Last Cinema Standing: The Fabelmans

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Saturday, March 11, 2023

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Picture

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Picture

The nominees are:

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Banshees of Inisherin

Elvis

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

TÁR

Top Gun: Maverick

Triangle of Sadness

Women Talking

It has been a while since a single movie so bulldozed the competition all season as to take all the guesswork out of Best Picture. So long, in fact, that I have never covered a season like this in such depth. Honestly, it’s been kind of lame and exhausting. Now, I am aware enough of myself to recognize that if it were a film I loved running away with the top prize, I would probably enjoy it quite a bit more. I’m sure I could wax poetic all day every day about Women Talking or The Banshees of Inisherin or TÁR. The truth is I ran out of things to say about Everything Everywhere All at Once on Day 2.

I will refrain from writing a eulogy on the year in film that was 2022 until after the Academy Awards are over on Sunday, but I can’t help but feel a little sorry that a year that was so excellent – both overall and at the Oscars – will end up mostly defined by a film I found so dreadful. But, as I’ve said a number of times before, they don’t erase all the other movies on Monday. The great ones will still be around to be watched and shared and admired, no matter what wins Best Picture.

In order of least likely to most likely winner:

Avatar: The Way of Water – Kudos to James Cameron on continuing one of the most remarkable runs in film history. He made the highest grossing film of all time. Then, he did it again. Then, he took 13 years to make a sequel, delivering it into a film universe that had changed immensely since the last time he conquered the box office. Virtually no one thought this was a good idea or likely to work. How to follow up the biggest movie in the history of movies? Well, we doubt Cameron at our peril. Avatar: The Way of Water isn’t entirely successful, but it’s successful enough, and even that is a miracle.

Women Talking – This is the best film of 2022. As the years go on, more people will catch up to that realization. They will get a look at the artistry of the filmmaking, the poignancy of the writing, and the brilliance of the acting, and they will wonder how this got so overlooked by the Academy. The silver lining is that great films don’t go away. They are continuously discovered, passed along by film fans to other fans until they take their rightful place in the canon.

Triangle of Sadness – If Ruben Östlund’s superb satire were going to challenge for Best Picture, Dolly de Leon would have snuck into the lineup for Best Supporting Actress. It’s a shame. The success of the film hinges on her turn in the third act, and she carries that weight in a way few other actresses could. There is irony in the Academy nominating for Best Picture a film specifically meant to skewer the most visible of the membership, but they might have missed that. It’s okay. I’m sure Östlund is chuckling to himself.

Top Gun: Maverick – The movie that saved movies, of course it had to be nominated for Best Picture. But, something feels a little off about the nomination, doesn’t it? Why does the movie succeed? There are probably two big things: the stunningly choreographed action sequences and the star power of Tom Cruise. So, why were neither director Joseph Kosinski nor Cruise nominated for their work? If you think the movie is successful, those are the two people most responsible for its success. (Note: Cruise is nominated as a producer, but we’re talking about star power as the lead of the film.)

The Fabelmans – Steven Spielberg feels a little like Thanos at this point: He is inevitable. He has made nine films since 2011, and six of them have been nominated for Best Picture. No other modern filmmaker can boast a resumé like that. A couple of the nods have felt like obligations on the Academy’s part, like The Post or Bridge of Spies, two movies I like. Lincoln, on the other hand, was a major player in 2012. The Fabelmans feels somewhere in between those two spaces. It picked up a number of major nominations and it has admirers within the Academy, but it’s not threatening to win the big prize.

All Quiet on the Western Front – This is the dividing line. The five movies above are the also-rans, the “just happy to be here group.” The next five are the ones that would be battling it out for the win if it weren’t for the fact that the top film on the list is utterly dominant. Edward Berger’s film is a grand accomplishment and should instantly vault into the discussion of greatest war films of all time. It builds on the modern classics that came before it such as Saving Private Ryan and Letters from Iwo Jima to deliver a totally immersive experience. To paraphrase another filmmaker talking about his own war picture, this movie is not about war; it is war.

TÁR – In the Best Picture lineup this year, there are multiple war movies, a big-budget action-adventure flick, a multiverse spanning sci-fi mashup, and a biopic of one of the most famous figures of the 20th century. Despite that, Todd Field’s TÁR is the one that feels the most like a grand, epic achievement. It’s There Will Be Blood in an orchestra pit. It’s Barry Lyndon goes to the symphony. It has all the hallmarks of a movie that will be discussed and debated for the next 50 years. It doesn’t need to win Best Picture to leave a mark on cinema history. The mark has been made.

