Unless you live for CGI blockbusters, 2023 was a terrific year for movies. It was not only a solid time for indie movies, foreign films, and documentaries, it was the best year in many years for Oscar-bait pictures that were actually great. 2023 saw a few more releases than 2022 when the industry was still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, but multiplexes were still not over-crowded with new releases or devoting all their best cinemas to running the same big studio product on multiple screens. Thus, the unusual, mid-budgeted pictures stuck around in theaters longer, and people ventured out of their homes to watch more than two movies on the big screen again, in numbers we haven't seen since the lockdowns. These included Academy members, many of whom actually went out and saw more than a dozen or so films rather than half-heartedly watching their screeners.

One of the downsides of a strong year for prestige pictures is that the Oscar nominations can be a bit predictable. But I’m not complaining. This is the first year since the Academy went to the mandatory 10 Best Picture nominees that I didn’t despise one or more of the selected movies. Even though I’m not a big fan of either half of the year's Barbenheimer phenomena, I think both films belong on this list—in fact, Barbie and Oppenheimer probably belong there more than films I liked better, like Maestro and American Fiction. It's just always more exciting when some of the biggest films of the year get nominated for Best Picture. But in order for that to happen, studios need to release universally appealing one-off movies that can compete with the likes of The Super Mario Bros., or the latest installment in a franchise like The Fast & The Furious, or an entry in a particular superhero cinematic multiverse. For Barbie and Oppenheimer to be the #1 and #3 highest-grossing movies of the year is thrilling, even for someone like me, for whom neither of those films even cracked my top 75.

That said, the Oscar races are not especially exciting this year because it's practically a foregone conclusion that Oppenheimer will do the kind of sweep that hasn't occurred in over twenty years. Of course, the Academy is not a club. They don't all collude to ensure that certain films or actors get nominated over others. (And when they do, like last year's push to get Andrea Riseborough a Best Actress nomination, they get reprimanded.) But even though most members vote for what they like, the current members of most branches want to spread the wealth around more than the Academy of earlier decades. Since they now use ranked-choice voting, many awards will go to the majority of the second or third choice of most members. This pattern will make it unlikely for Oppenheimer to pull off a Titanic-level sweep—that film won 11 of its 14 nominations—although the 2023 film may still come close to the 1997 picture's tally.

Now, my track record as a prognosticator is pretty bad. I don't pay a lot of attention to the horserace or the social media chatter. I only know what people think because Film Twitter outrage is so loud and strident it’s impossible to ignore all of it. I know there are a lot of theories out there put forward by the woke and the anti-woke that Barbie could win because of guilt over Greta Gerwig not getting nominated for Best Director. But I don't expect an Argo situation or a Moonlight upset. I also don't think Oppenheimer peaked too soon. I think the academy will reward Christopher Nolan's flawed epic with Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Film Editing, Cinematography, Sound, and Score. There is no question that Robert Downey, Jr., will win for Supporting Actor, though I think Robert De Niro and Mark Ruffalo are more deserving. I'm also predicting that Cillian Murphy will nab Best Actor, despite the much-loved Paul Giamatti giving him a run for his money during precursor awards.

Two non-Oppenheimer wins that are almost guaranteed are Giamatti's Holdovers co-star Da’Vine Joy Randolph for Supporting Actress, whose sweep of nearly all other awards shows makes her a foregone conclusion, and Lili Gladstone as Best Actress for Killers of the Flower Moon. The Best Actress race feels like it could go either way between Gladstone and Emma Stone for Poor Things since both have been taking home multiple statues from various awards bodies. But I can't imagine the current makeup of the Academy will blow the opportunity to give this award for the first time to a Native-American actress whose quiet performance grounded her picture with such profound intensity in favor of again rewarding a prolific thirty-two-year-old who already has a Best Actress Oscar under her belt. 

The seeming predictability of an Oppenheimer sweep makes me wish some of the smaller categories, like the short films, were more exciting. But as great a year for feature films as 2023 was, the same can't be said for the short form. This year's crop of animated, live-action, and documentary shorts was hardly stellar. And just as this was a weak year for CGI blockbusters, the nominated animated features were also subpar. It's easily a two-film race between Hayao Miyazaki's highest-grossing film ever, The Boy and the Heron, and the year's only superhero movie not to under-perform at the box office, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Balancing the overall slate and adding interest, 2023 was a great year for documentaries. There were so many personality-driven biographical docs that I was sure at least one would be nominated. There were the docs that explored the legacy of departed pioneers—like Being Mary Tyler Moore, the first-rate career-retrospective about the iconic TV trailblazer; Squaring the Circle, an evocative and witty look back at the design team responsible for many of the most iconic album covers of all time; Aurora's Sunrise, which blends animated narrative and documentary retrospective to tell the story of an Armenian Genocide survivor who wound up starring in a Hollywood silent film that told her story; and The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a visually dynamic historical doc about the mysterious, influential, and all-but-forgotten feminist sexologist whose work challenged patriarchal attitudes about intimacy and female sexuality. Then there were those docs where the subject is still alive and able to take the stage for a touching Oscar moment—the clunky but effecting Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie; the warm, funny, and timely Judy Blume Forever; the comprehensive Liv Ullmann: A Road Less Traveled; the immersive Anselm; and the powerful Joan Baez: I Am a Noise. But none of those documentaries made it past the shortlist. The addition of so many international members to the Academy has resulted in more challenging films getting nominated, which I think is a good thing—though there are plenty of loud voices decrying that none of the fun, celebrity-driven documentaries get nominated anymore.

