2024 Oscar Viewing Project

For the first time ever, I finished watching all of the Oscar Viewing Project nominees before the Oscars, a huge moment for me overall.  I didn't do my official year-end awards my brother, however, until this past weekend, so I am publishing both this AND the My Ballot weeks after I finished these (and am actually writing this before the Oscars so for the first time ever I am doing this without knowing whom Oscar actually picked).  As is tradition (we will not do our 20+ articles anymore, but I will be logging every completed OVP in one giant article here when I finish, hopefully on a monthly cadence for either an OVP or My Ballot going forward), here is the Top 10 of the domestic box office:

1. Inside Out 2

2. Deadpool & Wolverine

3. Wicked

4. Moana 2

5. Despicable Me 4

6. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

7. Dune: Part Two

8. Twisters

9. Sonic the Hedgehog 3

10. Mufasa: The Lion King

Keeping with recent tradition, I saw virtually all of these, missing only Sonic 3 (is this good...I generally like Jim Carrey, so should I get caught up on these?).  In terms of box office I also missed Bad Boys: Ride or Die, It Ends With Us, and Venom: The Last Dance, but saw virtually every major awards contender (save for Lee with Kate Winslet...again, is it good?), including, of course, the Oscar nominees.  Let's look back on 2024, remembering a time when a Democrat was in the White House, when the President-Elect briefly faced justice for his crimes, and when we were all flipping for Simone Biles & the sexy nerd aesthetic of Stephen Nedoroscik.  And of course, let's remember the movies...

Note from John: When I did this series during the time when I wrote individual articles, and had this blog be a daily part of my life, I made a point of highlighting each nominee in my many write-ups.  While I will be writing these every time I complete a year (hopefully monthly going forward), I can't make that time commitment, either in terms of number of articles or in terms of giving each nominee their due with a mention.  I promise, though, that I have given each nominee their due under the confines of the specific category while making my rankings (and of course I've seen every single nominated picture), including giving higher rankings to movies I didn't like if the craft was better than ones I did like (Oscar should consider that).  Hopefully you enjoy the trimmed-down, but still devoted to the original concept version of the OVP we'll have going forward!

Picture

1. Dune: Part Two

2. Nickel Boys

3. The Brutalist

4. I'm Still Here

5. Conclave

6. Anora

7. A Complete Unknown

8. Wicked

9. The Substance

10. Emilia Perez

The Lowdown: I'll start out by saying something that I suspect gets repeated in this article-I did not think that 2024 was a particularly impressive year for the movies.  In fact, I thought it was the dullest year for movies since 2020, a combination of slavish over-praise of the Oscar fare (which was largely middling more than grand), and many of the blockbusters being underwhelming.  That said, I do really admire the first 3 films on this list.  Dune is better than the original, even if it's not quite as non-descript, Nickel Boys is an experiment that largely works, and The Brutalist is truly perfect until the intermission card comes up.  The rest...well the order speaks for itself, and because Oscar can only focus on ten movies in a given year anymore...we'll get to them all more in detail below.

Director

1. Brady Corbet (The Brutalist)

2. Sean Baker (Anora)

3. Coralie Fargeat (The Substance)

4. James Mangold (A Complete Unknown)

5. Jacques Audiard (Emilia Perez)

The Lowdown: Without Denis Villeneuve, this contest becomes considerably easier.  Corbet botches the ending to The Brutalist, but that's more an issue with the writers and one key supporting actor than the direction, which is really the cornerstone of the movie.  He deserves the win, with Baker second over Fargeat because I think that his story feels easier to get off the rails (and also I liked Anora better than The Substance even though I'll own that Anora is more a writer's movie and The Substance is more a director's picture).  I still can't believe that James Mangold, after years of attempting the same route (middle-of-the-road AMPAS fare like Walk the Line, Girl Interrupted, & Ford v. Ferrari that has no directorial signature) managed to grab a nomination.

Actor

1. Adrien Brody (The Brutalist)

2. Timothee Chalamet (A Complete Unknown)

3. Ralph Fiennes (Conclave)

4. Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice)

5. Colman Domingo (Sing Sing)

The Lowdown: This is as good of a time as any to remind you of two things: 1) The OVP is made in a vacuum, so I do not consider whether someone has an Oscar or not when handing out trophies and 2) I have a My Ballot where I pick my own nominees, and in that I also decide in a vacuum who should win.  This isn't about career awards, so under those circumstances I have no problem handing Adrien Brody a second statue for his luminous work in The Brutalist even if in real-life I might have thrown a bone to the fine work of Chalamet and Fiennes, who are both still hunting for their first Oscar.  I don't think that Sebastian Stan's film choice would impact his ranking (A Different Man would also get him 4th, for the record), though I will admit I'm excited by this direction of his career, as I love a handsome man finding his inner character actor.

Actress

1. Fernanda Torres (I'm Still Here)

2. Mikey Madison (Anora)

3. Demi Moore (The Substance)

4. Cynthia Erivo (Wicked)

5. Karla Sofia Gascon (Emilia Perez)

The Lowdown: With or without the scandal, it's an easy call to put Gascon's performance in fifth.  Emilia Perez is a dreadful, cinematic abortion of a movie (virtually nothing redeemable in it...the worst nominee since Bohemian Rhapsody), and she is not up to snuff as the lead.  For the actual win, I'm going with Torres, whose quiet determination in I'm Still Here has the added bonus of a script that always knows where she's headed, which you cannot say for Madison's (solid) Anora.  Demi Moore's role in The Substance has a lot of fans, and while I think she's better than the movie (which badly overshoots its ending), she can't carry it through & makes Elizabeth too unknowable.

Supporting Actor

1. Yura Borisov (Anora)

2. Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain)

3. Guy Pearce (The Brutalist)

4. Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice)

5. Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown)

The Lowdown: This is a quick reminder that I will always dock a point for any actor who is obviously the lead but is committing category fraud to improve their Oscar chances.  If I was judging based on total performances, I might give it to Culkin's really strong work as a broken man filled with overflowing charisma, but under these rules, there's no way he takes out Borisov's sensitive, brooding security guard in Anora, a scene-stealing performance that makes the movie.  Guy Pearce is the only actor who seems capable of holding together The Brutalist in its back half, but I have him in third both because his competition is good (expect a few repeat names when we get to the My Ballots tomorrow), as well as because I don't think he lands the final moments of the picture quite well enough.  I didn't get what Strong or Norton were doing, and feel like this was a nomination for being showy more than being good.

