February 17, 2023
In three weeks, the 95th Academy Awards will be broadcast and we’ll see which films are recognized as the best of 2022. After two years of a tumultuous movie landscape, the industry started to see a sense of normalcy last year, and you can see that with the ten films nominated for Best Picture. In 2009, the Academy expanded the category, with ten nominees now for Best Picture and this year’s class shows a nice diverse selection of movies for all types of fans. We have auteur-driven stories from well-known filmmakers, and some not so well-known. We have international productions, including one foreign language film. And we have two bona fide blockbusters that each earned over $1.5 billion at the box office. Movies are back, baby!
But will the Oscars be back? Good question. It’s likely the ratings will be up from last year, but still soft compared to previous years. Let’s face it – unless your television program has the letters “NFL” in it, there just isn’t a large audience for linear television viewing. That’s ok, though – this is about recognizing the best in film, not about eyeballs on the television screen.
When the nominees were announced in late January, there were only a few snubs and surprises across the major categories. No one was really stunned at the Best Picture nominees and the four major acting categories featured a whopping sixteen first-time nominees out of the twenty actors recognized. So, it’s likely we will have a lot of first-time winners this year. There was one shocking nomination in Best Actress, which we’ll get to later. But first, I need to discuss the one major contender that I have yet to cover in my year-end series. It’s the film with the most nominations (eleven) – the genre-bending comedy-drama that I really struggled to love as much as most people who saw it.
Too…..Damn….Much…. – Everything Everywhere All at Once
I really tried. I went in with an open mind. I read early reviews that this was a wacky, absurdist film with a crazy plot, but that it was brilliant. The early reviews on Letterboxd (the social media app for movie lovers) were off-the-charts. It instantly became the highest-rated film on the platform. Highest of all time. C’mon, really? Nope, not for me.
The plot of Everything centers around Evelyn, a middle-aged Chinese immigrant, who is in an unhappy marriage, has a strained relationship with her daughter, and is caring for her elderly father. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) run a laundry business and are in the midst of a troublesome IRS audit, led by an agent (Jamie Lee Curtis) who is not so kind. Seems like a decent idea for a nice family comedy-drama, right? Well, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as the “Daniels” and the writers and directors of the film) concocted a crazy story about Evelyn being identified as the one person who can save all the universes in the multiverse from an evil being, who has inhabited her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu). The multiverse wackiness gets started early in the film and we are instantly sent off on a rocket ship journey of Evelyn navigating her way through this adventure.
As I said, I tried to get into this, but this was just too much. I can handle any type of crazy plot – there are plenty of films that I have loved that would be described as unconventional. And I can handle a multiverse story – Marvel has done this before and it can be pretty cool. But what frustrated me so much about Everything was that there is just too much damn plot in this movie. There are really fun action sequences and some comedy bits that hit, but the film moves at such a frenetic pace that it’s hard to enjoy them.
Also, there is a really nice story of family, love and acceptance in this film, but it is buried under an avalanche of bits, exhaustive exposition of characters explaining what is going on in the movie, and raunchy jokes that just didn’t land for me. Have you ever heard the expression “hat on a hat”? This was a million hats on a million hats. After feeling lukewarm about the movie, I saw someone’s review on Letterboxd that summarized it perfectly – It’s as if every conceivable idea for the movie that was developed in a writers’ room was shoved into the screenplay and nothing was cut out.
Now, despite my feelings, Everything Everywhere All at Once has been doing very well in the awards race. With its eleven nominations, it’s one of the frontrunners for Best Picture. But I’m not buying it. I think the film will be very divisive and a lot of the older Academy voters are either not going to like it, or not even finish watching it. With the voting process for Best Picture (more on that later), I think that could lead to another film winning. But let’s first discuss an award Everything will definitely win.
