An Oscars Disclaimer
Let me start by saying I dislike the Oscars, which have a narrow view of cinema and even within that narrow view often make conservative, bland decisions. Hollywood is insular and doesn’t have a strong sense of which of its films are actually important to the wider culture or will have a lasting impact. Often it can’t even tell if something is good or not. Ideally awards would put a spotlight on largely unknown artists or work, driving audiences toward new experiences. Instead the Oscars land at the end of (shudder) “awards season,” when the nominated movies have been picked over for months. The Academy Awards itself is a long and tedious affair (unless you’re into fashion or, presumably, are nominated yourself). Furthermore, awards for art and the horse-race that surrounds them takes valuable attention from discovering and enjoying more art. What the Oscars are, though, is a great organizing principle for writing about movies. The nominees encompass a pretty representative slice of commercial cinema, and movie discourse is fun. So, with that snobbery dispensed with, here's part one of my rundown of the nominees (that I’ve seen).
Barbie
It’s got stars, style, gags, and dance numbers. It’s missing three dimensional characters and a reason to exist beyond the promotion of Mattel’s most popular product. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach wrote a movie not based on but about one of the most popular toys of all time. Something very similar was done with The Lego Movie; both movies star Will Ferrell as a symbol of patriarchal dominance getting in the way of toy liberation. It’s better than a commercial has any right to be.
Fans of the film were recently rending their pink garments over Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig’s respective “snubs” for acting and direction. I thought Gerwig’s direction was great, particularly when it came to the overall design and vibe of the movie (the dance sequences could have been better and not all of the physical gags landed). Robbie’s a great actor who does great things with a not-very-interesting role. She’s literally playing a toy, and toys don’t have the kinds of human needs and desires that tend to animate great performances. Robbie has to coast largely on her (abundant) charisma and periodically inject emotion into situations that have only the vaguest resemblance to human experience.
At its heart Barbie is a Pinocchio story, where a non-person gains knowledge about the world and magically becomes real. It’s a journey from innocence and naiveté to experience and understanding, but because Barbie’s still a toy for 99% of the movie that journey consists largely of her processing the fact that the Barbie Brand is not universally beloved and that patriarchy exists. It’s not that it’s a bad premise (obviously it worked for audiences) but it doesn’t give Robbie a ton to do. And I can’t stress enough how odd it is for a central character to be the idea of a physical product wrestling with the reputation of themselves in popular culture. It feels like we’ve broken through to a new phase of capitalism, where consumer goods have gained sentience. Robbie deserves lots of credit for making such a character interesting at all.
While Barbie wrestles with Mattel’s complicated legacy, Ken wrestles with the seductive power of patriarchy itself. Ryan Gosling’s Ken is as two-dimensional as Barbie, but the change he goes through felt more interesting to me—it is, after all, something human men might actually experience. It’s also more of a subversion than the Barbie character. Gosling gets to play a role usually given to women: the supporting love interest who lives in total devotion to the hero. The twist is Barbie doesn’t desire or love Ken (or anyone; she’s a doll). And so Ken does what supporting love interests never get to do, and literally takes over Barbie World, brainwashing all the other Barbies and taking control of the whole narrative. He’s like Lucifer rebelling against his God in Paradise Lost. The sheer drama of that role, and its potential for camp, is a great opportunity for an actor, and I believe it’s why Gosling probably secured a nomination.
Barbie is the best pure comedy I saw in theatres all year. It’s also the only one. Hollywood has forgotten how to make big budget, star-driven comedies, particularly ones aimed at girls. I like that this outlier had enormous success outside of the typical rom-com genre (though I would love a proper rom-com revival). The movie is putting relevant, if obvious, ideas out there. And it has some sweet, sentimental sequences about motherhood. I would like to see more movies like this get made, ideally with human characters.
Poor Things
Barbie’s evil twin, Poor Things is another highly stylized fantasy about a cloistered woman who learns about the true nature of women in the world while fending off the controlling predations of men. In this respect, the movies are uncannily similar. I’d be curious to hear some theories as to why, in the year 2023, two of our biggest actors played women learning the very basics of life under patriarchy. You’d think we’d be a little more ahead in the pop-feminist conversation by now, but perhaps not!
There is one notable difference between the movies: the characters in Poor Things have genitals and they use them. Before seeing the movie I’d heard that it was chock-a-block with sex scenes. This is not true! There are a few scenes and a few brief montages as Emma Stone’s Bella—a full-grown woman with the brain of a literal baby—discovers the pleasures and financial utility of fornication. It’s no more graphic than a run-of-the-mill European art film. It does take sex as its primary subject, with a particular focus on a woman’s experience of it. Most wide-release films these days are completely sexless, so I think it just feels like it’s full of sex by contrast. What this movie is not is erotic. Bella—again, a child’s brain in a woman’s body—approaches sex with the same frank innocence a toddler approaches dessert or cute animals. The men who fall in love with her all overlook her immaturity and ignorance. Maybe this is how things were in Victorian England, and maybe director Yorgos Lanthimos is trying to suggest this is still the case (not sure I entirely agree—most men probably expect a basic level of maturity from a partner).
