say is that it’s ABSURD that Past Lives got the same amount of nominations as both The Creator and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One — and one less nomination than Napoleon. I guess Past Lives needed more pyramids blowing up in it.

And just like any other year, there are a slew of snubs that didn’t make the cut in this year’s Oscar race. Air, Talk To Me, and Ferrari all got zero nominations despite how creative and compelling all of them were. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse got robbed of both music and VFX noms, which is especially maddening since there are nominees that Across The Spider-Verse is emphatically BETTER than. Perhaps most upsetting is that the devastating Von Erich family drama The Iron Claw got a resounding ZERO nominations. No acting nominations for either Zac Efron, Lily James, or Holt McCallany. No director or writing noms for Sean Durkin. No cinematography nomination for Matyas Erdely, no editing nomination for Matthew Hannam, and no music nomination for Richard Reed Perry. If I had to point to a snub that was the most egregious, it would probably be the Academy ignoring The Iron Claw across the entire board.

That doesn’t change how obscene it is that Greta Gerwig or Margot Robbie didn’t get nominated. Regardless of how dumb or nonsensical some of the other snubs may be, there is a set limit for how many noms each category can have, so I understand that the Academy can’t fit EVERYBODY in. Snubs are going to happen, but what happened with Barbie isn’t a snub — it’s stupidity. It’s pure idiocy thinking that the most commercially and critically successful film of the year isn’t worth not only a Best Actress nomination, but a Best Director nomination either — especially since those two people were the most ESSENTIAL part of your movie. It’s like nominating Oppenheimer for Best Picture but then snubbing Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy in their own categories. It’s beyond insanity.

At the end of the day, moviegoers know just how special Barbie is and the women who brought it to life. So tonight, I hope these amazing artists are sipping on the tallest glass of Moscato along with their millions knowing that their movie made a greater impact on film than any other Best Picture nominee this year. Cheers to you, ladies — you are more than Kenough.

– David Dunn

Tagged Academy Awards, American Fiction, Anatomy Of A Fall, Barbie, Killers Of The Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Oscars, Past Lives, Poor Things, The Holdovers, The Zone Of Interest

Mar 13 2023

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

Everything Sweeps Everywhere All At Once At The Oscars

Everyone has heard the old adage “Life gives, and life takes away.” The same could be said for the Academy Awards. For every heartfelt emotion and every well-deserved win it gives us, it’s usually followed up with an incredibly awkward moment or a deeply disrespectful snub. Perhaps no ceremony embodies that more than the 95th Academy Awards, which embodies the best and worst of both worlds.

On one hand, the ceremony itself was… pretty lackluster, to be quite honest. The pre-show on the Red Carpet was the same disaster as it’s always been (Hugh Grant was a BIG mood), the playing-off was especially obnoxious this time around, and Jimmy Kimmel was… fine. Just fine. He had a couple of good jabs about the infamous slap at last year’s Oscars (and one especially scathing one-liner about the now-deceased Robert Blake), but the rest of his time as host ranged from passable to downright cringeworthy. I never want to hear him ask Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai if she thought Harry Styles spat on Chris Pine, and I never, ever, EVER want to hear her be called “Malalaland” ever again.

On the other hand, outside of a handful of giant, gaping “WTF?” moments, the winners by and large this year were well-deserved. I mean sure, there were some glaring errors (*cough, cough* SUPPORTING ACTRESS *cough, cough). But by and large, this was one of the better years for the Academy Awards. I don’t get to say that often, so I’m very happy I get to say that this time around.

Best Picture: Of course Everything Everywhere All At Once won Best Picture, and it more than deserved it. Not only is it A24’s highest-grossing movie of all time, but it is simultaneously one of the most beloved pictures of the whole year, sweeping awards season like it’s the greediest kid on a Monopoly board.

But more than the awards hype, Everything Everywhere All At Once truly is just one of the most unique, creative, captivating, and mesmerizing cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. It’s simultaneously a layered yet simple story about a family of broken souls trying to find their place in a vast multiverse and learning that their happiness doesn’t lie in status, success, or money, but in each other. It shows that love is the greatest superpower you can have in any multiverse, and that’s one of the most beautiful things about this unusual, strange, wacky little film.

It’s so wonderful to see something like Everything Everywhere All At Once win Best Picture not only because it’s outside of the Academy’s usual wheelhouse, but because it’s outside everybody’s usual wheelhouse. It genuinely is one of the most abstract and outrageous films ever made, but simultaneously, it hit the mark on every single emotional note that it needed to. It is a truly special, one-of-a-kind cinematic experience you owe to yourself to experience at least once, and the fact that it won Best Picture makes me happy beyond words. What else can I say? The Academy got it right this year, folks. The Academy got it right.

Best Director: In the same vein as Best Picture, directing duo Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan also won Best Director for Everything Everywhere All At Once. How could they not? With as bold, batty, and breathtaking as Everything Everywhere All At Once is, one would have to be insane to even think of such an outlandish premise in the first place. But the Daniels prove that they are of sound mind because they somehow made all of the insanity work. I still don’t know why Ruben Ostlund is nominated here for Triangle Of Sadness, but it’s all history now. Daniels won Best Director this year, and boy did they deserve it.

Best Actor: Brendan Fraser won it big for The Whale, and man did he deserve it. His performance as the 600-pound Charlie is strong enough to bring any man to tears, and he displayed a depth, complexion, and vulnerability that I didn’t even know he had. This was a well-earned comeback year for Brendan Fraser, and I hope his career only continues to climb from here.

A side-note to Warner Bros.: Release Batgirl, you cowards. This win only further proves that Brendan Fraser was ready for his villainous turn as the Firefly, and I still haven’t forgiven you for robbing me of that.

Best Actress: Michelle Yeoh was the heart and soul of Everything Everywhere All At Once, so it doesn’t surprise me that she also won the Oscar for Best Actress. But man, am I so, so happy for her. The fact that she is only the second woman of color to win this award and that Halle Berry was the one to present it to her just speaks to how far we’ve come and how much further we need to go from here. A well-deserved congratulations to Michelle on her win. At 60 years old, she proves that no woman is beyond her prime.

Best Supporting Actor: Ke Huy Quan won Best Supporting Actor for playing multiple versions of Waymond Wang in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Was there any doubt? Whether he was a feeble or meek husband or a larger-than-life action hero, Waymond’s many roles demanded range from Ke Huy Quan, and he played all of them beautifully. I especially love that when he went up to the stage, Harrison Ford was there to embrace him as Indy. You did it, Short Round. Congratulations.

Best Supporting Actress: This is the part of the ballot where I begin to have a meltdown, because what the actual HELL was the Academy thinking? Here is a category where there are several worthy nominees, and nearly all of them are deserving of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Hong Chau for portraying a grieving nurse in The Whale. Kerry Condon playing a sister torn between two sides of a feud in The Banshees Of Inisherin. Angela Basset playing a grieving mother to a fallen king in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. And Stephanie Hsu for playing the conflicted and torn daughter split between all of her alternate selves in Everything Everywhere All At Once. All of these actresses were more than deserving of the Supporting Actress Oscar. Instead, the Academy decided to give it to… Jamie Lee Curtis for playing a lesbian with hot dog fingers.

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Jamie Lee Curtis is a fine actress, and she’s played several remarkable characters over the years, from Laurie Strode in Halloween to Linda Dryadale in Knives Out. But with all due respect to Jamie Lee Curtis, she isn’t the Best Supporting Actress of the year. She isn’t even the Best Supporting Actress in her own movie. Stephanie Hsu’s character demanded way, way, WAY more from her as an actress and as a performer. One could fairly say she’s just as essential to the film as Michele Yeoh and Key Huy Quan were. Instead, the Academy just skipped over her entirely and gave her Oscar to someone who did just a fifth of the work. That isn’t just disrespectful to Hsu as an actress: that’s disrespectful to all of the nominees in the category. What possible justification could there be for such snobbery?

Well that’s just it: snobbery. With her career spanning 45 years, it’s safe to assume that the Academy views this more as a legacy award rather than a legitimate acting Oscar. So what? That still doesn’t make it any better. You meant to tell me that this nepo baby deserved it more than Angela Basset, Kerry Condon, Hong Chau, and newcomer Stephanie Hsu, who gives a better performance than her anyway? Really? REALLY???

In terms of snubs, this is probably worse than Chadwick Boseman’s Best Actor snub in 2020, and I’m being dead serious when I say that. Because at least in that situation, Boseman lost to a worthy actor in Anthony Hopkins for The Father. Not only is Jamie Lee Curtis not comparable to her fellow nominees: she’s not comparable to them in any of the other multiverses. That’s how stupid this win is. It defies reality as we know it.

This may go down as one of the worst Oscar snubs in history, but there will be time to reflect on that later. Right now, I’m going to eat a hot dog and pretend it’s one of Jamie Lee Curtis’ fingers. Maybe that’ll make me feel better.

Update: It did not make me feel better.

Best Animated Feature: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio deservedly won Best Animated Feature, which helps make up for all of the other categories it was wrongfully overlooked in. Guillermo Del Toro’s speech saying animation was a medium and not a genre was long overdue and well-earned, and his tribute to his late mother was simply beautiful. We could all learn a thing or two about life and love from that wonderful little film. But whatever you do, don’t watch the live-action remake on Disney+. We have enough of those to worry about already.

Best Documentary Feature: As close as this category was, Navalny took home the Oscar for Best Documentary, and rightfully so given the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The words of Alexei Navalny’s wife Yulia sticks out to me the most: “My husband is in prison for telling the truth. My husband is in prison for defending democracy.” Those are two things that are very much under attack in America right now as well. Hopefully Alexei’s fight against tyranny will stir some hearts to do the same over here as well.

Best International Feature: All Quiet On The Western Front, of course. Can you imagine the outrage if anything else won? But as predictable as the International Feature category was, there was a lot more relating to All Quiet On The Western Front that was much more surprising. But we’ll circle back to that later.

Best Original Screenplay: If Everything Everywhere All At Once is anything, it’s wholly original, which made it a shoo-in for the Original Screenplay category. God dang, did the Daniels have a good night at the Oscars.

Best Adapted Screenplay: With only two nominations, Women Talking winning Best Adapted Screenplay was a big win for the small but mighty feature on Oscar night, especially since half of the Best Picture nominees went home with zero Oscars (including even The Banshees Of Inisherin despite garnering nine nominations). Though I will say my favorite part of this win was when my mother-in-law asked why they weren’t playing Sarah Polley off of the stage. “Ma!” my brother-in-law says. “It’s because women talking!” You couldn’t write better comedy than that.

Best Cinematography: We already knew James Friend was going to win Best Cinematography for All Quiet On The Western Front, but his win is more of an indictment on the category itself and how awful this year’s nominees were. Roger Deakins even publicly chided the Oscars for intentionally snubbing Greig Fraser for his incredible work on The Batman. Granted, he already won last year for his amazing work on Dune, but that doesn’t make his snub feel any better. In fact, it makes it worse, because you can clearly tell the craftsmanship behind it and yet still see it get skipped over because “it’s a superhero movie.” Pfft. Please.

Many more well-deserved cinematographers were snubbed here, including Larkin Seiple with Everything Everywhere All At Once, Ben Davis for The Banshees Of Inisherin, Jarin Blaschke for The Northman, Claudio Miranda for Top Gun: Maverick, and the truly idiotic one, Hoyte Van Hoytema for Nope. But whatever, it’s old news now. At least the Academy picked the best one out of a bad bunch.

Best Film Editing: It was down to Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All At Once in the editing race, and Everything clinched it, if ever so barely. With Top Gun: Maverick being such a popular hit, I thought the Academy would take any chance it could get to recognize the acclaimed action sequel. The Academy ended up going with the jump cuts and genre-mashing that came with Everything Everywhere All At Once. An easy mistake to make, but it could have gone to either of those films on Oscar night. And in another multiverse, it did.

Best Makeup And Hairstyling: The Whale won for convincingly adding 600 pounds to Brendan Fraser’s battered body, and deservingly so. Was there ever any doubt? Of course, there are naysayers out there who say The Batman or Elvis should have won instead. To that I say, nothing is worst than when Norbit was nominated for Best Makeup in 2007. Absolute nothing. The Whale deserved to win, and Charlie deserves a hug.