The International Feature category is also easy to predict this year since France submitted the wonderful (and unmistakably French) autumnal romance The Taste of Things instead of (in my opinion) the year's best picture, Anatomy of a Fall. Had the more acclaimed and popular Anatomy been nominated, it would be a lock. Since it's not, The Zone of Interest will take the prize. Zone was one of the International Features that caused a bit of a dust-up on Film Twitter, since the director of Germany's entry is a Brit, Jonathan Glazer. Even more controversial is that a German, Wim Wenders, directed Japan's entry, Perfect Days. Still, as controversies go, these are weak conflagrations.

Unlike last year's entertaining kerfuffle over the Andrea Riseborough nomination, the insipid Internet outrage this year was no fun at all. Social media was up in arms about the “snubbing” of the year's biggest box office winner, Barbie. But these tired and tedious hot-takes only succeeded in illustrating the sheer ignorance and hypocrisy of most people who disparage the Academy Awards on Twitter and other mediums, where thoughtful commentary goes to be stoned to death. Rather than celebrate the many nominations of women, especially women of color and non-Americans—the lack of which is usually the cause for Oscar uproar—the social media warriors largely ignored the nominations of Lily Gladstone, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, America Ferrera, Celine Song, Justine Triet, Samy Burch, Kaouther Ben Hania, Maite Alberdi, and Yegane Moghaddam (some historically noteworthy nominations) to focus on the fact that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were not nominated for Barbie.

Of course, both women were nominated for Barbie, just not in the categories their crusading fans wanted. Since we live in a film culture forever poisoned by the Auteur Theory, Gerwig's nomination for Best-Adapted Screenplay (along with her partner Noah Baumbach) feels to many like some kind of consolation prize. But it's hard to feel sorry for Gerwig, who has had literally 100 percent of the movies she's directed nominated for Best Picture. As for Robbie, people seem to think when an actor has a producer credit it must be some kind of honorary title signifying nothing. Folks, I assure you, Margot Robbie was a creative producer on Barbie, with input into virtually every aspect of that film. If it wins, she'll be up there.

But how often does the #1 box-office movie get nominated for Best Picture anyway? Since 1980, only four movies were named Best Picture that topped the box office charts—The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Titanic, Forrest Gump, and Rain Man. So much of the outrage about Oscar nominations has to do with ignorance about how the Academy operates. Each individual branch nominates films for each category, and the only category everyone in the Academy votes for is Best Picture. Thus, we should expect some inconsistencies from branch to branch since the Academy is not a monolith. Reading and listening to the vitriol about the nominations makes me think that what many people want is the woke equivalent of the old smoke-filled room, where a body of elites sits around and decides how best to divvy up the goodies in ways that will ruffle the fewest feathers and make the organization look good. That's not how the Academy works. (That is pretty much how the LA Film Critics Association works!)

The director's branch is one of the least diverse segments of the Academy since most American directors are still predominantly old white guys. It would be great to see that branch expand, as others have in recent years, inviting in more youthful and international representation. But if the goal is to get more films made by women directors, and that is a goal I certainly share, then people's “activism” needs to start by buying tickets to the movies that women direct. In a capitalistic (and a Democratic) society, complaining at the end of a process doesn’t do nearly as much good as getting actively involved at the beginning. I wonder how many people who were outraged about Barbie getting “snubbed” by the Academy, themselves “snubbed” Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, Past Lives, Showing Up, Earth Mama, You Hurt My Feelings, Priscilla, A Thousand and One, Blue Jean, Reality, The Royal Hotel, Bottoms, Scrapper, The Unknown Country, Birth/Rebirth, and many other women-directed films that, in my humble opinion, were superior cinematic works to Barbie.

All the sound and fury around the nominations has largely died down, which is a relief. Still, the barrage has colored the writing that accompanies my semi-annual ranked list of the nominations. This year, my order sometimes seemed absurd to me. The apples-to-oranges (to single grapes) comparisons were especially wild in a year when there was a 180-minute celluloid IMAX historical film that became an international phenomenon and a simple 7-minute animated short about fabrics. But I am placing these movies in order of how well I felt they succeeded at what they were attempting to do. That is always my criteria.

