Best Picture Rundown

 Best Picture Rundown

Hello and welcome to Cinema Wellman. I am your host David, and I’m excited about today’s episode because I get to talk about this year’s Best Picture nominees! 

I’m pleased to say that I liked every one of this year’s ten nominees at some level.

That doesn’t always happen. 

In fact, since the Academy made the mistake of doubling the number of Best Picture nominees back in 2009, there have only been three (now four) years that I liked all ten nominees.

I love the fact that the last year there were only five Best Picture nominees (the way it should be) was the year that I saw all five in a theater in one sitting. 

I hated a couple of those movies, but that day remains one of my most cherished movie memories. 

So here are this year’s Best Picture nominees ranked by how much I liked them and nothing more. I am not a film critic by any stretch of the imagination, and these are just, like, my opinions, man. :) 

#10- Maestro

R/129 m/IMDb: 6.6/directed by Bradley Cooper

7 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Makeup & Hairstyling, Sound, Actor, Actress, 

Original Screenplay, Cinematography

IMDb: “This love story chronicles the lifelong relationship of conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein.” 

Biopics are kind of tricky in my mind.  If you’re familiar with the person before the movie, you most likely have an opinion about them and their real life.

I think you not only need to like the subject, but also like the person playing that subject. 

I was never a big fan of Leonard Bernstein, and I’m not a fan of Bradley Cooper either. If I was, I’m sure I would have enjoyed this film much more.

Maestro was well done, Cooper does a solid job in front of and behind the camera, and the music was lovely.

I found his voice to be grating after a while, but that’s what Berstein sounded like, so no problem. 

While discussing this film with my sister Vanessa, she mentioned that she was distracted by the smoking in the film, and I agreed with her. I realize they both smoked, and this is a biopic, but it’s a lot.  I think the only time he isn’t smoking is when he’s conducting. But, once again, true to real life.

As was the nose. 

I have zero issue with the nose and was kind of shocked that some people did. Look at a picture of Leonard Bernstein. He didn’t have a small nose. Neither does Bradley Cooper, for that matter.

Get over it and find something else to complain about. 

Maestro finishes at #10 because when you have a list of 10 items, one of them has to be number ten. 

Even if it’s good.

#9- The Holdovers

R/133 m/IMDb: 8.0/directed by Alexander Payne

5 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Film Editing

IMDb: “A cranky history teacher at a remote prep school is forced to remain on campus over the holidays with a troubled student who has no place to go and a grieving cook.”

I love Paul Giamatti. I love his unique look, the sound of his voice, and his delivery. 

He’s also very good at playing grumpy/cranky, which he gets to do quite a bit in The Holdovers.

Being a former teacher, I enjoyed Giamatti’s portrayal of a teacher who has just about had enough.

Been there. Done that.

When I was teaching, I always knew that troubled students were troubled for a reason. I tried to find out what was going on while others were dismissing them as a “problem” student. 

There was always a reason behind the “trouble,” and, in most cases, it wasn’t the student’s fault at all.

No student should be dismissed, except from class. 

One of the aspects of this film I enjoyed is the fact that it’s a “real” movie in the sense that no sets or soundstages were used.

And director Alexander Payne wanted certain scenes to be shot in the snow, so they waited for it to snow. 

 That always makes the film more natural to me, although I realize this realism doesn’t lend itself to certain genres.

Detractors have said that this film is sappy and schmaltzy, but it takes place at a boarding school.

A lot of films set in boarding schools are sappy and schmaltzy.

Not Taps though.

Or The Tribe.

#8 - Anatomy of a Fall

R/151 m/IMDb: 7.8/directed by Justine Triet

5 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, Film Editing

IMDb: “A woman is suspected of murder after her husband’s death, and their visually challenged son faces a moral dilemma as the main witness.”

This taut French thriller will have you wondering (and questioning) throughout. 