Supporting Actress

1. Ariana Grande (Wicked)

2. Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown)

3. Isabella Rossellini (Conclave)

4. Felicity Jones (The Brutalist)

5. Zoe Saldana (Emilia Perez)

The Lowdown: Once again, Saldana loses a point because she's the lead (without that I think she is ahead of Jones given she at least understands the film's tone).  You could make an argument that Grande is also the lead, but because there's an argument I keep her in first, and honestly even without that I might keep her there due to a weak field.  Barbaro's Joan Baez looks the part, but I wanted a bit more of the ambition of someone who is more famous than Dylan having him usurp her throne, and the lack of resolve there shows how difficult a Dylan biopic was always going to be.  Grande's work is in her wheelhouse, and sometimes borders into parody of Kristin Chenoweth (who is the better actor), but she's so good it's hard to fault feeling indebted to the original.

Adapted Screenplay

1. Nickel Boys

2. Conclave

3. A Complete Unknown

4. Sing Sing

5. Emilia Perez

The Lowdown: I have not read Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning source material (though a copy of it is sitting behind me...the eternal nagging of the books on my shelf that I've never read continues to haunt my dreams), but what comes across on the film is spectacular.  A meditative, thoughtful look at how hard it is to beat the system, and how life can find a way...and a plot can find a way even as you mine Terrence Malick for inspiration.  Conclave would make a worthy winner as well, giving us a really scrumptious 1990's-style thriller that is virtually impossible to find in 2024.

Original Screenplay

1. A Real Pain

2. Anora

3. The Brutalist

4. The Substance

5. September 5

The Lowdown: Jesse Eisenberg's look at how we keep certain people in our lives and in our hearts years after they stop feeling like they fit into whom we became is really wonderful.  I know the focus is on grief, and the mourning that happens when we lose someone we can't replace, but that juxtaposed against the question mark of the friendship that's core to the film is really why this is something special.  Anora and The Brutalist both have wonderful sections, but they don't know how to inform key characters (specifically their female leads) and The Brutalist doesn't know how to make its ending work (which is not the case for Anora-that ending lands the film), so I can't seriously put them against A Real Pain in this field (Eisenberg wins handily).

Animated Feature Film

1. The Wild Robot

2. Flow

3. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

4. Memoir of a Snail

5. Inside Out 2

The Lowdown: It's become depressing how predictable this category is, with even the off-beat or independent films heavily telegraphed the entire season so there's no surprises on nomination morning.  One of many reasons why I wish this was only a three-wide like I'll do at tomorrow's My Ballot for 2024.  But taking that out of the equation, this is a solid list, particularly the top two which are completely different looks at how nature cannot endure the touch of humanity.  I went with The Wild Robot because I felt its story more, but either would make a worthy winner.  I will note, that in the first 19 years of this category, Disney/Pixar only got the #5 slot once (2002's Lilo and Stitch)...in the past five years it's gotten it 80% of the time.  This is not an appealing trend for the Mouse House.

International Feature Film

1. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Germany)

2. Flow (Latvia)

3. I'm Still Here (Brazil)

4. The Girl with the Needle (Denmark)

5. Emilia Perez (France)

The Lowdown: As I said above, I wrote this before the Oscar ceremony, so I don't know any winners, and this is the category I'm most curious to see where it landed (it might not be the most shocking win, but it's the one I am trying to guess if the Emilia Perez buzz has died enough to allow for a different Best Picture nominee instead).  Really, though, this shouldn't be a contest.  While I admire I'm Still Here's look at how sins shouldn't necessarily be forgiven if they're heinous enough (and sure as hell shouldn't be forgotten), and the gorgeous computer game aesthetic of Flow, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was one of the best movies of 2024, full stop.  An engrossing look at fascism and the way that it strips away any shred of humanity you have...assuming you had much to begin with (because fascism also numbs you to such horror).

Sound

1. Dune: Part Two

2. The Wild Robot

3. A Complete Unknown

4. Wicked

5. Emilia Perez

The Lowdown: I still miss when the Sound categories were split in two, but honestly...I get why looking at this.  I will own that I am not giving these statues to the same movie, but it's hard to argue with Dune being the dominant choice here, its gorgeous elevation of the sounds of the deserts of Arrakis combined with new special effects and great crowd work.  Behind it are The Wild Robot (I love the nature sounds, combined with strong music & vocal work) and the concert recreations of A Complete Unknown.  Solid lineup overall, honestly, and I want to say that as most of it I don't repeat tomorrow-lots of good choices this year.

Score

1. The Brutalist

2. The Wild Robot

3. Conclave

4. Emilia Perez

5. Wicked

The Lowdown: This is the first of only two times that an Emilia Perez nomination isn't in last place (the next category is the other one), and there's a reason for that-the musical score of Wicked is lovely, but it's not original...I can't pinpoint anything in the score that isn't borrowing from Stephen Schwartz's fabulous Broadway composition, and so this nomination feels like a cheap way to up Schwartz's (and the film's) Oscar count, even if the actual score is better than Emilia Perez.  That said, the other three scores are all wonderful, and will show up tomorrow with my My Ballot, best of them being the atypical, confrontational work of The Brutalist.

Original Song

1. "Like a Bird" (Sing Sing)

2. "Never Too Late" (Elton John: Never Too Late)

3. "El Mal" (Emilia Perez)

4. "The Journey" (The Six Triple Eight)

5. "Mi Camino" (Emilia Perez)

The Lowdown: I do not think the music in Emilia Perez, even the lauded numbers like "Mi Camino" is any good.  The singing is not strong, the music feels too conversational, and the lyricism is dreadful (the best of the bunch, "La Vaginoplastia" is at least catchy and visually interesting).  That said, "El Mal's" problems are more so the way it's staged (bad lighting & dance direction) than it being a bad song.  Honestly, none of these are that good, both because 2024 wasn't a great year for film tunes, and because Oscar needed to get creative to come up with a decent lineup in a year where there weren't many good choices.  I picked "Like a Bird" because it's fitting to the film and doesn't feel as disposable as Elton John's "Never Too Late," a song that has his great vocals but feels like a cheap ending after hearing so many actual classics in the documentary.

Cinematography

1. The Brutalist

2. Dune: Part Two

3. Maria

4. Nosferatu

5. Emilia Perez

The Lowdown: We'll get into the Best Picture nominee that I can't believe didn't make this lineup tomorrow when we discuss the My Ballot, but for today let's all be thankful for the two deserved nominees that DID make it.  Between The Brutalist and Dune: Part Two, I'm favoring The Brutalist more so because it's truly inventive and it pays off...getting experimental with a movie can always be a risk, so when that risk pays off, you need to use it to break the tie, but both are sensational.  That Emilia Perez is nominated here, given that they literally couldn't even get the lighting cues right during the centerpiece musical number, is insanity to me-other than Best Actress, maybe the worst nomination from the film?

