And the 2024 Oscar goes to … !

It was a most enjoyable movie year!

We’ve seen all ten of the nominated best pictures (!) without leaving home, and that’s a testament to Catherine’s dogged determination and willingness to (temporarily) subscribe to every streaming service and go back and back and back until the promised film is finally available. And I love her for it! Myself, I simply don’t have the patience, but I’m a very grateful beneficiary!

The category everyone talks about is best picture, of course, and I will too, but I won’t start there. First I’d like to highlight some of my favourite “other” categories, namely short documentary and short animation. Sadly, most of the animated shorts have not yet come up on streaming services so we are shut out of that category, except for one notable exception:

Ninety-five Senses tells the story of an elderly man enjoying his five senses in the brief time he has left. His situation unfolds at a leisurely pace then hits hard as you come to understand what that situation is.

A visit to https://smallscreenings.org/mast/ninety-five-senses/film will introduce you to some of the people and concepts behind the film. The film itself is available on Documentary +

Short documentaries, on the other hand, are all available. Our two favourites were The ABC’s of Book Banning and The Last Repair Shop.

The first focussed on the children attending Florida schools in which a startling number and variety of books have been challenged, restricted or banned outright by parents and school boards. “Why do they want to stop kids from learning?”, the children ask. Good question!

Watch it on Paramount Plus, if you subscribe.

This one focused on people who repair musical instruments for school music programs that serve kids whose families would never be able to afford their instruments.

We meet a few of the children, but the most surprising feature of this film is the sensitive portrayal of four dedicated individuals who work in the shop. They come from widely varied backgrounds, and all had their lives shaped in one way or another by a deep connection to music.

This one has my vote.

Go ahead, treat yourself to 40 beautiful minutes on YouTube!

By the way, another nominee in the Short Doc category is The Barber of Little Rock, which definitely deserves an honourable mention.

The other “short” category is Live Action — basically fictional short-stories performed by actors, some well-known, others not at all. Have a box of tissues handy when you decide to sit down to a program of live action shorts. They’re powerful and there’s little time spent on distractions. The five nominations go to:

The After
Invincible
Knight of Fortune
Red, White and Blue
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

First I’ll dispense with Henry Sugar. Great actors, fun for some, I suppose, but I found it silly and hard to follow and maybe not worth the effort.

You can find it on Netflix. It might win, just because of the big names involved, but I think you have to be a big Roald Dahl fan …

Invincible and Knight of Fortune were both interesting and worth watching, but not Oscar material, in my view.

So the Oscar must go to one of two remaining films: The After or Red, white and blue. Which one will depend on the mood of the Academy this year. Both pack an emotional punch. Both deal with heart-breaking family situations. And both deserve to win.

The After deals with the aftermath of irrational violent loss, its ensuing grief, and finally insight that arrives in the back seat of an Uber, driven by a former businessman, played by the wonderful David Oyelowo. At the start of the film, he is a distracted modern dad who’s engaged with work, but out of emotional touch with his daughter and ex-wife. When he suddenly loses all three, life has to find meaning somewhere. But where?

I felt his grief in my body. Masterful performance!

Red, White and Blue introduces a young single mom who is faced with the necessity of a trip out of her home state, which has outlawed abortion. Her struggle to get enough money together for the procedure includes raiding her daughter’s piggy bank. It’s not just about poverty though. Her daughter travels with her and they both cross two state lines for the first time in their lives.

I can’t decide which one to vote for, so I’ll just be glad they were both made and nominated.

To learn more about where to watch these films, visit https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a46538118/2024-oscar-nominated-short-films-watch-stream/
or there’s a place called ShortsTV
https://shorts.tv/theoscarshorts/

But not all are available to Canadian viewers.

So that took longer than I thought it would, and it’s now officially Oscar day — in fact with the time change, we’re well into it. So I’d better skip best performances, and all of the other categories, and get on with the big task: Best Picture

Will the Academy be in the mood for a serious little film, a big blockbuster movie, or one that crosses all the boundaries? If they were to ask me to choose, I’d have a really hard time unless they answered that question.

Let’s talk about the serious little films first.

American Fiction was good entertainment with a serious undercurrent. How to treat the topic of racial stereotyping at a time when it seems like 30% of the US wants to return to the good old days of socially sanctioned segregation and open hate, while another 30% is so overcome with guilt over the sins of the past that they have difficulty being critical of anything a Black or Indigenous person does in the present? Complicating the pitfalls of critique is the landscape of capitalism, where books that sell trump those that don’t. This film plays with those extremes in quite an in-your-face way, absurd and silly at times, but never dumb. Toronto audiences awarded it the Audience Choice award last year.

Also in this category, I would put Anatomy of a Fall, and The Holdovers. These are both strong stories about ordinary people in difficult situations, trying to hold or reclaim freedom in lives that are at the mercy of systems that are sometimes absurd and often insensitive. Both are really good films, but neither will take the Oscar. Size-wise, Past Lives fits in this category, but it’s quite different in that it raises intriguing questions about how who we were in the past relates to who we have become in the ordinary course of a modern life. Layered with questions of loyalty and memory, both personal and racial, this film deserves the nomination, for sure, but probably won’t win. If it does, I would not be upset at all.

But let’s be real. There’s Oppenheimer on the one hand, and Barbie on the other. They couldn’t possibly be more different from one another, but they are both big box office winners. One or the other will sweep the awards in all probability. I think it will be Oppenheimer but I don’t feel like writing about that one. I must say though that I really enjoyed the movie about making the movie, explaining some of the photographic techniques that were used to produce the film’s big effects.

Other possibilities in the “serious big films” category: Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro and The Zone of Interest. The latter film really belongs in the serious little films category, because it’s a limited cast with small, ordinary events taking place on the screen, but what’s going on just off the screen, just out of sight, just at the edge of sound, catapults it into the big film group. It is one of the most chilling stories about what Hannah Arendt dubbed the banality of evil that I have ever seen. Flower Moon also studies evil, in a peculiarly American version based in true crimes committed against the Osage tribe in the earliest years of 20th century Oklahoma. Maestro does not seem to deal with evil in the same way, and yet there is a cancer rooted in an ego-driven self-centredness that insists on personal freedom at the cost of everything and everyone else in that ego’s environs. Bernstein’s wife names it “anger” at one point in the film, but he’s not really an angry man and her inability to put her finger on the exact nature of the problem allowed that cancer to literally invade her body and ultimately cause her death. All three of these are must-see films and they should all win.

On the other hand, if the Academy is in a different mood and wants to reward films on the brighter Barbie side of life, they might want to consider Poor Things although I have problems with this film. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed it far more than I thought I was going to — my expectations were very low. Do we really need another Frankenstein movie, I asked myself? Well, it turned out to be much more entertaining than I’d feared, but it lacks Barbie‘s innocence and light-hearted but real insights. Maybe I’m just an old prude, but I found there was a lot — a LOT — of explicit sexual activity that I did not enjoy. I found it especially galling that, while the central character, Bella, was housed in an adult body, her brain was that of a child during much of the sexual exploration (exploitation?) — and at least some of the men were aware of that fact. Mind you, she got through it, maintained her sense of herself as a powerful woman, and triumphed in the end, so I should just get over it and love the film, right? Hmmm …. just not quite there.

So, although I never played with Barbies and never regretted it, I will end here by casting my vote for Barbie because that’s the kind of mood I’m in. Great music, loads of fun, but not mindless — just uplifting, and I guess I’ve needed that lately. Greta Gerwig should have been nominated for Best Director, by the way! Enjoy the awards show!