Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2023

The Contenders:

American Fiction
Anatomy of a Fall
Barbie
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
Oppenheimer (winner)
Past Lives
Poor Things
The Zone of Interest

What’s Missing

2023 was a solid year for movies. I at least somewhat like nine of the nominees, even if there are a lot of changes I would make for a list of 10. Still, there have definitely been worse years when it comes to Best Picture nominations. Horror rarely gets its due, but Infinity Pool would have been an interesting nomination. If we’re talking horror, though, Scream VI, Evil Dead Rise, and Late Night with the Devil are far better choices. The same is true for animated movies, which is going to leave out both Nimona and Robot Dreams. I was pleasantly surprised by Knock at the Cabin and while it wouldn’t get a nomination in a million years, I was even more pleasantly surprised by Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Neither Polite Society nor Godzilla Minus One are Oscar bait in any way, but I liked them both. Dumb Money would be a long shot, but I liked it more than several of the nominees. The two big misses for me You Hurt My Feelings and The Iron Claw, both of which would class up the list of nominations.

Weeding through the Nominees

10. I may as well rip off the Band-Aid on this one—of the ten nominations, Poor Things was the one movie that didn’t climb above the 3-stars rating for me on Letterboxd. That’s notable because, for me, “3 stars” equates to “I liked it, at least well enough to admit that I liked it.” Admittedly, there’s not a great deal about Yorgos Lanthimos that I like in terms of the movies he has made in general. I like weird, but I find his films off-putting and unpleasant. Poor Things was going to face an uphill battle regardless, and it didn’t have nearly enough to get over that hill.

9. Maestro is the movie that just clawed over the 3-star rating for me. I can’t imagine wanting to watch it a second time. It was well-made and I can’t fault the performances a great deal, but it really feels like a film that was badly misfocused. If we’re going to get a biopic about Leonard Bernstein, why wouldn’t it focus at least in part on the man’s music, the stuff that made him famous? I get needing to bury ourselves in the things that moved him, but this would be like making a film about a baseball player and only showing a couple of minutes of the player on the field. What was the point of this?

8. There’s a lot to like with American Fiction, and it takes some real chances. The issue I have is that I don’t think that all of those chances paid off. There’s a sense here that the filmmakers really wanted this to have a genuine sense of verisimilitude—there are so many things that happen over the course of the film that feel like real life and that don’t actually impact on the plot. From a sense of realism, that’s great. But for a film, where we expect what we are seeing to matter to us and to have some commentary on the story being told, it feels like a lot of noise being added without it adding anything to the actual story.

7. It always feels wrong to put someone like Martin Scorsese this far down the list, but this is where I think Killers of the Flower Moon belongs. This is exactly the sort of movie that Oscar loves, of course. It’s big, it’s about an issue, there’s a lot going on. But it feels like we have gotten to the place with Scorsese where everyone is scared to tell him “no.” The man is a legend for a reason, but someone needs to tell him that he’s allowed to make cuts to his film. When’s the last time he put out a major film that comes in at a tight 95 minutes? Cut in half, this film is still longer than that.

6. Now things get tough, because I’d love for the next three movies to all be in fourth place. I don’t like putting eventual winner Oppenheimer in sixth place because there’s a lot here that I really like. But, ultimately, I have the same issue here that I do with Scorsese’s film. It’s too damned long for the story it wants to tell. Nolan is certainly capable of telling a big story in an efficient way (Dunkirk is 107 minutes), but no one seems to want to rein him in. Of course, this did ultimately win, so I’m probably talking through my hat, but I’d like this one a lot more if it were 30 minutes shorter.

5. I spent a lot of time thinking about what should be fifth and what should be fourth. Past Lives is better than fifth place, I think, but it’s where I’m putting it for one very specific reason. This is a small story. That doesn’t make it less valuable, but the idea of the Oscars, more often than not, is that the stories for “Oscar movies” are big ones, that have sweeping importance, and that are about “issues.” Past Lives is intimate, and so it feels less impactful in that way, even if I think that the idea that it is so personal is what gives it its power. It’s a better movie than this, but this was a strong year.

4. The central difficulty of The Zone of Interest is that we need at all times to know what is happening behind the wall that is in so many of the shots without actually being shown what is happening behind the wall. It’s about creating a specter that hangs over the rest of the film, something that we have to sense rather than see, a constant horror that is always just off screen. That’s not easy to do, and this does it brilliantly. Am I penalizing this film because of how terrible the subject is? Perhaps, but there’s nothing I can do about that. These ratings are subjective, after all.

3. I’ve said before that Anatomy of a Fall walks a difficult line as well. We need to be invested in what happens while disliking the person the film is about. This feels like an odd nomination, frankly. It’s not the sort of film that I would guess ramps up the Oscar voting base, but I love it as a nomination. This is the kind of film that should be nominated more and more. I wouldn’t have squawked terribly if this had won, even though I can’t really see a world where that would have happened. Sometimes, the nomination really is the win.

2. I realize that I said above that Past Lives is a smaller movie about a smaller story, and here I am putting The Holdovers in second place. This is also a small story, and it’s one that we’ve seen before in a lot of ways. Young rebel paired with tired old guy is a classic combination that has been turned into dozens of films. None of them have done it so well as The Holdovers, though. The characters are all immediately compelling and perfomed beautifully, and the story feels completely real. These are real people we are watching, with real lives and real fears and real tragedies.

My Choice

1. Of course I’m putting Barbie at the top. It was not merely the highest-grossing movie of 2023, it was absolutely the best thing that was produced in 2023. It’s a smart movie, one that honors where it came from and that plays with some real concepts. And it had the added benefit of pissing off much of the political right because it wasn’t about them. And, of course, Hollywood took all of the wrong lessons from it—we're going to get a bunch of stupid toy movies rather than movies about the experiences of women in the real world. That wouldn’t have changed had Barbie won, but it still should have won.

Final Analysis