Every year the Oscars nominate some excellent movies, and every year they nominate something they definitely should not be elevating. But how can you, the discerning viewer, figure out which Oscar nominees are worth watching and which should be consigned to the dustbin of history? Enjoy this comprehensive ranking of the 52 feature and short films nominated for this year’s Oscars, presented in order from worst to best.
52 – “Skin”
Nominated for: Best Live Action Short
Hoo boy, let’s talk about “Skin”, the worst thing nominated for the Oscars this year or probably many other years. At first it’s actually pretty good–well-filmed and acted, focusing on the morally complex relationship between a skinhead and his pre-teen son. As viewers, we understand that this is a warm, loving family, but we also see how the son will no doubt inherit his father’s hate. The problem with “Skin” comes when it tries to set up a “both sides are bad” narrative by presenting a black family with mirror issues. When the black father is horribly, arbitrarily beaten by the skinhead and his buddies in a supermarket parking lot, the victim’s wife and son looking on in horror, the look of shock and unease on the skinhead’s son’s face seems like the culmination of the short film’s message about innocence and hate. But then the film takes a hard right turn, as the skinhead is abducted by a bunch of tough black guys, held drugged in a garage for 10 days, and tattooed with black ink all over his body before being dumped back outside his home. This bizarre twist, like something out of a racist version of Tusk, only serves to set up the painfully ironic conclusion, in which the skinhead’s son mistakes him for a black intruder and kills him.
There might have been a way to make this film work, if it used stylistic cues to present this outlandish scenario as a kind of tongue-in-cheek, political cartoon-come-to-life critique of overbroad anti-racist parables, but no such cues exist. We are forced to assume total sincerity by the filmmaking, and especially by the way the film deals with its African-American characters, from the voiceless “thugs” who do the abducting to the assumption that the family man at the supermarket has a ready posse of such people ready to kidnap and mutilate–and especially the shots in which the beaten man’s son witnesses what’s being done to the man who hurt his father. The pervading sense that “Skin” wants to convey that both sides of this racial conflict are bad is inexcusable, given that one side of this is humanized, with realistic problems, and the other side of this is otherized, with problematic elements that don’t exist outside of fevered imaginings in the grossest corners of the internet. “Skin” should not have been nominated, should not have been made, should have been kept in the filmmaker’s brain where nobody would have been troubled or influenced or insulted by its moral foulness.
51 – Bohemian Rhapsody
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing
When I finally watched Bohemian Rhapsody due to its Best Picture nomination, I had long since heard about the film’s offensive portrayal of Freddie Mercury’s sexuality. That was priced into my expectations already. What I didn’t expect was the film itself would be so poorly constructed. This slapdash biography of Queen and its iconic frontman is badly written tripe, filmed poorly (it’s visually painful to watch all those cuts between static shots and the same dramatic dolly in) and edited worse (making its Best Editing nomination perhaps even more of a joke than its Best Picture nom). Rami Malek’s much-ballyhooed performance would be excellent in a vacuum, but it was hard to credit when surrounded by a script that not only wasn’t supporting it but sometimes seemed as though it was contradicting Malek’s interpretation of the character. BoRhap might be enjoyable during most of its musical sequences, but everybody on the planet enjoys Queen and you don’t get credit as a filmmaker for putting beloved songs in your movie over uninspired visuals and then surrounding those sequences with a terrible film.
In what is sadly all too characteristic of this year’s Oscar nominees, the film’s quality (or lack thereof, in this case) is complicated by a problematic message. BoRhap takes a queer icon and portrays him from the perspective of his straight band mates. Whether intentional or not, the film argues by its structure that AIDS was Freddie’s punishment for leaving the band to go solo. Certainly it is completely intentional that the film defines Mercury’s complicated sexuality for him, by letting another character tell the singer “You’re gay, Freddie,” when Mercury (who carried on long relationships with both men and women during his life) tries to come out to her as bisexual. This fundamental, probably willful misreading of the character extends to Queen itself–the film insists that the band’s genius was making everybody into an outsider, when the reality is that Queen mainstreamed the feeling of being an outsider. Everybody feels special for liking Queen even though everybody feels special for liking Queen, and this is a movie that, above all else, wants to make the viewer feel special for believing in Queen while the film’s half-assed paper antagonists criticize the band and the titular song. Somewhere along the way, that insipid motivation expressed through hacky, low-quality filmmaking became a tremendous insult to the real human being whose story deserves a much better celebration than this shoddy piece of trash. And that’s even without getting into the Bryan Singer of it all. Enjoy your spot at 51, Bohemian Rhapsody, you’ve earned it.
50 – Green Book
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing
There’s nothing all that wrong with Green Book that could have been fixed by not nominating it for any non-acting awards. Mahershala Ali is super good (of course, he’s always good), and Viggo Mortensen creates a weird but legitimately funny comic character in the form of the dumb-as-rocks New York Italian Tony Lip. The movie surrounding those two performances is an adequate buddy movie of the type they used to make in the less enlightened ’90s. The main trouble with Green Book is that these are the woke 2010s, and it is no longer acceptable to highlight and award a movie in which an instinctual racist and, let’s face it, what the film considers an “uppity” black man go on a road trip and moderate toward one another. On one level this is a decently amusing, decently moving story about two men becoming friends in the Jim Crow-era South; on another level, it is a racist, regressive, “both sides are to blame” film that never really connects the ignorance and clear revulsion its white protagonist feels toward black people with the system of racial oppression that held sway at that time and in that place. Nowhere is the film’s “feel good, all you racists” message as lazily or as infuriatingly applied than at the end, when Tony’s family appears to have gone through the exact same moral transformation he did. Lucky them, they did it without the road trip! Green Book clocks in at #50 on this list by virtue of technical competence alone–message-wise, it would be equally dire for the Academy to reward this or Bohemian Rhapsody beyond their performances. This is not the look we need in 2019, people. In summary, Green Book really puts the “great” in MAGA.
49 – Christopher Robin
Nominated for: Best Visual Effects
I’ll say this for Christopher Robin, those visual effects are, indeed, fantastic. In fact, seeing these “realistic” versions (inspired by the original stuffed animals about which A. A. Milne wrote) of Winnie the Pooh and co. in the trailer is probably what gave me the wrong idea about the movie. I had hoped CR was going to be a poignant, mature deconstruction of the Pooh stories, a look back in adulthood at the unconscious childhood delights to see what there could still inspire. Instead, the film is still essentially aimed at children. That would be fine–my fault, and not the film’s, for assuming–if this was a good children’s film. Instead, flashes of brilliance are largely buried under a shallow, overbusy and underthought story about Business Dad (aka Christopher Robin, played by Ewan McGregor as a man trying and failing to act properly against a tennis ball on a stick) becoming less Business. In a nostalgia-bait movie about favorite characters from everyone’s childhood, I should not be sympathizing with the main character’s decision to ignore his wife and child in favor of a weekend of hard work–and yet that’s just what happens, given the film’s lopsided balancing of those two priorities. (If Christopher neglects his family this weekend, he can vacation with them next weekend. If he neglects his work, many employees will be cruelly fired, including him. Pooh, being a bear of very little brain, does not understand the significance of rent checks, or whence they come.) I wouldn’t mind a winsome movie that cast a spell of nostalgia and poignant reflection on me, but I do mind one whose spell is defective, where I’m not enthralled enough to avoid asking obvious questions like, “If Robin’s goal is to get Winnie the Pooh out of his hair for the weekend so he can properly neglect his kid, why not solve both problems by dropping off the magic talking bear friend with his daughter while he’s right outside her window?” Christopher Robin isn’t homophobic or racist–although Christopher’s solution to his business problem being essentially “let’s co-opt benevolent corporatism to push consumerism” (an exceedingly Disney Corp idea) is somewhat distressing to imagine being learned by small children–and so it manages to not fall below the very worst films on this list.
48 – Ralph Breaks the Internet
Nominated for: Best Animated Feature
The original Wreck-It Ralph was overrated, in my opinion, although I liked it a fair amount, and judging by this nomination, the sequel is too. Ralph 2 largely ends up exposing the original’s chief flaws, from hacky jokes to lazy worldbuilding to lackluster plotting. I want to talk about the worldbuilding particularly, here. This film reminded me that the main characters, video game protagonists and antagonists alike, literally live in the surge protector at their arcade, and when the arcade is closed, they literally just wait around for it to open again so they can go back to work. (Why they act like shift workers is beyond me, given that Ralph later reveals he has no idea what money is, and none of them have bosses, and oh dear I’ve gone cross-eyed.) At one point Vanellope literally refers to outside the game as “the real world,” as if she doesn’t believe she’s real–a total failure to imagine from the character’s unique perspective. That indelible Pixar twist (like, monsters have a whole city behind your closet door and it’s undergoing an energy crisis) is just missing from the entire Ralph concept and it’s a shame.