Costume Design

1. Wicked

2. Conclave

3. A Complete Unknown

4. Gladiator II

5. Nosferatu

The Lowdown: Best Cinematography is my favorite of the My Ballot lineups I pulled together, while Costume is unfortunately my least favorite.  That isn't meant as a slight to the winner here, Wicked, which I have made room for in tomorrow's My Ballot, but it is a sign that the costume work here wasn't as great as it could've been (I would've loved us to maybe stray a bit more from the pink-and-green motif, which is why one of my favorite costumes last year was Michelle Yeoh's celestial lilac-colored gown...but this is still great & Wicked's worthiest tech nomination).  Conclave's repeated costumes and twists on the cardinal outfit are a worthy runner-up, and lovingly-detailed.

Film Editing

1. The Brutalist

2. Conclave

3. Anora

4. Wicked

5. Emilia Perez

The Lowdown: The invisible art, film editing for me came down to the quick plot-pacing of Conclave, and then the avant garde approach of The Brutalist.  Of the two, I was most smitten with the sheer scale & confidence of The Brutalist, a movie that I liked better, and while I will quibble with the ending, I don't think you can blame that even a little bit on editing, as even in the worst scenes I was struck by how it kept pulling the viewers into the movie, cavernous in its approach.  The nomination for Wicked, given that it's only half a movie, feels odd & maybe the most confounding (and coattails-driven) citation in 2024.

Makeup & Hairstyling

1. The Substance

2. Wicked

3. A Different Man

4. Nosferatu

5. Emilia Perez

The Lowdown: Horror so rarely gets into this category (which is odd because An American Werewolf in London was the first film to win the statue), and given how quintessential makeup is to the success of the genre, it's kind of exciting to see its return (the last horror film to be cited was 2010's The Wolf Man).  But it's more exciting to be able to give it the crown because it's genuinely good.  Whatever issues I had with The Substance, the makeup wasn't one of them, giving us the ruthless destruction of poor Demi Moore's Elizabeth Sparkle, which is more impressive than the "borrowing from past experience" work in Wicked or the drawing a real-life comparison in A Different Man, which take the runners-up positions.

Production Design

1. The Brutalist

2. Dune: Part Two

3. Conclave

4. Nosferatu

5. Wicked

The Lowdown: In my opinion the best lineup that Oscar pulled together in 2024, none of these are stinkers, and while I won't copy this list verbatim to my My Ballot tomorrow, every one of these feels like an appropriate Oscar nominee.  I am not immune to the Oscar crutch of honoring a movie because it's about a specific production aspect, and indeed, the gorgeous work in The Brutalist (inexplicably on a $10 million budget) is hard to deny.  Dune: Part Two does a great job of expanding this world, and I was in awe of the (also weirdly inexpensive) palatial estates of Conclave, but I have to hand this one to the team from The Brutalist.

Visual Effects

1. Dune: Part Two

2. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

3. Better Man

4. Alien: Romulus

5. Wicked

The Lowdown: I grade these on a 5-star system, and I generally dock a star whenever a lead performance is in supporting or an end credits song with no presence otherwise in the movie is up, so as to even the playing field without sacrificing the nominee's chances entirely.  I think I will start to do that for movies that use dead actors without their permission (I don't care if the estate said yes...I still think it's morally repugnant).  Much of Alien: Romulus is gorgeous, and it would be higher-ranked (possibly in My Ballot territory) if they hadn't used Ian Holm the way they did (both uncanny valley and using a dead man in this way is gross).  Certainly above Better Man, which tried to cover its VFX budget with dark cinematography.  The Top 2 are indisputable-two of the most spectacular franchises around living up to their reputations once again.

Is There a Wrong Time to Win an Oscar?

On Sunday, the Oscars will give out their 95th Academy Awards, and with that, they will give out a statue for Best Actor.  This is, as you can imagine, one of the biggest ticket moments of the night, and of course, is one of the highest honors for any actor in their career.  Winning an Oscar generally is about more than just the performance at hand, and cynical people use this as a cudgel to wield against the ceremony, but I do think this is occasionally kind of the point-the Oscar is such a high honor, maybe it should be about more than just the performance in that year, and instead about the career that led to that win, and about the career that's happening out of it.  Either way, that is what happens.  People hold actors who have won an Academy Award to a different standard than those who merely make a movie, or who even just get nominated.  This occasionally leads to a really odd question-is there a situation where, for an actor's long-term career, it's bad to win an Oscar?  I ask this in relation to the Best Actor category because I'd argue the two men who are frontrunners for this year's ceremony, Austin Butler & Brendan Fraser, may well fear the backlash of the win as much as they could covet the statue itself.

It's worth taking a step back and looking at these two performances in relation to this question, and that's going to require me to be a bit qualitative about my thoughts on the two actors, and what they're nominated for this year so be forewarned-I'm about to have opinions.  Let's start with Butler.  Austin Butler is 31-years-old, and up until this past year, was largely known for his relationship with actress Vanessa Hudgens.  Though he has worked in Hollywood for over a decade, it's been mostly in guest spots on Disney Channel & Nickelodeon shows, and in unsuccessful teen shows like The Carrie Diaries.  Butler is attractive, almost in an absurd how-is-this-possible way, which would be unusual for a category that generally likes their winners to be in their forties or fifties, and a bit grizzled.  Even those with pretty boy pasts, like Paul Newman & Leonardo DiCaprio, had to wait until crow's feet had set in, before winning trophies.

Butler's nomination opens up a new career chapter for him.  The notices he got for Elvis, which I will note he's quite good in, are the stuff that bring on a new type of career, and already it's paying off, as he's gotten work with Denis Villeneuve & Jeff Nichols on upcoming projects.  But winning would put him in a different category all-together.  At 31, it's not entirely clear that Butler can sustain the pressure usually pitted on young men who win Best Actor before they're firmly established as stars.  While women can frequently outrun an early Oscar victory (for a variety of reasons, many of them sexist), when it comes to male performers, winning young has a rough track record.  It's hard not to think of performers like Adrien Brody or Timothy Hutton, both of whom won Oscars very early in their careers and ultimately could never live up to the hype in subsequent roles.  Brody, in particular, would feel like the rest of his career was a disappointment compared to the early career high of The Pianist.  Though he'd be the lead in King Kong, a critical success & box office champion, the victory there largely belonged to the titular gorilla, and he's spent the past two decades feeling like someone who had unfulfilled promise as a star.