Best Supporting Actor
- Brendan Gleeson – The Banshees of Inisherin (1st nomination)
- Brian Tyree Henry – Causeway (1st nomination)
- Judd Hirsch – The Fabelmans (2nd nomination, no previous wins)
- Barry Keoghan – The Banshees of Inisherin (1st nomination)
- Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once (1st nomination)
This is the easiest award of the night to predict. Throughout the entire award season, Ke Huy Quan has won virtually every award for which he was eligible. Quan was a child actor who gained popularity in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, but for many years after that he didn’t have any big roles and eventually left the business. His role in Everything is seen as his big comeback and giving him the Oscar is a nice way to complete the story.
I was pretty happy with the other nominees. Gleeson and Keoghan were fantastic in Banshees, as was Henry in Causeway, a film I liked a lot and his recognition was a surprise. I have to quibble slightly with the nomination for Hirsch. His screen presence in The Fabelmans was brief and a little too cartoonish for me, even if it was a perfect representation of Spielberg’s great-uncle, according to the director. This feels like a recognition for the actor, not the performance. I would have rather seen the nod go to Hirsch’s co-star Paul Dano, who was magnificent as the father of the Fabelman family, but it doesn’t really matter, because Quan has this one wrapped up.
Best Supporting Actress
- Angela Bassett – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2nd nomination, no previous wins)
- Hong Chau – The Whale (1st nomination)
- Kerry Condon – The Banshees of Inisherin (1st nomination)
- Jamie Lee Curtis – Everything Everywhere All at Once (1st nomination)
- Stephanie Hsu – Everything Everywhere All at Once (1st nomination)
This is probably the second easiest award of the night to predict. Throughout most of the award season, Angela Bassett has been picking up the wins for her role as Queen Romanda in the sequel to Black Panther. I thought the film was pretty good – too long, not nearly as good as the first one, but still decent. She was fantastic (of course) and this may be somewhat of a career award for Bassett, who was nominated almost thirty years ago for her portrayal of Tina Turner in What’s Love Got To Do With It? One other piece of trivia – this will be the first Marvel film to win an acting Oscar.
As far as the other nominees go, I was glad to see all of these names show up. Condon was excellent in Banshees and it was nice to see her not get lost among the other strong cast members of that film. I think Chau was the best part of The Whale (more on that movie next) and she was even better in The Menu, one of my favorites of 2022. The last two nominees will probably cancel each other out, since they are both from Everything. As much as that film frustrated me, my problem was more of the story (and the “too much” of it all) than the performances, which I thought were all very good.
Best Leading Actor
- Austin Butler – Elvis (1st nomination)
- Colin Farrell – The Banshees of Inisherin (1st nomination)
- Brendan Fraser – The Whale (1st nomination)
- Paul Mescal – Aftersun (1st nomination)
- Bill Nighy – Living (1st nomination)
When the film festival season got underway last summer, there was one name that jumped to the top of the Oscar list – Brendan Fraser, for his performance as a morbidly obese man trying to reconcile with his estranged teenage daughter in The Whale. Fraser was a successful actor early in his career and then kind of drifted away, doing much smaller roles. Much like Ke Huy Quan, Fraser’s comeback story became a talking point leading up to the Oscars. I thought his performance in the film was very good, but I had a hard time with the movie itself. I found the plot somewhat overwrought and the tone of the film too melodramatic. Sadie Sink (best known from Stranger Things) is a great actress, but I was distracted by the cruelness of her character and the shrillness of her performance. Hong Chau (as Fraser’s nurse) was very good, but she wasn’t enough to save the movie for me.
As the award season moved along, two more names emerged to potentially crash Fraser’s party. The first was Austin Butler’s very successful turn in the starring role of Elvis, which was one of the more surprising box-office hits of 2022. I haven’t written about this film before, simply because I didn’t have a lot to say. As much as I was impressed by Butler’s performance, I found the Tom Hanks performance (as his manager Colonel Tom Parker) cartoonish, particularly the accent choice. Whenever Butler was performing, I was mesmerized by his talent and charisma. Then we would shift to Hanks and I was taken out of the movie.