Elvis – I feel odd putting Elvis this high in the rankings when Baz Luhrmann failed to garner a Best Director nomination, but it’s been a weird season. As it stands, I expect Elvis to be the next big winner after Everything Everywhere All at Once, taking home anywhere from three to five statues. It would hardly be the first time a big, flashy movie with a showy lead performance wowed voters into showering it with awards. It’s just that in a year with this many tremendous films, it’s unfortunate to see the Academy falling in love with “most” over “best.”

The Banshees of Inisherin – In 2017, it felt like Martin McDonagh got really close to winning it all with Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. This year, it feels like he got even closer with The Banshees of Inisherin. As mentioned before in this series, McDonagh has said he wants to focus on moviemaking as he moves forward in his career. More than likely, that means he will be back in this race again, and he will probably get that Best Picture statue someday. One hopes it is for work as formidable as this. Knowing McDonagh, I have no doubt.

Everything Everywhere All at Once – What more is there to say? This film premiered at SXSW on March 11, 2022. The world fell in love with it. One year and one day later, it will be crowned Best Picture of the year at the Academy Awards. Some started predicting it for the big prize at that premiere. Kudos to them. I thought it was wishful thinking, forecasting with the heart, not the head. But, damned if the whole film industry didn’t just embrace this thing with open arms in ways I have found truly shocking. I don’t get it. I probably won’t ever get it. But, I don’t need to get it. It’s happening.

The final analysis

Sometimes, weird things come to pass. When Crash won in 2005, it basically proved that we can never be 100 percent sure of anything. But, even Crash had some bit of precedent, if only in hindsight, in winning the SAG ensemble award. If we’re being honest, it also had a sizable voting bloc of homophobic, anti-Brokeback Mountain folks.

There is no precedent for anything other than Everything Everywhere All at Once winning Best Picture. It has won every important guild award – PGA, DGA, SAG, and the WGA. It has won virtually all of the below-the-line guild awards, too. It has all the important Oscar nominations – Director, multiple acting nominations, Screenplay, Editing, along with a few others just for show. The industry has fallen absolutely head over heels in love with this movie.

There is no conflict here. There’s no scrappy underdog like CODA or Parasite. There’s no one campaigning hard against it for political reasons, like the year the anti-Netflix crowd tanked Roma in favor of Green Book. There’s not even an interesting two-horse race like Birdman vs. Boyhood or Moonlight vs. La La Land. It’s just pure sweep all the way down the line.

This is like that run from 2010-2012 when The King’s Speech, The Artist, and Argo all just dominated from start to finish. Those were all years when the movie of the moment triumphed over the movie that would prove to have staying power. Proof, perhaps, that the Oscars are a snapshot of what the movie industry is feeling at any given time. Academy members aren’t voting based on how history will remember their choices. They’re voting for what feels good right now. Making history is incidental.

It really doesn’t matter if Everything Everywhere All at Once holds up the way Women Talking will or TÁR will. That’s not the point. The point is that for one week of voting in March 2023, a lot of people just really had a good time with this strange little confection. Like cheap champagne, it feels great while you’re drinking it. Worry about the hangover tomorrow.

Will win: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: Women Talking

Should have been here: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

A note about my favorite snub: No documentary has ever been nominated for Best Picture. I’m not even sure what the Academy rules are anymore on films competing for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Picture. Doesn’t matter. I don’t feel any need to be beholden to their rules in dream casting my ballot. Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is poignantly felt, deftly executed, and stirringly resonant. It is without question one of the 10 best films of the year and would absolutely be on my list of Best Picture nominees.

Next time: We’re going to rank all the nominated movies! That should be fun.

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Supporting Actor

Best Supporting Actor

The nominees are:

Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin

Brian Tyree Henry in Causeway

Judd Hirsch in The Fabelmans

Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin

Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once

The acting categories are truly exciting this year. It is rare that we have this much drama in four of the biggest awards of the night. I love it. Last year, I broke down the previous 15 years of winners across all four acting categories. Across 60 winners, there were at most eight that could even be considered surprising, and the real number is probably closer to three or four.

Last year was about as bland as they come with Jessica Chastain, Will Smith, Ariana DeBose, and Troy Kotsur sweeping their way to the Academy Awards stage with virtually no (pre-show) drama. I am not saying they were not deserving winners, particularly DeBose and Kotsur, but I am saying they were predictable. And, that’s not a healthy place to be for the future of this awards show.