Anyway, this time around, Ralph and Vanellope quickly leave their arcade for the internet, an environment that presents infinite opportunities, all of which are squandered in favor of literalism (all of the websites are big tall buildings with logos on the outside and on the inside, the stuff that’s on the website), really bad jokes (looking at the Google building, Ralph exclaims, “That must be where they keep all the goggles!”), and disgusting amounts of product placement (eBay is a significant plot point, and the less said about the film’s extended Disney Princesses commercial, the better). Most disappointingly, the movie feints in the direction of good messages–one scene where Ralph accidentally reads hurtful comments about his “Buzztube” videos skates right up to the edge of connecting the awfulness of internet trolls with the main plot’s critique of Ralph as an entitled “nice guy” whose insecurity leads to controlling behavior–and then surfs away again on a tidal wave of dumb memes. Ralph Breaks the Internet comes off exactly like a movie that was pitched first and only thought through later, if at all. Surely there was a better Animated Feature out there to nominate than this perfunctory Disney effort.
47 – Solo: A Star Wars Story
Nominated for: Best Visual Effects
There’s a fair amount to like about even this weakest entry in the post-Lucas Star Wars cinematic franchise, but in a way, that only makes it more frustrating that Solo is broken at the core. A prequel focusing on the adventures of a young Han Solo before he ever met Luke and Leia, Solo‘s main problem is that it has no idea what it wants to say about the character, and in fact no coherent reason for existing beyond dutifully checking off a list of everything we knew about Han Solo in A New Hope (here’s how he got his blaster, here’s how he got his co-pilot, here’s how–groan–he got his surname) and, I guess, successfully repurposing somebody’s old Firefly fan script to make up the first act. Han’s famous character arc from greedy jerk to selfless hero happens in Episode IV, so what’s a prequel to do? Either build a movie around a Han who remains a greedy jerk the whole way through, like a Sergio Leone Western in space, or show a naive, kind Han becoming a greedy jerk as the result of adversity and privation. Solo decides to half-ass both in a naive-to-jerk-to-hero-to-jerk roundabout that simply results in a main character whose attitude and motivations are wildly inconsistent throughout. You might not know why the film feels sapped of excitement, but that’s the reason: it’s got no center for the audience to care about.
Gee, other than that, Queen Amidala, how was the holo-play? For all its faults, Solo skips along easily enough, generally working from scene to scene. It’s only by the end, and afterward walking out of the theater, that you realize none of it held together properly. Before then, it’s easy to be amused by Lando’s affinity for capes and his woke droid, or to enjoy the colorful pop art visuals (particularly the Kessel Run’s foggy, tie-dye look), or to get caught up in the romance between Han and Qi’ra–a pairing predestined to end before Episode IV rolls around, so they wrap it up with an outlandish twist and a cameo those unfamiliar with the Star Wars EU are simply confused by. See? Tug on any one thread and the film unravels. In one sense, it’s a miracle the movie is as coherent as it is, since it began as a Lord and Miller comedy and ended as a mostly reshot Ron Howard space opera. In another sense, that’s probably why half the movie looks like it was filmed on the same soundstage using different kinds of ugly smoke for a backdrop. Silver lining: at least Solo‘s poor performance encouraged Disney to axe its other planned Star Wars prequel films, and if Solo is any indication, that’s really for the best.
46 – At Eternity’s Gate
Nominated for: Best Actor
At Eternity’s Gate is the most schizophrenic movie I’ve seen in quite some time. Not because of its subject matter–a period in the troubled life of Vincent Van Gogh, who painted magnificently but lived in alternating states of confusion, misery, and exultation–but because the movie vacillates so often and so wildly between bold, interesting choices and frustratingly bland and boring ones. I have no real quibbles with Willem Dafoe’s nomination here, as it’s an excellent performance of a brilliant, passionate person descending into madness without losing his essential nature, but the film as a whole struggles to turn what little we know about Van Gogh’s life into a coherent narrative. The result is something like a cross between a Wikipedia page and an experimental art film.
Gate is at its best when grappling with the philosophy and technique of Van Gogh’s inimitable style–scenes that use techniques like black and white, shot composition, or point-of-view to help the audience better understand the artist’s approach to painting are generally intriguing and rewarding, and the arguments Van Gogh has with Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaacs, characteristically excellent) speak to two equally valid perspectives on both art and life. But where the film flags is whenever it tries to tackle either Van Gogh’s mental illness (audio from one scene repeating over the next is one perhaps accurate but extremely unpleasant example) or the key points in a biography featuring little that is known for a concrete fact. The question of Van Gogh’s sexuality is hinted at but not really explored (man, what a year this has been for Oscar nominated bisexual erasure); the very thing he is most known for besides painting happens off-screen; and the film approaches the mystery surrounding his death through an ambiguous possible dream sequence. The end result lands somewhere between (or rather, at both) fascinatingly innovative and obnoxiously boring–ie., exactly the kind of “history comes alive” movie whose chief future audience is half-awake high school students in art class.
45 – “Detainment”
Nominated for: Best Live Action Short
The internet will tell you this short film is controversial, but with all due respect to England, there’s nothing wrong with true crime stories–even this one, a cinematic re-telling of the infamous James Bulger murder. Based on police interview transcripts and court records, “Detainment” focuses on the police questioning suspects Robert Thompson and Jon Venables about the abduction and murder of the three-year-old Bulger. Shockingly, Robert and Jon were both 11 years old. It’s a horrifying, yet darkly fascinating case, but what power “Detainment” exhibits comes largely from the facts, and indeed in spite of the filmmaking itself. Technique counts for a lot more than subject matter in live action short films, I think, and in this case writer/director Vincent Lambe’s creative decisions are generally misguided. The film is awkwardly repetitive, often cutting between one suspect being asked and answering a question to the other suspect doing the same (sometimes with “but the other boy said…”), and the whole tone feels more like melodrama than sincere empathy for either the killers or their victim. Perhaps most disappointing is Lambe’s insistence that he made the film to try and explore the largely unexamined motivations for the crime–I would argue that the proper way to do that is for the writer to use his imagination to concoct a scenario that makes sense to him. There are no answers in the records “Detainment” sticks to so faithfully. That makes this short film a failure on Lambe’s terms, as well as mine.
44 – “End Game”
Nominated for: Best Documentary Short
This year’s Netflix nominee, “End Game”, is a slow, boring documentary about a powerful, heartrending subject. Focusing on a group in San Francisco that does holistic palliative care, the film is at its best when introducing the viewer to people who know they don’t have long to live, whether because of extreme old age or the ravages of incurable disease. How they and their families deal with that imminent mortality is fascinating. Unfortunately, the film itself is long, slow, and shapeless, with no real structure and little visual interest. There’s actually some real wisdom in this short doc about how to approach death and the fear of death, but it’s buried under long takes of bland hallways while patients die somewhere off-screen. If I was handing out prizes for choice of topic, “End Game” might rank a little higher, but as an example of the form, it has, fittingly, the same unfortunate bloat that Netflix series tend to exhibit.
43 – Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Nominated for: Best Documentary Feature
Conceptually, Hale County is really interesting. It’s an experimental documentary, which is not something the Academy typically recognizes. It tries really hard to find a new way of seeing in general, and in specific seeing black lives and placing them within a more natural, rather than social, context. It’s about black bodies and black lives, but it’s also about trees, smoke, the sky, light, movement, and time. In concept this is really neat. In practice, however, it’s honestly pretty boring. It’s almost as if the movie consists of nothing but the B-roll footage shot for a different, narrative-driven documentary. Those few characters who do emerge from the seemingly random shots of people and nature are compelling on their own. There might have been a great documentary here that mixed the experimental passages with more thorough interview portions, but as it is, Hale County remains for me more curiosity than entertainment.
42 – A Star is Born
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing
There’s one truly great sequence in this latest remake in a series (the others unseen by me), and it works like gangbusters despite (or maybe even because of) the schmaltz. Unknown but talented songwriter Lady Gaga is invited to a concert by her newfound mentor, aging country star Bradley Cooper, and then, thrillingly, pulled on stage in front of a roaring crowd to sing the song she wrote for him. The sudden rush of fear and excitement, met by the intimacy of their bond on stage and then Gaga’s incredible musical performance, makes for an indelible moment of pure cinema–swooning wish fulfillment for any artist who’s ever dreamed of and feared the big time.
It’s too bad the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to that sequence. Overlong and underwritten, Star meanders aimlessly from one fabricated emotional high or low to another, so plotless that the movie seems to have fallen accidentally backwards into being more of a mood piece. There’s good acting work here from both leads, and strong cinematography and direction, but the emotional throughline feels shallow (no pun intended) and unearned. Example: does the film agree with Cooper’s character that Gaga’s is wrong to move toward a pop sensibility when chasing success? Does Gaga? The film’s posture toward authenticity is as constructed as everything else in the film. This and similar issues cause a lack of foundation that strangles the structure completely. From a reasonably strong first act, A Star is Born gradually slumps into misshapen bits of misery and unacknowledged misogyny until it reaches a frustrating conclusion to what is barely a story. Overall good craftsmanship and one great moment can’t save this Best Picture nominee from the low 40s on my list.