So, with one missing film—the animated feature Robot Dreams, which I was unable to catch during NEON's nationwide one-night-only pre-Oscar screening—here is my complete list of the 2023 Oscar-nominated films.

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52: THE AFTER - 1 nomination ★
Picture the worst offering from a night of thesis films from a second-tier film school in the early 1990s, but with a major movie star in the lead and a Netflix-level budget, and you've got The After. Director Misan Harriman's film about grief and loss begins with an act of violence so absurdly staged that one can’t help but be shocked, not at its depiction of random urban savagery (did Fox News co-produce this?) but at the astonishing preposterousness of the conception and execution of the act. David Oyelowo plays a British businessman who loses his wife and daughter and spends the following years driving an Uber and carrying the weight of his grief until one fateful ride, which provides the film with a climax almost as embarrassingly overblown as its opening.



#51: THE CREATOR - 1 nomination ★
The latest from Rogue One director Gareth Edwards was considered the best science fiction film of the year by many, but it failed to be a major box-office success—maybe 2023 wasn’t the best year for a work of pro-AI propaganda. The film blends the hackneyed clichés of a dozen superior sci-fi films with stale tropes from a half dozen Vietnam movies to tell this story of a 2055 Earth where the US is fighting a war against artificial intelligence. The twist here is that these are not the type of murderous interconnected operating systems that most dystopian future fiction predict; here, the robots and synthetic organisms are asking, "Can't we all just get along?" None of the endless world-building Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz labor at stands up to even the most basic scrutiny. The nominated Visual Effects barely register because the whole thing is presented in the typical dark, muddy style we now expect of contemporary blockbusters.


 
#50: FLAMIN' HOT - 1 nomination ★
The “inspirational true story” of how Flamin' Hot Cheetos came into existence was the dumbest (though not the worst!) of the eight or nine 2023 films about a commercial product or business phenomenon. There might have been a compelling film in this rags-to-riches tale of a Frito-Lay janitor who harnessed his entrepreneurial spirit, his faith in himself, and the buying power of his Mexican-American community to revolutionize the snack market. Unfortunately, the writing, direction, and cheeseball approach to the material sinks any interest the story might generate. The only reason this film is an Oscar contender is because many Academy members are determined to get Diane Warren a competitive Oscar for Best Original Song. "The Fire Inside" is her fourteenth nomination, and it would be a real shame if the songwriting legend won for such a generic ditty. Since she won a lifetime achievement award from the Academy last year, I hope they'll not be silly enough to reward her for such disposable fluff.

#49: WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko - 1 nomination ★
Veteran Pixar animator Dave Mullins, previously nominated for the 2017 Best Animated Short Oscar for Lou, delivers an overcooked but half-baked tribute to the titular John Lennon and Yoko Ono song about giving peace a chance. Set in the trenches of WWI, the film envisions a chess game played between two soldiers on opposing sides who communicate their moves via carrier pigeon crisscrossing no man's land. Co-written by Sean Ono Lennon, who executive produced with Yoko, the film has a sizable budget and a lot of high-end talent, including a score by Thomas Newman and visuals by Weta FX. In a year where multiple complex armed conflicts are raging in the world, this simplistic, cartoony platitude, with its cutesy, sanitized depiction of one of the bloodiest wars in human history, rings nothing but flat, false notes.



#48: EL CONDE - 1 nomination ★
The great American cinematographer Ed Lachman, who shot Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan, David Byrne's True Stories, Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich, Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, and Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, lenses the utterly unimpressive black-and-grey visuals of Pablo Larraín’s latest picture. The director of No, Jackie, Spencer, and other notable pictures squanders a terrific premise and the opportunity to blend political commentary with genre tropes. The film supposes that Chili's former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, is an immortal vampire who, after sucking the lifeblood of the proletariat in many continents for over two hundred and fifty years, is finally ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. Larraín’s dreary satire makes us wish “The Count” would just hurry up and get on with it. After two richly deserved nominations for Far from Heaven in 2002 and Carol in 2015, it would be a shame for Lachman to win for an effort this monochromatic—in every sense of that term.



#47: NAPOLEON - 3 nominations ★
There's no getting around the fact that Ridley Scott is a legend and an amazing director of many movies. However, when it comes to historical epics, his dismissive arrogance and reductionist style-over-substance approach result in these being some of the worst entries in his uneven filmography. Napoleon is even worse than his Oscar-winning Gladiator (2000), easily one of the ten worst Best Picture winners. While most of Scott's historical pictures feel like they were conceived by a fifteen-year-old cheating on a test, only the two that star Joaquin Phoenix made me feel embarrassed that I bought a ticket. Phoenix is an actor with a wealth of emotion but zero technique. That's not to say he hasn't given some beautiful, extraordinary performances when he's well-directed in movies that suit his screen persona (see this year's terrific Beau is Afraid), but under Scott's direction in a period picture, he gets lost in a canvas of expensive finger-painting.