Best Production Design: This is where the Oscars go in a sharply different direction than I was expecting. In a surprise upset, All Quiet On The Western Front bested Elvis, Babylon, The Fabelmans, and even Avatar for Best Production Design. This is deeply unusual because historically, war pictures never perform well in the production design category. The closest I’ve seen is when Lincoln won in 2013, and even then, I think you could argue that’s more of a historical film than a war film. It just doesn’t happen, so the fact that Christian Goldbeck and Ernestine Hipper beat all the odds makes their win even more impressive.

Now, do I think it deserved to win? Not really, no, especially when you compare it to the grandiose sets of Elvis and Babylon. But I can at least see the craftsmanship behind All Quiet On The Western Front. At the very least, it’s less embarrassing than when Mank won Best Production Design in 2021, so I’m going to take this as a win either way.

Best Costume Design: In another stunning upset, one king bested another when Black Panther: Wakanda Forever won Best Costume Design over Elvis. Which isn’t really that surprising. After all, Ruth Carter previously won the Oscar for the first Black Panther movie in 2019. My reasoning for not picking her was more historical than anything else, because not only has a black woman never won two Oscars in the costume category: a black woman has never won two Oscars in any category. With this win, Ruth Carter has made history, and I couldn’t be happier for her blazing a trail for others to follow.

Best Musical Score: Of all of the musical scores that could have been awarded the Oscar, the Academy had several great options to choose from, from Justin Hurwitz’s snazzy and stylish score for Babylon to John Williams’ wonderful melodies in The Fabelmans to Son Lux’s ambitious and transcendental compositions in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Instead, the Academy chose All Quiet On The Western Front, a score so bloated and poorly mixed that it made me think my stereo speaker was broken.

The funny thing is when you look at the larger composition overall, Volker Bertelmann crafts a wonderfully tragic and heart-wrenching score that fits perfectly with the film’s anti-war themes and the loss of innocence. The problem is its main musical theme, the one it played during its presentation snippet no less, is just three blaring dubstep synths that make you want to gouge your eardrums out. It is the worst part of the score by far, and yet somehow, it beat out all of the other nominees.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy for Volker and I’m glad All Quiet On The Western Front has yet another win under its name. But in terms of this year’s nominees, this score was easily among my least favorites. I’ll be revisiting the tracks that filled me with an emotion other than mild annoyance and confusion.

Best Original Song: RRR’s “Naatu Naatu” won Best Original Song, and rightfully so. As much as I loved Lady Gaga’s stripped-down version of “Hold My Hand” and Rihanna’s powerful performance of “Lift Me Up,” there’s no question which song was the most fun, the most high-energy, and just the most memorable of the year, and it’s one where you don’t even understand the lyrics. I love the fact that “Naatu Naatu” won when RRR was effectively shut out from the rest of the ceremony, and I especially love that Telugu cinema finally got its moment at the Oscars. Congratulations to M. M. Keeravani and Chandrabose for their much-deserved win, and I look forward to seeing what they produce next.

Best Sound: Unsurprisingly, Top Gun: Maverick won in the Best Sound category. And it’s deservedly so, with the sound design blasting you in the face like the engine of a Super Hornet. That said, what is a surprise is how much Top Gun: Maverick was overlooked in the rest of the ceremony. It didn’t win Best Film Editing. It didn’t win Best Original Song. And on a much larger scale, it was not nominated for a lot more, with its biggest snub being in the cinematography category.

It goes to show that just because you’re the most popular film of the year doesn’t mean you’ll be revered by the Academy as much. Oh well. At least it didn’t go home empty-handed, plus it has over $1 billion waiting at home to make it go down better.

Best Visual Effects: Avatar: The Way Of Water won, duh. If All Quiet On The Western Front won in this category too, I swear I would have lost my mind. Thank God that didn’t happen.

And finally, the short categories. It’s funny. Normally, I expect to do pretty poorly in the shorts since I never get to see them, but against all odds, I’ve done pretty decently at predicting them in recent years. The only one I got wrong this year was Best Animated Short, where The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse won. But considering the fact I predicted live-action and documentary shorts correctly, that’s a win in my book. Regardless, no title was better from any of the categories than An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake And I Think I Believe It. My Year Of Dicks is a close second.

Speaking of which, my favorite moment from the Oscars this year actually comes from the live-action short category, where An Irish Goodbye won. During their acceptance speech, director Tom Berkeley asked to use his time to wish his co-star James Martin, who has down syndrome, a happy birthday. Seeing the entire audience sing happy birthday to this wonderful young man as his face lights up with happiness is easily one of the greatest moments I’ve ever witnessed at the Academy Awards. It’ll be hard for anything to top that sweet and sincere moment in future Oscar ceremonies.

So yeah, the Oscars gives and takes. With my guessing 17 out of the 23 winners correctly, this was a pretty great year for the Academy Awards all around. Just don’t ask my opinion about Jamie Lee Curtis’ supporting actress win. The Academy will never live that one down.

– David Dunn

Tagged 95th Academy Awards, All Quiet On The Western Front, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Oscars, The Whale

Mar 05 2023

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

2023 Oscar Predictions

It’s funny how long controversial Oscar moments live in our memory. The infamous mix-up between Best Picture winner Moonlight and La La Land, for instance, happened six years ago, yet it feels like it could have happened yesterday. The same could be said for when Crash won Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain in 2005, where many people wished that there actually was a Best Picture mixup. Then there’s 2022, when Best Actor winner Will Smith infamously walked up and slapped Chris Rock in front of 15 million viewers for an off-color joke he made about his wife. That happened a year ago, and it’s still being talked about to this day, including in Chris Rock’s recent comedy special “Selective Outrage,” where he slapped back at both Will and Jada (“I didn’t have any entanglements!” he clapped over the weekend).

With all of these flubs, flashbacks, and eff-ups still living in our memories years later, this makes me even more excited for this year’s Oscar ceremony than usual. What surprises await this year? Will Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announce the wrong winner yet again? Will Mark Wahlberg pronounce the name of Women Talking correctly? Will Will Smith and Chris Rock box it out on stage like Apollo Creed? Who knows! Your guess is as good as mine, folks.

Speaking of guesses, with the 95th Academy Awards taking place next weekend, it’s now or never when it comes to making my predictions. After all, we can’t predict everything that’ll happen on Oscar night, so let’s have fun with the things we can predict, starting with…

Best Picture: Ah, Best Picture. We meet again. This category has become noticeably dicey to predict in recent years. Out of the past 10 ceremonies, I’ve predicted the Best Picture winner correctly four times: Argo in 2012, 12 Years A Slave in 2013, Birdman in 2014, and Nomadland in 2020. Every other year has been a complete and utter crapshoot. The Shape Of Water won in 2018 despite no other science-fiction film winning out of the Academy’s 90-year history. Same goes for Parasite in 2019 in regard to International films. The Power Of The Dog seemed primed to win Best Picture last year, but CODA snuck up right behind it and snatched it from its grimy hands. Which is all fine and dandy because, as you might remember, The Power Of The Dog was vastly, vastly overrated.

Since the Producers Guild of America award seems to carry more weight than it has in previous years, it seems that Everything Everywhere All At Once is the clear frontrunner for Best Picture this year. If it is, then it is more than deserving, because film duo Daniels created one of the most immersive cinematic experiences of all time with that picture. I’ve never seen a film that has been simultaneously exciting, gripping, absorbing, emotional, weird, funny, unusual, horrifying, and heartfelt all at once. It truly is one of the most unique moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had in the theater, and it stands out amongst its fellow nominees.

Sure, there are other great movies that are in contention, from Martin McDonagh’s Banshees Of Inisherin to James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way Of Water to Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, but none of them have the momentum or the energy behind them the way Everything Everywhere All At Once has all season long. If Best Picture wasn’t going to go to Everything Everywhere All At Once, my next best guess would be All Quiet On The Western Front since it’s the next most-nominated film at nine nominations total. But since its predecessor already won Best Picture (albeit in 1930), it doesn’t seem likely that its remake would reach the same heights. Everything Everywhere All At Once is the most likely Best Picture winner. If it does end up winning, then the Academy got it right this year big time.

Best Director: Daniel Kwan and Scheinert defeated Steven Spielberg to secure the DGA, which means they’re all but assured to win Best Director for Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s just as well, because they easily delivered one of the most creative, unique, original, mesmerizing, and breathtaking films I’ve seen in the past several years. I will be overjoyed if the Daniels end up taking home one of the night’s biggest prizes. Now if only someone would explain to me why Ruben Ostlund is nominated here for Triangle of Sadness.

Best Actor: I actually agonize quite a bit over this category and how badly two different nominees deserve to win here. On one hand, Austin Butler gave a mesmerizing and incredibly gifted performance as the King of Rock N’ Roll in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, brilliantly resurrecting the rock icon and giving him humanity, heart, and soul. On the other hand, Brendan Fraser is at the best he’s ever been in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, and he gives a deeply intimate and tragic performance as a morbidly obese father who is slowly dying from heart failure.

It’s a close call, and I honestly wish I didn’t have to pick between these two amazing performances. But if we’re going solely off of impact, it’s no question that the Best Actor Oscar belongs to Brendan Fraser. Sure, he hasn’t done anything as significant up until now, and he was downright awful in those Godforsaken Mummy movies. Despite all of this, he gives a real tearjerker of a performance as Charlie and he makes you reflect on life, love, joy, happiness, grief, trauma, sadness, and all of the emotions in between. Austin Butler solidified himself as Elvis in our hearts forever, but Brendan Fraser shattered our hearts as Charlie.

Best Actress: As great as Michelle Williams and Ana de Armas were in The Fablemans and Blonde respectively, this year’s Best Actress race boils down to two phenomenal performances: Cate Blanchett in Tar and Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once.

I’m going with Michelle for three reasons. One: Cate Blanchett already has two Oscars, one for The Aviator and one for Blue Jasmine. The only other actresses to secure three Oscars are Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand, and I’m sorry, but I just don’t see Cate Blanchett being on Meryl Streep’s level, no matter how great her performance was. Two: Michelle Yeoh won the SAG Award for Best Actress, and seven times out of 10, that’s been most accurate in predicting the Oscar winner too. And three: She just plain deserves it. Between portraying a strict and overbearing mother, a dissatisfied wife, and a neglected daughter, Michelle wore many faces in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and she portrayed all of them beautifully.

She perfectly encapsulated womanhood while simultaneously demonstrating how generational trauma affects more people than just yourself. Dare I say, her performance was perfect in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and her fellow nominees will be hard-pressed to unseat her.

Best Supporting Actor: Ke Huy Quan, without question. I know that Everything Everywhere All At Once demanded more dramatically from both Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu, but it could be argued that Waymond was just as central to the film as much as his on-screen wife and daughter were. Not only that, but Ke Huy Quan did a brilliant job portraying multiple versions of Waymond, not just as his shy and squeamish self from the main universe, but also as the superheroic action-hero version of himself from the Alphaverse. His monologue on doing laundry and taxes was the most powerful, pure thing out of the whole movie, and Ke Huy Quan proved he’s more than just Short Round from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom.

Best Supporting Actress: First of all, what on Earth is going on with Hollywood’s sudden aversion to Stephanie Hsu? She was every bit as essential to the film as her on-screen parents were, arguably more so since the main conflict dealt directly with her character and her search for meaning and purpose in all of her different lives. Yet, since the Golden Globes took place back in January, she’s been relentlessly snubbed in place of her co-stars, and I don’t know why. She wasn’t nominated for the Golden Globe. She wasn’t nominated for the BAFTA. She was nominated at the SAG Awards, but she lost to… Jamie Lee Curtis. For what? All her role entailed was stapling a circle to her head, griping about taxes, and licking Michelle Yeoh’s hot dog fingers. She had nowhere near the depth, complexion, and variety that Stephanie Hsu brought to her performance, yet she’s consistently been recognized more on the awards circuit than Stephanie Hsu was, and I don’t know why. She should be at the top of consideration for supporting actress this year, but because of how relentlessly she’s been snubbed all season, she’s at the bottom of the pack, which is easily the most disrespectful thing to come out of awards season this year by far.

That being said, I think Best Supporting Actress this year will go to Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. She brilliantly and powerfully portrayed everyone’s collective grief over Chadwick Boseman, and there were moments in the film where it didn’t feel so much like she was acting as much as she was just expressing her genuine emotions. I can’t explain why Michael B. Jordan was stupidly snubbed years ago in the first Black Panther, but that’s neither here nor there. Angela Bassett deserves this year’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar. If Jamie Lee Curtis somehow nabs it away from not one, but two deserving nominees, I’m going to drown her Oscar in dirty hot dog water.

