Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in Barbie.
Reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie run a critical eye over the list of Oscar nominations.
SHE SAW
There was a lot of hubbub around Saltburn - mostly about Barry Keoghan lustfully drinking Jacob Elordi’s bathwater - but hubbub doesn’t equate to quality film-making, and I’m with the Academy on this snubbing. Despite a promising start, director Emerald Fennell fails to land the plane with Saltburn, which descends into lazy storytelling and a nonsensical conclusion. There is, however, one category for which this film deserves a mention and that’s Best Supporting Actress. Rosamund Pike is exceptional as the filterless matriarch, and without her performance holding the film together, Saltburn wouldn’t even be in the conversation. She can have America Ferrera’s spot in that category - her role in Barbie was dull as dishwater.
One of my favourite films of 2023, The Iron Claw - about a professional wrestling family, the Von Erichs - has been completely ignored by the Academy. I presume this is the fault of A24, which didn’t really give the film a fighting chance (pun intended) by releasing it in late December and clearly failing to get enough of the Academy to see it in time. Or perhaps they spent their entire Oscars campaign budget on The Zone of Interest and Past Lives, which are both up for Best Picture. The Iron Claw is quintessential Oscar-bait: a heartbreaking true story with an impressive physical transformation by its lead actor, Zac Efron, and a slew of spectacular supporting performances.
The absence of Wes Anderson from the Best Screenplay and Best Director categories for Asteroid City is unsurprising to me. Anderson continues to churn out meticulously designed films with quirky characters but has failed to ascend beyond that into meaningful or emotionally resonant filmmaking. The film is more notably absent from the Best Production Design category. The production took over an entire area in rural Spain, where the set was constructed from scratch, even importing soil in the exact tone that Anderson wanted - does no one in Hollywood care about the environment? It’s undeniably an expertly designed film, but I think we’ve all got a bit of Anderson fatigue. He’s going to have to do something completely new and revelatory to be recognised by the Academy in the future.
Expected to garner Sofia Coppola a Best Director nomination and its star, Cailee Spaeny, a Best Actress nomination, the Academy made the right choice in recognising the mediocrity of Priscilla. I’m sure Priscilla Presley had an interesting life, but it was completely flattened in this film - she came across as passive and uninteresting - and the film lacked Coppola’s usual dynamism.
Despite much brouhaha about the notable Barbie snubs - Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie - let’s take a moment to acknowledge that a film of this nature is on the ballot at all. The Academy, in all its uptight seriousness, doesn’t typically reward blockbusters like Barbie - we don’t expect to see the Avengers films up for Best Picture, for example. It’s a sign of the times, and the flailing Hollywood economy, that Barbie is being recognised at the Oscars at all. Still, it’s a travesty that Gerwig is up for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture but not Best Director - we can put that down to the fact that former directorial nominees get instant voting rights, and of the 476, only eight of those have been women. That boys’ club just can’t help themselves when they see Scorsese, or Nolan for that matter, on the ballot for their interminable “masterpieces”.
HE SAW
I could not have been more delighted that the overblown hype machine of Air didn’t get a single Oscar nomination. The movie is so bad that I wondered if the title was a troll – Affleck and Damon saying: “No, we’re not giving you your money back; we told you what it was made of.” This morally empty film about marketing was itself a triumph of marketing, not just in the way it pushed the easy buttons of its in-built audience of Nike/Jordan lovers, but in the way it sold a story about its cinematic bona fides that critics at the time were bafflingly willing to lap up. History will judge it harshly. The Academy already has.
A windy exploration of a director’s ability to test an audience’s patience, bladder and ability to remember more characters than in the rest of the year’s nominated films combined, this movie, like Air, will not survive the test of time, in part because audiences have so little left after watching it. I hope every member of the Academy who voted for this nuclear-scale disaster is forced to watch a version of the ceremony in which winners have unlimited time for speeches.
As good a short film as it’s possible to make, but is it a short film? The Academy thinks so, having nominated it for Best Short, but at 39 minutes, it’s closer to a feature, and once the seemingly growing number of old men who believe 200-plus minutes to be reasonable are dead and the leading platform for movies is TikTok, it probably will be. If it is a feature, this is among Wes Anderson’s best, maybe second only to Rushmore, since his increasingly obsessive focus on shot curation seems to be interfering with his ability to sustain anything over 90 minutes (see Asteroid City). This is a jewel box of a movie in which your interest will never waver, and only partly because it won’t have time.
This movie is so sweetly affecting, with such a firm and balanced grip on life’s darknesses, light and comedy, its hopes fulfilled and dashed, its ultimate meaninglessness punctuated by the power of human connection, that writer David Hemingson has instantly become one of our most important modern philosophers. And while most lead roles in Hollywood require only one of the interchangeable chunks of eye candy whose reputations rise and fall on factors largely unrelated to their abilities, this movie could not have existed without the genius of Paul Giamatti, one of the industry’s few true artists. If Bradley Cooper beats him to best Oscar for his self-indulgent, self-directed turn as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, we may as well give up on the Oscars. We should probably do that anyway.
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