It's also hard not to think of someone like Timothee Chalamet, who has spent much of his post-Oscar nomination years (he was cited for Call Me By Your Name) kind of finding himself as a performer.  While he has certainly had success, they've been in projects where he wasn't the calling card (Little Women) or where he's upstaged by the visual effects (Dune).  Much of the rest of his work since Call Me By Your Name has been in box office bombs (Beautiful Boy) or streaming titles that were released with little fanfare (The King, A Rainy Day in New York).  Without an Oscar, this could be chocked up as Chalamet finding himself, someone who clearly had great potential but needed to test his persona out with the public.  Had he won an Oscar, particularly against a screen icon like Gary Oldman (who is celebrated by a certain type of very loud Gen X cinephile as one of the great actors of his generation), the pressure & publicity around a film like Beautiful Boy underperforming at the Box Office, or The King basically being a nonentity would've led to something similar to what Brody endured.  Though I think his work in Call Me By Your Name was revolutionary (I would've voted for him), in hindsight not winning was probably for the best...and is an indication of how Butler might benefit from waiting until his second or third citation to get a statue.

Brendan Fraser would not stand out as a particularly young Best Actor winner (he is 54), and the challenge of him winning would not be the same as that of Butler.  Fraser is in the middle of a comeback.  He spent much of the 1990's as a go-to affable guy in films like George of the Jungle and The Mummy, a handsome leading man with a light comic touch in films that didn't need a lot of thespian credentials.  It's clear with roles in Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American that he aspired for this type of role, but after a series of box office flops like Dudley Do-Right and Monkeybone, as well as a number of personal setbacks including the death of his mother & a divorce from his wife Afton Smith, he largely disappeared from public consciousness until The Whale brought him back.

Fraser's career is arguably in the best spot it's been in since 1999.  The Whale was a sleeper hit, and he's costarring in upcoming films starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Glenn Close.  One could argue this is the right time to give him an Oscar...but I'm going to point out that this comes with serious risks.  There are a few reasons that Fraser could suffer, but in very different ways that Butler.  The first is that The Whale is, well, not very good.  Though your mileage may vary on his performance (which I found to be quite poor but I'll admit some give him more leeway), the film itself has already become something of a pop culture punching bag, and it's hard not to quickly compare Fraser to Rami Malek, who won in 2018 for another movie (albeit a much bigger movie) called Bohemian Rhapsody with a similar critical reception.  Like Fraser, Malek didn't have the resume of a traditional Oscar winner (nothing in Fraser's career has approached an Oscar nomination, not really, other than The Whale), and the performance was mixed-at-best.  He won off of the momentum from ardent fans, and from people obsessed with the physical transformation onscreen, but Malek's win in retrospect is considered a poor decision by Oscar.  Even worthy Oscar winners usually suffer something of a backlash for not sustaining that hype post-win (look at Anne Hathaway or Nicole Kidman, for example), but winning for a bad performance...Malek's career since then does not look like that of a traditional leading man (Bond villain, several high-profile critical & commercial flops).  Quite frankly, it looks like Oscar made a mistake.  Couple that with Fraser's performance being that of a gay man (played by a straight man) and someone who wears a fat suit for the entirety of the film, both of which are already considered to be eyebrow-raising (and I suspect in the years to come could become more taboo), and you've got the recipe for a sequel to Malek.  If you were his publicist, you might just hope Fraser loses, and can use the momentum of this nomination (which has already revitalized his career) to win for something with Scorsese or Nichols...something that would age better.

The other remaining actors would be able to handle a win better.  Paul Mescal is younger than Austin Butler, but his career has proven already that he is a once-in-a-generation talent (did you see Normal People?) that could likely sustain an early win, because he's shown he's able to top his work in Aftersun already.  Bill Nighy at age 73 would be seen as a career-capper for a longtime character actor.  There's no pressure at that age to become a leading man, so him going back to supporting roles wouldn't be seen as a failure.  And of course there's Colin Farrell, an actor who should be on his third or fourth nomination by now, and who gives the best performance in the category in The Banshees of Inisherin.  At age 46, Farrell is already a leading man & a dependable actor.  His win would give him a different career sheen, but as a man who has worked with directors as storied as Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Woody Allen, Neil Jordan, Terry Gilliam, Peter Weir, Liv Ullmann, Yorgos Lanthimos, Sofia Coppola, Tim Burton, Steve McQueen, Kenneth Branagh, & Ron Howard...this is someone who understands that putting in the work and picking the right material can pay off.  It's also notable that, like Leonardo DiCaprio before him, he hasn't selected his next project yet, and is smart enough & well-positioned enough in his career to wait a year or two for the perfect followup to a win.  All-in-all, Farrell is in the best spot to win an Oscar both in terms of quality and in terms of career position, but it doesn't look like he'll pull it off.

OVP: Actor (2017)

OVP: Best Actor (2017)

The Nominees Were...

Timothee Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name

Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread

Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out

Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour

Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

My Thoughts: We are going to, after a week off from the blog, hit the Big 4 categories at the Oscars & finish it off with a My Ballot look at 2017 this week.  The 2017 acting races were largely focused on Best Picture, like so many fields for Best Actor recently (only one of these nominees doesn't show up again in our remaining categories), but I will admit out-front that unlike many fields for Best Actor, this one has some differentiation even if it's only Best Picture citations, and is one of the better fields in recent memory.

For starters, only one of these five figures is playing someone in real life, Gary Oldman.  Oldman's performance in Darkest Hour for reasons that are both obvious & a little bit undeserved has not aged well.  Placed against young performers who have delivered on that promise & an acting icon who has (so far) stuck with his plan to not come back from a second retirement, Oldman's prosthetics-driven work as Winston Churchill is generally name-checked as a "bad" acting win, but I'll be honest-I don't see it.  Oldman takes on the guise of a character actor, becoming near unrecognizable as Churchill in appearance and manner, but still having the measured energy that makes an Oldman performance so special.  I loved the way that he plays Churchill as a man-of-history, but also a man who understands politics (Churchill enjoyed winning in all aspects of life), and I think this is a good performance that doesn't get all of its grace from simply "looking like" Churchill.

Based on the title you'd assume that Roman J. Israel might actually be a real person, but he's not.  Instead, he's from the creative mind of Denzel Washington, and more of our real-life people should be based on Denzel if this is the case.  Despite its unusual (SNL-mocked) title and a plot that doesn't really work, Washington plays the twists in Dan Gilroy's story excellently.  This might have read like a filler nomination when it came out, but it's very good work from the two-time Oscar winner.  He finds so many layers into the loneliness that Roman experiences, and makes the greed he feels authentic as he finds success after a lifetime of failure.  It's hard to have the center of a movie realize a new facet of their life and not also totally upend the character, but the Roman we meet at the beginning of the movie is the same man throughout, a testament to Washington's investment into small character details.