The other name to surface was Colin Farrell for his exceptional performance in Banshees, one of my favorite films of 2022 that I covered last week. This is likely a three horse race – Farrell could win for his excellent performance as well as a career recognition nod, Fraser could get the comeback / redemption story, or Butler could get the nostalgia win for playing the iconic singer, a la Rami Malek’s win for Bohemian Rhapsody (I still can’t believe he beat Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born – what a travesty.) The last two nominees (veteran British actor Nighy, and future superstar Mescal, who will star in the upcoming Gladiator sequel) are in the “happy to be here” category. I’m rooting for Farrell, but would not be shocked if Butler or Fraser win here.
Best Leading Actress
- Cate Blanchett – TÁR (8th nomination, previous wins for Leading Actress for Blue Jasmine and Supporting Actress for The Aviator)
- Ana de Armas – Blonde (1st nomination)
- Andrea Riseborough – To Leslie (1st nomination)
- Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans (5th nomination, no previous wins)
- Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once (1st nomination)
This category seemed to be a pretty straightforward two actress race between Blanchett (magnificent in TÁR) and Yeoh, a beloved industry veteran who had an incredibly high bar to play the lead role in Everything, and exceeded those high expectations. But when one name was announced, it was clear this was no ordinary race.
Williams was considered a likely nominee and it was nice to see her recognized for a performance I liked a lot. Unfortunately, I think she might be on the same path as Amy Adams (many nominations, zero wins). There was mild surprise when de Armas’s name was announced. Blonde was widely derided, but people admired what de Armas put into the performance as Marilyn Monroe in a very messy biopic, and rewarded her as a symbolic payment for the torture of making the movie. But the real surprise was the nomination for Andrea Riseborough, recognized for To Leslie, a small movie that most people had never heard of. I’m not exaggerating – there were audible gasps from people sitting in the room where the nominations were announced.
Shortly thereafter, the Oscars had a potential new scandal on their hands. It seems there was a feverish campaign launched by the film’s director and his wife (actress Mary McCormack) who lobbied their famous friends to recommend Riseborough’s performance for an Oscar nomination. People like Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow, and many others were posting on social media and hosting screening parties to drum up support. It’s funny because word started spreading about this campaign right before voting closed, but no one took it seriously until the nominations came out. The Academy performed an “investigation” (ok, now this is getting beyond silly) and determined that nothing was done to justify taking away the actress’s nomination, but they will be looking at the campaign rules going forward to ensure there is nothing untoward happening. Again, this is pretty silly for a trophy contest.
I did manage to see To Leslie and it’s a decent movie. Riseborough is very good in the lead role, as is comedian and podcaster Marc Maron. Did she deserve the nomination? Not ahead of Viola Davis (for The Woman King) or Danielle Deadwyler (magnificent in Till) who were both robbed, in my opinion. With all of that drama, it doesn’t change the expected competition between the two leading contenders. If Blanchett hadn’t won before, I think she would be a shoo-in, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Yeoh pulled the upset here. I could see the Academy thinking that this might be her only shot to win, Blanchett has won twice before and will probably be nominated again in the near future given her strong track record. Consider this one a toss-up.
Best Director
- Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin (1st nomination for Best Director. Seven career nominations for directing, producing and writing, including three this year. One previous win for Best Live Action Short Film)
- Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once (1st nomination for Best Director. Three nominations this year including directing, producing and writing)
- Steven Spielberg – The Fabelmans (8th nomination for Best Director. 22 career nominations for directing, producing and writing, including three this year. Previous wins for directing and producing Schindler’s List and directing Saving Private Ryan)
- Todd Field – TÁR (1st nomination for Best Director. Six career nominations for directing, producing and writing, including three this year. No previous wins)
- Ruben Östlund – Triangle of Sadness (1st nomination for Best Director. Three career nominations for directing and writing, including two this year. No previous wins)
There was only one real surprise in these nominations with Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s recognition for Triangle of Sadness, his black-comedy satire about wealth and class. I found parts of the movie funny, but most of it didn’t work for me, especially a disgusting seasickness scene that I found revolting. The recognition for Östlund feels like a nod for an international filmmaker, much like we saw the last two years for Drive My Car and Another Round, two movies that were much better than Triangle of Sadness. I thought that Joseph Kosinski might get in here for Top Gun: Maverick, but he came up short.