41 – Ready Player One
Nominated for: Best Visual Effects
Ready Player One is hemmed in and undermined at every turn by its shoddy and problematic source material, Ernest Cline’s obnoxious best-selling novel of the same name, but this is probably the best version of this movie given its decision to be as faithful as it is. Do we judge the RPO movie based on its overall thrust, nostalgia bait infused with toxic nerd masculinity and founded on nonsensical worldbuilding? Or do we judge it on its execution and craftsmanship of those ideas, the result of which is the most lively Steven Spielberg output since Minority Report? When RPO is in motion, it’s pretty glorious: the auto race, the zero-G dance club, and the climactic battle are all stand-out sequences, imaginative and thrilling lessons in visual storytelling. When RPO opens its mouth to speak, though, the problems become apparent, from trite writing to genuine puzzlers (why hasn’t pop culture advanced in the last 30 years? if people used the Oasis while walking the streets, wouldn’t they run into traffic?). Although the film benefits greatly by (necessarily) ditching the book’s first person perspective, which was a self-aggrandizing litany of references for the sake of references, the film doesn’t really do anything to address the key problem with the story, which is that the characters all commit the cardinal sin identified in the classic rom com High Fidelity: they believe that what you like is more important than what you are like. RPO the movie has at least one moment for many that stands out as a reference that thrilled them or touched them (for me, it was the extended riff on The Shining), but this is ultimately hollow. Especially when this adaptation’s chief thematic contribution is to look down its nose at the internet (sure, it’s easy to say “take a day off” when you have wealth, fame, and love). Ultimately RPO is an enjoyable ride. Just don’t think about, well, any of it.
40 – Incredibles 2
Nominated for: Best Animated Feature
Why start a sequel more than 10 years in the making right where the previous film left off? While Incredibles 2 is more technically advanced than its predecessor, it feels like the story hasn’t grown up a bit, even as society has around it. The original’s tale of a mid-life crisis as told through superheroics was quaint, to put it lightly, back then, but the simple flip-the-script of the sequel (this time it’s Mom who gets to go out and punch things, while Dad has to learn how to stay behind with the baby) feels downright prehistoric. The 1950s style, all Art Deco and jazzy score, is welcome; the 1950s values, not so much, and despite generally good execution it rankles that this is all writer/director Brad Bird could think of to do with these characters. But let’s get real: the biggest problem with this Pixar sequel is that it doesn’t have the courage to play straight with its themes. Stabs at feminist issues or society’s interest in superheroes are left dangling (particularly due to neglecting the superpowered side characters), and the first movie’s argument about the collateral cost of superheroics is deliberately, frustratingly sidestepped here. (After the opening sequence, we’re told that Bob is the problem, then see action sequences that can’t possibly cause collateral damage as staged, then a random judge handwaves all of it away which is NOT how this works, it’s not how ANY of this works.) And then there’s the problem with the villain’s plan, which makes absolutely no sense–why bother reviving discredited heroes just so you can discredit them again? There are good laughs in this movie and lots of exciting, very well animated action, but I can’t help but ask why Bird didn’t spend some of the decade-plus between one of the best Pixar films and this sequel writing a script more solid, more inventive, and more brave than this shaky effort.
39 – Mary Poppins Returns
Nominated for: Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design
I wanted to like Mary Poppins Returns… and I did! Go me. It’s an easy film to like, because all it’s trying to do is evoke the delight of the wonderful original, using songs, animation, special effects, cameos, and the power team of Emily Blunt (pitch-perfect) and Lin Manuel Miranda (also quite good). In fact, the climax of the movie appropriately involves Mary Poppins using her magic to turn back time, so to speak. What holds the movie back is that, although it gets the surface very right, it misses out on the chance to rival the original by failing to match it in substance. The original Mary Poppins isn’t just songs and sweetness–there’s a real story there, about how this strange, almost eerie woman arrives out of the sky and begins manipulating events to improve the outlook of everyone she meets, and especially Mr. Banks, a priggish paragon of a certain type of British masculinity, who learns to loosen up and enjoy his kids. Returns‘ chief problem is that, although it copies the form of the original quite handily (to the point of, if I may paraphrase Roger Ebert, demonstrating that a completely unnecessary song in the original, if reproduced with Meryl Streep instead of Ed Wynn, will be completely unnecessary in the sequel as well), its overall emotional narrative is quite confused. Where the 1964 movie is rock solid–Mary is strange and wonderful and a little dangerous, and through subtle efforts manages to cause a crucial crisis precipitating Banks’ change of character–the 2018 movie truly has no real arc to speak of, and no subtlety. The Mr. Banks parallel, grown-up Michael Banks, has rather the opposite problem of his father, pursuing an impoverished career as an artist and floundering financially in the wake of his wife’s death. Everyone’s attempts to solve an absurdly arbitrary problem (find Michael’s father’s stock certificates before the family loses the house to an ill-advised bank loan) fail, including Mary’s; then she deus ex machinas them out of it at the end, supposedly triggering Michael to rediscover his capacity for whimsy and joy (which, you’ll notice, wasn’t really his problem, and has nothing to do with his financial difficulties or their solution). Aside from that, the movie just doesn’t have that edge, that J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan sense of a children’s story with real wildness in the margins. Worst of all, of course, the songs just aren’t very good. Perhaps they should have let Miranda write as well as sing. In the end, Mary Poppins Returns is enjoyable enough, but a movie based entirely on reminding us of a classic should hit a little closer to the original (the way, say, Blade Runner 2049 did).
38 – Avengers: Infinity War
Nominated for: Best Visual Effects
In some ways it’s unfair to blame Infinity War for its shortcomings, since they mostly boil down to the shortcomings of the entire MCU experiment to date, and since the real outcome of this story lies in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. But on the other hand, bringing television-style serialization to big movie franchises is the whole idea, and the big penultimate episode is when any season’s set-up can truly be judged. Certainly Infinity War does itself no favors by focusing so much on Vision, a character which has never been fully fleshed out or even explained, and whose romance with Scarlet Witch (on which the whole movie turns) is likewise undeveloped and underwhelming both here and in previous entries. For a movie which is just several simple punch-’em-up stories intercut, and despite its length, IW does flow pretty well. But one of the better examples of moment to moment craftsmanship in the MCU canon (a few badly written scenes notwithstanding–looking at you, obvious Tony foreshadowing) just ends up exposing how pointless and hollow Marvel movies tend to be. Those entries which actually have a heart and/or a brain (the original Iron Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Black Panther) are few and far between, and the rest tend toward meaningless stories about pointless conflicts expressed through CG punching, beams of light, and boring villains. Infinity War, aptly named, is pretty much just that for virtually its entire two hours and forty minutes runtime, with the addition that the unbeatable Thanos saps tension from even the most well-choreographed punching. The film’s moral structure is so confused that many people walked away believing Thanos’ ideology is correct, while “the snap” is just the most visible and frustrating of the MCU’s eternal problem with telling stories that lack meaningful or lasting consequences–after all, it’s hard to feel anything about the apparent deaths of characters who are already contracted for the sequel. IW is largely just another step in the frustrating, banal death march that is the MCU, but it’s a particularly hollow and miserable step, one that exposes more clearly than ever what’s missing at the heart of the most popular franchise in the world.
37 – “One Small Step”
Nominated for: Best Animated Short
A young girl dreams of space. Her father, a humble cobbler, gives her love and support in the only way he knows how. But do children ever really know how much their parents sacrifice for them? “One Small Step” is a heartwarming short in a 3-D, Pixar-esque style–in fact, it shares some similarities with “Bao”, another nominee about a complicated relationship between a parent and child. In that film, a mother confuses sharing food with sharing love, and struggles to let her child find independence. In “One Small Step”, the father shows he cares by repairing his daughter’s shoes over the years. (In a way, this sort of thing may have less to do with parental relationships and more with ways to visually express relationships without dialogue. The number of animated films that are needlessly silent is ridiculous, in my opinion.) The drama of the piece is that, as the daughter grows up, she barely notices her father anymore, too frustrated in the struggle to achieve her dreams to see the ways in which he supports her. It’s only after she’s gone that she realized what she had, and that discovery spurs her on to success. The message for audiences of this Chinese/American co-production might be that behind every national hero is a family willing to sacrifice to help their child achieve greatness (and that children should learn to better respect their parents for it), but it’s easy to ignore the politics and just enjoy this cute (maybe too cute?) story. “One Small Step” doesn’t really push the envelope when it comes to animation or even narrative, and maybe it’s a little too simplistic, but there’s nothing all that wrong with it. Welcome to the mid-30s of this list, where you’ll find the nominees which are pleasant but of limited ambition.
36 – “Period. End of Sentence.”
Nominated for: Best Documentary Short
“Limited ambition” certainly doesn’t apply to the subject of “Period. End of Sentence.”, the only nominated documentary this year that isn’t a pile of misery and horror; it documents the efforts of a group of women in India who, with the help of American crowdfunding, founded a company that manufactures and distributes cheap, effective menstruation pads. As it turns out, periods are a strictly taboo subject in India, and this has some very practical effects in terms of holding women back from full participation in society. One woman reports not being allowed to pray in the temple while on her period; another had to drop out of school due to a lack of appropriate facilities. Only 10% of Indian women use pads, which are typically both expensive and not great quality, and the rest often use whatever unsanitary cloths they might have lying around. Enter the crowdfunded machine, designed for cheap and easy manufacture and given to a new company, run by women, that hires women to make pads and hires women to sell those pads to women. It’s like a feminist equality turducken, and although the film can feel a little bit like a commercial sometimes, it’s an infectiously happy look at people hopeful that they can help bring India’s women into a modern equality. The short doesn’t break any new ground, formally, and sometimes feels too light and structureless for its subject matter, but it’s certainly enjoyable and you wish these women all the success they could want.