Best Animated Feature: First of all, what an amazing year in animated film. Yes, the animated feature category is usually one of the strongest every year, but this year that’s especially the case. With this year’s five nominees including Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, The Sea Beast, Turning Red, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, any one of these nominees is more than deserving of the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Not for nothing, three of these movies made it onto my best films of the year list. It might have been four if Puss In Boots: The Last Wish wasn’t released so damn late into the year.

That being said, I think this year’s animated feature Oscar should go to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Not only is it beautifully animated with expert craftsmanship and detail with its stop-motion animation, but it also carries a maturity to it that makes it feel as relevant for adults as it does to children. It is easily one of the most beautiful, thoughtful, and poignant remakes of 2022, and it deserves nothing less than the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

On another note, I am absolutely baffled that Pinocchio only secured one nomination in the animated film category. I understand it not getting a Best Picture nomination, but seriously: nothing for music? Cinematography? Production design? Good gravy, if Avatar can get nominated for production design for its animated work, surely Pinocchio deserves nothing less.

Best Documentary Feature: In most other years at the Oscars, there’s usually a clear frontrunner when it comes to Best Documentary, whether you’re talking about My Octopus Teacher in 2021 or Summer of Soul in 2022. We don’t have that privilege this year with all of the nominees being on mostly equal footing. The closest one to a frontrunner I can think of is Fire of Love, which was recently announced to being adapted into a feature-length film. But just because it’s more popular doesn’t automatically make it the winner. After all, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was simultaneously one of the highest-grossing and most well-made documentaries of all time. It wasn’t even nominated in 2019.

No, for Best Documentary, I think the Academy is going to go more topical than anything else, and there’s probably no other film more timely than Navalny, which focuses on the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020. With the ongoing Ukrainian War costing hundreds of lives daily, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Academy highlighted a film that brought attention to this issue, especially since previous Oscar winners CitizenFour and Icarus had similar subjects.

Of course, this could just be me trying to justify my prediction for an otherwise unpredictable category. Take your pick. Mine is Navalny. Screw Putin.

Best International Feature: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — if a Foreign-language film is nominated for Best Picture, it’s a lock in the International Film category. With All Quiet On The Western Front being nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, it’s safe to say that Edward Berger’s gripping war epic will win the International Feature Oscar as well. It’s more than deserving, with Berger creating a harrowing yet tragic portrait of war and how it does nothing but take lives and leave families devastated. While there’s much well-deserved confusion as to how on Earth Decision To Leave was snubbed in this category, there’s no questioning the emotional impact behind All Quiet On The Western Front and how much it deserves to win. I can’t wait to see Edward Berger win his first Academy Award. That’ll be a big moment to pay attention to on Oscar night.

Best Original Screenplay: Everything Everywhere All At Once, no contest. Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees Of Inisherin was equally as emotional and heartbreaking, but it lacks the complexity, the innovation, and the creativity that Everything Everywhere All At Once has. I make no exaggeration when I say it is the most original screenplay I’ve ever read. I don’t know how the Daniels’ came up with the wacky, crazy, bat-insane ideas they come up with in that film, but they did it and they turned it into something meaningful, sincere, and deeply profound. If that doesn’t deserve to win Best Original Screenplay, then none of the nominees do.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Let’s start with the obvious question here: what the heck even counts as an “adapted” work nowadays? Out of the five nominees, only three of them are based on preexisting works. The other two are sequels to original films (Top Gun: Maverick and Glass Onion). What’s worse is that one of those movies, Knives Out, was first nominated for original screenplay before its sequel flipped over to the adapted side. What gives? How can something be considered original in one second and adapted in the next? Why weren’t these movies nominated for original screenplay? What confused, outdated system is the Academy using to make these confounding nominations?

As far as the remaining nominees go, it’s pretty clear who the winner will be: Women Talking. Living hasn’t generated anywhere near enough conversation to even be considered in the running, and as great as All Quiet On The Western Front is, its greatest strengths lie elsewhere beyond the writing (such as Edward Berger’s phenomenal direction, James Friend’s breathtaking cinematography, the disquieting and eerie visual effects). That leaves Women Talking as the most likely winner for this category. If, for any reason, either Top Gun or Glass Onion wins, I will pull my hair out and question reality as I know it.

Best Cinematography: Out of all of the categories from this year’s Oscar ceremony, the worst one by far is Best Cinematography. Not only are there two nominees nobody’s even heard of before (Bardo and Empire Of Light), but Elvis is nominated under this category. ELVIS. Over Everything Everywhere All At Once? Over The Banshees of Inisherin? Over Top Gun: Maverick? The Fabelmans? The Northman? The Batman? Nope? I could pick like 10 movies that deserve to be here more than these nominees, so the fact that these were the ones we ended up with is utterly infuriating.

That being said, it does make my job of predicting the winner easier, so the Oscar for Best Cinematography this year will go to All Quiet On The Western Front. It may not be as spectacular as the other movies I mentioned, but the scope of its battles is phenomenal and it does a brilliant job showcasing how war tears apart the body and the soul. It’s not my favorite cinematography of the year, but then again, none of these nominees are. If, for some bizarre reason, All Quiet On The Western Front doesn’t win, it will be a snub on monumental levels.

Best Film Editing: Yes yes yes, I know Best Film Editing is the biggest joke of a category since that stupid “Oscars Cheer Moment” award was introduced last year. Not because film editing isn’t important, mind you, but because the Academy consistently names some of the stupidest winners more than any other category. Dunkirk won in 2018 despite being more incomprehensible and disjointed than a Michael Bay picture. Bohemian Rhapsody’s win in 2019 was straight-up laughable. And can anyone tell me with a straight face why The Power Of The Dog was even nominated last year? If Peter Sciberras’ editing was that outstanding, he would have edited The Power Of The Dog down from two hours to one hour. Or even better, barely a minute.

That being said, the category has been making something of a comeback in recent years, with The Sound of Metal and Dune being the most recent winners. The fact that Academy voters are beginning to take film editing more seriously gives me hope for the category this year, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they still gave it to Elvis or something.

Anyhow, predictions. I love Paul Rogers’ work on Everything Everywhere All At Once and thought he did a brilliant job diving into all of these different multiverses and editing them into one cohesive story. But by that same token, Eddie Hamilton also had to take over 800 hours of flight footage and edit all of that down into the lightning-quick action sequences you see in Top Gun: Maverick. For context, that’s more footage than all three films in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy — combined.

Film editing this year is really something of a coin toss, especially since there are two outstanding nominees that are more than deserving. But as far as my coin toss went, I’m going with Top Gun: Maverick. Whatever wins, it can’t be worse than Bohemian Rhapsody’s Best Film Editing win… probably.

Best Makeup And Hairstyling: First of all, why on God’s green Earth is Everything Everywhere All At Once not nominated for Best Makeup? The many different forms, shapes, and appearances of the Jobu Topaki prove that it should have at least been a contender. Or at least, more of one than Elvis, whose greatest makeup work was making Tom Hanks look fatter than he normally is. But I digress. This is one of many snubs from the night, and unfortunately, it isn’t the last one.

Despite that, there actually is a clear winner in this category, and that is Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. People who were shocked to find Brendan Fraser’s sudden weight gain for that film might be surprised to find out that he was wearing a fat suit the entire time. That’s especially stunning since there are extended sequences in that film where Charlie can be seen naked, and there is zero indication that body isn’t his own. It’s that convincing.

Of course, there’s other incredible makeup work that deserves to be praised, such as transforming Colin Ferrell into the Penguin for The Batman or covering soldiers in mud and gore in All Quiet On The Western Front. But there really is no defeating The Whale. At least, as long as Austin Butler’s bloated fat suit in Elvis doesn’t take it first.

Best Production Design: If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Oscar for Best Production Design, it’s to never bet against Baz Luhrmann. The past two times his films have been nominated for Best Production Design, they’ve won it for both Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby. I expect this year to be a three-peat as Elvis wins for production design yet again. Frankly, I’ll be shocked if any other nominee wins. If there is a technical category that Elvis excels in, it’s definitely production design.

Best Costume Design: Elvis. See production design above.

Best Musical Score: As controversial as Babylon is, the one thing I think everyone can agree on is that the score is mesmerizing. That’s thanks to composer Justin Hurwitz, who has been Damien Chazelle’s primary collaborator since his 2009 debut Guy And Madeline On A Park Bench. He even won two Oscars in 2017 for La La Land. With Babylon being nominated in three categories, it isn’t expected to win much on Oscar night, but its best chances do lie in Best Musical Score.

Compare that alongside the likes of its fellow nominees. Hauschka’s score for All Quiet On The Western Front is so bloated and droning that it’s offensive that it’s even nominated. Carter Burwell’s score for The Banshees Of Inisherin is so mopey it’s pathetic. Son Lux’s composition for Everything Everywhere All At Once is the most beautiful and transcendent score of the year, but this is their first nomination, so their chances are pretty much zilch. And John Williams for The Fabelmans? How many Oscars does that guy have again?

Nah, Babylon has the best chances here. I’m still personally rooting for Everything Everywhere All At Once to win, but I’m not betting on it. Meanwhile, let’s all share our collective frustration that The Batman wasn’t even nominated. That snub alone makes this category that much less legitimate.

Best Original Song: Yet another great category for the Oscars this year. This year has five outstanding nominees from five outstanding artists: “Applause” from Diane Warren, “Hold My Hand” from Lady Gaga, “Lift Me Up” from Rihanna, “Naatu Naatu” by M.M. Keeravani and Chandrabose, and “This Is A Life” by Son Lux. In any other year, any one of these nominees could have been the clear-cut winner, but 2022 just happened to be the year they all collided. They’re all simply outstanding nominees, and any one of them deserves to take home the Academy Award on Oscar night.

As great of a problem as it is to have such a competitive category, it unfortunately makes predicting this year’s winner an absolute nightmare. “Hold My Hand” is an absolute banger from Lady Gaga, while “This Is A Life” is an intimate and personal little lullaby-like tune that’s a personal favorite of mine. But if we’re going with the populist’s vote, there’s no denying that RRR’s “Naatu Naatu” has a real shot at winning this year. Not only was RRR ridiculously skipped over in the International Film category, but “Naatu Naatu” is just EPIC in all caps. The most impressive part? You don’t even need to understand the lyrics. The song is just that infectious to listen to on its own.

I honestly don’t know who the Best Original Song Oscar is going to on Oscar night, but my bet is on “Naatu Naatu.” Either way, I can’t wait for the live performance.

Note: Yet another snub among many is the Weeknd’s “Nothing Is Lost” from Avatar: The Way Of Water. Abel’s vocals and the heart-wrenching lyrics hit harder and harder after you’ve seen the movie.

Best Sound: As competitive as this year’s sound category is, I don’t think anyone seriously expects any of the nominees to unseat Top Gun: Maverick, do they? I mean sure, The Batman’s sound work stands up just as much as its Oscar-winning predecessor The Dark Knight, All Quiet On The Western Front uses the presence and absence of sound to brilliant yet horrifying effect, and Avatar: The Way Of Water got incredibly creative with the sounds of the Na’Vi, the human invaders, and the Tulkun alike.

That being said, nothing beats Tom Cruise breaking the sound barrier in the first 10 minutes of the film, and the rest of the movie doesn’t let up. The entire film feels like you’re in the cockpit while 1,000 feet in the air, with the G-forces constantly pushing against your body. The out-of-this-world sound design is to thank for that. Another film could steal this Oscar in an upset win, but it isn’t likely.

Best Visual Effects: If any other film wins Best Visual Effects over Avatar: The Way Of Water, I’m going to burn the Dolby Theatre to the ground. As amazing as Top Gun: Maverick, All Quiet On The Western Front, and The Batman are, the visual effects are just one part of those films’ brilliance — especially when so much of it is practical effects. Avatar: The Way Of Water, on the other hand, utilizes both practical and computer-generated effects to brilliant effect, beautifully blending both styles into a mesmerizing display of Pandora. Avatar: The Way Of Water is the clear-cut winner. If anything else wins, it will be straight-up thievery.

And now, those pesky short categories that I never see every year but still have to predict nonetheless. How about we go with An Irish Goodbye for live-action short, The Elephant Whisperers for documentary short, and My Year Of Dicks for animated short since the title is funny. That’s about as good a metric as any when predicting the short categories.