Still, the epic film deserves its nominations for Production Design, Costume Design, and Visual Effects, right? Not in a year that saw such a wealth of inventive and distinctive forays into these crafts like Barbie, Asteroid City, Poor Things, Beau Is Afraid, Ferrari, Maestro, and The Killer, to name a few. Everything in Napoleon, with the exception of that exploding horse, feels generically computer-generated. At least with his early period films, The Duelists and 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Scott's blasé storytelling could fall back on beautiful cinematography. But his more recent historical efforts, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, and the atrocious Exodus: Gods and Kings all look like digital dreck, which renders their photography, effects, and even costumes as artificial as their scripts and casting. The humor in Scott's historical epics is also pathetically adolescent, and Napoleon epitomizes this failing. The one time Scott got the script, tone, and casting right on such a project was The Last Duelin 2021, but that film didn't score any Oscar nominations!



#46: THE COLOR PURPLE - 1 nomination ★
Like a cinematic game of telephone, this filmed musical adaptation of the stage musical adaptation of the film adaptation of Alice Walker's exceptional novel loses all semblance of the source's original meaning as each successive team of storytellers reinterprets it. Walker's punishing, enlightening, enthralling tale of an African-American woman living in the rural South who survives unspeakable abuses of every sort gets the full Little Shop of Horrors treatment in this shamelessly slight and sterilized production. It is simply one of the most schizophrenic mismatches of tone and subject matter ever committed to screen. Nearly every choice made in every category, across the board, feels utterly wrong—the pedestrian visual style, much of the casting (Colman Domingo is a great actor, but he's all wrong for Mister), the banal staging of the production numbers, the painfully obvious truncations of songs written for the stage musical (some as short as 60 seconds in this movie!), the absurd sanitizing of the historical context, the clumsy way this screenplay handles the passage of time (a critical element to any telling of this story), the way contemporary attitudes about resilience and identity via entrepreneurship and branding warp this profound period exploration of sisterly bonds into a saccharine self-empowerment narrative. I could go on.

The only choice that makes a favorable impression is casting Danielle Brooks in the major supporting role of Sofia. So it's fitting that if this colossal misfire of a movie is to receive any Academy love, it should be for its most positive attribute. Brooks played Sofia to great acclaim on Broadway, and she fully embodies the character's confidence and outspoken swagger. She's far less convincing when Sofia gets stripped of her fierce self-possession in the second act, but that is entirely the fault of the writing and direction, not the actor. Brooks exemplifies how a great performance can transcend (or at least survive) a bad production; that's worth some acclaim.



#45: NIMONA - 1 nomination ★
This feature adaptation of ND Stevenson's episodic webcomic and graphic novel has some original character design, but the overall style of animation is the same high octane, hyperkinetic, everything flying at you at a million miles an hour style that makes so many modern animated films tedious and exhausting. In terms of premise, setting, and themes, Nimona is practically identical to the prior year's Netflix Best Animated Feature nominee, The Sea Beast. That film, however, enabled its audience to discover the subtext and message of the story along with the characters— brave warriors with their proud tradition of killing the dangerous monsters that lurk outside the protective wall of their kingdom who come to discover that perhaps the legends, conventions, and laws they've held close for generations might be all wrong. In Nimona, this message is telegraphed, shouted, spray-painted, dictated, signaled, and crammed down viewers' throats. It's as if the filmmakers believe they will score extra points if their film is as pedagogic and preachy as possible so that even people who don't actually watch it will champion it. But sitting through it is a slog.



#44: INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY - 1 nomination ★
One of the greatest original film series ever devised is buried by director James Mangold, co-writers David Koepp and Jez & John-Henry Butterworth, and original producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy—along with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas sanctioning these dismal proceedings as executive producers. One of the many things that made the original Indiana Jones trilogy so exciting and distinctive was the tactile nature of the productions—actually traveling to exotic locations, reveling in the practical special effects and thrilling real-world stunts, the remarkable sets, the matte paintings, the inventive sound design, the expert editing!!!! These films embodied the things that made Hollywood blockbusters fun before CGI reduced 94 percent of them to a murky, monotonous swamp of digital glop. Even though I believe this production was made all over the world, what does it matter what hill Harrison Ford is sitting on if they're just gonna put a green screen behind him and fill it with digital skies, cities, or other patently unreal environments?