This year, on the other hand, there’s drama all down the line. Actress is a toss-up between two worthy performers. Supporting Actress is a free-for-all. Actor is a fight to the finish between the up-and-comer and a comeback story for the ages. And, while Supporting Actor seems the most locked of any of them, there is one little stat that stands in the way of predicting a clean sweep for the frontrunner. Exciting stuff. Let’s get to it.

Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once – As much as I might prefer other performances in this category, it’s hard not to be happy for Quan. It’s the comeback of a lifetime. Even Brendan Fraser has been working steadily overseas and on television. Quan was all but out of the game. Before making Finding ‘Ohana in 2021, he had not acted in a feature film since 2002. It’s a cliché, but the put-upon husband/universe-hopping secret agent Waymond Wang is the role of a lifetime, and Quan did not miss his chance to leave a mark.

Though the script often leaves the actors high and dry, Quan makes the most out of what he’s given. Whether in the In the Mood for Love-style romantic drama pastiche or the Matrix-style fight sequences, Quan rises above the mess around him and pulls real emotion out of a character that’s pretty one-note on paper. Quan has already filmed the next Russo Brothers movie – a sci-fi action adventure movie, if you can believe it – and I’m sure he’s great in it. But, here’s hoping all this attention nets him some opportunities to dig into some real characters.

Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin – Keoghan has been unforgettable in every movie he has appeared in. Whether in scene-stealing bit parts like The Green Knight or weightier supporting roles like Dunkirk, he brings an unmistakable blend of intensity and vulnerability to every role he plays. Though he had been around for a few years, I first noticed him in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer as an implacable villain hellbent on revenge. I called it the best supporting performance of 2017. He outdoes himself in The Banshees of Inisherin.

We have seen the village idiot character in plenty of movies before but never portrayed with this much pain and pathos. Keoghan plays Dominic as a man bound by circumstance, good-hearted in a cruel world, not wholly innocent but moral in his way. There is a gentleness to everything Keoghan does in the role, a touch so light you wonder if you felt it – that is until the tears start falling. It is a beautiful piece of acting, and I look forward to many more years of Keoghan’s work.

Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin – If we’re being honest, Gleeson is really more of a co-lead with Colin Farrell in this picture, but Farrell is the movie star, and Gleeson is the character actor, so it was always going to go this way. Regardless, Gleeson is perfect in The Banshees of Inisherin as a musician who just wants to use the time he has left composing songs and thinking about the weightier aspects of life.

Gleeson is an actor’s actor, great in everything he does, but he has been at his best working with Martin McDonagh and McDonagh’s brother, John Michael McDonagh. Between the two filmmakers, Gleeson has appeared in four features and an Oscar-winning short, and they comprise the best work of the performer’s long career. Maybe it’s because they’re countrymen, or because Gleeson just understands the rhythms of their writing, but whatever it is, it’s magic.

Brian Tyree Henry in Causeway – Because of the vagaries of moviemaking and the way release dates can shift around, sometimes an actor who has been working a while will seem to burst on the scene and be everywhere. I think a lot about 2011, when Jessica Chastain had Take Shelter, The Tree of Life, and The Help all come out within a few months of each other. Henry experienced that to the nth degree in 2018, when he had seven movies in which he appeared come out in theaters. His brilliance in Widows and If Beale Street Could Talk could not be denied, and it has all led up to this.

Causeway is a strange little film. It was sold to audiences as something of a comeback for Jennifer Lawrenece, but Henry steals every scene they’re in together. He doesn’t get a ton to do in the film – honestly, neither of them does – but he does what he can as a mechanic who befriends Lawrence’s wounded war veteran. It is an understated performance, but if the movie works at all for you, it is because Henry grounds the events in an emotional reality that brings you into the characters’ world.

Judd Hirsch in The Fabelmans – Hirsch has already made Oscars history with this nomination, breaking none other than Henry Fonda’s record for the longest gap between Academy Award nominations. Fonda went 41 years between his nods for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and On Golden Pond (1981). Hirsch’s previous nomination came for Ordinary People in 1980, 42 years ago. Hirsch is also now the second-oldest acting nominee ever at 87 years old. He is three months younger than Christopher Plummer was when he was nominated for Supporting Actor in 2018 for All the Money in the World.

With this nomination, Hirsch adds his name to the list of one-scene wonders to strike it big with the Academy, joining the likes of Ned Beatty in Network and William Hurt in A History of Violence. Hirsch is only in The Fabelmans for a few minutes, but as Great Uncle Boris, he delivers the central theme of the movie to little Sammy Fabelman and makes plain the conflict that will haunt Sammy (and Steven Spielberg) for the rest of his life. Art or family? Family or art? It’s quick and to the point, and Hirsh holds nothing back.