35 – RBG
Nominated for: Best Documentary Feature
RBG is, of course, a documentary about RBG, the affectionate nickname of recent years for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Affectionate” seems like the right term for the film. As a celebration of this little old lady who keeps doing her job as a left-wing member of the highest court in America, and even as an exploration of how she became the unlikely subject of memes and internet culture, it’s warm and pleasant. But that approach necessarily means that RBG isn’t anywhere near as informative as it could be about Justice Ginsburg’s actual cases. The film does do a good job of going over her early history as a groundbreaking lawyer making significant progress on gender issues through brilliant, bold legal arguments, and that material is interesting and compelling, as is the film’s portrait of her as a good-natured workaholic who was married for decades to man who supported her extraordinary career at every turn. RBG’s bonfides as a feminist icon (and a comfort in these politically trying times) are firmly established. I just wish RBG had told me something really new, or gone more in-depth on her SCOTUS career or legal philosophy. This is the definition of a “feel good” doc, but I prefer my documentaries to be more powerful and less self-congratulatory. RBG is a nice lady and RBG is a nice movie; I just think the former deserved more from the latter.
34 – “Marguerite”
Nominated for: Best Live Action Short
Live action shorts are a tricky business. You have to establish characters and a situation in a short period of time, make it relatable and compelling immediately, and close with something lasting (usually a twist). It’s a demanding form, not least because there’s very little market or audience for it. Even for aspiring filmmakers, why bother making a short when a low-budget feature may not be that much more of a stretch financially and does more for your career? Perhaps that’s why almost all of the nominees this year are foreign language, funded by countries that put significant grant support behind short films. “Marguerite” is one such short, a Canadian production that also demonstrates why the short form is worth tackling: sometimes an idea just works best as a short story. In this case, it’s the story of Marguerite, an old woman who lives alone, and Rachel, who comes by once a day to check on and take care of her. When Marguerite learns that Rachel has a girlfriend, emotions and memories arise that lead the pair to a greater understanding of one another’s needs. It’s a quiet, gentle film that finds real sweetness in the brief exploration of the human desire for love and companionship, while tactfully swerving around any number of points where it could have gone wrong by becoming too saccharine or cliched. Simply but effectively shot, compassionately written, and movingly acted, this is a lovely little short.
33 – Vice
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling
It’s easy to look at Vice as a “lite” version of The Big Short, writer/director Adam McKay’s 2015 Best Picture nominee about the 2008 financial crisis. But that’s actually selling short (no pun intended) how different the two films are–and how much that comparison is to the detriment of the newer one. Covering the entire adult life of Vice President Dick Cheney in a whirlwind of styles, metahumor, and bizarre biographical asides, Vice is history as polemic. Its argument is that Dick Cheney is a heartless, power-grubbing monster who latched onto a toxic ideology for personal gain and rode it all the way to the White House (and the Iraq War). The problem with Vice is paradoxically two-fold: 1, yeah, duh, he’s a monster, and 2, the movie somehow fails to avoid humanizing Cheney.
McKay pioneered a rather thrilling and highly effective mix of satire, drama, and meta-humor in The Big Short, most prominently in the scenes that used celebrities to explain complicated financial instruments that, seven years past the start of the Great Recession, still weren’t well-understood by most people. That movie took a story few knew about–four groups of people who predicted the crash–and used it to explain a story that affected millions. Vice took a story most people knew and used it to explain what most people also knew. Cheney is a man who was publically perceived as being the real power in the George W. Bush administration, who is joked about often as being a monstrous asshole, who once shot a man in the face and got that man to apologize to him (a moment that is barely addressed or dramatized in the movie, weirdly enough). None of this is a new information or a new approach, and neither are the film’s attempts to tie Cheney’s history to the Republican party under Trump. (Sidenote: is anybody going to make a subtweeting film about the Watergate investigation or what? What’s the hold-up on that?) More problematic is the way Cheney is portrayed as caring about his daughter (even if he kind of subtly betrays her later on) and is given a self-justifying soliloquy without rebuttal or refutation at the end of the movie–the kind of movie monologue that could easily become a cinematic douchebag anthem, ala Fight Club or Wall Street, for the way it excuses and glorifies Cheney’s behavior and ideology. For all its faults, Vice has some very funny bits (any list of the best movie moments of 2018 might include both the Shakespearean scene and the fake cut to credits), some great performances (Bale and his makeup are spookily accurate, and I would have nominated Steve Carell’s squirrelly Rumsfeld over Sam Rockwell’s undercooked Dubya impression), and all the good intentions in the world. I respect its stylistic ambitions; I just wish that, unlike Vice President Cheney, it had aimed its shot a little better.
32 – Of Fathers and Sons
Nominated for: Best Documentary Feature
If they gave out awards based on how difficult and dangerous it was to make a movie, Leonardo DiCaprio would have an Oscar right now. (Oh, wait.) Anyway, the story behind Of Fathers and Sons is legitimately insane. Director Talal Derki essentially went undercover in a village in Syria controlled by Al-Nusra Front, also known as al-Qaeda in Syria. Talal befriended a family there whose father was a member of this Salafi jihadist group and lived with them for two years, pretending to be sympathetic to their political views and their fight against the Syrian government. His goal was to observe the nature and effects of radical fundamentalism on those who believe it and on their families, and the result is certainly horrifying. We see the father praising Bin Laden and 9/11 (and explaining that he named his children after famous terrorists and Taliban leaders). We see him trying to shoot one of “the enemy”. We eventually see his sons join a training camp to learn how to fight and serve, and the eeriest part of the film might be when the kids we have seen simply being ordinary young boys put on masks and uniforms and pick up guns and suddenly seem like terrifying, faceless jihadists. The film does well in showing us the banality of jihadism, however shocking and horrible it might be, and how it is passed from father to son like a disease. It’s also clear that these men are not so far removed from their counterparts in other countries; these could be Americans, undergoing militia training, spouting bullshit politics based on religion, driving around in cars listening to hate music. In short, Of Fathers and Sons is a very interesting and impressive movie–it’s just not a very entertaining one. Slow and structureless, lacking an overt perspective, the film suffers greatly as an entertainment and would have benefitted from either more of a narrative, more visual interest, or even just more of an ethnographic voice-over explaining and critiquing what we’re seeing. Is it wrong to ask that such a serious subject be approached also as piece of entertainment? I don’t think so. Better storytelling is how movies like this make a stronger impact; more entertainment value is how they find a wider audience for their message. Few are going to see this grim, austere documentary about bad people living harrowing and hateful lives. I’m not so sure that’s entirely the fault of the audience. A filmmaker should meet us halfway.
31 – “Animal Behaviour”
Nominated for: Best Animated Short
I don’t have much to say about this short, which was entertaining but conventional. Every year there seems to be at least one animated short film nominee that’s just a funny cartoon, and this is that one for this year. A fun, witty film about a bunch of animals in group therapy, “Animal Behaviour” features nice animation, strong voice acting, and lots and lots of animal jokes. Yeah, they’re pretty obvious–the pig is an overeater, the female praying mantis can’t commit to a husband, the parasite is codependent–but it’s fun to watch them bounce off of each other in a small room as the dog therapist tries to keep order, despite the intrusion of a gorilla with anger issues. The film is a little bit like a New Yorker cartoon come to life, or the old animated Dilbert TV show: wry, slightly absurdist, fast-paced. Amusing and inoffensive, this is cartoon comfort food. (My favorite part was the jokes in the background–funny titles on books the dog has published, or the puns on the doors of the other offices in the building.) Consider “Animal Behaviour” the middle of the scale for this year’s 52 nominees. After this, the balance tips in favor of better than average.
30 – Border
Nominated for: Best Makeup and Hairstyling
29 – “Madre” (“Mother”)
Nominated for: Best Live Action Short
Sometimes, but especially when it comes to live action short films, execution counts for everything. I’d argue that the story “Madre” tells is frustratingly, heartbreakingly incomplete, that it doesn’t achieve any kind of thematic depth, that all it does is present the full emotional weight of this one moment in the life of two mothers. But it does that so well that I was taken along for the ride, captured the way any good film captures your attention and engagement. That’s good enough. The production is as bare bones as you could possibly get: two women, an apartment, and a telephone, bookended by shots of an empty beach. The apartment scene is filmed almost entirely in one take (so smooth that it took a while for me to even notice). But the tension the short delivers is remarkable, due in large part to the performance by Marta Nieto as a young mother whose six-year-old son calls to tell her that he’s been left by his father alone on an unknown beach. Nieto’s pitch-perfect, rapid-fire delivery as she cycles through confusion, anger, terror, wrenching frustration at not being able to help her son and putting on a brave face for him suck you into the story and make it very real for you, even though all we’re seeing is a woman talking into a phone. Meanwhile, her own mother watches, equally powerless to help her daughter. The situation is universal, yet specific in detail, and my only real complaint about the short is that, given the way it ends, it feels like the movie wants us to draw the worst possible conclusion without actually giving us enough clues to nudge us in that direction. True ambiguity gives us reasons to both hope and despair, but “Madre” seems to gesture in the direction of the latter mainly by virtue of its limitation as a short film. But since writer/director Rodrigo Sorogoyen has already expanded the concept into a feature, it seems as though that problem has been solved.
