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

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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Yorgos Lanthimos finally makes a good film!

I'd loathed every single Lanthimos film I'd seen until 2018's The Favourite where his feel-bad cinema for once evinced some mild subtlety. And now I'm semi-bowled over that he's finally directed a good film. Based on Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, Poor Things traces the rebirth of Bella (Emma Stone, typically fantastic), a Frankenstein's monster created by Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a surgeon who has reanimated her near-dead body with a baby's brain. As Bella moves beyond mastering basic motor skills and simple sentence structures, she self-actualizes into a brilliant woman, freeing herself from Baxter and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) and falling in and out of love with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lumpy lawyer with whom she jetsets around the world. Much of Bella's self-actualization resides in the realm of the sexual - she eagerly becomes a prostitute and fails to see the logic in monogamy. For some viewers, this trajectory makes her a feminist icon; for others, it's the ultimate male fantasy of unbridled sexual availability. But what makes Poor Things somewhat transcend this debate is that it takes her self-actualization as a totality. From eating properly to not punching a crying baby, Bella's journey in becoming reveals the processes we all go through in fashioning a socially acceptable presenting self. And along the way, she/we can reject any of the norms to which we're supposed to adhere, e.g., she has no need to adjust her rigid dance moves if the hilariously unconventional ballroom sequence is any measure. Poor Things helps us examine the truths we hold to be self-evident and Bella's struggle with them reminds us that the self is a perpetual work in becoming.

Of course, how much of the thrill of self-fashioning on display can be laid at Lanthimos' feet is up for debate, especially since I haven't read Gray's novel. Lanthimos fans can be reassured that his misanthropic fish-eye lens remains, thus potentially making Bella yet another of his objects of contempt. Nevertheless, there's a purity of conception here that I never would have thought possible in his cinema. It's no longer impossible imagining him joining us in the human race.

Grade: a carefully hedged B+