Well, that’s all until next weekend, folks. Good luck with your Oscar ballots, and whatever you do, stay away from Chris Rock, or he’ll make his next comedy special about you.

– David Dunn

Tagged Academy Awards, All Quiet On The Western Front, Chris Rock, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Oscars, The Whale, Top Gun: Maverick

Jan 24 2023

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

Every Oscar Everywhere All At Once

I think the Oscars have conditioned me for disappointment. Every year, I tune in eagerly to the nominations announcement waiting to see who is in the running, only to face one baffling snub after another. Knives Out missing out on a Best Picture nomination in 2020. Da 5 Bloods getting skipped over in nearly every category in 2021. Denis Villeneuve being snubbed a very much-earned Best Director nomination for Dune just last year. Every year, I wait and wait and wait for the Oscars to get it right, only to be met with confusion, frustration, and mind-boggling disappointment every single time.

For the first time in five years, that disappointment never came. In fact, this was probably one of the best Oscar nominations I’ve seen in quite some time.

Now don’t get me wrong, there were still plenty of snubs from this year’s nominees. Robert Eggers’ The Northman was overlooked in all of the categories, as well as Adam Sandler’s heart-pounding basketball drama Hustle. Perhaps most bafflingly, Jordan Peele’s eerie sci-fi horror film Nope got a resounding zero nominations. Seriously? Not even one for cinematography? Film editing? Production design? Visual effects? Even sound?

So yeah, snubs are still aplenty, but for the most part, the Academy got it right this year. Now there’s a sentence I’d never thought I’d type.

At 11 nominations total, Daniels’ genre-bending masterpiece Everything Everywhere All At Once is this year’s biggest contender with four acting nominations, a Best Director nomination, and a Best Picture nomination. The film deserves every single nomination it has received and then some, with the only categories it was notably absent in including makeup and visual effects. Still, even with those snubs, it practically swept all of the major categories and has solidified itself as a for-sure contender on Oscar night.

At nine nominations apiece, the next biggest Best Picture contenders include the German anti-war film All Quiet On The Western Front and the Irish tragicomedy The Banshees Of Inisherin. The surprising thing here isn’t the fact that both are so closely tied to Everything Everywhere All At Once. The surprising thing here is that All Quiet On The Western Front is nominated as many times as it is. Originally thought to be a front-runner in the International Film category, it’s now considered a leading contender in the Best Picture category as well, especially with additional cinematography, visual effects, and adapted screenplay nominations.

Following closely behind those two films, however, is Baz Luhrmann’s bedazzling musical biopic Elvis. Austin Butler was obviously a shoo-in in the acting category, and it’s probably the film’s best chance to win an Oscar as well. But I wouldn’t call it a done deal. After all, Austin still has to contend with Brendan Fraser in The Whale, and I question if there’s any performance that could potentially overtake his. Although bafflingly, The Whale did not receive a Best Picture nomination despite also securing makeup and Best Supporting Actress noms for Hong Chau.

From there, the Steven Spielberg biopic The Fabelmans secured seven nominations, including Best Picture. Spielberg obviously got nominated multiple times up and down the ballot, from director all the way to original screenplay. Yet, the biggest surprise to me was Judd Hirsch’s inclusion under the supporting actor category for Sammy’s excitable circus Uncle Boris. His scene was one of my favorites from the whole film, and he did a really brilliant job showing how art can make us feel whole while simultaneously ripping us in two. He was easily one of the film’s most standout actors and created a big impact despite his small screen time. I’m really glad he was nominated, even though his chances to win are extremely slim.

Following The Fabelmans with six nominations apiece are the tragic psychological drama Tar and the heart-racing action sequel Top Gun: Maverick. These are two very different films finding success on two very different sides of the ballot, with Top Gun: Maverick sweeping in most of the technical categories while Tar secured screenplay, actress, and directing noms. The interesting thing is seeing what they aren’t nominated for. Tar was noticeably overlooked in the music and production design categories, while Top Gun: Maverick was wrongfully snubbed under cinematography (actually, the entire cinematography category has gone down the crapper. But there will be time to talk more about that later).

After that, Avatar: The Way Of Water fits in comfortably as the eighth Best Picture nominee, securing additional nominations under the sound, production design, and visual effects categories. While it is a technical and emotional powerhouse of a film, I don’t really expect it to be a major contender in most categories with the notable exception of visual effects, which is fine. After all, the first movie won three Academy Awards and even earned James Cameron another Best Director nomination. If The Way Of Water even comes close to the first film, it will have been a success. Besides, at over $2 billion, it’s the highest-grossing movie of 2022. It’s not like it needs the extra hardware.

Behind Avatar: The Way Of Water is the Swedish satire Triangle Of Sadness, which has secured screenplay and direction nominations aside from Best Picture. Besides that, I gotta be honest: I’ve never heard of the movie. The only thing I know about this film is that its poster features an older woman throwing up gold. Aside from that, I’ve got nothing. Needless to say that there will be few people rooting for it on Oscar night.

And finally, the last Best Picture nominee is Women Talking, a monumental little film about a group of women who band together to defend themselves from vicious attacks in their colony. What’s perplexing about this film isn’t the fact that it’s nominated for Best Picture: that much is to be expected for a film of this subject matter. What’s perplexing is that it only secured one other nomination in the adapted screenplay category. How many times do we have to go over this, Academy? A film cannot be considered Best Picture-worthy for one element alone. Selma wasn’t Best Picture-worthy just because of the song “Glory,” and The Post wasn’t Best Picture-worthy just because of Meryl Streep. Neither can Woman Talking stand on its own just for its screenplay. Seriously, would have killed you to give the movie a supporting actress nomination? Production design? Costumes?

I could pick apart other grievances I have with the nominees this year, like how The Batman astoundingly missed a Best Original Score nomination, while The Woman King was overlooked in every category Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was nominated in despite being superior in nearly every way. But for the most part, I’m surprisingly pleased with the nominees we have this year. For once, Academy Award voters prioritized the films that deserved the most recognition and lifted up the artists that we might have missed last year. Let’s hope they keep that momentum going into the Oscars ceremony on March 12.

– David Dunn

Tagged 95th Academy Awards, All Quiet On The Western Front, Avatar: The Way Of Water, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Oscars, Tar, The Banshees Of Inisherin, The Fabelmans, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle Of Sadness, Women Talking

Mar 28 2022

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

Shoulda, CODA, Woulda: How The 94th Academy Awards Was A Knockout

Umm… okay then. Guess we gotta talk about the Oscars.

Let’s start by saying that I had no idea what to expect going into this Oscar ceremony. Between the producers cutting eight categories from the live telecast to a couple of superfluous awards that served as half-hearted attempts to win over a mainstream audience to Amy “Joke Thief” Schumer being named one of the Oscar hosts, I was not expecting this to be a good ceremony at all. After all, the past few ceremonies have been struggling immensely with audience ratings and viewership. All of these ludicrous changes seemed like they were going to worsen the symptoms that were already there.

Well, I was half-right. While the technical categories were still minimized during the live telecast, they did have a small snippet play of the winners accepting their awards. So they weren’t so much “cut” from the ceremony as they were simply edited down for time, which still isn’t ideal, but I’ll take what I can get. The superfluous “fan-favorite” and “cheer moment” awards were also not highlighted as much as I feared they would be, briskly montaging through their winners and nominees before cutting straight to commercial. It was a surprisingly good use of time, didn’t take up too much space, and got to involve more movie fans in the voting process. Plus, Zack Snyder now gets to technically call himself a two-time Academy Award-winner, which he’s more than earned since the Academy shelved his cut of Justice League from any Oscar consideration for some arbitrary reason (God knows he deserves it more than The Power Of The Dog does).

Even the hosts were really good. Wanda Sykes’ wit and sassiness easily stole the show, with her tour through the Academy museum easily being the biggest highlight (the part where she pointed to an orc and called it “Harvey Weinstein” had me dying). Regina Hall was also really funny, pulling up all of the most attractive guys in the Dolby Theatre and saying she was going to administer a COVID test “with her tongue.” Even Amy Schumer had her charming moments, especially one hilarious bit where she dressed up as Spider-Man and shot silly string at the audience.

Dare I say it, this telecast was more fun than last year’s Academy Awards. That’s especially surprising considering how much behind-the-scenes drama was going on.

Unfortunately, this is still the Oscars, and every year brings its own variety of shocking surprises. After previous ceremonies where Best Picture winners got mixed up, a Korean film took home the top prize, and an In Memoriam segment where the Academy disrespectfully sped through it like it was trying to skip a cutscene, I thought I had seen it all.

I was wrong. I was so, so, so very wrong.

Best Picture:

Let’s start with the good news: The Power Of The Dog lost 11 out of 12 of its nominations, including Best Picture. It more than deserved it too since it’s one of the most tepid and stale movies ever put in the running for Best Picture. How it got this far is beyond me, and I’m glad to see it bomb so precariously at the Oscars, even if my ballot suffered as a result of it.

Instead, the tender deaf family drama CODA took home the top prize at this year’s Academy Awards. This is surprising for a few reasons. For one thing, out of all 10 nominees, CODA was tied with Licorice Pizza for the least amount of nominations with three. This meant that in the grand scope of things, CODA had the most to overcome, especially with Dune and The Power Of The Dog sweeping across the nominations board.

For another thing, its director Sian Heder was not nominated for a Best Directing Oscar, and that hindered its chances even more. Sure, a Best Picture win wasn’t impossible (Green Book won Best Picture in 2018 despite also not receiving a Best Director nom), but considering eight out of the past 10 Best Picture winners were at least nominated for Best Director, it was nothing but an uphill battle for CODA. The fact that it persevered and pulled off a Best Picture win despite everything it was up against makes CODA’s victory all the more incredible.

Either way, congratulations to this amazing film and its heartfelt victory. I still feel like Dune was the most visionary out of all of the Best Picture nominees, and Tick, Tick… BOOM! and The Last Duel were still straight up robbed in this category. That doesn’t change how important CODA’s win was for the deaf community or how grateful I am to it for taking away the win from The Power Of The Dog. God, do I hate that film.

Best Director: Unfortunately, The Power Of The Dog did win one Oscar last night, and that was Jane Campion for Best Director. She didn’t deserve this award any more than Simon McQuoid deserved it for his Mortal Kombat remake, but like I already said, CODA’s director wasn’t nominated in this category anyway, so if The Power Of The Dog had to sneak in a win, I guess Best Director is most acceptable. I’m still infuriated over the fact that Denis Villeneuve wasn’t even nominated for Dune. He more than deserved to win, not to mention at the very least get nominated. A cinematic crime if there ever was one, and it unfortunately won’t be the last one the Academy ever commits.

Best Actor: This is where the ceremony gets really, really bizarre. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Will Smith won Best Actor for playing Venus and Serena Williams’ father in King Richard, a win he absolutely deserved due to his sincere and deeply moving performance in that film. Unfortunately, absolutely nobody was paying attention to that moment or his speech because they were still reeling from when Will Smith slapped the bejeezus outta Chris Rock minutes earlier for joking about his wife’s hair loss, calling Jada Pinkett Smith “G.I. Jane.” Then Will Smith just strutted off, sat back down, and yelled at Chris to “Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth.”

Man. Talk about everybody hates Chris.

Now look, this is a very loaded moment, and I’m not going to even begin trying to unpack this because of all of the complex emotions tied into this. I will simply emphasize three truths. First of all, it was a bad joke on Chris’ part to make. A really, really, really bad joke. Jada had spoken publicly several times before about how much her hair loss has affected her and her well-being, so it was highly insensitive for him to make that remark without realizing how she or her husband might take it. Whether that joke was prewritten for the ceremony or if Chris made it up on the fly doesn’t matter. It was in poor taste, and Chris should have known better.

Second, Will Smith probably could have handled the moment a little better. Should he have? I admit I don’t know the answer to that. Or at the very least, I don’t know how I would have reacted if my wife and I were caught up in that same moment. Would any of us have? It was an idiotic comment to make, and in a flurry of rage, Will was blind to reason and self-control and acted solely based off of his instincts. His reaction was a very human one. Could he have potentially waited during a commercial break and confronted Chris then without involving the entire theater and the television audience? Again, I don’t know. It’s a difficult situation to get caught up in, and unfortunately, neither party is really free from blame.

