2023 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) - This is the kind of film American Fiction satirizes, bloated Oscar bait about the suffering of a disenfranchised group. Hell, even the title was pre-ridiculed by Daniel Clowes in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) - remember The Flower That Drank the Moon? But if it's gotta exist, let it be the work of a master. Scorsese's account of the slaughter of the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma is rich in novelistic detail and earns every moment of its 206-minute [sic] running time. And I'd say that this showcases a career-defining performance for Lily Gladstone if the exquisite Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) hadn't already done so. A-minus.

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) - I'd probably knock it down to B+ today. But I had it at A-minus when I reviewed it after Barbenheimer weekend.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) - I can't believe it either. Reviewed here. B+.

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) - Tender, welcome evocations of Black middle-class quotidian existence vie with corny satirical jabs at white liberal well-meaningness, promising yet another two-steps-forward, six-steps-back prestige project. But then there's the ending which I initially loved because I thought Jefferson was offering us a pomo Choose Your Own Ending type of dénouement à la Clue. Watching it more closely a second time, I now realize it's more conventional than that. Still, it's looser and jazzier than most prestige projects ever get. I'm impressed. B+.

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)  Like American Fiction, a film to curl up with at various points of the year - December for this one, July for the former. Reviewed here. B+.

Barbie (Greta Gerwig) - Reviewed here. B+.

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet) - Solid. But only the ambiguity of "did he fall or was he pushed?" and its was-it-really 152-minute running time save it from a certain Investigation Discovery feel. Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) covers similar ambiguities with more complexity and a better ventilated conception. It expands where Anatomy of a Fall implodes into its overly localized concerns. And Saint Omer is half an hour shorter. B.

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) - One of the biggest disappointments of the year from a director capable of the very best (Birth, Under the Skin). Reviewed here. B-minus.

Past Lives (Celine Song) - Even more localized than Anatomy of a Fall, a considerable feat given that the film concerns a woman who leaves her native South Korea to become a writer in the USA. Bittersweet if you don't think too hard about it. I just want to know if all the talk about 80,000 layers of fate and past lives and future lives is an apologia for ghosting. A much better film about the importance of living this present life: Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2015). B-minus.

Maestro (Bradley Cooper) - Ugh. And it looked so enticing on the New York Film Festival lineup. Panned here. C-minus. 

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Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

A film like this made sense in 1946 when Michael Curtiz told the story of Cole Porter as a brash heterosexual in Night and Day. For Bradley Cooper in 2023 to center a Leonard Bernstein biopic on bisexual Bernstein's marriage to Felicia Montealegre is no-steps-forward, six-steps-back Oscar-bait filmmaking. Bernstein's relationships with clarinetist David Oppenheim and musician Tom Cothran, for whom Berstein left Montealegre in the mid-1970s, are given offensively short shrift. The Bernstein-Montealegre marriage structures the entire film and so we get borderline homophobic synopses on Wikipedia such as "his homosexuality is diverted soon afterward, when he meets Felicia Montealegre." When Montealegre becomes ill with lung cancer, Bernstein returns to her and their three kids. Cooper places these scenes as the climax of the film, thus lending the impression that Bernstein's ultimate achievement was taking up his proper place within a heterosexual family unit. 

Even worse, centering such clueless representational politics results in a narratively unkempt film. Maestro comes across as a series of pins in a bulletin board - some musical sequences here, some discussions of craft there, one (can't have any more than one) coke-fueled gay party, all ever so briefly swirling around the heterosexual romance at the fulcrum. The only moments when the film comes alive are during the de facto (and welcome in this context) musical appreciation courses (e.g., when Bernstein is teaching conducting to a young acolyte) or when Cooper abandons the story altogether (the Mahler's Resurrection Symphony scene). A stunningly bad movie.

 

Grade: C-minus (upped a notch so I don't seem like a total crackpot)