I have in the years since found Daniel Kaluuya performances (specifically Judas) that I can sign onto, so I am going to admit (and bury in the center of this article) that I didn't really get the hype around his work in Get Out.  I liked this movie, and the script was very good (though, as I said two weeks ago, Us is much better & more fully-formed), but I think that Kaluuya's very reactive performance in this film never takes off for me.  For me it's because he's not really asked to undergo a traditional narrative arc in terms of "learn what he's like, then we see how he handles the main problem of the story."  Instead, all of his performance is trying to reflect how uncomfortable he is with the story.  He's good at this, but it feels limiting to my understanding of this character-I feel like he's the one character not given enough room to breathe, which serves the narrative, but also makes this feel like a weird performance to cite.

There are moments initially where this feels like it might be the case for Timothee Chalamet.  After all, so much of the first thirty minutes of this movie is him reacting to the world around him, including his new crush Oliver.  However, as the film goes, we get a sense of not only young love, but young love that doesn't know that there's a ticking clock on this relationship (and how special it is).  Chalamet goes full throttle, making his Elio impetuous, reckless, protective...every emotion feels like it's being felt through-and-through even if it's not entirely understood.  Wonderfully, sometimes prickly chemistry with Armie Hammer helps a lot, but Chalamet takes this film to another level with his best work.  He hasn't been as good since, but honestly-how many actors top work like this even if they get fifty years of career?

Our final nomination is for Daniel Day-Lewis, who in Phantom Thread gives us a potential sendoff to a storied career.  Day-Lewis is always marvelous, even if you just observe him from a technical aspect (no actor does the kind of character legwork the extreme method actor puts into his creations).  His Reynolds Woodcock is an angry man, clearly starved as much for perfection (which he's able to make with his creations) as he is for something to disrupt his world...a challenge the actor can't entirely overcome.  The movie takes some weird detours with Alma, and I wouldn't say even DDL can pull off some of the twists late in the game, but that's a ridiculously high bar to ask an actor to achieve, and overall the performance here is a grand testament to a great performer.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes of course break out their nominees between Drama and Comedy/Musical, so we have ten names from their ceremony.  Drama went with Oldman (who, like Janney & Rockwell before him swept the precursors), besting Chalamet, Day-Lewis, Washington, and Tom Hanks (The Post) while Comedy/Musical went to James Franco (The Disaster Artist) against Kaluuya, Steve Carell (Battle of the Sexes), Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver), and Hugh Jackman (The Greatest Showman).  SAG went with Oldman atop Chalamet, Franco, Kaluuya, & Washington while BAFTA favored Oldman against Day-Lewis, Kaluuya, Chalamet, & Jamie Bell (Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool).  In terms of sixth place, it was Franco, who had a late-breaking scandal that derailed his nomination, and as it would turn out, his entire career.

Actors I Would Have Nominated: I try not to use an actor's personal life in picking who should win or be nominated for these awards, so I definitely would've found room for Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name.  Like Chalamet, he has never been as good before-or-since, but he finds a strange amount of sadness in his Oliver, a man who will never experience the world he's briefly being given insight into during a summer in Italy.

Oscar’s Choice: Some will frame this in years since as a closer race between Chalamet & Oldman, but the latter was so far in front that it's probable he won a majority rather than a plurality.

My Choice: Chalamet, hands down.  My favorite performance of 2017, possibly my favorite performance of the 2010's.  Just superb work.  Behind him I'll go Oldman, Day-Lewis, Washington, & Kaluuya.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Do you want to stick with Timmy & I, or do you think Oscar got it right with Winston Churchill?  I'm the only person who has actually seen Roman J. Israel, as it feels like more a poster than a movie at this point?  And who would Franco have ejected if his scandal hadn't broken (I know most would say Washington, but I kind of think it was Kaluuya in fifth)?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Also in 2017: Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2017

Past Best Actor Contests: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019

A Rainy Day in New York (2020)

Film: A Rainy Day in New York (2020)

Stars: Timothee Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber

Director: Woody Allen

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

A Rainy Day in New York is one of those films that cannot possibly live up to the scuttlebutt around it.  For those who were living under a rock at the time (or just don't regularly read Variety), this was the film that Amazon refused to release after critics of Woody Allen started to publicly deride the company & the film's stars for working with the director due to the allegations levied at him by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.  Stars of the film like Timothee Chalamet & Selena Gomez publicly donated their salaries to the Time's Up movement, while the film's other stars Jude Law & Cherry Jones stated that they were not comfortable with the public criticisms of Allen & Amazon's willingness to pull the film due to public opinion surrounding the director.  At the time it wasn't clear if anyone would ever see the movie in America, even as it was released in Europe (Allen even sued Amazon for breach-of-contract, which was settled out-of-court).

Two years later, however, it seems that Amazon is willing to take some risks with the film, and thus a two-year-old movies becomes one of our last minute run of 2020 films as I catch up on movies heading into my Top 10 lists (which I'll release around the 23rd).  Allen has since made another movie (Rifkin's Festival), which has not received an American release date yet, and Amazon, despite basically giving up the film, now has the movie available for rental on its Prime platform.  I'm not going to get into the morality of watching a Woody Allen film; we've talked about that many times on this blog before, and so if you look back you can find my thoughts on it, but this stars a number of people I enjoy (and I do, despite having reservations about Allen as a moral figure, love his movies), so I decided to catch it last weekend & intentionally watched it on Prime for the sheer "eye roll" of it suddenly deciding it was okay to air the film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on a New York City weekend getaway to New York between Gatsby Welles (Chalamet), the son of Upper East side money, and his girlfriend Ashleigh (Fanning), who is the daughter of a wealthy banking family from Arizona.  Gatsby is young & pretentious, while Ashleigh is a bit air-headed but beautiful (and wants to be a journalist).  She is brought to NYC to interview a director Roland Pollard (Schreiber), who takes a fancy to her, and eventually she's being courted around by Pollard's screenwriter Ted (Law) and his leading man Francisco Vega (Luna), with the latter also pursuing her romantically; they nearly sleep together before they're interrupted by his girlfriend.  While this is all happening, Gatsby meets up with the younger sister of an old girlfriend named Chan (Gomez), with whom his anxious intellectual is better suited.  The film finishes with them together, the rare Woody Allen movie that has a full, pretty uncomplicated romantic ending.