Since we don’t see the man’s death, we don’t know if the woman killed her husband or not.

I don’t think I’m the only person who saw this that kept going back and forth; “She didn’t do it!” “Oh my, she DID do it!” 

I love movies that keep me guessing. I also love movies that I can't totally figure out after 20 minutes. I’m looking at you, The Sixth Sense.

It took the filmmakers seven months to find the young man who plays the son, and he’s one of the best parts of the film. 

The accused woman is played by Sandra Huller, who earned a Best Actress nomination for her performance. She’s excellent, and I’m going to talk about her in this episode, but not right now.

After reading about the film, I know I’m not the only one in the dark about the woman’s guilt or innocence while watching it. Director Justine Triet didn’t tell Huller whether her character committed the murder or not.

Triet’s only instructions were, “Play it like you are innocent.”

Most excellent!

#7- Past Lives

PG-13/105 m/IMDb: 7.9/directed by Celine Song

2 Oscar Nominations: 

Best Picture, Original Screenplay

IMDb: “Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrested apart after Nora’s family leaves South Korea. Twenty years later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront notions of love and destiny.”

First of all, kudos to director Celine Song! This is her directorial debut, and she garners a Best Picture nomination! Well done!

Past Lives is a story about many things, with love at the forefront, right alongside unrequited love.

Unrequited love flat out sucks. 

I’ve always said that movies have magical powers over us that include the ability to dredge up memories you haven’t had for years and years.

Even though Past Lives is about childhood friends who are separated, and then reunited two decades later, it made me think of a young woman I met briefly when I was sixteen.

Vanessa was a freshman at SUNY Binghamton, and my parents and I visited her, most likely on Parents’ Weekend.

In a bold move, my parents allowed me to stay at the dorm as opposed to the hotel with them.

I hung out with a group of guys that weekend who were very accommodating to a high school junior. 

I also hung out with Maureen.

She was my type before I knew what my type was, and we spent many hours together just talking and getting to know each other. 

Maureen had a boyfriend, who she told me about, and nothing happened between us except for a connection that I felt. 

When I got home after that weekend, I remember crying myself to sleep that Sunday night because I knew I’d probably never see her again.

Past Lives brought me right back to that moment, and I felt those same feelings all over again watching the characters navigate a relationship they felt differently about. 

That’s magic.

Director Song made a brilliant choice by not having the adult actors playing the couple meet before the shoot. She also didn’t want them hanging around with each other off screen so their interactions on screen would be “fresh.” 

This totally worked and added to the overall realistic feel of the film.

So…another romantic drama that I liked and would recommend?

What has become of me….

#6- American Fiction

R/117 m/IMDb: 7.8/directed by Cord Jefferson

5 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Original Score, Actor, 

Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay

IMDb: “A novelist who is fed up with the establishment profiting from Black entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of the hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain.”

I’ve always enjoyed movies about writers whether they be journalists or poets or novelists. I could be because I was an English teacher for 33 years. I find it very interesting to see them work their craft, and I always wonder what it would be like to be a great writer. 

I may also enjoy these types of films because I have more than a few friends who are writers. 

And I don’t mean bloggers.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Real writers, journalists, poets, etc. I may even know a Pulitzer Prize Winner!

So there are several reasons I found American Fiction compelling, well done, and a movie I heartily recommended.

I’m not giving away anything that’s not in the trailer, but the author’s family suffers a loss that hit me very hard because of who it was. I spent much of the rest of the movie thinking about how that loss would affect me if it happened in my life.

Another example of movies working their magic. 

I never said all of the magic was positive. 

Both Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown were nominated for their performances, and both were brilliant. 

Jeffrey Wright is an excellent actor, who may get the recognition he deserves when the Oscars are handed out next month. 

And another 1st time director with a Best Picture nomination! Well done, Cord Jefferson!

Looking forward to future work. 