Regardless of whether you see Smith or Rock primarily at fault, it doesn’t change the fact that this situation colored the rest of the ceremony in an awkward and uncomfortable way. After that very intense altercation, I couldn’t focus on Questlove’s moving speech about advocating for Harlem with Summer Of Soul. I couldn’t really tune in to Will Smith’s acceptance speech when he won his Oscar. I couldn’t even really celebrate CODA’s Best Picture win. All I could think about through the rest of the ceremony was that damn slap. It kind of took away from the rest of the evening and sadly kind of ruined the ceremony for me. That really, really sucks.

We’ll see in the coming days if the Academy decides to discipline Smith in some way for his actions. Regardless, I hope they don’t decide to revoke his Oscar. He’s worked way too long and too hard to have this honor taken from him now just because of one altercation. I hope the Academy can see past that and Will and Chris can come to some understanding afterward regardless.

Best Actress: As predicted, Jessica Chastain won Best Actress for her performance in The Eyes Of Tammy Faye. I’m happy she has finally earned an Oscar, especially after a long and illustrious career with credits including The Help, The Tree Of Life, Zero Dark Thirty, and more. But considering this is the same category where both Jodie Comer and Lady Gaga were robbed for their performances in The Last Duel and House Of Gucci, I’m too pissed about this category to properly celebrate her win. I guess I’m just grateful Nicole Kidman didn’t win for her half-hearted performance as Lucille Ball in Being The Ricardos. Still, what slim pickings we have for Best Actress this year guys.

Best Supporting Actor: This is easily my favorite win and moment out of the whole night. After playing the role of a loving father and husband in the drama film CODA, real-life deaf actor Troy Kotsur won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. It was a touching moment before Troy even stepped onto the stage to accept his award, with Youn Yuh-jung not only signing his name to himself but with the crowd also showing the “clapping” sign to show their support for Troy. Him dedicating his success to his father and to those who empowered him throughout his career was sincerely heartfelt and deeply touching to listen to. I’m not crying, I swear.

Best Supporting Actress: In the first acting Oscar of the night, Ariana DeBose won for her performance as Anita in West Side Story. She joins an elite club of actors winning Oscars for the same role, including Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, and even Rita Moreno. Congratulations to Ariana for her much-deserved win. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

SOURCE: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Best Animated Feature: No surprise here either: Encanto won Best Animated Feature. Again, I would have preferred the Oscar go to The Mitchells v.s. The Machines, but in a year where Luca, Flee, and Raya And The Last Dragon were all nominated, this was a spectacular year where all of the nominees were deserving of the win. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: the real winner here is the Best Animated Feature category overall. Congratulations to all of these amazing nominated films and their achievements.

Best Documentary: In the midst of all of the awkward Will Smith and Chris Rock drama, Questlove won his much-deserved Oscar for his restoration and revival of the Harlem Cultural Festival in Summer Of Soul. His film was the most deserving winner, especially when Val wasn’t even nominated in the first place.

Best International Feature: Drive My Car won this year’s international feature Oscar, and props to Ryusuke Hamaguchi for not letting the orchestra play him off stage. If the Academy can give Will Smith 10 minutes for his acceptance speech after clocking Chris square in the mouth, they can give Ryusuke Hamaguchi two minutes to thank his cast and crew.

Best Original Screenplay: I’m a little flabbergasted that Kenneth Branaugh’s Belfast won Best Original Screenplay over Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, especially when his body of work has been more consistent and creative than Branaugh’s. Still, Belfast is some of his most genuine work yet, and I hope he writes more screenplays like it in the future. Congratulations to him and his upset win.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Just like how it stole The Power Of The Dog’s chances at winning Best Picture, so too did CODA seal its fate by winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. I’m still stunned that Sian Heder wasn’t nominated for Best Director, but at least she didn’t go home empty-handed and won an Oscar for her writing. Other Best Picture-winning directors aren’t so lucky (see Driving Miss Daisy, Gladiator, Chicago, etc.).

Best Cinematography: The first of many awards to not be televised live, Greig Fraser won for his stunning and captivating work on the science-fiction epic Dune. It’s criminal to imagine that we couldn’t see him accept his award live. If you want to support more of his work, check out The Batman in theaters. You’ll see more of Greig Fraser’s mesmerizing technique on display and you’ll get to see a hauntingly great superhero flick at the same time.

Best Film Editing: Joe Walker followed up Dune’s next technical feat by winning Best Film Editing. With credits that include Shame, 12 Years A Slave, Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, it’s hard to imagine it taking so long for him to win his first Oscar. But clearly his patience paid off for him. I can’t wait to see his work on Dune 2.

Best Makeup And Hairstyling: The Eyes Of Tammy Faye won best makeup. Is anybody legitimately surprised? Let’s just be grateful Coming 2 America didn’t win instead.

Best Production Design: Dune once again wins for its brilliant realization of Arrakis and its many warring factions. At this point in the ceremony, I’m losing my mind a little bit that Dune has won half of its technical awards and has yet to get a full spotlight moment during the main telecast. I’m grateful they weren’t outright cut from the ceremony, but I really can’t understate how stupid it was to edit these awards down from the main telecast. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Best Costume Design: It was split down the middle on this one between Cruella and Dune, and I’m glad I went with the popular vote on this one, because Cruella barely snagged it from Dune. Personally, I felt Dune had a stronger showcase of its outfits and costumes, but if Cruella were to shine in any category, costume design was its best chance to do so. At least Cruella’s outfits weren’t made out of puppies… yet.

Best Musical Score: While he couldn’t be there in person to accept his award, Hans Zimmer won his second Oscar for his hypnotizing score on Dune. His work on that film displays the very best of his talents. He couldn’t have won for a better score: not even Inception or The Dark Knight trilogy.

Best Original Song: It was a close call between Billie Eilish’s “No Time To Die” and Encanto’s “Dos Oruguitas”: and “No Time To Die” clinched it, in no small part thanks to Billie Eilish’s breathtaking performance. I’m just grateful that Billie Eilish can now cement herself among the all-time definitive James Bond singles. Imagine how maddening it would have been if Billie Eilish lost while Sam Smith won for their dry, drab, melodramatic single “The Writing’s On The Wall.” Thank God that didn’t happen and Billie Eilish can now call herself an Oscar winner. She more than deserves it.

On another note, Lin Manuel-Miranda had to unfortunately skip out on the Oscar ceremony due to an untimely positive COVID test from his wife. Pray for them as COVID hits a little closer to home for their family this week.

Best Sound: Dune again, obviously. This is the fifth Oscar the star-studded saga has won and the fifth one to get edited down from the ceremony. At this point, the eight category snubs are gradually becoming the Dune snubs and it’s royally pissing me off.

Best Visual Effects: FINALLY. After snubbing the picture all blasted night, Dune FINALLY got its moment to shine by winning in the Best Visual Effects category. It’s incredibly frustrating that it takes SIX Oscar wins to get TWO MINUTES of recognition for its hard-working artists and animators, but better late than never I guess.

With that, we come to the dreaded short categories. As with any other year, I’ve gotten most of these wrong save for Best Live-Action short for The Long Goodbye, which I didn’t realize until the ceremony that it was actually produced by Sound Of Metal actor Riz Ahmed, which now makes him an official Oscar winner. Good for him. I thought I’d have to wait much longer to see him win an Oscar, and here he is a year later proving me wrong just like that. Man, do I love it when a pleasant surprise comes my way.

With that, my final tally for this year’s Academy Awards is 17, which is a slight improvement over last year’s ceremony. Where will the Oscars go from here? Hopefully back to a regular telecast with all of the award categories included this time, and ideally with less slapping involved.

– David Dunn

Tagged Academy Awards, Coda, Dune, Oscars, The Eyes Of Tammy Faye

Mar 21 2022

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

2022 Oscar Predictions

Is it just me, or are the Oscars feeling much less relevant than they used to be? I’m not talking about them being out-of-touch or frustrating. Good golly, if we had to stop the presses every year the Oscars got something wrong, they wouldn’t be running long enough to produce a single envelope. I’m talking about the Oscars themselves feeling like they don’t matter anymore. In the past, the Oscars felt like a monumental event, almost as epic and cinematic in scope as the movies themselves they were honoring. Nowadays, they feel arbitrary, complacent — even unimportant. No longer the pinnacle celebration of the movies like they once were, now… just another awards show. Is this what the Oscars have become? Is this what they are destined to be?

Every year, the Oscars have made one dumb decision after another that has confounded and confused audiences at the same time. This year, those dumb decisions come in two regarding what to cut and what to include in the telecast. For the first time in Oscar history, eight categories will not be announced live and will instead be pre-taped an hour ahead of the telecast, including film editing, makeup, original score, production design, sound, and the short categories.

I understand cutting the short categories: they’re lesser known than their feature-length competitors are and don’t have a widespread audience outside of Academy voters, so recognizing them through other avenues like the governor’s awards makes more sense. But what’s the excuse behind cutting the five technical awards? You’re shelving recognizing these pretty important artistic elements… just to save time? Are you kidding me?

And it would be one thing to scrap these technical awards if it meant dedicating that time to something more worthwhile, like either a larger presentation for the other awards or the In Memoriam segment. But nooooooo, instead, those awards are getting scrapped for more musical numbers, cringey comedy segments, and two new superlative awards: the Fan-Favorite Oscar and the Cheer Moment Oscar, which is basically the equivalent of the failed “Popular Film” category the Oscars have tried to introduce for several years now.

Which, by introducing these new categories, the Oscars create a new problem by trying to solve an old one. The issue viewers like myself have had with previous ceremonies is NOT the fact that there wasn’t a “Popular Film” category: it was that you didn’t include the most popular or most notable films of the year in the Best Picture lineup. You do not need to create a whole other category for movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars, Skyfall, or The Dark Knight trilogy. You JUST need to include them in consideration for larger awards like Best Picture. THAT IS IT. We are not asking for separate recognition. We are asking for equal recognition alongside the rest of the under-the-radar movies that are considered some of the best pictures of the year: because they ARE. This new move solves nothing and instead just creates more issues for the Academy Awards. Because you know, that’s something we need more of.

But like with any other Oscar ceremony, the biggest issues are not just with how they choose to present these awards on the small screen — it’s also with the individual winners they choose. Let’s hop into my predictions for the 94th Academy Awards and the biggest problems I have with this upcoming ceremony:

Best Picture: At this point, it’s pretty much a given that The Power Of The Dog will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Not only has it been nominated the most out of the past five ceremonies with 12 nominations total, but it has also won nearly every Best Picture award this season from the Golden Globes to the BAFTAs. It’s rare that a film sweeps the entire awards season before losing the Best Picture Oscar at the 11th hour. In fact, the last time that happened was in 2019 when 1917 lost Best Picture to Parasite, and that instance was very much the exception and not the norm. I don’t expect that to happen again this year as The Power Of The Dog will inevitably win the highest honor of the night, just like it has been for the past two months.

Now, does it deserve to win Best Picture? Absolutely freaking not, and it’s very rare that I speak so definitively on a Best Picture nominee. With most other Oscar ceremonies, I usually try to see the Best Picture winner from the Academy’s angle and try to understand the value they see with a particular film. Even in ceremonies where I’ve blatantly disagreed with the Academy, I can at least appreciate certain aspects of the eventual winner. For instance, I find The Shape Of Water to be a beautiful and heartfelt tribute to forbidden love even if it is equally strange and bizarre in the same sentence. Green Book was your basic, by-the-books, feel-good anti-racist movie that succeeded in making its point, even if other movies made that same point better like with BlacKkKlansman and Black Panther. Even Nomadland, which I still profess is a bland and uneventful film, at least possessed some beauty between its sweeping score, cinematography, and subject matter.

The point is, I can find redeeming qualities in each of the Best Picture winners from the past few years if I try hard enough. I can’t find any such redeeming qualities in The Power Of The Dog, a film that is so comatose, boring, and painfully lifeless that to keep it on life support for this long can be considered cruelty. I make no exaggeration when I say I hate this movie and how little it rewards you for suffering through its two-hour runtime. I quite literally would prefer any other nominee win Best Picture over The Power Of The Dog. That includes Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, West Side Story, and Being The Ricardos, a movie that isn’t even nominated for Best Picture but deserves it more than The Power Of The Dog does anyway.

But none of my animosity changes the fact that The Power Of The Dog is most poised to win Best Picture regardless. I’m praying that I’m wrong and some other more deserving film sweeps it under the rug. But until that actually happens, my skepticism has the better of me.

