A Complete Unknown
Conclave (winner)
Emilia Perez
Nickel Boys
Sing Sing
What’s Missing
I don’t hate this list of nominees, although, as always there are some improvements I think that can be made. As always, we need to talk about how horror movies are continually ignored come Oscar time, which leaves out a few films that deserve to be here and a bunch that don’t. The films that could be talked about in this context are Alien: Romulus, A Quiet Place: Day One, and especially Nosferatu. Comedy often has the same problem, and those with horror ties like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice are doubly hampered. If animated movies get a second nomination, it’s usually in a category like this one, but there’s no soap for Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, or the partly-animated Paddington in Peru. The Return felt designed for nominations, but didn’t get any. Some might make a case for Furiosa (I wouldn’t), and I had problems with Dune: Part Two, but I’m in the minority. The biggest miss, I think, was Wicked.
Weeding through the Nominees
5. I said in the review of it that saying that you didn’t like Emilia Perez was something you needed to be careful doing. It would be easy for people to think that any distaste for this film to be based on the theme. The reality is that it’s just not that good of a movie. When it comes to screenplay, the biggest issue with this film is that, and this has to be a part of the screenplay, the songs are terrible. The characters are generally pretty awful as well. I don’t know that this film deserved many of its nominations (if any), and it doesn’t belong here. It’s clearly the film that doesn’t belong in this group.
4. I like Bob Dylan, gravel voice and all, and to be fair, I like A Complete Unknown pretty well. It’s not a movie that covers all of his career, but it’s not meant to do that. This is a memoir more than a biography. If all of this is true, why am I putting this in fourth place? I didn’t, originally. My gut was to put it in third and have Conclave in fourth. Why the switch? Because I remembered I’m Not There exists, and it’s really a better movie about Bob Dylan. It covers more, it’s more interesting, and it’s also a film that I’m a lot more likely to watch again. I don’t hate this nomination, but I’m not sure I love it.
3. I started writing this last night because there’s an obvious 5th place for me, but the rest are a lot harder to rank. I like all of them, and I like all of the screenplays pretty well. Of the remaining four, ultimate winner Conclave is the one I’ve ranked the lowest. There are two twists in the screenplay of Conclave, and while I respect both of them, I guessed the first one in the first 15 minutes of the movie. This isn’t specifically bad writing. In fact, I don’t know that there was a way to not telegraph that particular plot element, but the fact that I knew exactly where we’d get 90 minutes before we got there is a disappointment.
2. I found Nickel Boys a hard watch not because there are problems with the movie, but because of the current situation in the U.S. It’s hard to watch a movie that is clearly about oppression and racial issues when living in a country where roughly a third of populace is encouraging the removal of anyone who is darker skinned than a paper shopping bag. Nickel Boys is a good and meaningful film, and I like this nomination. I’m putting it in second specifically because I like the movie I’m putting first better.
My Choice
1. I went into Sing Sing knowing nothing and with no expectations. I left the film questioning why this was missed for Best Picture nominations. Sing Sing is a complete package of a film and establishes Colman Domingo as one of the best actors working. All of this comes from a screenplay that looks like it should be a pretty standard prison movie and ends up being something completely different from that. This is a movie that is far more than the sum of its parts, and all of that begins with the screenplay. It’s my winner, and honestly, it’s not really close.
Final Analysis
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