Which Oscar Nominees I Fell Asleep In This Year!
The Oscars are Sunday: It's time to take stock.
Welcome to Part 2 of my Oscars recaps! In Part 1, I reacted to Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, and Triangle of Sadness. Today we’re doing a buffet-style roundup of the rest. 🥳
An undeniable fact about me is that I fell asleep while watching nearly every single Best Picture nominee this year!*
And listen, before you start scolding me [EMMA], it’s not because they’re not good or I didn’t enjoy them. It’s just biology, folks! We used to tease my mom relentlessly about how she was always falling asleep in movies. Now fate has had her final laugh, and I am one-and-seven against sleep in the Best Picture category! I can only be me my mother’s daughter!
Anyhoo, the Oscars are this Sunday night, in a competing time slot with The Last of Us finale and hear me when I say the Lord did not prepare his child for this trial!! I do not know HOW they expect me to sit there listening to Jimmy Kimmel debase his audience while Pedro and Bella are out there protecting the future of humanity! But I’m going to do it because I am a hard-working woman who takes her [unpaid, unasked-for] job seriously!
Today we’re wrapping up reviews/thoughts/drags of the Best Picture Nominees, plus a few extra Oscar-nominated films that I either hated or loved. Before the big night, I want to know:
Who do you hope wins Best Picture — and who do you think will win?
*An Impolite Ranking of the Best Picture Nominees by How Many Sittings it Took Me to Finish Them
*Note: I did not watch Avatar [which I am still refusing to sit OR sleep through] or All Quiet on the Western Front [which I cannot find the gumption/instinct for self-flagellation to watch!].
∞ - Triangle of Sadness [yes, that is an infinity symbol; I did not finish this film]
5 - Elvis
4 - The Fabelmans
3 - Women Talking
3 - Tár
2 - Everything Everywhere All at Once
2 - Banshees of Inisherin
1 - Top Gun: Maverick [I saw this in theaters, and, like, I don’t sleep in public because THAT is a young man’s game!!]
My Pick for Winner
Who I think will win and hope will win: Everything Everywhere All at Once. By far the Vegas odds leader, and one I’d be very happy to see win — even if I found it a bit bizarre for my tastes. It was wildly inventive, required so much of its actors (action! family! heart!), and the writing, cinematography, editing, costuming, casting, you name it, was all good! Plus, in the end it’s a lovely story about, well, love.
My favorite movie of the year: Probably Nope. And it didn’t get a single nomination! Sure, it wasn’t a perfect movie and it helped that I saw it in North America’s Largest IMAX (so it was STUNNINGGG). But it was at least better than Top Gun! It was at least better than Elvis! Seriously this is some “Oscars So White”/Oscars So Clubby/Oscars so Rigged b***s***!!
My Final Oscar Movies Roundup
(Here’s a reference list of the nominations in the top categories. And my thoughts on the Best Picture Noms we’ve already discussed: Elvis, Banshees of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, & Triangle of Sadness)
Now for the three I have left! Plus a couple other movies with Acting Nominations that I have opinions about!
Tár
Top Nominations:
Best Picture
Best Director, Todd Field
Best Actress, Cate Blanchett
+ more!
Cate Blanchett’s cheekbones and perfectly pressed collars alone deserve trophies! This movie has the aesthetic of those beige children on TikTok and the soul of Paradise Lost but if Satan was actually the bad guy. [Make sense?]
This movie is a ghost story where you become so unraveled by the end you’re not sure what’s real and what’s a bad dream happening in the head of an even badder woman! It presents a character so unbearably cringe that despite yourself you can’t look away. I thought it was outstanding.
Weirdly, Tár and Portlandia live in the same section of my brain library, just with different styles of humor [one outrageous and laugh-out-loud, the other unwaveringly dry and discomfiting]. Tár starts the film talking about her “ethnographic fieldwork” in the Amazon and we roll our eyes like we do at Fred Armisen, not yet aware of the impending perfect irony of her final movement.
Women Talking
Top Nominations:
Best Picture
Zero acting awards—but Claire Foy DESERVES! She floored me!
This is almost a stageplay. The color dimmed to almost black and white, the primary set a single room, the action nearly all dialogue, the themes deep and pondering. Women Talking was adapted from a book based on true events of sexual violence within a religious commune. It’s not about the violence, perse, it’s about the choices of faith and survival — the instincts, emotions, reasoning, and connectedness of women surviving through collective trauma.