Best Director: Jane Campion won the Director’s Guild Award for The Power of the Dog, which inevitably means she will also win the Oscar for best film direction. Again, I quite literally would prefer any other nominee win in this category over her, including Steven Spielberg for West Side Story. But the DGAs have nevertheless spoken, which by extension means the Academy has also spoken. I’m still livid that Denis Villeneuve was not nominated for his captivating and stunning realization of Frank Herbert’s vision in Dune regardless. That snub alone speaks more to how out-of-touch the Academy Awards have become than Jane Campion’s eventual Best Director win ever will.

Best Actor: I’m split for Best Actor, perhaps more than any other category, because two of my most favorite performances of the year are in the running here: Will Smith for King Richard and Andrew Garfield for Tick, Tick… BOOM! They both have so much going for them. First of all, both of them have been nominated for best acting Oscars before, with Will Smith being nominated for Ali and The Pursuit Of Happyness and Andrew Garfield being nominated for Hacksaw Ridge. Second of all, both of them are playing real-life figures, with Smith playing Venus and Serena Williams’ father Richard and Garfield playing Rent musical legend Jonathan Larson.

But on a much more simple level, both really deserve the Oscar because their performances are just that dang good. Smith brings a vulnerability, a deep-rooted love, passion, and father’s heart to Richard Williams dying to see his little girls succeed, while Garfield plays the aspiring musician eager for more yet feeling like time is running out for him. This is a tough, tough race this year, but I’m going with the math on this one. Will Smith has so far won the Golden Globe, the Screen Actor, and the NAACP Image Award for his performance as King Richard. That makes him the safest bet to win Best Actor, and that’s the one I’m going with.

Your day will come soon, Andrew. In the meantime, be grateful that it literally took a Hollywood titan like Will Smith to stop you from winning Best Actor. It’s a privilege to lose to the best, and you definitely have that situation here with Will Smith and Andrew Garfield for this year’s Best Actor race.

Best Actress: On the other hand, Best Actress this year is a complete and utter crapshoot. Kristen Stewart, who was once considered a leading contender for her portrayal of Princess Diana in Spencer, has now faded into the background as she failed to earn both a Golden Globe and a Screen Actor nomination. Penelope Cruz doesn’t fare much better considering her nomination for Parallel Mothers was a shock in and of itself. And don’t even get me started on Nicole Kidman being nominated as Lucille Ball for Being The Ricardos. She shouldn’t even be nominated in this category, let alone potentially win.

That leaves Olivia Colman for The Lost Daughter and Jessica Chastain for The Eyes Of Tammy Faye. I haven’t seen either film, so my prediction in this category is intrinsically worthless either way. I’m going with Jessica Chastain simply because Colman has already won an Oscar for The Favourite while Chastain hasn’t won yet despite being nominated twice before. I’m still frustrated that Lady Gaga and Jody Comer were snubbed in this category regardless for their stellar performances in House of Gucci and The Last Duel. Both of them not being included here automatically makes this category less credible in my eye. Next.

Best Supporting Actor: Out of all of the races this awards season, few have been as interesting to watch take shape as Best Supporting Actor. First Kodi Smit-McPhee won Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes for his role as a soft-spoken son with a darker side to him in The Power Of The Dog. Then real-life deaf actor Troy Kotsur won the Screen Actor for playing a loving father and husband in the family drama CODA. Which of these actors will take home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor? My money is on Troy Kotsur for CODA. Authenticity usually gives you a competitive edge in the acting categories. In the case of Troy Kotsur, not only was he one of the most charismatic and heartfelt additions to CODA, but he’s also been a lifelong advocate for the deaf community throughout his 30-year acting career. Kodi Smit-McPhee might pull off a surprise upset win, but God, I don’t want him to. Give Troy Kotsur his Oscar, Academy. He deserves his moment to shine.

Best Supporting Actress: The one thing that seems to be universal about Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story is that people LOVE Ariana DeBose as Anita. She deserves the affection, because not only did she take an iconic role that was once inhabited by Rita Moreno, but she somehow managed to bring her own life and passion to it and made it her own. She was a clear standout in the movie, and she definitely deserves all of the acclaim she has been getting for reviving this beloved character for a new age on the big screen.

Would it be a little redundant to give two different actresses an Oscar for the same role twice? Sure, but Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix both won Oscars for playing the Joker, so I’m not mad if Ariana wins an Oscar for the same role that made Rita Moreno an Academy Award winner as well. Go for Ariana DeBose on Best Supporting Actress, she’s a lock in this category.

Best Animated Feature: First of all, what a packed category this year. With any other given ceremony, the Oscar for Best Animated Feature is usually pretty straightforward to predict with one obvious standout clearing out the rest of the nominee pool (Toy Story 3, Frozen, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, etc.). That isn’t the case this year with an incredible lineup of nominees including Encanto, Flee, Luca, Raya and the Last Dragon, and The Mitchells V.S. The Machines. For all intents and purposes, any one of these amazing films could win Best Animated Feature on Oscar night, and all of them are equally deserving. I can’t really say that about any other year for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, and that alone is an achievement worth celebrating this year.

That being said, I think Encanto is going to end up winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year. Not only is the animation beautiful, the characters lovable, and the music catchy and clever, but it is arguably the most popular and most talked-about film out of all of the animated nominees. That’s never a bad thing going into the Oscar race, especially when Disney and Pixar are involved.

While I personally would love to see either The Mitchells V.S. The Machines or Luca take home the Oscar this year, Encanto is not a bad pick by any means and arguably deserves the Oscar even more than other winners from the past few years. We’ll see what happens on awards night, but regardless of which film wins, the Best Animated Film category is the biggest winner at this year’s Oscars.

Best Documentary Feature: Looking past the Academy’s disrespectful snub of Val, there is one clear standout in the Best Documentary category this year, and that is Summer Of Soul. Beautifully restored in vivid picture and sound quality, Questlove brilliantly brings the Harlem Cultural Festival experience to the big screen in a way that no other film can. Were Val nominated this year, I would have been more split in this category. But since Summer Of Soul is the only true contender, that makes my choice for Best Documentary easy.

Best International Feature: Drive My Car. Not only is it also nominated in the Best Picture category, but its director Ryusuke Hamaguchi also received two other nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. No other international feature nominee can say the same, so Drive My Car is a lock for this win.

Best Original Screenplay: More than any other nominee in the Best Original Screenplay category, the one thing you can say about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is how original it is. From its dreamy, euphoric sense of 70s nostalgia to its off-brand and awkward style of comedy, Licorice Pizza is quintessentially Paul Thomas Anderson and he succeeded in making it his own. Whether you like it or not is another thing entirely. Still, I find how personal and profound it is to be endearing in its own way. Kenneth Branaugh’s Belfast might pull an upset win, but considering it hasn’t won much since its original Best Screenplay win at the Golden Globes, I have to go with Licorice Pizza on this one.

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Power Of The Dog is probably going to win Best Adapted Screenplay as well, because why not? Sure, it wasn’t nominated at the WGAs this year. But then again, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm won adapted screenplay last year while The Father won at the Oscars, so maybe the WGAs mean diddly-squat nowadays. Either way, I’ll be actively rooting for any other nominee to win in this category besides The Power Of The Dog. Denis Villeneuve deserves to win for Dune solely because he was snubbed in the Best Director category anyway.

Best Cinematography: The first of many sweeps to come on Oscar night, Dune is the favorite to win Best Cinematography and easily deserves to win the most out of all of the nominees. Sure, Best Cinematography is a stacked category this year with Dan Laustsen, Bruno Delbonnel, and Janusz Kaminski offering stiff competition for their work on Nightmare Alley, The Tragedy Of Macbeth, and West Side Story respectively. But Greig Fraser made too good of use of his gorgeous, massive sceneries and masterfully immersed you in the death, destruction, and desolation of Arrakis. No other film this year came even close to reaching the visual achievement that Dune did, and Greig Fraser had a big hand in that and deserves the Oscar for it. If for some obscene reason Ari Wegner snabs Best Cinematography from him for The Power Of The Dog, I will lose my mind.

Best Film Editing: Dune again by a very, very, very long mile. While I questioned for a second if The Power Of The Dog bias would blind Academy Award voters to make the wrong choice, I think Dune is going to come out on top for a few reasons. For one thing, it has racked up the most best film editing honors so far this awards season (including Best Edited Feature Film from the American Cinema Editors). For another, Joe Walker has amazingly enough not won a Best Editing Oscar yet despite being nominated twice for 12 Years A Slave and Arrival. Tenure usually gives you a competitive edge at the Oscars, so it’s best to root for Joe Walker and Dune for Best Film Editing.

Best Makeup And Hairstyling: First of all, why on God’s green Earth is Coming 2 America nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling? The only film whose makeup looked sillier than that film was Norbit in 2007. What is it with Eddie Murphy and his movies constantly being nominated for best makeup year after year? Is he for some reason considered Meryl Streep in the makeup category? Is there a specific clause in his films that his producers need to pour a crapton of campaign dollars into the Oscars to score a makeup nomination? WHY IS COMING 2 AMERICA NOMINATED FOR BEST MAKEUP? WHY? WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY?!?!

Moving past that obscene and ridiculous nomination, the one film whose makeup job truly impressed me this year was The Eyes Of Tammy Faye. With Cruella, Dune, and House Of Gucci, you can still clearly identify each actor and tell them apart despite the makeup they’re wearing (including even Jared Leto’s turn as Paolo Gucci). But in The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, I couldn’t even tell that Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield were even in the film. Honest to God, when I saw Tammy Faye first appear on screen, I thought Bryce Dallas Howard was playing her, not Jessica Chastain. That type of makeup job is transformational, and that usually earns its makeup artists the Oscar.

Best Production Design: From its massive sets and sceneries to the intricate detailing on the ornithopters and carryalls, Dune builds an ingenious and imaginative world through its masterful production and set design. If we’re picking the leader in this category, Dune wins by a huge, huge margin, even alongside fellow competitors Nightmare Alley and West Side Story.

Could either one of those titles pick up an upset win in production design? It’s possible but unlikely, especially when you consider how much world-building Dune really did in that film. When it comes to production design, creating a world as immersive and immaculate as Arrakis usually brings home the gold (see Avatar’s Best Production win in 2010, Mad Max: Fury Road’s win in 2016, Black Panther’s win in 2019). I think Dune’s stunning production design will yield the same result for the science-fiction film on Oscar night.

Best Costume Design: It comes down to Cruella and Dune for this year’s Best Costume Design race. Considering fashion is one of the key elements behind Disney’s live-action remake/prequel to 101 Dalmatians, it’s no surprise that Cruella’s incredible and exotic outfits make it one of the biggest contenders for best costume design this year. Then again though, Dune’s wardrobe is arguably just as masterful with all of the variety and culture between all of the different outfits that the film’s many factions wore. It’s a tough one, but I have to go with Cruella solely because the costume design is literally baked into the film’s plot. Don’t be surprised if Dune ends up stealing this one too though.

Best Musical Score: I know Hans Zimmer previously won an Oscar for The Lion King in 1994, but few of his scores are as captivating and imaginative as Dune’s exotic chants and drum beats are. It’s been five months now since I’ve seen the film, and its haunting and beautiful melodies are still stuck in my mind. That makes Dune the frontrunner for the Best Original Score Oscar. I don’t see any other nominees winning this award, and frankly, none of them deserve it over Hans Zimmer anyway.

Best Original Song: First of all, props to all of the incredibly competitive nominees in this year’s Best Original Song category. With most other Oscar ceremonies, there is usually a clear frontrunner that takes home the Oscar gold. That isn’t the case this year, with this year’s nominees including Billie Eilish, Van Morrison, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Diane Warren, and freaking Beyonce. When BEYONCE is nominated for an Oscar and she’s considered the underdog, you know you have a competitive category in your hands. It honestly makes picking a winner so, so difficult, and the fact that Best Original Song is so unpredictable this year is honestly the best compliment I can give to all of its nominees.

That being said, we still need to predict a winner, and this year’s race comes down to Billie Eilish for “No Time To Die” and Lin-Manuel Miranda for Encanto’s “Dos Orugitas.” While I love the eerie, haunting, and tragic piano notes of Billie Eilish’s monumental James Bond overture, “Dos Orugitas” is a beautiful and heartbreaking melody about love, loss, growth, and moving on. I mean, have you even read the translated lyrics? The song alone is wonderful to listen to, but it’s the deeper meaning behind it that really shatters your heart while slowly mending it back together piece by piece.