As much as I liked Banshees and TÁR, I don’t think McDonagh and Field have enough juice to win this award. It feels like one of them will win Original Screenplay and one (or both) of their films may win an acting award for Farrell or Blanchett. I think the Directing award comes down to The Daniels or Spielberg. If Everything has a huge night and sweeps a number of awards, The Daniels could win here, but it feels like this will be a crowning achievement for Spielberg’s fifty-year career by honoring his family’s story with his third Best Director Oscar.
Best Picture
Before diving into the nominees for the biggest award of the night, it’s helpful to understand how the voting works, because that helps inform who might win. For all of the Oscars except Best Picture, the voting process is simple. There are five nominees. Every voting member picks a winner. Whoever has the most votes wins. Since the Academy expanded the number of Best Picture nominees in 2009 (there are now ten), the voting is not simply whoever has the most votes wins. It is decided by preferential voting. What is that? Glad you asked. Here is how it works.
Every voter ranks the movies from 1-10. The first step is to sort the films in order of most first-place votes. The film that is last on that list is thrown out. The ballots that picked that film are reviewed and their second-place films get those votes. The remaining films are then sorted from 1-9. The process is repeated over and over again until one film has 50.1% of all the ballots submitted. The goal is to try to build a consensus, and not have one film win by only getting 15% of the votes (as an example) if the tally was widespread.
Why is this important? Because a movie that has a lot of votes in the top few spots has a lot better chance of winning compared to a divisive movie that may have a lot of passionate fans (who rank it #1) but a lot of fans who hate it (and rank it #10). After last year’s ceremony, a strong theory about CODA winning was that a lot of voters either loved it or liked it a lot (and ranked it in their top three) whereas a lot of people really didn’t like The Power of the Dog and ranked it low on their ballots. Keep that in mind as we go through these nominees, because I think this will factor in why one film will not win.
I’m going to break these nominees down into a few different tiers as we narrow down the real contenders.
Happy To Be Here
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- Avatar: The Way of Water
- Triangle of Sadness
- Women Talking
While we’ll never know the real vote totals, it’s safe to say that Women Talking was the last movie to make the final ten nominees. As the predictions were coming in, it seemed like the last spot would be either Women Talking or The Whale. With that in mind, the film only has one other nomination (Sarah Polley, who has a really good shot at winning for Adapted Screenplay), so a Best Picture win appears unlikely.
Twenty-five years ago, James Cameron was “king of the world” as Titanic tied an Oscar record by winning eleven awards. Quick tangent – a remastered version of Titanic was just released in theaters for its 25th anniversary. I saw it this week and let me tell you that the film is still incredible, especially on the big screen. You wouldn’t know that the movie was made 25 years ago. If you loved Titanic, go see it again on the big screen. It is still in theaters this week.
OK, back to the Oscars. The nomination for Avatar: The Way of Water feels like an acknowledgment for the technical achievement, but not enough to get the win. The first film was nominated for Best Picture in 2009, but lost to The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who happens to be Cameron’s ex-wife (awkward!). Anyway, the working theory in Hollywood is that the Academy will wait to recognize Cameron for Avatar when he finishes the saga, much like they did with naming Peter Jackson’s third and final Lord of the Rings film as Best Picture in 2003. Of course, we don’t know when Cameron will finish the Avatar series – he has plans for at least two or three more films. Time will tell.
The last two films in this grouping have an international flavor. There is a lot of global admiration for Ruben Östlund, but I don’t see Triangle of Sadness breaking through the group of movies below to get the top prize. All Quiet on the Western Front is a German language adaptation of the World War I novel that was previously made into a 1930 film which won Best Picture. The new version is excellent, albeit a tough watch given the subject matter, and received nine nominations this year. I could see it picking up some technical awards and will likely win Best International Feature Film, but it doesn’t have enough broad support to win the top prize. One other note – this is the only “streaming” film nominated for Best Picture. I use that word in quotes, because while Netflix funded the production, it’s not exactly an innovative accomplishment for the streaming service, considering the novel is almost 100 years old.