Like I said, I generally love Woody Allen's movies-they're always so cinematic, and seem to weave together into a similar, consistent tapestry.  But I'm also not oblivious to him making bad movies (some of his later work has a stench about it even if I can appreciate elements), and initially I thought Chalamet was a terrible choice for the "Woody surrogate."  He is far too young, cool, and well, sexy, to ever draw an obvious comparison to Allen, but Chalamet eventually grows into the role.  He's made to spout dialogue that any normal 22-year-old would know, but Chalamet isn't a normal 22-year-old, and it works as the movie goes.  He has an oddly jarring chemistry with Gomez (again, another actor that feels a bit too hip to be in a Woody Allen movie but who yet finds her groove) which feels off-kilter but eventually comes together.  A Rainy Day in New York eventually becomes a good, if not great, entry in Woody's filmography.

The biggest flaw in the film is Fanning.  To be fair, this part is impossible to play well.  The filmmakers never let on just how smart (or dumb, if you're a pessimist) Ashleigh is intended to be-you get the sense at moments that she understands that she can make grown men lose their cool on-purpose just because she's so pretty...but she doesn't land a critical role & if you didn't like the movie, I'm guessing it's because of this part.  I remember reading at the time that Allen was intentionally angering his critics by having a young woman (Fanning would've been twenty or so when this was initially supposed to come out), flirting with a much older director, but Schreiber's role is pretty small, and he's nothing like Allen so I think this was more a coincidence (or something you'd see a lot of in Allen's filmography-beautiful women frequently fall in love with older, insecure guys).

I'd be remiss if I didn't quickly mention the movie's best element-Vittorio Storaro's cinematography.  In a year gasping for first-rate camerawork, this movie has it.  He washes the stars & sets in a golden light, playing with shadows & candles in a way that almost feels like certain scenes are painted.  In a different era, Storaro would've been nominated for an Oscar for both this and his even better work in Wonder Wheel, but there's no way the Academy is touching a Woody Allen movie with a ten-foot pole in the modern era.  But it had to be said-this is one of the most luminous films you'll see in terms of sheer cinematography prowess this year.

OVP: Little Women (2019)

Film: Little Women (2019)
Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothee Chalamet, Meryl Streep
Director: Greta Gerwig
Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actress-Saoirse Ronan, Supporting Actress-Florence Pugh, Costume Design*, Score, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Confession time-I've never read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.  Another, weirder confession-I've never seen any of the onscreen iterations of the film.  Not the one with Kate Hepburn.  Not the one with June Allyson.  Not even the one with Winona Ryder.  Somehow, despite all being "OVP" (we'll get to them all eventually), I'd never seen this story onscreen until I saw Greta Gerwig's recent iteration.  This also presents something of a challenge, because while I know enough about the story to be dangerous (weirdly due to that one Friends episode where Joey & Rachel read this book and The Shining), I don't know it by heart, and based on some of the reviews I've read, Gerwig's film takes a lot of different directions that aren't typical for interpretations of Alcott's story.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is not told in the traditional more linear fashion that past versions (and the novel) were told.  Instead, it jumps straight to the middle, and we get an array of flashbacks into the lives of the four March sisters.  We see Amy (Pugh) already in Paris with Aunt March (Streep), trying to pursue Laurie (Chalamet) after he's just been rejected by her sister Jo (Ronan), who is off trying to become a successful writer.  Meanwhile, Meg (Watson) is back home struggling to find a way to make ends meet with her poor husband, and we soon learn that she once had the opportunity to have a far wealthier end to her story.  And of course there's sweet, piano-playing Beth (Scanlen) off in the corner getting deathly sick.  Told back-and-forth, the film gives us backgrounds about these young women, as well as an indication of where they're going.

As I'm not familiar with the story, I was, while not confused, a bit perplexed.  Gerwig's film is clearly meant to be a companion piece to someone who is already a fan of this tale, not simply a "stand alone" story as if it's treated as such, it's kind of messy.  The film is charming, no doubt, and has enough of the original tale to make sense, but it has less impact when you are halfway to realizing Amy will marry Laurie and not Jo since that's the opening scenes for those characters, or that you have a strong indication that Beth is about to die from the film's beginning.  I am a firm believer that you shouldn't have to read the book to understand and enjoy the movie (they need to exist on different plains), so I am going to fault Gerwig's film a bit here even though others will claim this is totally acceptable.  As it is, the film is good, but it's not great, and that's because it feels kind of jumbled and without enough narrative stakes for the audience as written.

That said, she assembled an amazing cast and a slew of actors that likely saw Lady Bird and were willing to sign up for anything that Gerwig was willing to do after that.  Chalamet is sexy & spoiled as Laurie, but one has to assume that this is a character that feels pretty dismissible for fans of earlier iterations of the picture as you can't really root for such a man.  He re-teams here with his Lady Bird costar Saoirse Ronan, who plays Jo as an ardent feminist, someone who is more concerned to be what she said she's always wanted to be than, as the film progresses, who she might secretly wish to be.  The scene toward the end where she realizes that she might have made it work with Laurie is devastating, but I don't think Ronan does enough groundwork to make the rest of her character stick.  This is in contrast to Florence Pugh, who kind of steals the picture from the cavalcade of Oscar nominees as Amy.  She gives a character that could be easily discarded a verve and passion that you wouldn't expect, and along with Midsommar, shows that she's an actress that has arrived in 2019.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Film: Beautiful Boy (2018)
Stars: Steve Carell, Timothee Chalamet, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan
Director: Felix van Groeningen
Oscar History: Chalamet made it with SAG and the Globes, but was the odd man out for the Oscars.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I remember the first time I saw Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie after Titanic, and for the briefest of moments, I was suddenly transported to a different world, for one second suddenly thinking that I was in the same cloud of Jack Dawson & that truly stupendous movie, arguably the most profound cinematic moment of my young adult life.  It took me years to accept another movie that I loved Leo in even close as much, and eventually had to sort of remind myself that movies like Titanic only come across once in an actor's career (if at all).  He's still one of my favorite onscreen performers, though, and I couldn't stop thinking about Leo when I caught Beautiful Boy recently, as it was a bit of deja vu for me as I watched Timothee Chalamet on the big-screen for the first time since Call Me By Your Name.

(Spoilers Ahead) For you see, Chalamet, in many ways, is the rare onscreen performance that has captured me as completely as Leo did so many years ago.  I've loved few other performances since then (there are some, of course, but they are sparse on the big screen), but Chalamet's Elio and that film in general took my breath away in a manner I wasn't sure was still possible (it's rare that I go into a film confident I'd love it, and still vastly underestimated how much I'd still end up adoring the picture).  But Chalamet, a talented performer who was also terrific in Lady Bird (a film that would have won Best Picture for me last year if CMBYN hadn't shown up), now has the impossible task with many moviegoers, but narcissisticly I'm focused on myself, to prove that not only he can play other roles, but that he can exist in a plane that isn't just Elio, but in fact (like DiCaprio before him) he's worth the price of admission for another movie.