Of course, another element that made these movies so spectacularly memorable was the scores by John Williams. But as much as I would have loved this film to give not only Ford a fitting farewell but also the grand old man of movie soundtracks, can anyone really say this music merits giving the 53-time nominated, 5-time winner yet another accolade?



#43: RED, WHITE AND BLUE - 1 nomination ★★
Thank goodness we're coming out of the asteroid field of terrible one-star movies, but it's going to be a while before things really start to improve all that much. Nazrin Choudhury's live-action short, Red, White and Blue, is, blessedly, well acted by its cast, but even the greatest thespians in the world couldn't sell the contrivances of this 24-minute conceit. Brittany Snow stars as a waitress and single mother of two who must arrange to drive from Arkansas to Illinois to obtain a legal abortion. You can not convince me that this was the best short film made this year about the horrific ramifications of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v Wade. Surely, less labored and hackneyed films on this subject were plentiful in 2023, right? From the generic yet imperious title, to the deus ex machina that provides the protagonist with money for the procedure, to the near Shyamalanistic twist at the end–which is meant to be a gut punch but is, in fact, an eye-roller–this movie disappoints. Between the beginning of fellow nominee After and the ending of Red, White, and Blue, one has to wonder what these branches are looking for in the shorts they select.



#42: THE ABCS OF BOOK BANNING - 1 nomination ★★
The weakest of the nominated documentary shorts is also a contemporary issue picture made by a champion of documentary films, which means it has a good chance of taking home the statue. The ABCs of Book Banning is a saccharine screed against the Right-wing movement that has politicized libraries and school boards across red state USA. The film practically admits it is not a serious documentary up front, with text stating that pro-book-banning voices have already been heard from plenty, so this film will center on the voices of those most directly affected: children (to which the film then proceeds to devote less than 30 percent of its time). The picture seems to have been made by folks completely disinterested in actually exploring the issue, its long history, the reasons certain books are being targeted, or in talking about solutions. And while it defines what is meant by the classifications of books that are "Restricted," "Challenged," or "Banned," it provides zero context as to how widespread this phenomenon is, how effective the bans have been, how many times a book needs to be objected to to merit inclusion in this film (is it 1000, is it 1?), etc.

Co-directed by Sheila Nevins, the 84-year-old former chief of HBO Documentary Films and executive producer at MTV Documentary Films, the project was inspired by seeing MSNBC coverage of a 100-year-old woman named Grace Linn protesting book banning at a school board hearing in Florida. That footage is included in the film, and it's moving. Likewise, the quasi-power-point presentation of titles that have been restricted, challenged, or banned is powerful if you know the books; if you don't, you'll need to take the filmmakers' word that the one sentence they've extracted from each work is fully representative of the book's content. As promised, the picture devotes a bit of its 27-minute running time to hearing from a select group of kids, but one could just as easily have taken a sampling from a different bunch of precocious 10-year-olds and gotten totally opposite responses. Watching the film, one has to ask, who is this movie for? Is anyone from the opposing end of this political issue going to be swayed by this lightweight puff piece? The ABCs of Book Banning leads with positivity and common sense rather than with fear and ignorance, but it's, frankly, the type of simplistic agitprop I expect from the other side of this fight.


#41: GOLDA - 1 nomination ★★
A chain-smoking Helen Mirren, under layers of padding and Oscar-nominated Makeup and Hairstyling, plays Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the pivotal 1973 Yom Kippur War with Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria. Director Guy Nattiv and writer Nicholas Martin depict the leader as a tarnished iron lady for whom the loss of every man she sends into battle has taken a physical and emotional toll. While the film attempts to contextualize what an existential fight these 19 days must have felt like, it never overcomes the difficulty any 2023 movie would have in not simply reinforcing the picture of how much power and influence this nation wields, even just twenty or so years after its founding. And by casting Mirren, a non-Jew, as this iconic Jewish leader, the film pissed off a big percentage of the folks who might have actually watched it. A war film set largely in conference rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens, Golda is unable to make its obviously limited budget work as a strength rather than a hindrance. The make-up and hair work is good, for sure, but watching Mirren listen anxiously to reports of things happening off-screen, we can't help wishing we were watching her un-transformed performance in the vastly superior fictional political thriller Eye in the Sky from 2015.

#40 GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Vol. 3 ★★ - 1 nomination
It was smart to build the third adventure of this band of galactic superhero misfits around the CGI raccoon, as he's the only character that can sustain the more-is-more-is-more-is-more aesthetic of James Gunn's sci-fi comic-book series. Also, the voice work is much stronger in this film than the performances by the actors who had to actually show up—except for a brief appearance by Nathan Fillion, whose costume, facial expressions, and line readings are quite funny (can't say the same for Stallone's cameo, though.) All things considered, it's a worthy nominee for Visual Effects.



