Here it is, the yearly award that becomes more and more divisive with every year. To some it's an increasingly irrelevant dinosaur scraping for its existing, to other it's a wokester agenda that only awards movies with maximum politics, to another it's an affirmation to their letterboxd profile (
couldn't be me), and to many it is an award show where they gives golden statuettes to movie people.
Anyway, I'll be going through the winners and nominations for the best picture in this OP.
- Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All At Once.
I like this movie, I think it's a fun action romp with a little dramatic story, but I it is definitely not best picture material. From what I've seen a lot of people felt rather strongly with its story of marital problem and parent-child relation, but I am never cared of such stories even though my family is far from perfect either. It is certainly no Parasite.
- All Quiet in the Western Front
I just watched it last week and yeah it's a great war movie about soldiers struggling with the horrors of war and all that, Felix Kammerer deserve award for his breakthrough role as Paul and this movie definitely deserved its stacked nomination list more than EEAAO. On the other hand I think the replacement of the home scenes with the diplomats and generals scenes isn't good, store brand Luddendorf is such a cliched character.
(also Rufus, they made the French looks really cool and uncompromising to the Allemands)
The further I am from this movie the more of my opinion of it sours. I legitimately do not care about special effect and all the gushing about it did nothing to me, the plot is largely filler where the characters just do stuff to showcase the CGI, and the characters are standard family movie tropes. Literally the biggest enjoyment I got from this movie was thinking about how the HFY nerds in SB will react to it.
- The Banshees of Inisherin
Never heard of it before the nomination, and just by looking at its Wikipedia summary along with its poster it strikes me as some oscar bait. Sorry to those who might like it, it could be after all. I mean I skipped over Parasite for the same reason at its premiere (big L).
The top positive review on Letterboxd described it as a "two hour long trailer", and from the few clips I saw it definitely had a madcap energy I would've loved had I watched it.
The mandatory "movie about how awesome movie people and Hollywood is". I heard it referenced Spielberg's dad cuckoldry which sounds really amusing, considering that this movie is a poorly disguised Spielberg biopic made by the man himself.
A highbrow movie about an obsessive conductor, sounds interesting Hadn't and its fans does seems to felt very strongly about it. And it have Cate Blanchett. For some of my friends here, this movie have an epic scene where the main character epically takes down a wokerati epic style, I think you guys'll appreciate that.
Proof that the MCU sludge have scalded moviegoers' palate that an 80s blockbuster can blow modern audience away. This is not a take down, I watched and liked the original one and I respect people who also like this one. But this is the kind of movie I'd rather catch and enjoy on streaming or TV year later.
A lot of The Menu review compared that movie to Triangle of Sadness, and I really liked The Menu for it's absurdist comedy and a stupid plot that worked thanks to its actors' amazing performance. Of course it also have an anticapitalist plot that a socdem scum like me would've lapped up while others would detest. Like The Menu.
I was about to a joke about oscar woman movie and whatnot but as I was typing this turns this movie was based on a real life event of mass rape in a closed religious colony between the year 2005 and 2009. Besides that this is a United Artist highbrow movie and to be honest I kind of liked those kind of movies.
And to top this off, the one movie I think is snubbed of its award.
A movie that could be boiled as a simple "man vs beast" story that went beyond with a great cast and gripping horror. It starts out with brutal monkey violence it did not bother to explain, it then slows down into paranormal suspense before hitting the ground running after its big reveal. Unfortunately, being a horror flick nuked this movie's chance of ever getting near the Oscars unless it the movie is labelled as a "thriller" or something. I think watching families with kids getting mulched was quite thrilling alright.