I dunno. Either one has a really good shot at winning on Oscar night, but I’m going with my gut on this one and predicting that Lin-Manuel Miranda wins for Encanto. Feel free to flip a coin if you’re having a hard time choosing one or the other.

Best Sound: Dune, 100%, no questions asked. I know No Time To Die and West Side Story put up solid efforts, but there is no other film this year that carries the unique sounds and ambiances that Dune does. Even if this award was split into best sound editing and mixing, I would still advocate for Dune in both categories. That makes it a solid lock in my book, especially when it comes to the Best Sound Oscar.

Post-script: What the crap is The Power Of The Dog doing being nominated here? What did its impressive sound work entail? Benedict Cumberbatch playing the banjo?

Best Visual Effects: As visually spectacular as Shang-Chi and Spider-Man: No Way Home is, Marvel has not won a Best Visual Effects Oscar since 2004 for Spider-Man 2. It’s unreasonable to think that’ll suddenly change now, especially with the snubs of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame from the Oscars’ most recent ceremonies.

Now Dune, on the other hand, has delivered a visual epic and odyssey unmatched by any other sci-fi blockbuster in the past few years, including even Avengers: Endgame. It may be considered sacrilegious by the comic book community to say that better visual effects exist outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s okay to say that in Dune’s case because it happens to be true. From the endless desert seas of Arrakis to the massive sandworms that burrow beneath them, every single frame of Dune immerses you in this dry, desolate, and desperate landscape that nobody can escape from. You never feel like you’re merely watching it: you always feel like you’re experiencing it.

Not only do I believe that Dune has a real shot at winning the visual effects Oscar — I even believe it deserves to win over the other nominees, including Shang-Chi and Spider-Man. If it doesn’t win, well then the Academy has truly lost all of its marbles. Luckily, I don’t think that’s happened to them… yet.

And as always, I’m completely clueless when it comes to the short categories since I’ve never watched any of the nominees. This year, I’m predicting Boxballet for Best Animated Short, When We Were Bullies for Best Documentary Short, and The Long Goodbye for Best Live-Action Short. Don’t ask my metrics for why I picked those. I literally just like their titles.

Do I even bother predicting the Oscars’ Fan-Favorite and Cheer Moment categories? Both of those “awards” are painfully bad efforts at connecting with mainstream movie audiences, and they both backfired in really awkward ways. When Camilla Cabello’s Cinderella has the potential to win an Academy Award, that category has officially lost any and all credibility whatsoever.

Regardless, I guess they are both still technically award categories anyway. So I’m going to predict Spider-Man: No Way Home wins the Fan-Favorite Award while Avengers: Endgame wins the Best Cheer Moment. They bloody well better win them too, especially since neither of them had a fair shot at winning an Oscar in their respective categories anyway.

Okay, I’m done with my predictions folks. I’ll see you on Oscar night… or maybe not. It is, after all, a school night.

– David Dunn

Tagged Academy Awards, Dune, Encanto, Oscars, The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, The Power Of The Dog

Feb 09 2022

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

The Power Of The Nominations

I’m starting to think that the Oscars are no longer meant for me. Every year, the Academy Awards makes one confounding decision after another that shocks audiences and makes them flare up at their nostrils. Bohemian Rhapsody winning Best Film Editing. Green Book winning Best Picture. Even during last year’s ceremony, the late Chadwick Boseman lost Best Actor for his amazing performance as an overzealous jazz musician in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to Anthony Hopkins’ heart-wrenching performance in The Father. Don’t get me wrong, both performances were amazing, but come on guys.

Even the nominations get stranger with each passing year. Last year, the overbearingly long black-and-white drama Mank received 10 nominations despite how dull, boring, and lifeless that film was. This year is keeping with the trend by awarding The Power Of The Dog with 12 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and a whole slew of technical nominations and way too many acting nominations. Out of all 12 nominations, The Power Of The Dog deserves maybe four: Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Acting nominations for Benedict Cumberbatch and Kodi-Smit McPhee. It definitely does not deserve Best Sound. Its Hollywood couple Jesse Plemons and Kristen Dunst definitely do not deserve Best Supporting Actor nominations. And there is no way in HELL that the movie deserves Best Film Editing for refusing to shave even 15 minutes off of its exasperating 2-hour runtime. But sure, let’s just give it as many nominations as Lincoln and The Revenant because the studio paid enough money to Academy board voters. Whatever.

Now the second most-nominated Best Picture nominee, Dune, is a vastly better picture and actually earns the majority of its nominations. From visual effects to cinematography to film editing to music to costume, makeup, sound, and set design, Dune is an audio-visual odyssey unmatched not only by any other film the past year, but by several films from the past several years. To say it is a science-fiction masterpiece is a massive, massive understatement. It has earned every nomination it has amassed and deserved to sweep away the competition on Oscar night.

The biggest frustration behind Dune isn’t what it is nominated for, but rather what it isn’t nominated for. Despite how many nominations it has racked up, Dune’s director Denis Villeneuve is noticeably absent in the Best Director category, which is especially bewildering given how many recent blockbuster movie directors were recognized for their outstanding technical achievement in previous years (see Sam Mendes for 1917, George Miller for Mad Max: Fury Road, Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity). What on Earth was the Academy thinking? Here is one of the most unique, creative, and immersive cinematic experiences of the last decade, and instead of giving director Denis Villeneuve his due, they instead decided that it was more important to give Steven Spielberg his 19th nomination despite already winning Best Director twice. Give me a break.

Speaking of Steven Spielberg, his remake of the classic musical West Side Story earned seven nominations right alongside Kenneth Branaugh’s Belfast, including Best Sound, Best Costume Design, Best Cinematography, Best Original Song, and a slew of Best Acting nominations, including one for supporting actress Ariana DeBose. I have no problems with these individual nominations themselves, and it is nice to see Kenneth Branagh get a Best Directing nomination after not receiving one for over 30 years since his director debut Henry V. I just really, really, REALLY hate that Spielberg is nominated in the same category. Even if you gave West Side Story one less nomination, it still would have tied for the fourth most nominations out of all the Best Picture nominees. Did Spielberg really have to take the Best Director nom away from Denis Villeneuve? Really?

At six nominations, King Richard is the second Best Picture nominee to miss out on a Best Director nomination, but it more than makes up for it in other categories. Besides Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Song, and Best Film Editing, co-stars Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis both locked in nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Both actors gave some of the best performances of the year and are more than deserving of their respective nominations, though I can’t help but feel Will Smith has a better chance of winning due to his sheer star power.

The next three surprises come in Nightmare Alley, Drive My Car, and Don’t Look Up. The big surprise with these isn’t just the fact that they secured four nominations a piece: it’s the fact that all three secured Best Picture nominations despite the fact that they were all considered dark horses before even entering the Oscar race. I wouldn’t expect too many wins though. With most of its nominations stacking up in the technical categories, that inevitably means Nightmare Alley and Don’t Look Up will be going head to head against Dune, and I just don’t see them winning that matchup (although Drive My Car does have solid chances winning in the Best Foreign Language film category).

The last two Best Picture nominees are underdogs that stand really good chances at winning in either of their categories. With Licorice Pizza and CODA securing Best Original Screenplay nominations and respective Best Director and Supporting Actor nominations, these two films’ windows are limited, but they’re hard-hitting contenders in their categories. It would not be much of a stretch to imagine Licorice Pizza winning in all three of its categories next month, especially when you remember Spotlight’s Best Picture win from 2015.

And in other ways, there were actually many small wins in this years Oscar nominations. For one thing, all 10 of its Best Picture slots were filled up this year, and that hasn’t happened at the Academy Awards since a full decade ago. Tick, Tick… BOOM! was nominated twice for film editing and Best Actor for Andrew Garfield, and that’s two more nominations that I wasn’t even expecting, so I was pleased about that. And of course, the biggest movie of the year Spider-Man: No Way Home earned a much-deserved visual effects nomination, which is more than you can say about other movies like Captain America: Civil War, The Dark Knight Rises, Thor: Ragnarok, etc.

But don’t get it twisted: there were still way more snubs this year than there were supposed to be. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights got a resounding zero nominations, which is especially surprising given all of its incredible costumes and set design. House of Gucci got snubbed in the acting categories, even Lady Gaga for her amazing turn as one of the most coldly calculated villains in recent memory. But the most maddening snub comes with Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, which got a resounding zero nominations across all the categories. That includes best adapted writing, cinematography, set design, costume design, editing, music: even its star Jody Comer got completely overlooked in both of the acting categories. The fact that The Last Duel and House of Gucci received Razzie nominations for Ben Affleck and Jared Leto’s performances only add insult to injury.

We’ll see how everything pans out on Oscar night, but at the moment I am feeling very unenthused about this year’s ceremony. As I say year after year, the Oscars should be about recognizing the biggest achievements in film: about honoring the best movies of the year and how they moved and changed us. This year’s ceremony seems to be about taking those nominations away from those deserving films and giving them to The Power Of The Dog instead.

– David Dunn

Tagged 94th Academy Awards, Belfast, Coda, Don't Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, Oscars, The Power Of The Dog, West Side Story

Apr 26 2021

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Awards Coverage, The Scope

Chadwick Boseman Loses Best Actor At 93rd Academy Awards

I’m gonna say it: this is the worst Oscar ceremony I’ve seen in a long time. I’m not just talking about the winners and nominees, which are so random and lopsided that a literal pandemic could not have made them worse if it tried. I’m talking about the ceremony itself, which was so poorly produced it felt more like we were watching the Golden Globes. Yes, I am actually comparing the Academy Awards to the Golden Globes. It more than deserves the comparison.

So many things were lacking in this year’s ceremony. For one thing, none of the categories had previews for the nominees that were being honored. That’s fine for the acting or directing categories if you want to save time (indeed, the Academy straight up skipped over them in the 2017 ceremony). But even the technical categories were overlooked. Visual Effects didn’t show any of layering effects, Sound didn’t show any snippets of their sound engineers working in the studio, Cinematography and Film Editing showed no sequences demonstrating their craft, and even Makeup and Costuming skipped over showing stills of the nominees’ phenomenal work. It’s frustrating that when the crew is constantly overshadowed by the actors headlining their craft, the Academy has the perfect opportunity to show them off, and then they just… don’t. I’m used to the Academy snubbing one or two films in the Best Picture category out of pure snobbery. I’m not as used to them snubbing filmmakers’ work outright just for the sake of saving time.

The telecast also screwed up with something they should especially never mess up at any Oscar ceremony: the In Memoriam segment. In previous years, the Academy may have had some slip-ups, from the choice of a musician to omitting people from the segment altogether. This year though, they did the most disrespectful thing they could have done: they quickly glossed through everyone in the montage, as if they were on a strict time limit and they couldn’t go past it. We lost a lot of amazing artists in 2020, not just with Chadwick Boseman, but also with Ennio Morricone, Kirk Douglas, Christopher Plummer, Sean Connery, Ian Holm, Max Von Sydow, Olivia de Havilland, and so, so many others. And how did the Academy choose to honor them? By timing their tributes to the music. This resulted in many artists being passed over briskly with every beat, while others were stayed on longer due to the swelling of the music.

I understand due to how late this year’s ceremony was held that more people were included in the segment. 2020 was a terrible year, after all, and we all lost much from the year. But you honor these artists the best by giving them the time they deserve on the screen: not by giving each one barely a second and moving on. It was a rude, pitiful, and disrespectful tribute to the artists, and quite frankly, the Academy would have been better off if they just cut it from the ceremony entirely and just release a YouTube video separately. At least then you could spend as much time on each person for however long as you want without interfering with the telecast. This presentation was just pathetic, and I can’t help but feel for the families that lost so much this year and deserved so much better of an effort from the Academy.

But as per usual, the worst part of the ceremony comes with the winners, and the Academy keeps up that tradition even with this year’s ceremony. With a year as bad as 2020, you think it would be impossible for the Academy to choose some of the least deserving winners imaginable. But you’ve gotta hand it to the Academy: even a pandemic couldn’t stop them from making some of the worst decisions imaginable for the 93rd Academy Awards.

Best Picture: Nomadland predictably won Best Picture this year, which officially makes it the most boring Best Picture winner this decade (I know, the decade has only started. Give the Academy time). It’s no shocker that Nomadland won Best Picture. After all, it was sweeping Best Picture awards left and right all season long, so it’s no surprise that it won the biggest award on Oscar night as well.