#5 - Killers of the Flower Moon

R/206 m/IMDb: 7.7/directed by Martin Scorsese

10 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Original Score, Original Song, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Film Editing, Production Design, Costume Design

IMDb: “When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.”

Legendary director Martin Scorsese’s 26th feature film is an epic story of organized, choreographed, and pretty much legalized murder of 20-24 members of the Osage Nation.

I often mention how much I appreciate authenticity and realism in films, so I was pleased to read that Scorsese lobbied for and received approval of the Osage Nation in the making of this film. 

Osage Nation representatives worked closely with Scorsese to ensure authenticity and accuracy in the telling of this important story. 

This investigation was the first ever assigned to the newly formed F.B.I. and its evil and corrupt head troll. 

Lily Gladstone becomes the first Native American to be nominated for her excellent performance. A well-deserved nomination. Let’s keep breaking those barriers.

I love the way Martin Scorsese described this film, “It’s not a whodunnit, it’s a who didn’t do it.”

This film is a long and bleak journey, but worth it.

#4- Barbie

PG-13/114 m/IMDb: 6.9/directed by Greta Gerwig

8 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Original Song, Original Song, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design

IMDb: “Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the colorful and seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land. However, when they get a chance to go to the real world, they soon discover the joys and perils of living among humans.” 

I already talked at length about Barbie because the film was featured as the best film screened here at Cinema Wellman last September!

I raved about it, and said I thought I would be nominated for Oscars, and here we are! How about that?

I don’t want to be redundant, but I wanted to touch upon a few items before moving on to the 2nd half of last summer’s unlikely double feature. 

*Barbie is 23% larger than her surroundings in the film, the exact proportions of the real Barbie and her world.

*Margot Robbie insisted that every member of the cast and crew wear something pink every day of the shoot.

*Almost all practical effects were used, all sets were hand painted. Designs were taken from original Barbie stuff.

*The song I’m Just Ken was written as a joke, director Greta Gerwig loved it and included it in the film, and now it’s nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar!

*” Paddle Hands” were tested but only Kate McKinnon could pull it off convincingly, so the idea was scrapped.

And I’m so pleased to see that America Ferrera was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Her feminista manifesta monologue was amazing and deserves to be heard by everyone.

I loved Barbie, but I’m afraid of what it may have spawned. I read that, after the film’s success, Mattel began developing 45 more film projects.

No way they’re all made, but they’re thinking about 45 of them?!?!

Are you ready for films about; American Girl Dolls, Hot Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, Matchbox Cars, Polly Pocket, Uno, and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots?!

Be honest. A couple of those sounded interesting to you. 

On to the “heimer” part of Barbieheimer.

It’s about a different type of toy. 

Was that a tagline? Not bad.

#3 - Oppenheimer

R/180 m/IMDb: 8.4/directed by Christopher Nolan

13 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, Sound, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing, Production Design, Costume Design

IMDb: “The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.”

I love Christopher Nolan films, especially the ones I can understand. 

And I understood Oppenheimer.

This multi-layered WWII epic has just about everything you could want in an exciting suspense thriller, and this thriller is true.

Nolan expertly switches between color and black & white depending on which character’s perspective is being shown.

He also realized how important production design was to this film, so he cut the shooting schedule by 30 days to free up money that was then spent on production design. 

This attention to detail speaks volume of Nolan, as does his giving up 30 days of shooting to benefit the film in another area.

The cast is filled with big name, known stars. Nolan did this on purpose to help the audience keep the characters apart by having them portrayed by familiar faces. 

You can do that when all of these known stars take massive pay cuts just to work with Nolan. 

It says a lot about him as a director. 

Cillian Murphy is hauntingly phenomenal as Oppenheimer.   

“Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This is an amazing film I expect to win Best Picture when that award is handed out at the end of the sixth hour of next month’s telecast. 

#2 - The Zone of Interest

PG-13/105 m/IMDb: 7.9/directed by Jonathan Glazer

5 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, International Feature Film, Sound, Director, Adapted Screenplay

IMDb: “Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.”