Whereas Barbie was about toys and mother-daughter dynamics, Poor Things is much more focused on male-female relationships, whether it’s between Bella and her creator/father figure Godwin (Willem Dafoe) or between Bella and her various suitors, played by Ramy Youssef, Mark Ruffalo, and Christopher Abbot. Bella learns that she enjoys pleasure and has a naive sense of agency that creates friction with the vaguely steam-punk fantasy world she inhabits. Like Barbie, Bella is largely reacting to injustice as she struggles to understand why the world is so broken. Emma Stone does good work with a part that doesn’t have a lot of the interesting adult complexities that actors use to build characters. Like playing a plastic doll, this is the kind of character you really have to invent.
Despite a bold visual style and some fun, hammy performances, I didn’t feel the movie had a whole lot of insight or bite. The jokes, when they land, are decent, but they’re too spread out, and much of the comedy and style feels recycled from director’s previous film, The Favourite. That film felt like a leap forward for the director, and had a sharper script. Poor Things is more silly than funny, and more dour than profound. If you’re going to see it, see it on the big screen—it’s got extravagant costuming and sets, some strikingly realized images, as well as some wonderful Franken-pets taken straight out of early Tim Burton.
American Fiction
The pace and tone of this movie is not what the trailer suggests. It’s only about 20% a satire of the publishing industry, where the appetite for gritty stories of black suffering dehumanizes its subjects, flatters a liberal white readership, and sidelines more expansive types of storytelling. The great Jeffrey Wright plays Monk, a novelist with low sales who writes a purposefully garish book called “My Pafology” under a pseudonym. Like Bialystock and Bloom before him, the ruse becomes an accidental success, garnering Monk the kind of sales and awards buzz he had previously been denied.
The remaining 80% of the film is a low-key family drama where our hero dates a neighbour, cares for his ailing mother, struggles to connect with his recently out-of-the-closet brother, and witnesses his house-keeper’s budding romance with a local cop. We live in a moment where satire tends to be brash and grotesque—think Don’t Look Up or Triangle of Sadness. The satire in American Fiction does heighten some of its characters and situations, but Jeffrey Wright and the rest of the cast are such grounding presences that the story actually feels credible.
This tonal balance is also important for one of the main themes of the movie, which is that black stories are too rarely rendered with subtlety and dignity, and too rarely focus on the lives of the educated and well-off. The movie helps fill this vacuum, and does so with melancholic tenderness before wrapping up with a fun choose-your-own-ending sequence. Part of me wished the director had leaned into these meta-theatrical sequences a bit more, but then we would have missed smaller, more humane moments, like watching guests at a beachside wedding dance together in the dusk light.
Oppenheimer
This movie is well made, with excellent performances and some cool sequences, but it is simply not very memorable. Much of the movie is about whether or not Mr. Oppenheimer will get to keep his post-war security clearance. I’m not entirely clear why this is worthy of drama, let alone big-screen spectacle. You could say the security clearance battle is really about how public perception of Oppenheimer took a turn once he helped create the most evil weapon ever invented. What looked like heroism while fighting the Nazis quickly turned into a shameful chapter in scientific history that thenceforth endangered all life on earth. But surely director Christopher Nolan could have come up with a more dramatic way of communicating all this. I suppose he was a bit hamstrung by the fact that Oppenheimer was never put on trial for crimes against humanity, or otherwise seriously punished for delivering such an abomination into the world. It’s hard to make a tragedy when your hero is mostly a success (however guilty he feels).
As a director Nolan excels at movement and process, and can conjure tension and suspense as well as anyone; character and more subtle emotion have never been his strengths. The acting in this movie is fun, with an all-you-can-eat buffet of white males making great use of their screen time. The two female characters are underwritten, as wives and girlfriends in period pieces so often are. Cillian Murphy holds the whole thing together with his haunting, beautiful eyes, without which I do not think the movie would be worth seeing.
I watched Oppenheimer (in a mostly empty theatre) and Barbie (completely surrounded by pink-glad girls and gays) in the same day. This was part of the “Barbenheimmer” phenomenon, an organic bit of quasi-sincere, quasi-ironic movie-going ebullience that encouraged everyone, from Tom Cruise on down, to watch these wildly different films in the same day or weekend. While I’m glad everyone was excited about non-Marvel movies for once, I can’t say that seeing them back-to-back was particularly enlightening or interesting. I am glad I saw both movies on the big screen, and am happy others got exposed to something they might not have otherwise checked out. I honestly probably would have skipped both if it hadn’t been for the incongruity of the match-up and the fun everyone was having around it. I doubt we’ll see another hype cycle like it, but hopefully it signals the ebbing of the superhero tide and leads to more original, stand-alone blockbusters.
Stay tuned for Part 2, which will include mini-reviews of the remaining Oscar hopefuls and my own personal picks.