Ranking 98th Oscars Best Picture Nominees

Here is how I rank the Best Pictures nominees of the 98th Oscars in reverse order:

F1 (Joseph Kosinski) - Graded leniently [sic] because this took Avatar: Fire and Ash's place as the one popcorn movie amongst the nominees, thus freeing me from having to sit through that 197-minute beast or even having to think about it until this very moment (whoa! $1.484 billion at the box office - who knew?). F1 is Top Gun on the race track and every blockbuster beat locks in with such dreary clockwork that it feels like you're watching an architecture diagram for 155 hellassdamn minutes. Its sole ambiguity is whether or not Brad Pitt's abs are AI. C-minus

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Poor Things suggested Lanthimos was ready to join the human race. But I skipped Kinds of Kindness because I had to wash my hair. So I can't claim that his remake of Save the Green Planet! (Jang Joon-hwan, 2003) continues a regression. But it reveals him up to his old nihilistic tricks again. Purely as a thriller, this is aces; my heart was racing throughout. But I could see the twist at the end coming the moment the conspiracy was explained and I'm not bragging. What attracted Lanthimos to Save the Green Planet! was the opportunity to suggest that, hey, some incel conspiracy theorists may actually be right! And boy, aren't I a moron for toiling away at an overdue article that's kept me from blogging while chasing after reputable scholarly sources and actually writing an essay with my real intelligence. I'm such a silly billy. In fact, we're all such silly billies because all humanity gets theirs in the end which one must assume included other incels as well. As usually, where this all leaves Lanthimos is known only to the therapist one assumes he feels he doesn't need. C

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao) - I'm not a gambling man. But I think this will take the statue only because it's the most Oscary, putting the mid in middlebrow. A forgettable evening at The Theatre. If it gets some teenager into Shakespeare as Amadeus did for me and Mozart, then I applaud it. B-minus

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) - A bit too stilted and, well, Oscary for my taste. But a basically honest glimpse into the turmoil filmmakers can inflect on their families. B+

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley) - I'm not sure Denis Johnson's work makes for compelling film adaptations, e.g., Stars at Noon. This Netflix production of his 2011 novella throws in some Malickian nature mysticism but leans a bit too heavily on a "we're all connected" vibe that makes Oscar voters' hearts flutter. B+

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - Reviewed here. B+

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) - Loved it. But it's a de facto remake of Uncut Gems. And Good Time. Maybe even Daddy Longlegs. It's time to branch out. Then again, Benny did just that with The Smashing Machine and came up with about a B+. Apparently, the over-amped intensity of their films is Josh's spiritual burden to bear. My advice is that their next collaboration should be a musical. A-minus

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro) - I was stunned by how much I loved this, especially given all the pooh-poohing it received. Like the novel, it starts off rickety. But as soon as The Creature (a superb Jacob Elordi) takes over the narrative, I was enormously moved by his more-human-than-human plight. A-minus

Sinners (Ryan Coogler) - Come see me deliver my talk “The Real and the Electric Sh*t: Sinners (2025), Recordings, and Inscriptions of History” at SCMS in Chicago on March 28th! A-minus

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) - Not quite up to the polyphonic density of Licorice Pizza. But a far more subtle film than naysayers are allowing. As for the charge that Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) lacks narrative agency and has been arranged for the white gaze, I can't help but think of the last line of Rita Dove's poem "Canary": If you can’t be free, be a mystery (also the title of Farah Jasmine Griffin's 2001 book on Billie Holiday). For more, check out Kristen Warner's Threads thread here. A

New York Film Festival - Fourth Dispatch

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - Wagner Moura gives an electric performance as a dissident in 1977 Brazil who finds precarious protection amongst a shelter for political refugees before attempting to flee the country. Those who fell for the Oscar-validated I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024) should enjoy this adept thriller skewering the Brazilian military dictatorship of the era. But at 158 minutes, it overstays its welcome. And it betrays a straightforward conventionality unworthy of the dislocations of Filho's Bacurau (2019), one of the finest films of our rapidly aging century. 

Grade: B+ 

Duse (Pietro Marcello) - I first heard of the legendary actress and Sarah Bernhardt rival Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) from All About Eve in Bill's rant to Eve about what The Theatre means (although my preteen, pre-internet mind heard it as "Eleanor Adusa"). Then for forty years, I never gave her another thought until this most welcome biopic. Marcello picks up Duse's story in the last act of her life, past previous glories and desperate to find her way back to audiences scarred by WWI. She even breaks bread with Mussolini over a doomed plan to recreate Athens in Italy. It's the kind of narrative that would have worked well with the anachronisms Marcello sprinkled throughout Martin Eden (2019), another film about a fiery artistic temperament. Like The Secret Agent, unfortunately, there's a safe, Oscary feel to the project that makes one long for the lopsided structure of Martin Eden or the proto-art-film longueurs of the Italian diva film of the 1910s. That it all still works is testament to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's blistering performance as Duse. Out of historical sync, in tears 90% of the time, Tedeschi's Duse exhausts herself trying to find a time and a place for her art. A full century after her death, she feels right at home in 2025. 

Grade: A-minus

The Best Film of 2020 (so far!)

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) starts at Point A and winds up at Point ∫ba∫dc|ru×rv|dudv (stole that from some math website). I don't want to say too much more because the story twists up like a wiener package and you'll be stunned at the unpredictable vectors it takes. It concerns the fictional utopia of Bacurau, a dusty village in Northeastern Brazil sometime in the near future. The first third runs its finger over the contours of the village, delineating its operations in a manner most Fordian. But utopias fail to generate much profit so complications arise. And then more complications arise... Swerving in and out of social realism, art-film ellipsis, and extreme violence, Bacurau elicits complicated reactions from the viewer. You guffaw at the carnage when you're not baffled by this unexplained development or that unidentified flying object [sic!]. In its florid wipes and contrapuntal use of popular music, it recalls the operatic mythmaking of a great Cinema Novo classic like Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Glauber Rocha, 1964). But more immediately, it's of a piece with recent popular (populist?) titles such as Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) and Uncut Gems (The Safdie Brothers, 2019), films that use class aspirations to fuel narrative intensity. Bacurau is even richer, though, because it tries to envision a classless society with no need for aspirations. Ten years in development, it somehow has arrived right on time as an allegory about the terror Bolsonaro has unleashed on Brazil, prompting Howard Hampton in Artforum to deem the film "[p]erpetually in and outside of the present moment." I fully support a campaign to have it win the Best Picture Oscar next year. Grade: A+.  

Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016)