#39: RUSTIN - 1 nomination ★★
Unlike The Color Purple, Rustin casts the talented Colman Domingo in a role he can sink his teeth into. He gives a fine performance despite having to navigate a woefully mismatched cast (Chris Rock, Yikes!) and just plain terrible direction from New York Theater hero George C. Wolfe—how any film director can make the 1963 March on Washington feel anticlimactic is beyond me. Everyone here does their level best to give the overlooked civil rights hero Bayard Rustin his due. But this well-meaning picture has a script by the lem'me-show-ya-how-to-write-a-really-terrible-biopic screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk, J. Edgar), which feels like the product of some Bizarro World Robert McKee seminar where the objective was to write a movie with not one actable scene. With all he's got working against him in this effort, Domingo deserves some love and recognition.



#38: ELEMENTAL - 1 nomination ★★
Pixar rehashes many themes of their prior year's offering, Turning Red, this time with a more abstract, less on-the-nose tale of growing up as a child of immigrants. The quasi-interracial-young-adult romcom is set in a fantasy city where the elements of fire, water, earth, and air are given the full Disney anthropomorphization treatment, though the screenwriter kinda forgot there are four elements, not just two. The level of storytelling here isn't exactly Romeo and Juliet—it's not even Lady and the Tramp—and too much about this narrative, the protagonists, and the central thematic analogy don't coalesce. In a world with only four types of people, we only get to know the fire and water folks; the earth people are barely even referenced. This lack of fantasy cultural development seems strange coming from a studio that usually creates such fully realized environments. The animation and character design are lovely, but the characters themselves are underdeveloped. Hardly worthy of Best Animated Feature.



#37: SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE - 1 nomination ★★
There are things I can appreciate about these Miles Morales Spider-Verse movies, but like so many modern animated features, there are just too many ideas, too much imagery, too much overt messaging, and just too much. A film writer I really love, Nick Davis, wrote in his three-and-a-half-star review of the first Spider-Verse film, “Watching this still feels like pounding Mountain Dew non-stop for two hours that feel much closer to three.” I can’t say it better than that. But since I'm not a film professor like Nick, I don't have to give it three-and-a-half-stars and fall all over myself trying to find positive things to say so my students won't discredit everything else I want to impart to them. Still, I know my negativity about this beloved movie, and every other film on the first part of this list, might cause some to stop reading. But if you've made it this far, we're almost out of the tunnel of darkness, I swear!



#36: THE ETERNAL MEMORY - 1 nomination ★★
As I noted in my introduction, there were so many fine celebrity-driven biographical documentaries this year that I was sure at least one would be nominated. But of all the strong docs that scored a nom, Maite Alberdi's intimate window of how Alzheimer's disease slowly takes over the marriage of Paulina Urrutia and Augusto Góngora is the only one I wish was more personality-driven. The subjects of this film are key figures in Chilean history, and it seems a missed opportunity that the film views them as an “everycouple,” devoting so little screen time to the vital roles they each played in their country's history. Especially considering the film's title, I don't think it belittles anyone struggling with dementia to focus on what is being lost as the specific individual at the heart of the picture is deprived of the chronicle of national events once contained in his mind.


#35: AMERICAN SYMPHONY - 1 nomination ★★
One biographical documentary that did get nominated, not for a documentary award but for Best Original Song, is Matthew Heineman's film about an unimaginably intense year in the crowded life of musician Jon Batiste. Over the course of the film, we watch Batiste as he threads the needle of the multiple communities he belongs to, gets nominated for 11 Grammy Awards over five or six different styles of music, works as the musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and creates his first symphony—all while supporting his wife Suleika Jaouad as she deals with a recurrence of leukemia. The most moving scenes are those of Batiste and Jaouad at home and in the hospital as he attempts to support her through her painful procedures and as she takes vicarious delight in his many successes—offset with notes of regret that she can't be there to experience much of it with him. But American Symphony hints at the better movie it could have been during the brief glimpses it gives us of Batiste dropping his smiling, top-of-the-world persona and just sitting with how difficult it is for this man to maintain the many identities and roles society wants of him. This I’m-dancing-as fast-as-I-can quality almost comes out musically when we hear the magnum opus he premieres at Carnegie Hall—which is trying to encompass nothing less than "the entire musical diaspora" into one night of music—but I'm pretty sure the film intends to present this high-stakes night as a triumph. Regardless of what you make of the finale, which is memorable, but the nomination is for the end title song, “It Never Went Away,” which is not.