The final analysis

I have talked a lot over the years about the BAFTAs as the best predictor for the acting categories at the Academy Awards. I have never felt less sure about that than this year, and that uncertainty holds across all four acting categories. So, bear with me as I feel this out.

Quan has won basically everything of importance, except the BAFTA. He has given humble, heartwarming speeches every time he has been given the opportunity. He is somebody for whom his fellow actors root. Everything Everywhere All at Once appears to be a merciless frontrunner for Best Picture, gobbling up every other award it is within striking distance of. I see no good reason why Quan won’t win this in a walk.

That said, Keoghan did win the BAFTA. Over the past 10 years, the BAFTAs have matched the Oscars in Supporting Actor eight out of 10 times. The two that didn’t: Barkhad Abdi won the BAFTA for Captain Phillips in 2013, while Oscar winner Jared Leto wasn’t even nominated by the Brits for Dallas Buyers Club; then, in 2016, Dev Patel won the BAFTA for Lion, while Mahershala Ali went on to win his first award for his work in the Best Picture-winning Moonlight.

In the past five years, they have matched every time. But, this year feels much more like 2016, doesn’t it? Patel is a beloved British star who did career-best work in Lion, much like the Irish Keoghan delivering his best work in a movie the Brits liked quite a bit more than they liked Everything Everywhere All at Once. Meanwhile, Ali was the heart and soul of the movie that went on to win the top prize, much like Quan is for this year’s Best Picture frontrunner. Never mind that Keoghan actually delivers the best performance of the group. The winner will be Quan.

Will win: Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin

Should have been here: Nicolas Hoult in The Menu

A note about my favorite snub: As the amateur foodie who gets taken down a peg, Nicolas Hoult is pitch perfect in The Menu. He is exactly the right kind of infuriating, making you root for his downfall throughout the whole film. Then, when it comes, Hoult turns it around and actually makes you feel bad for the fate that will befall him.

Next time: Supporting Actress

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Original Screenplay

Best Original Screenplay

The nominees are:

The Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

TÁR

Triangle of Sadness

As far as I can tell, this is just the second time in the history of the Academy Awards that all five nominees for Best Original Screenplay are also Best Picture nominees. The other time was two years ago, when Promising Young Woman beat out Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, Sound of Metal, and The Trial of the Chicago 7. We should expect to see this happen more often as long as the Academy hangs on to having 10 nominees for Best Picture, but it will be interesting to watch develop in the coming years.

For as much as Hollywood relies on sequels and franchises and remakes for their box office hits, original stories are the lifeblood of the movie industry. This is where the real innovation happens, where the movies we’ll be talking about in 20 years or even 50 years show up. This is where you get Pulp Fiction, Network, The Apartment, and Citizen Kane, all winners of this award. This is where the future of film scholarship resides.

Everything Everywhere All at Once – How to describe Everything Everywhere All at Once? It’s a comic sci-fi action fantasy drama inspired as much by Saturday morning cartoons as The Matrix. In other words, it’s everything and the kitchen sink. And the whole kitchen. Hell, throw in the whole damn house. You’d hardly notice it given how overstuffed and underbaked this whole enterprise is (I promise I’m going to say some very nice things about the actors in the coming days).

I’ll try to paraphrase some of this film’s many supporters to explain its presence here: They would have you believe it expertly balances the emotional nuances of a sincere mother-daughter drama with its genre-bending universe-hopping action fantasia. They might argue it works as pure entertainment but ultimately earns its emotional catharsis by the end. I don’t think it does any of those things, but I am in the extreme minority on this – or at least, that’s what the film’s fans would have me believe.

The Banshees of Inisherin – Martin McDonagh has three nominations for Original Screenplay from four movies in his filmmaking career. He’s tied with a bunch of people who have three career Original Screenplay nominations, but there are only 10 people ahead of him. In various interviews this awards season, the preeminent playwright has said he’d like to focus more on making movies in the future, as opposed to plays. Which is to say, I don’t expect many of those 10 people to stay ahead of him for much longer.

I love In Bruges, McDonagh’s first screenplay. It’s a fun, brilliant little movie that was also nominated for this award and should have won it (Milk won that year). That said, this is the best work McDonagh has yet committed to screen. From a simple premise – what if two men stopped being friends? – the filmmaker rings out an almost impossible amount of pathos and empathy. With that classically dark Irish humor and an ear for the perfect turn of phrase, McDonagh turns a quiet human drama into an epic tragedy. It’s like a magic trick, and only McDonagh knows how it is performed.

