It’s entirely probable that scandal, gossip, politics and a general sense of “never heard of it before” have obscured something obvious and important about this year’s 10 best picture Oscar nominees. They’re weird — every single one. They take weird forms. The people in them do weird stuff. They induce weirdness in you.
Demi Moore jabs herself with a goop known as “The Substance,” and out of her split-open back climbs Margaret Qualley, who refuses to obey the goop’s rules and proceeds to ruin their life. I paid to see this movie in a packed theater on a Saturday afternoon, where we laughed, screamed and almost threw up.
Believe it or not, that movie’s a fairy tale, a funny one. So’s “Anora.” Here, the would-be princess is a Brooklyn stripper who marries a Russian nitwit whose oligarch father dispatches a goon squad to procure an annulment. If I told you “The Brutalist” ran for more than three hours and pitted a recent Holocaust survivor against his moneybags employer, maybe you’d ask which Oscar lab cooked this thing up. Then I’d have to tell you that the scale of this thing is so strangely intimate, so redolently personal, that it feels as much eavesdropped on as its premise sounds familiarly epic.
A sugarless Brazilian dictatorship melodrama (“I’m Still Here”) is up against a sugar-encrusted American dictatorship musical (“Wicked”). “Conclave,” the pick-a-pope nail-biter, relies on so much shanking that it feels like a prison movie and features more cafeteria grandstanding than “Mean Girls.” For a spell, the front-runner had been “Emilia Pérez,” a musical fairy tale whose songs flout rhythm and melody, and whose Mexican cartel overlord mistakes her transness for sainthood. Then its star’s bigoted old tweets and some harsh comments by its mighty French director (about Mexicans and the Spanish they speak) turned the Oscar race into “Conclave.”
Then, there’s “Dune: Part Two,” a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it’s easy to remain passive in the face of all that’s weird about it. But look! It’s Stellan Skarsgard, plumped, pursy and a-vape, as a baron whose kink, in part, arises from stadium-size gladiatoring. When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timothée Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It’s “Lawry’s of Arabia,” “Lost in Spice.” The race delivers double-feature Chalamet. In “A Complete Unknown,” he boldly reimagines Bob Dylan as a figure of tremendous petulance. Otherwise, it might be the most conventional thing you could hope to see about a once-in-a-lifetime weirdo; and that counts as kind of weird.
“Nickel Boys” unfolds during Dylan’s ascent but in Jim Crow Florida as opposed to Greenwich Village, so, essentially a different planet. Colson Whitehead wrote a novel by the same name, yet this movie is less a feat of adaptation than a wholesale dreaming of what Whitehead composed. It’s been shot so that we see only what its two protagonists experience, through their eyes — friendship, abuse, self-estrangement. That simple choice — to personify the camera — might be as close to “avant-garde” as a best picture nominee has come since whenever Terrence Malick was last on accolades duty.
These films serve puke and pus and anal rape. At least three culminate in a wild plot twist that deepens the meaning of what preceded it rather than cheapens it. I lost count of all the witch imagery on offer. In “Dune,” witches are a spice of life. “The Substance” might be the grossest movie to come this close to topping the Oscar pile since “The Exorcist”; although, really, by its final, watch-through-a-tarp minutes, it makes “The Exorcist” look like “The Sound of Music.” These movies sense, in their own ways, that we’re past whatever used to pass for normal, including “best picture” itself.
Before 2009, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made the mistake of expanding the crop of nominees from five to as many as 10 and then just to 10, the quintets usually included what I had thought of as the Fifth Movie. It was artier or poppier, more indie and more from somewhere else (like Mexico or Sundance) than its fellow nominees, less of a hit or just a bona fide box-office sleeper, more likely to be directed by, say, Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson. Was it the one with no director nomination? Can I prove that, say, “Crash” was the Fifth Movie of the 2006 nominees? I can’t. (Maybe that movie was “Capote.”) “Crash” willed its way to “sleeper.” It won. But it’s an all-time best picture upset because it reeked of squeaker. (It also just reeked.)
Fifth Movie Syndrome is what led to 10-movie bloat, because, in part, there was real confusion in 2009 over how anybody could prefer something like “Frost/Nixon” or “The Reader” to “The Dark Knight” and “Wall-E” — to blockbusters. At 10 movies, you lose the declarative surety, the effrontery and the embarrassing truth of five. And if we’ve learned anything about the Academy over this last decade and a half, it’s that it’s as risk averse as the industry comprising it. The “Dark Knight” outcry provoked the Academy’s reactive accommodation at the moment that Facebook achieved cultural centrality — two communication juggernauts crossing each other on the escalator of mass influence.
This year’s 10 feel, largely, like a lawless batch of movies made by filmmakers who, I imagine, might be surprised to find themselves in the thick of what everybody casually calls awards season now, artists who’ve likely had many a studio door closed on their ideas, who’ve probably declined entering rooms where an open door might entail some atrocious compromise. These are tales of disillusionment, exploitation, tyranny and iconoclasm where, even if the movie doesn’t do it for you (and “Emilia Pérez” really doesn’t, for me), you still feel the direct transfer of a moviemaker’s unadulterated principles, her lunacy, a vision.
These films are in some way about transitions, from acoustic to electric, from old to young to monstrous, from one identity’s viewfinder to his schoolmate’s, from innocent to evil, from immoral to munificent. They all begin in different emotional registers and conclude, more or less, in sadness, resignation or rage. (A lot of them also have fantastic endings. Not “Dune,” which has some pungent stuff in it but not an ending, because “Dune” is never going to end.) Only “Conclave” sees fit to sublimate consternation, deception, political violence and warring egos into a rejection of moral collapse.