What is surprising is which order Best Picture was presented. In previous ceremonies, the Academy presents Best Picture last to cap off the evening and end the ceremony with a bang. This year Best Picture was presented third to last, right behind Best Actress and Best Actor. I can only assume the Academy did this because they predicted who was going to win in the remaining categories, which they were embarrassingly wrong about. Either way, it makes for a very weird placement and a very strange way to wrap up the ceremony.

For now, I’ll say congratulations to Nomadland for its Best Picture win. Nearly all of the Best Picture nominees were more deserving, but hey, who am I to rob Frances McDormand of yet another Oscar?

Best Director: Chloe Zhao won Best Director for Nomadland, making her the second woman to win in this category and the first woman of color to win the Oscar ever. That’s about the biggest accomplishment to come out of this movie, because as I already said, it is a snooze fest from start to finish. Regardless, the movie does have some sweet, sincere moments in it, and I especially liked how she brought in real-life nomads into the film’s narrative. As far as uniqueness goes, that’s about everything that makes Nomadland special though, and I would have much rather the Oscar have gone to Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman or Lee Isaac Chung for Minari. Either way, congratulations to Mrs. Zhao. I look forward to watching Eternals later this year. Aaron Sorkin was still snubbed in this category for The Trial of the Chicago 7 regardless.

Best Actor: This is the biggest upset of the night and it easily ruined the whole ceremony for me, especially since this category concluded the telecast. Despite giving a career-best performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and winning over the hearts of fans and critics alike, the late Chadwick Boseman lost Best Actor to Anthony Hopkins for his role as an elderly man battling Alzheimer’s in The Father.

I have so many problems with this that I don’t even know where to start. First of all, with Chadwick sweeping the majority of awards season from the Golden Globes to the SAG Awards, it seemed like Chadwick pretty much had this win in the bag. And why wouldn’t he? He gave a great performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and outshined even the titular character on that project. His character was crass, headstrong, confident, cocky, smooth, sassy, pained, and tragic all at the same time. Few actors possess all of those characteristics, let alone in one performance. He was very much the driving force of that film and deserved all of the praise that he received.

Compare that to Anthony Hopkins in The Father, which barely generated much conversation or impact until it was nominated for awards. I have not seen The Father thanks to its overpriced rental of $20, but judging from what I have seen, the film tackles heavy themes regarding losing your memory, your grip with reality, and in a way, a part of yourself. It’s for sure a challenging topic and performance to take on, but no more challenging than say, a metal drummer losing his hearing, a drunken screenwriter taking on the media moguls of Hollywood, and a struggling immigrant trying to provide for his family.

What I’m saying is that amongst all of the nominees, Chadwick’s performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom felt unique and stood out amongst his fellow nominees. Hopkins in The Father, in comparison, felt like an honorary mention that rarely elevated to the influence of his peers. The fact he couldn’t even tune in to accept his Oscar remotely makes his win even more awkward.

I’ve heard some commentators remark that fans are more motivated by Chadwick’s tragic passing than they are the merits of his performance for the award, but I genuinely don’t think that’s the case. Before Ma Rainey, I thought Riz Ahmed was the clear standout for Sound of Metal and thought that Chadwick was getting the sympathy vote. Then I watched Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and was completely blown away. He immediately sold himself as this overly ambitious musician with dreams of reaching the top, only to be roadblocked by white America around every corner. He made the movie, and after watching it, Chadwick became my only favorite to win the Oscar.

Consider also, that Hopkins has already won a Best Acting Oscar in 1992 for Silence of the Lambs. Meanwhile, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was Chadwick’s first and only nomination. It feels like he deserved stronger consideration for the award, especially since this was his last performance before he died. And before some of you come at me with “bUt tHaT wAs hIS FIrSt nOminAtiOnnn,” Anthony Hopkins’ first Oscar win also came with his first nomination for Silence of the Lambs. It isn’t unprecedented for that to happen, and a stronger case definitely should have been made for Chadwick.

I could be wrong, of course, and I very well may feel differently after I watch The Father later this year. Until then, this snub feels like if Heath Ledger’s Oscar for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight went to someone else: and that really, really stings.

Best Actress: I got this one wrong as well, but I was already on uncertain grounds with a four-way deadlock between Carey Mulligan, Frances McDormand, Viola Davis, and Andra Day. McDormand ended up securing the win for Nomadland, made an awkward remark about including karaoke machines in the ceremony, and then left the stage right after howling like a wolf. Again, I feel like her performance in Nomadland was more muted and less expressive than some of her more memorable performances, especially in comparison with her 2018 Oscar win for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Compared to her fellow nominees that crafted a very vivid presence in their respective films, her performance in Nomadland feels more transparent, like a surrogate for audiences to channel themselves into.

Regardless she now has three acting Oscars under her belt, tying her with Meryl Streep herself. She should feel honored just for that comparison. Hopefully the Academy doesn’t decide to nominate her even further into the future, otherwise good ol’ Meryl might get jealous.

Best Supporting Actor: Even though he was literally the lead in the movie, Daniel Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor for playing Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah. Again, I have no idea how he won Best Supporting Actor for a role that was very much non-supporting when Chadwick literally went home with nothing. Was the Academy somehow convinced that Levee Green was a supporting character and should have been nominated in this category instead? If that was the case, why wasn’t Kaluuya nominated for Best Actor? Would he have lost to Anthony Hopkins for The Father anyway? Does anyone even care enough to examine the Academy’s weird justifications anymore?

Either way, congrats to Kaluuya for his much-deserved Oscar win. It was nice to see him on stage accepting the award, as well as interacting with his old Get Out co-star Lil Rel Howery. And his message of unity in his acceptance speech was especially uplifting and powerful. He deserved an Oscar for that speech alone.

Best Supporting Actress: Yuh-Jung Youn has been called the Meryl Streep of South Korea, so is it really that surprising that she won Best Supporting Actress for Minari? She was just as playful and endearing as her character was in that movie, and her fun little poke at presenter Brad Pitt was especially amusing.

Best Animated Feature: As expected, Soul won Best Animated Feature, marking it as Pete Docter’s third Oscar win and 11th Oscar win for the Pixar team as a whole. Much congratulations for everyone involved with that phenomenal film. Personally I felt Onward was just a bit better, but it’s a win for Pixar either way. At this point, the Academy should just preemptively award the Pixar nominee every year before the ceremony and call it a day.

Best Documentary Feature: In a particularly tight race, My Octopus Teacher beat out its competition to win the Best Documentary Oscar this year. I personally feel for the Collective team since they’ve lost twice this year in both the documentary and international film category, but My Octopus Teacher has a very interesting subject and a unique way that it approaches it. I look forward to watching it in a few weeks, right after trying to understand why Time has so many viewers riled up.

Best International Feature: Thomas Vinterberg won for Another Round, and he gave a very powerful tribute to his late daughter during his acceptance speech. Congratulations to him for his much-deserved win. I’m glad he got to experience this honor in her memory, and I hope he continues to make movies that inspire him as much as this film has.

Best Original Screenplay: As expected, Emerald Fennell won Best Original Screenplay for her wickedly clever and smart portrayal of a woman fighting sexism in Promising Young Woman. I still feel a stronger pull for Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and would not have been upset at all if he had won this award instead of her. Regardless I am glad both of the nominated female directors this year got to walk home with a prize, especially since women are very often overlooked in the writing categories. So much congratulations to Mrs. Fennell. She very much deserved to win this one over her male peers.

Best Adapted Screenplay: In the night’s first surprise twist, The Father beat out Nomadland for Best Adapted Screenplay. I was fine with this win because 1) The Father seems centered on a very strong emotional foundation, and 2) The awards circuit seemed annoyingly obsessed with Nomadland, so any opportunity where it can be overlooked I’m mostly fine with it. I’m just glad the Oscar didn’t go to Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Can you imagine how annoying it would have been circumventing nine screenwriters onto that blasted stage? I barely have the patience for even two of them, so thank God we didn’t have to suffer through that social distancing nightmare.

Best Film Editing: The underdog Sound of Metal prevailed over the likes of its stronger nominees in The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Promising Young Woman. While I preferred those titles over the winner, Sound of Metal does have a solid assembly of its shots and paints a vivid and somber picture of a man losing a big piece of his life. That’s a hard thing to capture and tell, and Mikkel Nielsen does a great job getting us to sympathize with this character. Plus, he took away this Oscar from the likes of Nomadland and The Father. That’s good enough for me.

On another note, Harrison Ford presented this category with a very funny story about how critics initially reacted to a screening of Blade Runner. I could take Harrison’s annoyed scowl hosting the entire ceremony and that would be enough to keep me tuned in for the whole night.

Best Cinematography: Of all of the nominees for Best Cinematography, the biggest contenders were also the two most boring nominees out of the whole pack: and Mank cliched it from Nomadland, barely.

As much as I love Nomadland getting overlooked in one category after another, cinematography is one I will disagree with and am actually very frustrated about it losing. For one thing, the best thing about Nomadland was easily its cinematography, capturing life on the road and these vast, wide, open shots of the landscapes the nomads get to see and experience. As dull, long, and overbearing as that film is, it is also visually beautiful and does a great job capturing the nomads’ perspectives. It was amazing camerawork, and Joshua James Richards easily outshined his fellow nominees.

Compare that to Erik Messerschmidt, who won the Oscar for essentially copying Gregg Toland’s canted cinematography from Citizen Kane in Mank. I find so many issues with his win, especially since his cinematography is 1) Redundant 2) Plagiarized 3) Contrived and 4) very underwhelming. His work on Mank was nowhere near as striking or memorable as The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah, News of the World, and especially not as much as Nomadland. At the very least, Erik Messerschmidt does not deserve the Best Cinematography Oscar over David Fincher’s frequent collaborator Jeff Cronenweth, who has been nominated for Best Cinematography on Fincher’s last three projects and has not won once. A pity that creative and captivating cinematographers are getting egged to the side while Orson Welles knock offs are going home with the gold. But that’s Hollywood for you, I guess.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom won Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Hey, if Chadwick wasn’t going to win the Oscar, Ma Rainey deserved to win something, right?

Best Costume Design: Again, Ma Rainey won. I have a tough time deciding whether she or Emma. deserved to win. Either way, it’s funny to see Pinocchio trending in these categories after people realized a live-action remake came out last year. Was the pandemic really that bad, to where viewers genuinely did not realize a Pinocchio movie came out in 2020? Or is that just the result of bad marketing? Either way, congrats to Ma Rainey for the costume win, though I much would have preferred the Oscar gone to Chadwick.

Best Production Design: As previously expected, Mank won for production design, and it was the only Oscar it deserved to win out of the whole night. Next.

Best Musical Score: I was genuinely nervous for a minute when Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ names were read, as I was worried that Mank was going to win yet another very undeserved Oscar. Then the Academy read Jon Batiste’s name too, and I was instantly relieved when I realized Soul won instead. Congrats to all three of these amazing composers. They definitely deserved it for the amazing, refreshing sounds they provided not just for the film, but for our hearts.

Best Original Song: In yet another tight category, H.E.R.’s “Fight For You” won against One Night In Miami’s Leslie Odom Jr. for Judas and the Black Messiah. I was split 50/50 under this category and preferred “Speak Now’s” quietly soulful vibe, but if it wasn’t going to win, “Fight For You” was definitely my second favorite pick. Congrats to her either way. With her recent wins at the Grammys, H.E.R. has been having a great, great year.

Best Sound: Sound of Metal won the newly-named Best Sound Award. Duh. It was kind of a given it was going to win since the word “sound” is literally in its title. Either way, congrats to the amazing sound design team. They did a brilliant job capturing what the deaf experience was like for Ruben Stone.

Best Visual Effects: As already expected, Tenet won Best Visual Effects. Congratulations to Christopher Nolan’s visual effects team for the much-deserved win. Good luck explaining the plot to anybody though.

And as per usual, I lost in all of the short categories this year save for If Anything Happens I Love You’s win for Best Animated Short. That leaves my final tally for 16 out of 23 categories predicted correctly this year. Good for me I guess, but it doesn’t take away from the pain of Chadwick’s Best Actor loss. I will never let the Academy live that one down, ever. I cannot imagine what snub could possibly be worse this decade, but the Academy has outdone me before. Let’s give them time to see how else they can infuriate me for 2022.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going back to watching Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Some of us appreciate icons when we see them.

– David Dunn

Tagged 93rd Academy Awards, Judas and the Black Messiah, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Mank, Nomadland, Oscars, Soul, Sound of Metal, The Father

DAVID DUNN

Film Critic. Analyst. Devotee.

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