When I first read the premise of this film, I was thinking it was going to be very difficult to watch.

I figured the director was going to show us the opulence of the rich Nazis juxtaposed with the suffering of their prisoners.

Then I thought, Spielberg already did that with the scene at the train station in Schindler’s List in a sequence that still haunts me. 

Instead of repeating something previously done, director Jonathan Glazer doesn’t show the camp or the prisoners once. 

We can hear the screams and gunshots, we can see the smokestacks belching fire and smoke over on the other side of the wall, but we never see the other side of the wall.

I thought that was a brilliant plan by Glazer. 

We don’t need to see the prisoners or the suffering because we’ve seen it before. We know what’s going on on the other side of that wall.

What Glazer chooses to show us instead is how life goes on normally on the Nazi side of that very same wall.

And it’s as disturbing and frightening in its own way as seeing the prisoners would have been. 

Glazer shot this film in a unique way in the sense that cameras were placed throughout the sets without operators, the same with mics. 

Up to 10 cameras and 30 mics were in play at any given time and the actors didn’t know if they were being shot in a close up or a long shot which I found fascinating. 

I saw The Zone of Interest at the AMC (not a sponsor) and watched Anatomy of a Fall when I got home.

As I was watching the French thriller with the lead actress speaking French and English quite fluently, I had to suddenly pause the film and head to IMDb.

Is that actress the same woman who I just saw play the commandant’s wife in The Zone of Interest? The actress who spoke fluent German in that film?!

Yes. Yes, it was.

That may be Best Actress right there. Two phenomenal performances in three languages. 

Sandra Huller, you are amazing, and I will now look for everything else you’ve ever done.

My AMC audience for this screening was a total of two. I was kind of glad that was the case after I audibly gasped at one of Huller’s lines. 

I may have even uttered an expletive of sorts. 

I used to teach WWII and the Holocaust, so I recognized the name Rudoph Hoss as the Auschwitz commandant. 

His name stood out because he was found guilty at the Nuremberg Trials and executed. 

In a case of epic karma, Hoss was brought back to Auschwitz to be hanged.

He is said to be the last person to die there. 

I’m not spoiling anything about the movie because it doesn’t even come close to telling that part of the story.

That part of the story actually isn’t important, if you can imagine that. 

This is stunning work by everyone involved and I will see it again.

I may start buying DVDs again.

They still exist, right?

So that leaves #1 on Cinema Wellman’s Best Picture Rundown Rankings, and it’s a film directed by F.O.C.W. Yorgos Lanthimos.

#1 - Poor Things

R/141 m/IMDb: 8.4/directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

11 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing, Production Design, Costume Design

IMDb: “The incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter.”

Even though Poor Things finished in the top spot of this year’s nominees and earned 11 Oscar nominations, I’m not going to say that much about it at all. 

It was absolutely amazing and, I hate to sound like a broken record, magical. 

I loved this movie. 

Emma Stone’s portrayal of Bella Baxter may very well earn her a Best Actress Oscar, and if that happens, it will be well deserved. 

He wasn’t nominated, but I loved Wilem Dafoe as the “unorthodox” doctor.

Poor Things needs to be seen to be believed, and more than once actually.

It is an otherworldly experience that director Lanthimos prefaces by the statement, “If you start to analyze the film as something that would actually happen, then, of course, the film doesn’t work.”

When you immerse yourself in his Poor Things world (love those animals!) you will see that this film works on all levels. 

Well, that is a wrap from here at Cinema Wellman. We saw all 10 Best Picture nominees and gave you our official ranking…for now.

In three weeks, we will be doing our annual Cinema Wellman Oscar Ballot, and we hope you’ll be back for that. 

Next week we’ll be showcasing…SIMIANS!!!

All monkeys. All the time.

And, until then, take care.