Of course, the human source of that transcendence (I refuse to spoil who) has brought the movie in for attacks from the anti-wokes. Which goes to show that one person’s tender crusade for forbearance and truth is another’s poopy tolerance trap. The Academy Awards also appear to be making a transition from Hollywood’s happiest night into the high point of a different organization: the Independent Spirit Awards, an evening, relatively speaking, for the little guys.
MOST OF THESE MOVIES do work for me; I love a couple of them. But maybe, more than any other year since the Oscars came into my life, this group declares that the old American film industry is broken, possibly forever. And not only because people keep telling me how they don’t care about most of the nominees or that they haven’t seen most of them. When you ask them which movies they’d swap in, they really don’t have much. You can’t blame these movies for our diminished viewing habits or the industry’s evident allergy to a narrative diet of characters and ideas.
The Academy Awards have served as a Hollywood M.R.I. You can’t nominate what doesn’t get made. The glee over Barbenheimer worried me. “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — juggernauts, by smart filmmakers, whose rivalry stretched to Oscar night — didn’t water a desert. They produced a mirage. In a diagnosis like this, I’m supposed to present the dual wakes of the pandemic and the guild strikes, the extirpation of release schedules and worsening of viewing hygiene, as extenuating speed bumps. Also the shuttering of the studios’ so-called boutique divisions, islands where good and deliciously bad taste flourished. Really, these are all accelerants for a kind of gathering cultural disaster.
During the 2000s, movies that lit up the Sundance and Toronto film festivals diversified the story of what constitutes an Oscar movie. But a nominee like “Little Miss Sunshine,” an impressively profitable (and quietly weird) hit from 2006, also meant something to the average moviegoer. Incursions against the status quo were exciting. Those pipelines have shrunk. Now the sensations of the Cannes Film Festival (like “Emilia Pérez” and “The Substance,” like “Anora”), movies from anywhere on Earth, are becoming the lifeblood of the Oscar race in a way that feels if not entirely new then perhaps inexorable.
This 2025 class is a boon for us Fifth Movie people. It’s all incursion. Yet, incursion is currently doing the work of “middlebrow,” the kind of star-driven, pretty popular, serious-enough Hollywood movie that no longer exists. I just looked at the 1985 nominees, and it’s time to face facts. “The Substance” is our “Places in the Heart,” “Nickel Boys” our “A Soldier’s Story.” No complaints here. But I do prefer the mélange of it all, the mess. I want the crowd-pleasingly cheesy alongside the appallingly, alienatingly cutting edge. That feels healthy to me.
In the old days of even 11 years ago, without much cramming, you could sit down for the show and root for movies and actors you had paid to see. What’s different now is the pool. It feels smaller, despite a chart I found tracking the number of releases since the year 2000 that insists the pool’s bigger than it was 25 years before. Released where? On a streaming service with no fanfare? OK, fine. The pool’s not drying up. But what’s filling it is still somehow leaving us dry.
The Academy completely ignored two of the strongest of the reported contenders that I saw last year, “Babygirl” and “Hard Truths”; two existential comedies (one about repression, the other about depression) that deepen into the unclassifiable. They’re truly missed up there on the official roster. Yet, I suspect a movie about a rich middle-aged white woman on a sexual bender and one about a Black British working-class woman’s tragicomic psychological implosion were a tough sell even for voters who ultimately went for blood baths and backstabbing. But also: Both films’ moods and audacity, their weirdness, are already there in the movies that did make the cut.
The Oscar campaign fiascos around some of these nominated movies might be reaching more people than the films themselves. I had a great chat with a barista buddy last week about the acknowledged use of artificial intelligence in “The Brutalist.” She hadn’t seen the movie (and she really should!), but she could make a cogent argument against its ethics.
THERE’S THIS OTHER THING about the characters in these movies. Despite all that’s thrown at them, they’ve opted to endure, to live, sometimes ludicrously, as revenge but especially as a matter of mere survival. We’re being shown ourselves. But the mirror is fogging up. . The complex, human art Hollywood used to make, if only to laud itself for having made it, has been outsourced and imported. It used to do a strong, principled weepie like “I’m Still Here” once or twice a year. (Since 2010, most of the winners of the directing Oscar hail from beyond the United States, from Mexico and France, South Korea and Taiwan.) So what’s happening here? Do an expanded field and a younger, less American Academy membership mean that excluded classes (nonwhite actors, films from other countries) are doing more winning? Sure.
But the artists who’ve made most of this year’s lineup don’t uniformly, with all due respect to “Dune” or “Wicked,” aspire to make “Dune” or “Wicked.” They want to make their Brooklyn caper about a kidnapped sex worker who marries rashly. They also don’t want to be punished for following their bliss. At the recent Spirit Awards, the directing prize went to Sean Baker for “Anora.” And he used the occasion to highlight the detriments of our current digital era and to make an earnest plea for more humane compensation, which is what you’d expect from the rare American filmmaker whose work prefers to imagine the lives of this country’s have-nots. He was asking for a living wage for himself and his peers in independent filmmaking.
It’s a bitter irony. Lots of us lament that the movies of yore would never be made now. They’re too dark, too original, too breezy yet brilliant to get a studio’s green light today. This 2025 class is the Movies They Would Never Make Now. If these outsiders are all the industry has to keep its biggest night afloat and they’re relative subsistence filmmakers, it might be worth transforming the Oscars into a nobler arena of merit: something like, I don’t know, the MacArthur Foundation, the “genius grant” outfit. Award the nominees the budget and living expenses to realize their next movie. Ordinarily, that would be called doing a deal. (Or “Project Greenlight.”) But what a luxury. Now it’d be weird not to at least consider trying it. The first ever Academy Rewards.
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