#34: NǍI NAI & WÀI PÓ - 1 nomination ★★
It seems each recent collection of Oscar-nominated documentary shorts starts out with a simple, personal, familial portrait, and this one from Sean Wang is warm and sweet without being cloying. The unseen but frequently acknowledged director visits his widowed maternal and paternal grandmothers, who now live together and care for each other as platonic pals of advanced age. With their distinctly Asian spin on the Boston Marriage, these two lovable ladies keep each other in high spirits while they contemplate their impending mortality and look back on difficult lives they are nonetheless grateful for. On its own, I would probably give this film three stars, but as an Oscar-nominated short, it’s just too slight. As with Jay Rosenblatt's How Do You Measure A Year from the prior year’s selected group, this "documentary" feels too much like the Academy nominating people's home movies, which are more fitting for a YouTube Creator Award.


#33: BARBIE: - 8 nominations ★★
The year's biggest movie was a triumph on many levels, scoring several nominations, including Best Picture, Supporting Actress for America Ferrera, Supporting Actor for Ryan Gosling, Adapted Screenplay for Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Production Design for Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Costume Design for Jacqueline Durran, and two for Original Song—“What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell, and “I'm Just Ken” by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt. The screenplay and production design awards feel especially appropriate for this story about Barbie and Ken leaving the magical, colorful, seemingly ideal world of Barbie Land and coming to contemporary America.

Gerwig's big swing starts out as if it might actually transcend the fake corporate feminism of Mattel's Barbie Doll philosophy and make a subversive film that deconstructs that whole mythos while still being a fun night out at the movies. But then Barbie walks into Mattel headquarters and meets its CEO, played by Will Ferrell, followed by an encounter with a group of tween girls who criticize her in a “comically” precocious manner for all the harm her unrealistic beauty standards have caused. Within a span of five minutes, the “real world” suddenly becomes as unreal as the “Barbie world,” and the film instantly devolves into one of those single-joke, extended comedy skit movies that can't sustain a feature-length running time. I honestly believe the casting of Ferrell in his well-worn disingenuous buffoon screen persona is the film's fatal mistake. After the Jacques-Demy-and-John-Waters-fell-into-a-cotton-candy-machine spell cast during the first forty minutes is broken, we suddenly feel like we're in an Adam McKay movie. And the film never recovers from this detrimental piece of casting because the story must, necessarily, become more didactic from that point on. It should never feel preachy, but too often it does.

The film's mildly pedagogic moralizing, unfortunately, extends to America Ferrera's big “Oscar speech” moment, which is key to making the entire film succeed. If you feel it works, the movie will work for you. If you feel it doesn't land, as I do, the movie ultimately won't work for you, regardless of all the many other aspects of the film you might enjoy. Gerwig sets her film and Ferrera up for the impossible task of summing up womanhood for all women of all generations and all identity groups. That's a huge challenge, and even though I feel the film misses the mark, I appreciated the attempt. Ferrera is still a great choice for her role, as is the hilarious Gosling, as are all the other inhabitants of Barbie Land and Southern California. While this is not a film I liked with anywhere near the affection I hold for Gerwig's first two directorial efforts, Lady Bird and Little Women, and I fear this runaway success may lead to yet another loss of a great indie filmmaker into the void of Intellectual Property Cinema, I can't say I'm not happy for our girl Greta. 



#32: OPPENHEIMER- 12 nominations ★★
As much as I love seeing a three-hour R-rated historical drama shot and released on celluloid IMAX becoming a massive commercial hit, I wish Christopher Nolan could have, just this once, abandoned his narrow, gimmicky approach to storytelling and worked with a real screenwriter to adapt Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's book American Prometheus into a film for the ages. But one thing I will say for Oppenheimer is that it is an ideal Best Picture winner for 2023. This is a movie about possibly the single most critical event in the history of human civilization that somehow builds to a Senate confirmation hearing in which someone who is barely a secondary character in the story of the Atomic Bomb may or may not have his political ambitions thwarted. When we consider the challenges world civilization faces versus what our political leaders and news outlets are focused on 24-7, how can this not be seen as the film that best epitomizes our current era? But it also demonstrates an act of surrender from a screenwriter so incapable of finding a cinematic narrative within the mountain of historical research in his source material that he falls back on the tropes of a dozen West Wing episodes.

Robert Downey Jr. certainly gives an excellent performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer's political antagonist, Lewis Strauss, but since the elevation of this character to an almost co-lead is at the heart of what I find so objectionable about this movie, I will have a hard time when he wins, which he will. Similarly, as much as I love Emily Blunt, how is this long-suffering wife role any different than a thousand other long-suffering wives in biopics about the deeds of great men? If Blunt wins, Sally Field should be pissed! Cillian Murphy, who I also think will win, is the most deserving of accolades for this movie. His performance—both internally, in terms of making such an enigmatic man so interesting, and externally in terms of his distinctive physicality—keeps us riveted for the full three hours, even those of us mentally cursing Nolan in our minds.