Chalamet is incredible in Beautiful Boy, a wonderful high-wire act of nerves, body language, and destructive behavior, but this is decidedly not Call Me By Your Name, and after a few minutes of trying to mentally realize that, I settled into a pretty mundane story about addiction.  Chalamet is the only reason to see this movie, and it's not one that you go to hoping for relief; this is a slog, a boring one that touches on addiction plot points you know by heart.  It's callous to say about a true story (it's based on twin memoirs by David Sheff and his son Nic, played in the films by Steve Carell & Chalamet, respectively), but there's nothing new here, and only Chalamet's strong work in the lead makes it anything other than an asterisk for awards season.  Carell, for example, has been playing this role for years now.  Once noted for his work in comedy, he's made a mark for himself as a serious, dramatic leading man, but honestly (unpopular opinion time), he's never shown in his filmic career the same sort of introspective spark he exhibited as Michael Scott in The Office.  He's serviceable here, but there's so much to David that we leave the film not knowing, and Carell offers us nothing extra.  What, for example, is his relationship like with his other children, those with Maura Tierney (who is also very good, I want to say, even if the screenplay wants nothing to do with the fascinating layers she's bringing to this role)?  Why doesn't the film explore the competitive, frequently "bad parenting" relationship he has with ex-wife Amy Ryan?  David could be really interesting, but neither the writers nor Carell care about him when he isn't attached to Nic's descent.

Perhaps most damning of all, the film doesn't seem to realize that Carell's David a lousy dad, and has been most of his life, treating his son like a buddy after the divorce more than anything else.  There is a belabored string of scenes toward the end of the movie where David has to cut off ties with Nic, and the film acts like this is some form of heroism, but it never admits that David's relationship with Nic totally enabled his drug abuse in the first place.  That may sound callous, but this is a disjointed affair, one that (were it not a true story) would have surely ended with the Nic character dying (it makes more sense in terms of a narrative).  I frequently state that real life is a terrible place to find movie ideas, and Beautiful Boy is a perfect example of a film that needs to cater to its actual counterparts' egos and sense of importance, and in the process we lose the picture.  Chalamet will have other chances to help me realize him as something other than Elio, but it'd be a lot easier to move on if he chose a movie where he wasn't the only reason to buy the ticket.

OVP: Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Film: Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Stars: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay*, Actor-Timothee Chalamet, Original Song-"Mystery of Love")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

I have been avoiding for nearly two months spoilers regarding Call Me By Your Name with alarming success.  I shall save for another day my disdain for release schedules and the fact that Twitter needs to find a way to better respect that not everyone lives within ten miles of Beverly Hills or Time Square, but this past Friday I FINALLY got to see the movie I have been hearing such extraordinary buzz about for months now, and see a film that, just a year after Moonlight, is somehow still getting Best Picture consideration even though Oscar "already honored a gay movie."  Thankfully, the hype was not only lived up to but exceeded my expectations-Call Me By Your Name is a remarkable achievement, and truly a special piece of cinema.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers on Elio (Chalamet), a Jewish-American young man of about 17 (did they actually say his age in the film, or is this just plucked from the novel?), who is annoyed with his father's (Stuhlbarg) research assistant, a grad student named Oliver (Hammer) who is working on an archeological dig.  The film starts with the talented Elio largely disliking the casual, relaxed Oliver, and then slowly realizing that his feelings of disgust are masking a deep attraction that they both feel for each other.  The movie wanders through this relationship, frequently hitting anticipated pitstops but never entirely giving into cliches the way one would assume such a film about self-discovery, forbidden sexuality, and love would unfold.

It's hard to know where to begin with the film, but I'll perhaps confess first that I was crying intermittently during the final twenty minutes (less than I had expected considering how moving it was) and then when I turned the engine on in my car in the parking garage, I felt a wave of raw emotion sweep me over and began sobbing uncontrollably.  Perhaps this is because Call Me By Your Name derives its masterpiece status from not being a movie with easy answers or simple questions.  The writing is momentous, with crisp, fresh dialogue, and gives you great ideas about how quickly life moves and how we don't always recognize what matters when it happens.  Michael Stuhlbarg gets an astounding monologue toward the end of the film where he tries to impress upon his son not that he will have other lovers, but more so how rare what he just experienced is, and how it gets harder to love so freely and with such abandon as we get older, so appreciate it and don't bury or cheapen the emotions he's feeling.  The line "We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new."  I genuinely can't remember the last time a movie I saw had such a profound pearl of wisdom buried within it.

But Call Me By Your Name is filled with jewels.  It's occasionally funny (though attention straight people-if you're the only person who is laughing, or clearly only straight people are laughing about the behaviors of gay characters, you're being homophobic-there was a woman who kept nervously laughing in the film during scenes that were a lot more serious than she assumed them to be, and it was bordering on a hate crime by the end of the picture), and I liked the beats of giving the characters more happiness than we're conditioned to assume in a gay-themed romance.  The movie's score is fantastic, littered with interpretations of classic composers, and enriched with several songs by Sufjan Stevens, who has crafted arguably the most unique-to-its-picture original soundtrack I can remember for a non-musical since The Graduate (the similarities with Mike Nichols' classic abound, and other than maybe Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, the 1967 picture is Call Me By Your Name's most obvious spiritual sibling).  And James Ivory's traditional class and stiff-then-relinquished view on love in movies is a natural fit for this story (and whomever was the person who nixed the narration idea that was apparently central to the novel deserves an Oscar by themselves-the genuine question that hangs over whether or not Elio or Oliver stay together drives the picture, with you assuming they don't but praying they do).

The film's performances, though, seem to be gaining the most attention, and with good reason.  Hammer has never shown this sort of ability before, and plays a man enjoying perhaps his only dalliance with a sexuality he's been taught to repress (he becomes engaged to a woman at the end of the picture, and shares that his father would disown him if he were to continue dating men) with great relish.  There are scenes of intimacy between the two that show Oliver starved for affection, a part of himself he shut off finally getting a day-in-the-sun.  Stuhlbarg has a smaller role than I assumed based on reviews, but is so devastating in his final monologue that it's easy to see why he's gained his plaudits-honestly, there's so much heartbreak and tenderness in that scene, it's impossible not to see more in every previous interaction his professor has with side characters, or really to see more in how you yourself see the world.  But most impressive of all is Chalamet, largely unknown before this year, who gives a master class in acting.  His work is so lived-in, it's as if he was being followed around an Italian villa and discovering his own world as he's going.  The final credits scenes, where he weeps into the fireplace, is sublime and the sort of moment actors dream about, but really there's nothing false in this performance, it's so self-assured.  Considering how tricky it could have been (it's easy to see a different actor making him too angry or too horny or too sad), Chalamet's Elio is a miracle.  I've been shocked all season that a 23-year-old man could gain love in the Best Actor field, but after watching the movie, it's a mystery no longer.  This is a performance too good to be ignored.