It’s heavy stuff, obviously, and hard to watch some scenes, but they did a fair job keeping it out of the trauma porn territory [looking at you, Blonde!]. It stayed focused on the women and their agency and their individual interpretations. I thought it was uneven in parts, but quietly astonishing. Perhaps the most unexpected part of the film for me was the gentle wisdom of the older women. They were so committed to their faith, but faith was also the reason driving them to leave.
The Fabelmans
Top Nominations:
Best Picture
Best Director, Steven Spielberg,
Best Actress, Michelle Williams
Best Supporting Actor, Judd Hirsch
and more!
The truest observation in The Fabelmans is how mean volleyball people are. Nobody will make you feel smaller as a person than someone who is better than you at volleyball! Deny it!!
Anyhoo, that was not the point of this movie, which I loved the second half of! It’s two-and-a-half hours long and finally, at 50 minutes in, Judd Hirsch shows up and brings it to life. He’s in it for 10 minutes max, gives a Nicole-Kidman-esque-“We Come To This Place for Magic” speech, and then leaves! That’s it! And he got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for that! That’s what we call a heat check!
After that scene, I finally felt like I was feeling the movie. It was charming and I cried exactly one time.
The Woman King
Top Nominations:
ZERO. A CRIME.
This movie is ❤️🔥 . It got snubbed in every category, and that’s EGREGIOUS, so I’m including it in my list. It didn’t get much attention in theater either, but its Netflix release means people are finally discovering what a fun, beautiful, energetic, brilliantly choreographed, powerful movie it is.
I think maybe the barrier for Woman King was figuring out where it fits. What audience is it written for? With a PG-13 rating and some of the plot/dialogue/character choices, it feels like it was made for young-ish audiences — but then some content is extremely mature/traumatic/rated-R heavy. People might not want to bring their younger kids, but then adults don’t often go see PG-13 movies on their own (unless it’s Marvel or Star Wars).
Ben and I wished they had just decided to go for it with an R rating and flesh out some of the themes and characters more deeply.
The Whale
Top Nominations:
Best Actor, Brendan Fraser
Best Supporting Actress, Hong Chau
Oof. This was…not good. The day after Ben and I watched this, I was in a massive funk, just a bad bad headspace, and Ben, generous partner that he is, blamed this film. And you know what?? He was 1,000% correct! It was distressing!
Sorry to all the Brendan Fraser-heads out there who were promised a triumphant comeback, but this was not it. He and Hong Chau were very good and put their whole hearts into it [Sadie Sink was not—sorry!], but they weren’t enough to push past the fact this movie didn’t have much to say, and what it did try to say felt forced and fake. It was going for empathy but instead gawked at Brendan Fraser in his fat-suit in a way that felt exploitative and dehumanizing, like, “Look at this pathetic, pitiable man!!” I mean, it’s literally called “The Whale”!? I don’t know y’all. What are we doing here.
If you want a parent-child film exploring mental illness and love, try Aftersun! Also nominated for Best Actor!
To Leslie
Top Nominations:
Andrea Riseborough, Best Actress
Am I the target audience for a movie that opens with a Dolly Parton song and closes with Patty Griffin? Yes, yes I am!
This was a solid, gritty, sweet, small movie with an awards-level performance from Riseborough anchoring it. [I barely remember her in Birdman but I remember her from my least favorite Black Mirror ep! If she hadn’t been so good in that episode, maybe it would’ve been less emotionally traumatizing!]
She’s getting major backlash for this nomination, and I think that sucks, because it was the producer’s and several other Academy members’ faults, not hers. [Explainer here.] If I had to choose between her and Danielle Deadwyler in Till, I would definitely pick Deadwyler every time, but can’t we just kick out Ana de Armas and let them BOTH get a nomination??
Anyhoo, this movie has that Oscars acting-category feel to it. You know: the dusty, grimy, Hollywood concept of “real people” living in the “dirty” “real” “world.” The rest of the cast was great: Allison Janney, Stephen Root, Marc Maron, and Bubbles from The Wire!
Till
Top Nominations:
Zero—another CRIME
Danielle Deadwyler in Till made me cry harder than any other performance has this year. [You might recognize her recently from Station Eleven where she carried an entire apocalypse plotline on her back.]
This movie was very tough and very important and very well-done. And what set it on another level was Deadwyler’s unmatchable performance as Emmett Till’s mother. Her ability to go from the most subtle dignity to the most torrential heartrending rage floored me. She was robbed of a nomination.
A lot of people missed this movie when it came out, partially I think because there was a fair feeling coming from the Black community that a lot of people feel exhausted and burned out seeing so much Black pain on screens, rather than joy and love and laughter. And that’s fair! But us white people—we should see it.
You just blew my mind with the Tar/Portlandia comparison. that is ITTTTT.