2022 Best Picture Oscar Nominations Ranked

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg) - Astonishing. For the first time in his career, Spielberg traffics in an ambiguity that keeps this semi-autobiographical legacy film unpredictable. The scene in which the beach-blond jock confronts Spielberg stand-in Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) may be the director's best ever for the baffled and contradictory responses it's elicited. And just when you think the dénouement is going to lock into Horatio Algeresque step, Sammy walks up to his new Hollywood apartment not in triumph but in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. Not counting A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the man's best film since Minority Report if not 1979's underrated 1941. A

Tár (Todd Field) - A film designed to be debated into perpetuity. Like a good poststructuralist, Field destabilizes the center of each scene (including the exquisite ending) and maintains an edifice of free play throughout. I haven't discussed a film so much in years, especially with people who aren't avid filmgoers. A

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann) - Reviewed here. A-minus

Women Talking (Sarah Polley) - A film designed to plunge Armond White types into apoplexy. I admired the severe visual palette and compressed intensity of this "act of female imagination." A-minus

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) - Vertically, yet another facile skewering of the rich and heartless. Horizontally, it shifts gears so many times that it gives whiplash to the viewer and, one must assume, Östlund himself given how he finishes it all off with a hilariously perverse non-ending. A-minus

All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger) - Not sure what to do with this remake of the 1930 Best Picture Oscar winner. It's effectively anti-war, sure. But why was it remade now? B+

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, 2022) - They spent so much time on this multiverse concept that they forgot to tell a compelling, non-cookie-cutter story. Once the rules of the multiverse were laid out, you could see how the rest of the film was going to lock into its narrative beats with dreary predictability. B

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh) - Reviewed here. B

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron) - I rolled my eyes about two dozen times at this "three-hour land acknowledgment" (to borrow Tyler Austin Harper's words in Slate). But I have to begrudgingly concede that Cameron brings off his colossally dorky vision with brio and keeps all 192 of those minutes moving briskly. B

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski) - Marginally more digestible than the godawful original. But it's essentially a remake so yeah, no. My Xmas 2022 screening of it is mercifully fading from memory to make for contemplation of much more substantial films such as Myra Breckinridge, Reform School Girls, Massacre at Central High, The Ritz, The Cassandra Crossing, etc. (to choose some recently digested titles). D+

West Side Story (Steven Spielberg, 2021)

For the first ten or so minutes, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story remake feels like a tomb opened up for the reanimated corpse of Robert Wise's 1961 film adaptation to pirouette onto 2021 screens. You ask yourself, "why this again? why now?" Soon, though, I was sucked in by the incomparable score. And by the time Tony (an underrated Ansel Elgort) lets forth with "Maria," I was blubbering. Spielberg injects some jokey moments into the number such as neighbors slamming their windows shut. But the man means no disrespect to the genre as evinced by the irresistible shot in which Tony looks heavenward while a pool of lights reflected in pissy street ponds twinkle around him, quite possibly the loveliest moment in Spielberg's oeuvre. Thanks to Spielberg's commitment, I now hear "Maria" as an apotheosis of American musical theatre and wonder if Stephen Sondheim ever composed a couplet as divine as "Say it loud and there's music playing/Say it soft as it's almost like praying."

And so it goes. Rachel Zegler as Maria, Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo, Mike Faist as Riff, and, yes Elgort all acquit themselves admirably and then some. The mambo at the dance gave me the chills (but then again, it always does). "Tonight" is performed largely through an illegally locked fire escape grate. Tony tells Maria that she should get the landlord to fix that, a specific more heart-warmingly New Yawk than an opened-out "America" featuring a protest against Robert Moses. "Cool" makes more sense here as a rift between Tony and Riff rather than as a time killer in the 1961 film. And giving "Somewhere" to Valentina, the new character to replace/beef up the role of Doc, is a stroke performed by Rita Moreno as a more generalized plea for transcendence. My heart was heavy. The 156 minutes whizz by. I loved it.

But...what does it all mean? Now that we know what a West Side Story film would be like with actual Latin actors in the roles of Maria and Bernardo (and an Anita with no brown face), what's next? Does this augur a Hollywood with not only more work for Zegler, DeBose, and Alvarez, but more culturally specific stories as well? Anbodys is now a trans guy (played by non-binary actor Iris Menes) who protests the Jets' marking him as female. When he wins them over by informing them that Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) has a gun and is looking to shoot Tony, one of the Jets praises him with a preposterous "You've done good, buddy boy." Even though I found this as groan-inducing as any of Tarantino's historical revisions, I applaud this moment of acceptance if it makes a trans viewer feel mighty real. But as Peggy Lee (and Cristina) once asked, is that all there is? A sprinkling of Representation Matters into a proven property?

Judging from the premature obituaries for the film's "underperformance" at the box office, that apparently is all there is, at least at the tentpole level. But there are (coughs) alternatives. I saw West Side Story after spending a weekend with two hideous, offensive films - Single All the Way and The Bitch Who Stole Christmas, the former Netflix's go at a gay Hallmark Christmas movie, the latter a feature-length version of one of those DOA musical numbers on RuPaul's Drag Race. Both function as what Kristen Warner calls "plastic representation" - a box-checking quantifiable difference that "overdetermines the benchmarks of progress and obscures the multifaceted challenges inherent in booking roles as well as securing work on writing staffs, directing gigs, or even reaching executive gatekeeper status—thus privileging the visible (actors) over all other cinematic and televisual functions." If Single All the Way and The Bitch Who Stole Christmas are "gay films," I'll stick with my "perverse" and "naive" readings of the queerness in select Joan Crawford and Franklin Pangborn titles. But I left West Side Story with plasticity on the mind. Is it a trans film now or even a Latin one? Could it ever be?

 Grade: A-minus