The technical nominations are harder to swallow, especially Best Cinematography for Hoyte Van Hoytema, who will also most assuredly win. For years now, this guy has been shooting movies with IMAX film cameras as if they were a plastic Holga. You know those YouTube tutorials that teach you how to film a professional-looking interview?—ya stick your camera on a tripod, center your subject squaring their head and shoulders, place a big ‘ol single light source off to one side of their face, and you're all set—swap your DSLR out for a giant 15-perf IMAX film camera, and you've basically got the visual style of Oppenheimer. Ever wonder why Nolan and Van Hoytema are able to shoot such long and complicated movies so quickly? It's because they don't bother with trivial things like lighting. They just use the sun or a single giant glowing lantern, and they're all set. These folks sure have a funny way of celebrating the artistry of the medium they are trying to save, but I'm still glad they are trying to save it. Maybe soon, we'll get to see some real cinematic artists working in IMAX.



#31: LETTER TO A PIG - 1 nomination ★★+
Yes, I'm ranking director Tal Kantor's not especially remarkable animated 17-minute short above Christopher Nolan's inevitable Oscar-sweeping Oppenheimer. The simple reason is that this little film gave me a bit more to ponder than the epic about the father of the Atomic Age. A different kind of WWII story, the inherent metaphors in this little story are never heavy-handed while also not frustratingly ambiguous. The film depicts an elderly Holocaust survivor telling a class of Israeli schoolchildren how a pig saved his life when Nazis chased him as a young boy. The kids do not seem all that interested until the man gets into his desire for revenge. When one girl dozes off and dreams of her own pig, we get a sense that she may have drawn a different moral from the story than her classmates. The film's quasi-pencil-sketch rotoscope approach is at times striking and at times bland. It does seem stylistically innovative enough to merit a Best Animated Short Oscar, but the story's subtle metaphors stayed with me.



#30: ISLAND IN BETWEEN - 1 nomination ★★+
Cinematographer and director S. Leo Chiang reflects on his birthplace, the islands of Kinmen, in this personal short doc about the group of landmasses that sit just two miles off the Chinese mainland but are an extension of Taiwan. Kinmen has been a consistent source of military tensions between the two nations, but until COVID-19, it also attracted tourists from both sides who came to marvel at its unique history and some scenic remains from the 1949 Chinese Civil War. Chiang's father served on Kinmen during that time, and the islands could become a place of battle again due to the escalating tensions between Taiwan and China. Short docs often blend mini-history lessons with personal stories, and this film fits within that tradition. I knew nothing of the Kinmen Islands and found Chiang's connection to them interesting. His identity has fluctuated depending on which of the three passports he holds feels the most relevant to him at different times in his life. If his film has any political agenda, it's simply a desire for peace presented in a far less pretentious way than War is Over.



#29: THE BOY AND THE HERON: - 1 nomination ★★+
Hayao Miyazaki returned from one of his many retirements to make this hit fantasy tale about a boy growing up during WWII who discovers an abandoned tower in the town he's relocated to after his mother's death. Several encounters with a pesky, talking grey heron lead the kid to enter the fantastical world within the tower. The screenplay draws heavily from Miyazaki's childhood, growing up during the war with a father employed by a company manufacturing parts for fighter planes who took his son away from the city after losing his mother to live in the relative safety of the countryside. It explores themes of coming of age and coping with significant loss during a time of complex conflict, creating an often wondrous world of beguiling images. But the loose narrative makes the picture a bit of a slog. Shifting back and forth between feeling listless and overwrought, it aims for the type of mysterious majesty of Miyazaki's Spirited Away but ends up feeling more like Ralph Bakshi and Daniels teamed up to remake Miyazaki's 2001 masterpiece.



#28: KNIGHT OF FORTUNE - 1 nomination ★★+
This Danish short film by director Lasse Lyskjær Noer is a story of grief and loss with a distinctly Nordic, light, absurdist touch. Two strangers, both widowers of a certain age, meet in the bathroom of a morgue where they have come to bid farewell to their late wives. Winsome, underplayed performances help put across the unexpected revelation of an expected twist, but it's hard to picture this film taking home an Oscar.


#27: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE - 2 nominations ★★+
Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie bring back some of the fun that was missing from the prior M:I installment, but this film's ratio of long, poorly written, lazily photographed exposition scenes to exciting and well-executed stunts and action set pieces is far too heavily weighted toward the former. Still, the third-act train sequence is a tour-de-force of action directing and special effects. Comparing this train fight to the one at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is like the difference between swimming in a crystal-clear lake and drowning in a muddy swamp. The main goal of special effects, especially in action movies, should be to make something impossible look credible, to make us believe that what we're seeing on screen really happened. It sure helps that Cruise is keeping himself alive and at the top of the box-office food chain by doing as much real-world stunt work as he can, but kudos should also go to the nominated Visual Effects and Sound artists who make it all work so well.