TÁR – I had a chance to read the screenplay for TÁR. The opening page alone belongs in a museum. The scene setting, the detail, the rhythm – it is, in a word, masterful. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Todd Field’s work. He has written and directed three feature films, and he has been nominated for his writing for each one. For his first two films (In the Bedroom and Little Children), he received Adapted Screenplay nominations. This is his first produced original screenplay, and it’s a doozy.

A fascinating thing keeps happening with people when they finally see this movie. Almost to a person, they ask, “Why didn’t anybody tell me this movie was funny?” It’s a fair question. The logline – a world-renowned orchestra conductor is accused of sexual impropriety – doesn’t exactly scream barrel of laughs. But, that’s Field’s genius: to recognize and highlight the black humor in this self-serious world, to prick the pomposity of these artists. What makes the film scary, though, is how real it feels. These artists are out there, as well as politicians, police officers, and many more powerful people, just waiting to use their positions to take what they want, though they have no right to it.

Triangle of Sadness – I am certain writer-director Ruben Östlund appreciates the irony of this film’s three Academy Award nominations. The script could not be more plainly disdainful of the exact kind of people who gather to hand out gold statues to each other. It is a true kick in the teeth to the moneyed elite, a razor-sharp dissection of class, power, and the precarious nature of our social structure. In short, the passengers on Östlund’s superyacht may as well have been Academy voters.

On the heels of Parasite’s Best Picture triumph, in the same year Knives Out and Ready or Not debuted, Triangle of Sadness has been lumped in with The Menu and Glass Onion as part of the de rigeur “eat the rich” trend that has swept Hollywood. That assessment is unfair to both Parasite and Triangle of Sadness. As much as I love the Knives Out movies, Ready or Not, and The Menu, they are mostly content to revel in black-and-white, good-vs.-evil tales of the poor visiting a comeuppance upon the materially wealthy and morally bankrupt. But like Parasite before it, Triangle of Sadness has more on its mind than easy heroes and villains. It is more complicated than that and all the richer for it.

The Fabelmans – With his three nominations this year, Steven Spielberg is up to 23 career Academy Award nominations. This, however, is his first nomination for writing. It makes sense. This is, after all, the story of his life. It doesn’t hurt to have a Pulitzer Prize winner in your corner either. Co-writer Tony Kushner has previous Oscar nominations for Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. He also wrote a little play you may have heard of called Angels in America. Anyway, it’s a helluva pedigree for a coming-of-age story.

The Fabelmans has been unfairly labeled as Spielberg’s love letter to movies and an ode to himself, the latter of which would be unseemly and the former of which just isn’t the truth. In point of fact, there is more “Ain’t movies grand?” sentiment in Damien Chazelle’s chaotic Hollywood tale Babylon than in this film. Instead, what is actually on the page and on the screen is a searing family drama about using art to hide from your real-life problems. It is insightful, honest, and yes, brave of Spielberg to put all of this on film.

The final analysis

The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) seem to have made the movie of the moment. Just this past weekend, Everything Everywhere All at Once completed an historic sweep of the Independent Spirit Awards. The Daniels also picked up the Writers Guild award for original screenplay while they were at it. This movie has all the momentum to win big on Oscars night, and if that’s really going to pan out, it is definitely going to win Best Original Screenplay.

It has the whiff of the year Green Book won Best Picture – a much-derided victor that I would much rather rewatch than this. Green Book also picked up Best Original Screenplay en route to the big win, beating out the likes of Roma, The Favourite, and First Reformed, each of which is a brilliant achievement that continues to stand the test of time while Green Book … well … doesn’t.

I am not saying Everything Everywhere All at Once will ever linger in that netherzone, but I am saying that someday, people will wonder how the hell The Banshees of Inisherin and TÁR could both have lost Original Screenplay, and they’ll look it up to remember the winner. How satisfied they are by the answer seems likely to be a matter of personal preference.

Will win: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: TÁR

Should have been here: Holy Spider

A note about my favorite snub: Ali Abbasi’s Iranian crime thriller does things with the genre I have never seen before. In addition to being a first-rate tale of a journalist on the tail of a serial killer, it subverts the tropes of the serial killer movie in ways no American film would dare. It is one of the best and smartest screenplays of the year, and one wishes the Academy had taken more of a liking to the film overall.

Next time: Adapted Screenplay