An Outside Chance
- Elvis
- TÁR
Two pictures that have strong admirers and strong dissenters, which is why I think the chances here are still kind of low, but you never know. As I covered in my love of TÁR, this is an excellent character study by an auteur writer-director that is loved by the Academy. There is a chance that it could sneak across the goal line through the preferential voting process to win, especially with the love for Blanchett.
A win for Elvis would have to be based on an Academy that has fond memories of loving the King of Rock n’ Roll when they were growing up. But, director Baz Luhrmann is definitely an acquired taste. His frenetic filmmaking style can be rather distracting and exhausting. I also found his choice to tell the story from the viewpoint of Colonel Tom Parker (including narration by Tom Hanks and his distracting accent) to be a poor one. That being said, Hollywood has a history of loving musicals and biopics, so you never know.
The Wild Card
- Top Gun: Maverick
What? A blockbuster that made $1.5 billion might win Best Picture? Hear me out. This is all about the preferential voting process. Given the nominees, I could see Top Gun: Maverick being in the top three choices for almost all of the voters. Not only is the film technically excellent, it received strong critical reviews, and the impact on the theatrical industry in the midst of the pandemic will not be lost on the actor members of the Academy, the largest branch. They might want to reward the film with the top prize.
Now, before I move on to the next group, I’ll let you in on my writing process. I generally work on a piece over several days, usually not in the order in which you read it. I wrote the previous paragraph last weekend and when I finished it, I wondered if I was being a little hyperbolic about the impact of Top Gun: Maverick on the movie industry. A few days later, the Academy hosted their Oscar nominee luncheon and one of the more popular people that everyone wanted to see was Tom Cruise. A viral video leaked on Tuesday of Steven Spielberg hugging Cruise and saying to him, “You saved Hollywood’s ass. And you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously. Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry.” Mic drop.
The Front Runners
- The Banshees of Inisherin
- Everything Everywhere All at Once
- The Fabelmans
The leading contender here is Everything Everywhere All at Once and on the surface, with the most nominations, it seems like a no-brainer. But I just have a funny feeling that many Academy voters were turned off by the movie and put it low on their list. Despite a strong passionate group of people who love the film, I’m sure there are plenty who despised it. Here’s another fun stat – In the thirteen years since the Academy expanded Best Picture to more than five nominees, the one with the most nominations only won the top prize four times. Then again, one of those films was The Shape of Water – you know, the one about a woman who falls in love with a fish-man. Disclaimer: I’ve never seen the movie – I just read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I guess a wacky multiverse comedy-drama shouldn’t be completely discounted.
So, that leaves two films. Steven Spielberg vs. anybody seems like a mismatch, but there has been some pushback about The Fabelmans and it doesn’t seem to have the momentum to be a lock for Best Picture. There were criticisms that it was schmaltzy and self-indulgent (two opinions I disagree with) and if the Academy wants to spread the wealth, then they could give Spielberg Best Director and Best Picture to someone else.
Which brings us to The Banshees of Inisherin. This film checks a lot of boxes – nominations for both the direction and screenplay (Martin McDonagh in both cases), four acting nods, plus two technical nominations (editing and score). McDonagh has been recognized before, so he is not unknown to the Academy. The other important factor is that a lot of people admire, love, or really like this film. That aspect could help its chances in a preferential voting process. So, that’s my guess for Best Picture, but I wouldn’t be surprised with any of these three. Or for that matter, I wouldn’t be shocked if Tom Cruise walked up to the stage to receive the Oscar for Best Picture as one of the producers for Top Gun: Maverick, my favorite movie of the year. Don’t forget the words of Mr. Spielberg – Cruise saved Hollywood’s ass.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed my Oscar preview. The ceremony is not until March 12th, so you have plenty of time to catch up on the nominated films. Most of them are already available at home, either on a streaming service or to rent on demand. Also, a number of them are still in theaters or will be re-released in theaters before the ceremony. So check out JustWatch.com to find where to watch them at home or Fandango to find a theater near you. I’ll be back next week with a preview of my most anticipated films of 2023. The release schedule is stacked, so it should be a fun year. Thanks for reading and if you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe below.