28 – “Lifeboat”
Nominated for: Best Documentary Short
I have some problems with the filmmaking choices of the makers of this short doc, from the over-reliance on title cards for exposition to overall pacing and structural issues (while powerful, the last sequence probably should have come earlier, or been excised). That said, the subject matter is perhaps the most impactful and important of the short documentary nominees. “Lifeboat” follows a group of people whose self-appointed mission is to intercept and rescue incoming migrants who crowd themselves onto small, rickety boats with little or no supplies and try to sail from lives of hardship in Africa to a potentially better life in Europe. Many countries in Europe have reacted poorly to the influx of migrants from Syria and other nations in recent years, but “Lifeboat” looks squarely at the problem from several sides, forcing the viewer to conclude that these migrants are not statistics but individuals, people who often have heartbreaking stories and a demonstrated determination to endure any indignity to escape terrible situations. It’s easy to complain about immigration but a lot harder to see a cold, thirsty, hungry person in front of you and not want to give them food, water, and a blanket. That the film makes very clear the human cost of not helping these individuals only adds to its impact.
27 – “Black Sheep”
Nominated for: Best Documentary Short
“Black Sheep” consists of two parts intercut. First, an interview with Cornelius Walker, a black British man, filmed in close-up, his face centered in the frame, lit warmly from left and right, looking straight ahead at the camera and explaining what it was like for him to move from London (where his parents feared he would be the victim of crime) to Essex (where he was the outsider in an often racist white society). Second, the short doc includes frequent cutaways to dramatizations of Cornelius’ story, often showing us directly what he’s saying. I had two reactions to the movie while watching it: one, Walker’s narrative is arresting, troubling, and sad. Two, the dramatizations seemed redundant, if not entirely unnecessary. By design they’re not quite presented as if they are fiction cinema, but are shot and directed to feel more like abstractions or illustrations. This sense only builds as Cornelius reveals the extremes he went to to fit in (paradoxically) with the violent, racist peers at his new school–changing his clothes and his accent, straightening his hair, even lightening his skin and wearing bright blue contact lenses to seem more like them. The actor playing the young Cornelius displays these visual alterations, but the result is very odd, not quite real. But as Walker’s story continues, and he describes how he kept quiet when his new friends made racist statements, didn’t speak up about what he really thought, and even participated in violence against other black students, the emotional power of the reenactments begins to build. When the two forms finally meet–when Cornelius as he is today confronts the actor playing his younger, visually altered self in a stormy field–we realize that it’s all been heading toward this moment when memory and expression collide. The sense of shame and hurt echoing across the intervening years is so powerful, even as the short challenges the traditional boundaries of documentary filmmaking. Fascinating and thoughtful, repulsive and empathetic, “Black Sheep” is an achievement that deserves notice.
26 – “A Night at the Garden”
Nominated for: Best Documentary Short
Some might claim this isn’t really a documentary, since it assembles and presents archival footage without comment, but I found it to be a fascinating and stirring art piece, more exhibition than film. Whatever category it falls into, “A Night at the Garden” is a seven minute long capsule that brings to light a forgotten moment in American history–a night in 1939 when American Nazis held a rally at Madison Square Garden to a cheering crowd of 20,000 people. Imagery of George Washington next to swastikas has a sense of surreality (shades of the video game BioShock Infinite), but the grainy, black and white footage is all too convincing, especially when you pick chilling details out of the crowd (people performing the Nazi salute, a teenager thrilled by the violent removal of a protestor). This short film lets you draw your own conclusions, but one unmistakable takeaway for Americans is that yes, it can happen here. And did.
25 – Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Nominated for: Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay
There are two problems that hold back Can You Ever Forgive Me? from excellence, but the film does get a lot right. That sounds appropriate for a movie about a woman who was a complicated, divisive figure–a criminal and an asshole, frankly, but also a person of wit and strength. Nobody but Lee Israel could have pulled it off. Nobody else would have had to. What she did was forge and sell letters and other documents purported to be typewritten by famous authors, which Lee composed in their voice. Why she had to–in fact, why she chose to–is the subject of the movie, based on Israel’s own book on the subject. As stylistically pleasant as Can You Ever Forgive Me? is, all warm colors and jazzy music, focused on the friendship between two damaged queers, the film doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to its protagonist’s flaws. Lee’s agent spells it out for her, cruelly but accurately: “You have two options. You either become a nicer person–you put on a clean shirt, you stop drinking, you say please and thank you… Or you can take the time to go out and make a name for yourself.” Lee is simply too abrasive and unpersonable to find financial success (or even sustainability) as an unknown biographer, and after the last straw of an $82 vet bill she can’t pay, rather than clean up her act or compromise her art, she ends up choosing a third option: crime. The chief irony of the film is that, as Israel invents letters full of gossip, insults, and clever remarks in the voice of authors like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward, she discovers her skills as a writer are finally, concretely valued.
The movie’s weakness is not really at all in the subject matter, and certainly not in the performances–Melissa McCarthy is incredible as Lee and Richard E. Grant is justly lauded as Lee’s bitchy, equally scuzzy friend and co-conspirator. Can You Ever Forgive Me? makes its title question both very difficult to answer in the affirmative and impossible not to–its uncompromising vision of a woman whose faults and hurts have closed her off to nearly all other avenues and relationships is matched by its deep, abiding empathy for her choices, fears, needs, and regrets. No, the problem is one of stylistic approach. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a movie about a couple of poor, abrasive, troubled drunks barely holding onto life in New York. Had it embraced this essential scuzziness and presented itself with a grimier, outsider aesthetic, it would stand out more from the pack of drawn-from-true-stories Oscar nominees that fill up this year’s (and every year’s) slate. Had the movie gone in the other direction, and presented its tawdry story with gorgeous, classy cinematography and elegant music, that also might have worked as stark, ironic counterpoint. Instead, CYEFM? ends up right in the middle–decent but bland, stylistically unobtrusive, letting the script and performances speak for themselves. That the finished product is actually quite good and involving is to the credit of that strategy; but the decision also severely limits the film’s ambition and ultimately its potential achievement.
24 – Mary Queen of Scots
Nominated for: Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Expectations play an important role in both film criticism and, as it turns out, running a kingdom. I never expected to enjoy Mary Queen of Scots, and soon after returning to the Scottish throne, Mary learns that what people think you can do is what determines what you can actually do. It’s all about managing expectations. I’ve never been one for movies about royalty (uh, Black Panther and The Favourite notwithstanding), and my European history is pretty shaky, so at the beginning of Mary Queen of Scots I was like, “Who are these people? Which ones are the Protestants and why are they mad?” By the end of the film, though, I was like, “How dare you brook the rightful Queen of England, knave!” Scots isn’t a great movie–it’s too muddled, narratively and visually, and has some key ambiguities where they didn’t have the daring to illuminate their own version of history–but what it does do very well is get you involved and sweep you along in its story. The keys to the whole thing are Margot Robbie (fast building a reputation for herself as a distaff De Niro, versatile yet electric in this film, I, Tonya, and even Suicide Squad) as Queen Elizabeth and Saoirse Ronan (a wonderful actress who is well on her way to a great career) as Queen Mary. Both women, alike in dignity and intelligence, playing chess with one another on a board of nations, each attempting to protect not only her crown and her power but her dignity as well. It’s unfortunate that the film surrounds them with, let’s face it, hordes of identical white, bearded, growling character actors (after seeing this, I know what face blindness feels like). But I suppose in a way that makes the two leads stand out all the more, particularly as each pays careful attention to how they present themselves, their dress, their (Oscar nomination-worthy) hair and makeup. After some initial, somewhat confusing exposition, the film eventually settles into the story of how these two women, ostensibly opponents (only one can hold the English throne), have more in common than they think, in a world where men will always seek to possess, control, and betray them. Mary’s religious and social tolerance, combined with the regressive mores of the era, eventually boxes her into a place where she must marry and produce an heir, yet no husband will not scheme to supplant her as King. Mary’s attempts to protect herself ultimately lead to a thrilling final conversation between the two queens–and the tragic recognition that, for all their sisterhood, neither may give the other what she truly wants. The structure of the story, the way it guides your sympathies, and the performances are what make Mary Queen of Scots work about as well as a traditional take on the English monarchy ever could. (Later on in the ranking we’ll see what a non-traditional take can achieve.)