I may be gilding the lily here, but I'm coming back to this review having tinkered with it four times and not being able to quite get across how emotional and stunning the film was for me personally.  I get this way with select movies where I can't put it down, like when you read a book and then instantly have to reread it because you don't want the high of a great story to end quite yet (I did this at least twice with On Chesil Beach, and read it every April because its final moments are so powerful to me).  Before Sunset, The Conformist, Lost in Translation, Nashville, Titanic-movies that I just want to keep recapturing that bliss of seeing something so spellbinding onscreen, trying to understand why it filled me so fully.  I literally cried again this morning when I started playing Sufjan Stevens' "Mystery of Love" in my car.  Really great film can affect you in ways you didn't expect, and Guadagnino's picture is the sort that will stay with me for weeks after, the sort of movie you watch and decide to live your life differently.  I'm trying really hard not to be hyperbolic here, mostly because I hate it when people are hyperbolic about movies (perhaps because the movies they wax on about feel pretty run-of-the-mill for someone who has seen over 50 calendar-release films in 2017 alone this year, not to mention dozens of others that I see in my living room), but I can't help it.  I keep thinking back to Chalamet's face and the briefness of Elio and Oliver's encounter.  Call Me by Your Name is the closest I have come to love-at-first-site at the theaters in a long time.  I'm a bit scared to see it again because how can it be so good upon revisit, but based on my experience my gut rarely gives in like this unless the love is going to be permanent.  Anyway, I'm going to end it there, just flummoxed how the movie I have spent the past year hoping to see with sky-high expectations still said "yeah, John, we're going to be better than that."  And with that indulgent final paragraph, I am going to go listen to "Visions of Gideon" and daydream about Italy some more.

OVP: Lady Bird (2017)

Film: Lady Bird (2017)
Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothee Chalamet
Director: Greta Gerwig
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actress-Saoirse Ronan, Supporting Actress-Laurie Metcalf)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Greta Gerwig is the sort of performer, so far, that it's very easy to admire for me that I couldn't quite love.  Frances Ha and 20th Century Women were both very good performances, frequently with her finding a groove that I found fascinating, but I'll be honest here that I haven't been as in love with her as the rest of collective Gay Film Twitter.  I felt like there was something wrong with me there, but I stand behind it (some actors just don't click in the same way as others for you, and that's okay).  I will say, though, that I was terrified heading into Lady Bird for another round of me hiding my review under a bushel, trying to avoid anyone calling out my befuddlement over her being declared the most vibrant filmmaker working.  To my relief, and then to my sheer delight, Lady Bird did not fall into that camp.  In fact, I not only love the movie, but adore it, and the way that Gerwig has been able to transform her onscreen persona into something magical behind the camera.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around Christine aka Lady Bird (Ronan), a young woman (who is suspiciously the exact same age as me considering when the film takes place as I deduced while the movie was unfolding, which made several of the characters all the more compelling in a narcissistic way), who is trying desperately to escape the life her parents have provided for her.  Living in Sacramento, she pines for the fancier houses in the better side of the town, wishing that she could have the things the "beautiful" girls in her class also enjoy.  She falls for two different boys Danny (Hedges) and Kyle (Chalamet), both ending in different forms of disaster, and has a constant fight with her mother Marion (Metcalf), over money, her treatment of her father, and her general disdain for where she lives.  The movie's backdrop is Lady Bird wanting to become a something she's not, and when given the opportunity decides she can be both herself and what she always dreamed of becoming.  Told in the backdrop of Sacramento circa 2002-03, it's a coming-of-age story that likely mirrored Gerwig's, a young performer who eventually went to Barnard to pursue a degree in English, but had aspirations to become a performer (that obviously came true).

If that sounds like boilerplate high school coming-of-age, it only feels that way when you recap the movie, as Gerwig's sharp, specific writing style is so witty and observational there's nothing cliched in the confines of Lady Bird.  An obviously personal film, the movie is detailed (note the caste system of cell phones and house sizes, or the way that the music is plucked off of a Top 40 chart rather than some hipster dreamscape-Lady Bird would go for what is conventional, not what is happening in the back of a record store).  I loved the way that her story unfolds, with none of the characters becoming caricatures, or even us getting all of the explanations (you'll want to spend more time with each of these people, but you end the movie getting a sense of who they are as human beings and never feel like the movie isn't complete).

The acting in the movie is equal to the writing and assured direction, and uniformly good.  Ronan is totally believable as an American teenage girl trying to prove she's not a cliche by falling into the same path so many before her have trod, and is at her best when she's finding a truth in what she feels and what she expects herself to feel.  Ronan, so porcelain and tragic in Brooklyn, finds a heartier disposition here and honestly-this should be a third Oscar nomination for her, even if it's not entirely in AMPAS's wheelhouse.  I suspect her onscreen mother will have a better shot at it, as Laurie Metcalf finally gets a big-screen role worthy of her acting talents, subdued but pointed (and imperfect but loving) as Ronan's mother.  I loved the very slim views we get into her as a person; look at how she adores seeing other people's babies or the calming, underlying love she has for all of her family, even if her outside is bluster.  Metcalf, so good at finding that woman beneath a hard exterior, is a flawless scene partner for Ronan (I'd have never put the two together, so hats off to casting director Heidi Griffiths on that front).  Additionally, you have Hedges and Chalamet, both so believable in their roles you'd be forgiven for thinking they were in fact these men in real-life, as her two ill-fated suitors.  Chalamet has the dreamy, obtuse intellectual routine down-pat, a jerk who it's easy to fall in love with, and we get why Lady Bird falls for him so quickly.  Hedges, on the other hand, is equally magnetic as Danny, a closeted young gay man whose relationship with Lady Bird ends when she catches him kissing another boy in a bathroom stall.  The scene where she confronts him, and then he bursts into constant, hyperventilating tears is jaw-droppingly honest, real, and heartbreaking.  This is perhaps the best illustration of what Gerwig is getting at in Lady Bird-the way that real life so often gets in the way of how we feel the world should be.  Her observational power, combined with bravura performances by everyone in the cast, makes this a must-watch.