Oscar voters don’t just vote for best picture; they submit a list ranking the films. If I were an Oscar voter, this is how my ballot would read and why.
Anora: I have Anora as the best picture by a wide margin this year over the other nine films. Writer/Director/Editor Sean Baker has always been interested by people left on the outside of capitalist society, but using this story of a stripper marrying rich, but making that only the first act, is his most insightful to date. Mikey Madison gives the performance of the year (any category) as the title character.
I’m Still Here: The brilliance of the film is spending the first half hour establishing the family dynamic, so that when the husband of the main character is kidnapped, we understand what was lost. That coupled with a performance by Fernanda Torres that is impossible to shake takes the film to decided greatness.
A Complete Unknown: Few films this year gave the audience a sense of time and place like this film. When the performances across the board are this fantastic, that’s the sign of a good director, which James Mangold is. Few studio films nowadays effectively tell a good story, so I want to celebrate one that did.
The Substance: Writer/Director Caralie Fargeat effectively nails our culture’s obsession with youth, with sublime production design — that apartment is the best set of the year — and pitch perfect performances by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. While the film reaches greatness frequently, it also gets a bit repetitive in the second act before the bonkers finale. Truly one of the most memorable films of the year.
The Brutalist: This is the true epic vision of the year. At intermission, I thought I was seeing the year’s masterpiece. Unfortunately, the second half has a plot twist that is way too thematically on the nose, and then the film’s coda makes no logical sense. The film has greatness in it, but fumbles too much of that away in the second half.
Wicked: Director Jon M. Chu’s insistence in using tactile sets paid off as it can be felt (and will probably win the designers an Oscar). Cynthia Erivo is one of the few to have both the acting chops and the singing chops to pull off the lead character of Elphaba. Yet I think the decision to lengthen the original play caused some of the impact to be lessoned, so ultimately this is a film that I respected, but I didn’t feel.
Dune Part II: Like Wicked, this is a film that I respected but didn’t love. Director Denis Villeneuve is one of the few who could pull this off. He successfully adapted a novel that flummoxed David Lynch, a great director. It is a stunning vision, and it’s a worthy film to applaud. I just can’t rate it above the previous six films.
Conclave: I don’t get it. I enjoyed the film, and its trashy novel style plot revolving over the election of a new pope. I don’t see how this is any grand statement or great entertainment. My memories of the film just evaporated. I enjoyed MaXXXine last year, but neither it nor Conclave belong on a list of best pictures, and I think both are fun at the time but not more than that.
Nickel Boys: The first-person camerawork is innovative. Unfortunately, I don’t think it works. I’ve seen director RaMell Ross’s Oscar nominated documentary Hale County This Morning This Evening, and I think it also was so wrapped up in style that it lost what the film was supposed to be about. This is frustrating, because the true story of Nickel Boys is an important one.
Emilia Perez: While I do not think this film is as bad as many of its critics say, I do not believe this has any business being nominated for best picture. I actually was intrigued during the first act of the film. Then the title character has surgery to become a woman, the film skips forward four years — and the film seems to not have any idea what else to do. It makes the big mistake of turning its title character into someone noble just because he becomes a she, when that person was a drug cartel leader. No. Also, the song score of this musical is rather tuneless. With these objections I should have at least still been intrigued. But mostly the film just seems to wander aimlessly. It is surprisingly boring.