23 – A Quiet Place
Nominated for: Best Sound Editing
With A Quiet Place, I’m in the odd and conflicted position of having enjoyed it and of wanting to champion it as an original sci-fi/horror movie (well, if you ignore Bird Box, whose pretty similar book predates the film by a few years, even if its cinematic Netflix adaptation came second)–and also feeling like the movie was a little bit overrated. It’s a cool concept, and the filmmaking is effective at drawing tension from everyday objects, from toys to Christmas lights (and gawd, that fucking nail). The performances are strong. But by necessity A Quiet Place has minimal dialogue, and without it, exhibits serious difficulty in fleshing out its characters. There’s nothing that destroys horror more easily than not caring about the people who are in danger, and it’s to the credit of the direction, editing, and sound design that the movie works as well as it does–which is to say, moderately. Moreover, the film missed a real opportunity by including such a heavy, emotionally indicating score, blandly traditional horror movie music that’s like a hand on your shoulder, turning you this way and that and demanding that you be frightened RIGHT NOW. If A Quiet Place had had as little score as it does dialogue, it might have been uniquely tense and absorbing in a way few films are–you would have been focused on every tiny noise, the way the characters are, and fearful of what it might bring scuttling out of the woods.
I liked the movie’s creature design, I liked the simple story it wanted to tell about a family trying to survive, I liked the way it understands and works in the experience of deafness in a way that expresses something very meaningful about the communication and love between father and daughter. But questions kept intervening. Like, if there are so many people out there still alive, why hasn’t anyone else found a solution yet? Like, if you were in this situation, wouldn’t the last thing you’d try to do is have a baby, whose noise output would be impossible to control? Like, wouldn’t you pretty quickly come up with a handheld device that made noise when activated and thrown, as a way to distract the monsters without sacrificing your life in the process? In a movie whose characters’ development wasn’t hamstrung by the plot, these odd choices might be written off as flaws of the humans on screen. Here, they feel like oversights of the screenwriters, who either didn’t think their world through properly, or couldn’t figure out how to tell their story without these gaps in logic and explanations. A Quiet Place works, it’s interesting, I want to see more movies like it in the world, but these flaws are the reason it’s here in the decent-but-flawed-or-limited 20s of this list.
22 – “Fauve”
Nominated for: Best Live Action Short
My pick for the best nominated live action short, you’ll notice, is “Fauve”. Elegant and powerful, it has the simplicity and punch of a short story, complete in and of itself. Every sequence was compelling, and compelling in distinct and artful ways. Unhappy as it is, I responded to it with real admiration, and there’s a reason it outranks a fair number of features on this list. The story of two young boys who get in over their heads while playing alone at a construction site, “Fauve” accumulates sunlit dread, discharges it in a stark and gutting handful of shots, and then unblinkingly contemplates the tragedy that has occurred. A Canadian, French-language film, it begins with two boys played by Alexandre Perreault and Félix Grenier messing around in a gray, empty industrial area–broken down trains, empty buildings. Grenier’s arresting appearance, shirtless with a buzz cut, adds to the slight sense of unreality as the two boys come up with one off-the-cuff masculinity challenge after another: counting feats of strength, tricking each other by pretending to be hurt, and so on. Eventually they wander into the nearby pit mine, currently empty, and fall into what is essentially quicksand. Perreault panics and digs himself deeper in; Grenier at first disbelieves him, thinking it a trick of their game, just as he didn’t believe Perreault’s earlier insistence that he saw a fox in the trees. Soon enough Perreault has vanished beneath the surface of the gray muck. In the short film’s most fascinating sequence, a shocked and devastated Grenier climbs out of the pit in a series of shots whose gray, cracked landscapes are sometimes wide, sometimes close, sometimes in between, in a way that’s impossible to tell until the boy enters frame and resolves the fluctuating sense of scale. This portion of the film presents a fractal sense of frozen emotion, and mirrors the way the boys’ small actions had immense consequences. The final part of the film, in which Grenier is picked up by a woman driving, shows the reality of what’s happened, and his part in it, dawning on him. And then he sees the fox. Seamless, expertly made, incredibly chilling, “Fauve” is an unforgettable nightmare in shades of gray.
21 – “Bao”
Nominated for: Best Animated Short
I’ve seen “Bao” three times now, and there are definitely diminishing returns from this Pixar animated short, which originally played before Incredibles II and has now been re-released in theaters as part of the Oscar shorts program. But the essential concept is still a strong and emotionally affecting one, told through excellent animation and character design. An old Chinese woman is making dumplings when one of them suddenly comes to life, wailing like an infant. She decides to care for it, a process which is first amusing (when injured, she feeds it more dumpling filling), then touching, then sad, as the bao grows up and grows apart from her (going off to play with friends, leaving home to marry a white girl). The twist, of course, is that this lonely woman isn’t actually childless at all, but that the dumpling is a literalized metaphor for her human son, who likewise grew apart from his mother. When he returns home to find her weeping–and shares a sticky bun with her by way of apology–we realize that, for all their differences, both believe implicitly that sharing food is sharing love. It’s a sweet, warm little movie, and one that brings an interesting new diversity to the Pixar universe (happily, the short’s director and the first woman to direct a Pixar short[!], Domee Shi, is now developing a feature for the studio)–but what makes it great is the magical realism, especially the complex, wicked moment when in a bout of frustrated self-pity the mother eats her dumpling child whole–and then wails, realizing a full stomach doesn’t preclude an empty heart.
20 – Capernaum
Nominated for: Best Foreign Language Film
Capernaum, the Lebanese submission for Best Foreign Language Film, is a frustrating example of how the way you frame a story can be almost as important as what that story is. It contains some of the best material of the year, particularly in the middle act, but is held back by a pointless and slightly unbelievable frame narrative that reduces a powerful and emotionally complex portrait of a troubled kid in an uncaring society. Written and directed by Nadine Labaki, the movie focuses on Zain (played by an incredible young actor named Zain Al Rafeea), a 12-year-old boy who runs away after his parents sell his young sister into marriage to their landlord in lieu of rent. The theme of Zain’s frustrated rage over his inability to care for those younger than him is extended when he befriends an illegal Syrian refugee who leaves her toddler behind when she’s unexpectedly arrested. Left behind in her slum apartment with no idea where she’s gone, Zain tries to care for himself and the toddler, but the impoverished and war-torn society around him throws up one obstacle after another. The film’s implicit narrative about how Zain’s lack of support has caused him to grow up far too fast in a society that also won’t give him what he needs to succeed in caring for those around him is a brutal meditation on how the youngest and weakest are the ones who lose out in a world of chaos and danger. It’s completely involving, completely heartbreaking, and presented in such a clear and effective way that Capernaum could have been one of the year’s very best films. Unfortunately, it surrounds these amazing passages with an ill-advised frame story featuring Zain’s legal stunt of a lawsuit against his parents for giving birth to him, in scenes that don’t really work, that are too broad, and that slow the pacing down to a crawl right at the end when the film needed to snap its conclusions into place and get out of the way. It’s a real shame, but the achievements here are towering, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for Nadine Labaki’s next film.
19 – Never Look Away
Nominated for: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography
Between this and writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s previous Oscar entry, The Lives of Others, it’s clear that he has a real interest in the way organizing principles of society, whether far right or far left, can have a drastic limiting impact on the freedom of artists, even as they may use their art as a means to process and respond to the sweep of history’s great events. Where The Lives of Others focused on the 1980s and Communist East Germany’s milieu of paranoia and political in-fighting, Never Look Away interweaves an affecting romance with a confronting of the legacy of the Nazi period as seen through the life and times of a German painter. A very long yet very well paced movie, Never Look Away is most often reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s populist mode, and in a way its protagonist, aspiring painter Kurt Barnert (played by Tom Schilling and loosely based on a real person), shares some similarities with Van Sant’s Will Hunting, who also had a peculiar talent which a number of older men around him tried to direct. Will also had a heartfelt romance, and one of Never Look Away‘s strengths is the powerful, mostly unspoken love between Kurt and Ellie, which is often expressed through gorgeous, erotic sex scenes. The other great performance in the film is Sebastian Koch, who was the spied-upon playwright in The Lives of Others but here plays a memorable, eminently hateable villain, Professor Seeband, a gynecologist who participated in eugenics programs during the war. Seeband had Kurt’s beloved young aunt Elisabeth sterilized and sent to the gas chambers–and Seeband also happens to be Ellie’s controlling, domineering father. The best thing Never Look Away does is use that dramatic irony to fuel the film’s tension without ever paying it off narratively–instead of a dramatic confrontation, an open accusation, a justice that would have been too easy, the film shows how the gradually shifting of German society and Kurt’s attempts to find himself as an artist changes the power dynamic between him and Seeband, and allows Kurt to process his childhood trauma through his art, just as Germany processes their own national history of insanity. At three hours, the film is never less than epic but also never less than deeply personal, and the choices it makes are so fascinating and involving that I can forgive the movie’s rather traditional style and somewhat sidelining of the female roles. Even if the movie’s overall thrust is slightly enigmatic, there are so many great scenes and set-pieces here that this is truly one of the year’s best films. (And it all only gets better from here.)
18 – Minding the Gap
Nominated for: Best Documentary Feature
Documentaries are usually perceived as informational, there to tell the audience something they didn’t know before. But the act of making a documentary is the act of discovering and expressing something yourself, and can be deeply personal. In a way, it was inevitable that the age of iPhone video would start to produce some intimate outsider docs where filming was a way of life and not preparation for the feature that the filmmaker would ultimately assemble–just as the age of the camcorder did in films like Capturing the Friedmans and Tarnation. Minding the Gap fits squarely alongside those as a personal exploration of friendship, parenting, and life on the board that grew out of director Bing Liu simply filming him and his friends skateboarding as they grew up in the small town of Rockford, Illinois. What makes Minding the Gap so powerful is its youth and naturalism; the contrast between the unhappy reality of a group of friends who all come from damaged, even violent families and the grace and bliss they find when skating together seems to arise naturally out of life as much as it does from the film’s editing and structure. You can really feel that Liu and his young adult friends are still struggling to figure out how to rise above their childhoods, how to re-evaluate their friendships and relationships as they grow up–particularly Zack, who at one point seems well on his way to becoming the kind of abusive husband and father that all of the boys suffered from in the past. Raw, messy, not sure of the answers but asking the right questions, Minding the Gap is excellent and unique look at life through the eyes of those still learning how to live it.
17 – The Wife
Nominated for: Best Actress
I’m a sucker for movies with a literary feel, and The Wife doesn’t just have the feel of a short novel or short story, it’s about the act of writing itself–and specifically, who gets the credit. Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close give sharp, exquisitely attuned performances as a famous author–as the film opens, a newly informed winner of this year’s Nobel Prize–and that author’s long suffering spouse. Respectively. Or maybe not respectively. Through a series of tense, intimate conversations in which hints and subtexts run rampant (only partially illuminated by flashbacks whose overly broad style obscures as much as it reveals), the film gradually lets us on to the notion that it’s Close’s character who is in fact the truth author, in whole or in part, of the critically acclaimed books. It’s that question–in whole, or in part?–that needlessly complicates the film’s otherwise strong feminist message; to what extent is Close a victim of her husband’s ego and a patriarchal publishing industry she felt had no place for her work, and to what extent is Close merely a neurotic codependent whose distaste for the limelight and decision to privately take full credit for his contributions has left her husband trapped in a humiliating existence as a human nomme de plume? These are ultimately minor flaws in what remains a fascinating and rewarding drama with an enigmatic yet powerful performance at its center.
16 – “Weekends”
Nominated for: Best Animated Short
This is one of the two best animated shorts this year, and I’m frankly torn between it and “Late Afternoon”. “Weekends” isn’t as focused—it’s more of a sketch of a period in a young boy’s life, which perhaps befits its scratchy, pen-line animation style, filled with splotches of color and slightly jerky movements. What stands out in the film, about a young boy who spends weekdays with his mother and weekends with his father after a divorce or separation, are the details, so clearly drawn from memory. Mom plays piano; Dad blares “Money for Nothing” from the car stereo. At Mom’s his room is painted with handprints on the walls; his room in Dad’s highrise apartment has a view of the city and a wooden horse he clings to at night. Mom sets off the fire alarm cooking on the stove; Dad orders Chinese takeout that they eat while watching old movies. The contrast between his experiences with each parent is striking, and so are the many dream sequences that express the boy’s anxiety and ambivalence about this situation—particularly about his mother’s new boyfriend, who in his dreams bends down to show the boy the candle that rests where the upper half of his head should be. I’m not sure the story finds a real ending or conclusion, and maybe that’s appropriate, but whatever its weaknesses as a narrative, it stands out as a rich and keenly felt emotional experience.
15 – “Late Afternoon”
Nominated for: Best Animated Short
This is my pick for the best animated short this year. It’s predictable, but just beautifully conceived and drawn, a free-flowing journey through love and memory from Ireland. A forgetful old woman’s biscuit and tea (shades of Proust) bring her back to the joys of youth. This film is one of the two this year that truly said something about animation, not just with it; in this case, about color and line as defining who are and what we remember—the purple of an old suitcase, the red of a childhood dress… Details swim, coalesce, evoke, and shift away like a dream. It’s a beautiful depiction of life and of thought. A perfect little movie.
14 – Roma
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing
The latest from dazzling auteur Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Gravity) has everything you could want in a movie–gorgeous cinematography, heartfelt performances, powerful emotional moments, fascinating themes of race and class and gender. Everything you could want in a movie, really… except a movie. There is in fact plenty of “there” there, there’s just not much of a there for “there” to be. Stephen King calls books like this beautiful, high-class automobiles with no engine, and the same applies here. When Roma actually does work–at the furniture store, the hospital, the ocean–all of its phenomenal craft snaps into place with a great whack of emotion. The problem is that those moments are few and far between, and that the scenes between them seem to be more passing the time than they are truly building to the film’s real drama. This is obviously deliberate enough–it’s no accident that Cuarón, who wrote, directed, shot, edited, and no doubt cooked for craft services too, wanted the movie to have this shape. The beginning portions are slow, quiet observances of a house and the family who live there–“family” definitely including Cleo, the live-in maid who sometimes seems like a second mother to her employer Sofia’s children and sometimes, as when she admits to being pregnant or learns about her employers’ separation, seems like another, older child to Sofia. The middle portions of the film are a slow development of these two fraught situations, as Sofia struggles to carry on without her husband and Cleo looks to the father of her child for help, and finds none. The film’s ending is in part powerful for the way Cleo finally admits to her own feelings about her experiences–but I’d argue that keeping her so silent and opaque throughout the movie robs us of a chance to see a character grow and change and not simply be revealed. Even Roma‘s beauty and exquisite craftsmanship isn’t enough of a distraction from the, let’s face it, fairly boring parts of the film where a more dynamic story should live. I have no quibble with the themes at all, and there’s a lot worth unpacking here, especially how Cleo and Sofia learn to turn to one another for love and support despite the class divide after all the men in the world have let them down. But the result of this lack of a strong narrative throughout most of the film leaves Roma as something you can admire, for sure, but which won’t drive you anywhere.
13 – Free Solo
Nominated for: Best Documentary Feature
Free Solo is a fantastic documentary about an absolute lunatic. The fascinating thing about it is that it doesn’t necessarily disagree with that description. At the very least, Free Solo dedicates a significant portion of its running time to answer the question any audience member would have upon finding out that its subject, Alex Honnold, wanted to climb the 3000 foot tall Yosemite rock formation known as El Capitan alone with no ropes, which is, “Whyyyyyyyy?” Why attempt such a dangerous and pointless feat? The film has two answers to this. One is that Honnold is an odd person (one wonders if he might be on the spectrum) who has been climbing all his life, who has trouble expressing emotions, who doesn’t fear death; for him, El Capitan is simply his dream climb. The other answer is that for anyone, sometimes the point of choosing and pursuing an absurd, pointless, even dangerous goal is to see if you can do it, and to let it drive you to the peak of your abilities and resources. The most interesting part of Honnold’s climb isn’t even that he attempts it without the rope, but that here is a sport which is truly solo, something that looks totally inward and simplifies everything down to you and the rock–one single toehold between you and oblivion.
The hints of a documentary about the making of Free Solo are, in my opinion, almost more interesting. Filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin and their team have to figure out how to film Honnold’s climb while hanging from ropes on this sheer rock wall themselves, and without interfering with Alex’s process. That’s not an abstract consideration, and there are on-screen conversations about the ethics of even encouraging Alex to make a climb where one mistake will kill him (as happens to many of even the best free solo climbers), let alone having him feel pressured or uncomfortable due to the presence of cameras mid-climb and make a mistake because of that. There’s a very real possibility that they will film their friend’s death and they are very aware of this, and they work hard to avoid it. In the end, by marrying an interesting character profile piece to what is essentially a very unique and rousing sports documentary, Free Solo provides a complete emotional journey and an indelible time at the movies. Now that’s a feat worth the attempt.
12 – Mirai
Nominated for: Best Animated Feature
Like Bill Watterson’s beloved comic strip Calvin & Hobbes for the anime set, Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai explores the very first part of growing up for a young, imaginative boy through a lens of magical realism. Previously an only child, with the natural self-centeredness that comes with being four years old, little Kun finds his world changing when his little sister Mirai is born. These changes, particularly the frustration of Kun’s desire for constant attention from his parents, leads to apparent flights of fancy in which Kun meets such characters as his dog, Yukko, in human form, and his sister Mirai as she’ll be as a teenager. Are these mysterious meetings really happening, or are they some subconscious signal from the part of Kun’s mind which is ready to start maturing? Either way, these lyrical passages give Kun a brand new perspective on the people around him, from discovering that his mother wasn’t so different from him as a young girl to learning the truth behind family stories about his grandparents. By placing Kun in these situations of (relatively) heightened drama, these encounters inspire him to gain empathy and understanding and to begin taking on responsibility for his actions and for others. None of this would work as well as it does, however, without Hosoda’s incredible attention to detail and personality that emerges through the way his characters move in their environments. Small gestures sell the reality of Kun’s home and family, and the film doesn’t shy away from making Kun that realistic combination of adorable and annoying that little kids so often embody. Mirai is a low-key, relaxing movie about what it’s like to be small and just beginning to learn about the world and your role in it, a film so lovingly, assuredly formed that it feels like a dream of the child you might have been.
11 – First Man
Nominated for: Best Production Design, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing
In an odd way, Roma is a distaff First Man, and maybe the fact that I enjoyed First Man a little better says more about me than it does about the films. (Side note: “distaff,” a word which here means “female equivalent of”, has no real antonym, which is a shame.) Although on the surface the films couldn’t be more different–Roma is about a maid in Mexico City who deals with life changes surrounding a pregnancy, and First Man is about Neil Armstrong’s journey to becoming an astronaut and becoming the first person to set foot on the moon–there are a number of key similarities, especially in terms of both films’ risky decision of how to structure the narrative and our understanding of the central character. That decision simply pays off a little better in First Man, I thought. Damien Chazelle directs and Ryan Gosling stars in a movie which, after an opening sequence in which Armstrong’s daughter dies of an incurable disease, consists primarily of Gosling dramatically underreacting to bad news as he (and the space program, fraught with danger, as indicated by almost abstract scenes of darkness, color, and shaking images to convey the essential ricketyness of these machines) continues his efforts to get to the moon. Just as in Roma, First Man‘s protagonist is taciturn, a placid exterior hiding unknown emotions below. First Man turns this into something of a critique of a certain kind of masculinity, the strong, silent, square-jawed “just serving my country, ma’am” astronaut type; Gosling’s Armstrong doesn’t seem emotionally secure so much as completely unable to reach out to his friends, his wife, or even his kids (not wanting to explain to them that he might not be coming back from his journey), something which the film portrays to be as damaging as it is driving (particularly in one haunting scene where Neil, having almost died in a crash, comes home bleeding, upset and confused, but doesn’t want to tell his wife what happened and ends up leaving the house again as if nothing was wrong). Just as in Roma, the last few scenes of the film are visually and emotionally overwhelming, and we learn how the protagonist feels about the child they’ve lost. The difference is that, although both films trade this structure of dramatic opacity and closing revelation for a somewhat boring and plotless first two acts, First Man‘s ending retroactively makes its previous scenes much more compelling, whereas Roma‘s early and middle passages seem equally unexciting in retrospect as they did the first time through. I went into First Man assuming it had nothing new to say to me, no tension to draw out of a situation which was famously successful, and yet by the end of the film my heart went out to Neil, who went to the moon and back but is still separated from his loved ones by a thick pane of glass and the weight of a grief so heavy, at least in Earth’s gravity, that it can never be shared.
And here it is, my top ten Oscar nominees for the year. Not quite the same as my top 10 for the year, as the Oscars never get it quite right, but the remainder of this list are all great movies in one way or another, and well worth seeing.
10 – The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Nominated for: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song, Best Costume Design
Six short films, all Westerns, all interesting, all funny in a sense, all horrifying in another sense. That’s the Coen magic, isn’t it? It worked that way in Fargo, a depressing black comedy snowbound noir, and it worked that way in No Country for Old Men, a harrowing gallows humor chase picture, and it works that way here–in six different ways, really. In “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”, a singing cowboy is also a violent psychopath, and meets his match in a dual duel/duet that blends tongue-in-cheek cornpone sentiments with the disturbing underpinnings of an arrogant, itinerant gunslinger. “Near Algodones” features James Franco as an absurdly lucky, absurdly unlucky would-be bank robber in a shaggy dog tale about the twists and turns of fortune in the hostile Old West. “Meal Ticket” is a grim allegory about the relationship between talent and management–and, I’d argue, the importance of changing up your performance every once in a while. “All Gold Canyon” is about the lengths men will go to for gold, from disturbing the beauty of nature to betraying their own morality, and how patience and grit are the keys to getting what you want. “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” probably the most conventionally affecting story (thanks especially to fantastic performances from Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck), is about how it’s not enough, in a world of privation and peril, to protect and care for women; men have to help them know how to care for themselves. “The Mortal Remains” may be the last and slightest of the tales, but its placement in the film points to the overarching theme of the whole anthology: death, say the Coens, is the wages of success. Death humbles the arrogant, toys with the lucky, haunts the talented, waits patiently for the diligent, snatches hope from the hopeful. Death comes for us despite all our best efforts to master it through religion, marriage, gambling, trapping, hunting–or singing. All lives eventually come to an end. All films, too.
9 – Cold War
Nominated for: Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography
Has there ever been a more bleak depiction of romantic love than this? Love in Cold War is beyond all reason, through all time, despite all betrayal. In Paweł Pawlikowski’s rapid-fire epic, the sensations of love linger in gorgeous, emotionally resonant shots–two people discover their counterpart as the audience discovers a mirror, a woman’s overheated passions follow her dancing through a smoke-filled club, a church stands starkly against the sky promising consummation–while the costs of love seem to vanish in the blink of an eye between scenes. One scene cuts to the next in leaps across time, eliding prison sentences, overlooking years of longing separation, suggesting finally that the twisted relationship between Tomasz Kot’s lovestruck musicians and Joanna Kulig’s elusive singer overshadows everything else in the world, an addiction, an obsession without end, without regard for anyone else. As much as she loves him, Zula cannot stop hurting him, cannot stop betraying and leaving and manipulating, even as she finds herself always drawn back to him; Wiktor cannot stop chasing her, missing her, following her through jealousy, beyond borders, into dangers and traps, as he loves her so much. The two are locked into a love that sees no others, sees no problems, sees no solutions except to cleave harder to one another. That they do this against the backdrop of the Soviet regime is only fitting. After all, when two countries are locked in unspoken conflict, there is a focusing in on each other, a closeness of thought and intensity of interest at the nexus of the spectrum where love and hate begin to blend. I hurt you by proxy; you love me from afar. Mutually assured destruction. And then winter forever.
8 – Shoplifters
Nominated for: Best Foreign Language Film
Shoplifters doesn’t seem as though it has an agenda, but it does, and it’s well into a seemingly unassuming drama about an unlikely, unorthodox family that the film reveals its true intentions, which is to tear your heart in half. The understated filmmaking and naturalistic acting from writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda and his cast (Lily Franky as the shifty Osamu, Sakura Ando as well-meaning Nobuyo, Mayo Matsuoka as the melancholy Aki, Kairi Jō as the young boy Shota, Kirin Kiki as the widowed Hatsue, and Miyu Sasaki as “Lin”, the young girl they take in) is like a magician’s trick, distracting you with one hand while carefully gathering up the strings of your emotions with the other, so that the film can yank them all at once. Hardscrabble poor and crammed unlawfully into Hatsue’s small apartment, the “Shibata”s are a makeshift family of uncertain value. If family is sharing food, sharing wisdom, sharing bodies, sharing life, then surely they are a family, and the first two thirds of the film demonstrate in slice-of-life fashion how those connections are so vital in a world where all these people have is each other. The young girl whom they find on the street and take in as their own, whom they name Lin, is too young to understand more than that her new family cares for her and that her old family hurt and abused her. But her “brother” Shota, a little older, understands that the way Osamu has led the family and the children especially into a life of petty theft in order to survive is, at the last, fundamentally wrong, and his refusal to allow Osamu to continue to do the same with Lin is the little stone that brings the whole mountain down. But even as the police uncover the truth behind the “Shibata”s’ origins and lives, we can’t help but be torn between the very real warmth the family made together and the equally real knowledge that when the chips were down the family couldn’t hold together, couldn’t truly act selflessly for one another. We see how important it was for all of them, especially Osamu, to have a family together, and we see how they ultimately fell short. Everybody in this so-called family was ultimately getting away with something, putting an entire certain kind of life in their pocket and walking out the door with it. But eventually the price comes due. Deeply affecting, skillfully made, this is one of the best films of the year.
7 – First Reformed
Nominated for: Best Original Screenplay
Is it really fair for me to have been so powerfully affected by First Reformed, a movie that is basically Paul Schrader reworking and directing his own script for Taxi Driver, which was once my favorite movie? Maybe, but I’m going to laud it anyway. That seems fitting, maybe, for a film about the agony of doing things you know are wrong because you can’t see any other option. Ethan Hawke plays a priest but he might as well be another Travis Bickle, riding the roads; what matters is the way both are lonely men whose essentially anonymous profession forces them into contact with the disturbing humanity around them. For Bickle, it was a seething New York mass of politicians, pimps, and other users that triggered first his unbalanced psychology and then an outpouring of violence; for Hawke’s Reverend Toller, already suffering from a crisis of faith, serious alcoholism and a diminished sense of purpose as the reverend at a small house of worship overshadowed by the nearby megachurch, the deadly incitement is his conversation with parishioner Michael, an environmental activist who ultimately commits suicide in part as a statement against environmental destruction and the specter of climate change. Toller, already doubting quite a lot about himself (Schrader repeats here the Taxi Driver conceit of a character’s journalistic voice over revealing disturbing depths), is almost infected with Michael’s anxiety, and then events proceed from there with a certain amount of inexorableness. Like Taxi Driver but more intellectualized and austere, First Reformed is ultimately about loneliness–loneliness from God, from community, from women, from family–and how in places where loneliness is not treated or given support, the likely result is a harrowing spiral toward despair. Anchored by Hawke’s measured, raw performance of a man increasingly out of control of his emotions, and hemmed in by the film’s 4:3 aspect ratio and stark, wintry photography, this is a deeply absorbing and deeply upsetting experience.