Oscars Preview 2024

 Around 72 hours until Oscar night, as I am typing, and it's an exciting year, with a lot of heated Academy Award races, a lot of good nominees, and a lot of excitement and anticipation.

My best movie rankings of last year, you'll find here.

The Best Picture field isn't bad.

I can't complain about Wicked, which was extremely popular, and The Conclave, which checks a lot of Oscar boxes more than pleasantly enough but is more the Zan and Jayna Wonder Twins version of an Oscar movie than an actual Oscar movie. 

I can't complain about The Substance.  I don't think it 100% works, largely because the ending felt like the place to go when the filmmakers didn't know where actually to go, so they picked a direction and just kept driving. The exact opposite of Anora, which ends brilliantly.  But if not perfect, The Substance has verve, vision, good performances.

I'm Still Here, Dune Part Two, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist and Anora are all on my own list of best movies from 2024.  

I will complain about Nickel Boys.  In cinematic entertainment I think a primary goal is to have identification with the lead character, and this movie tries to achieve with a sort of first person filmmaking where we hardly ever see the lead character.  It's a problem in first person novels, when sometimes I've seen writers struggle to name the lead character because people rarely names themselves.  Why volunteer for this problem.  But I won't complain too too much.  It was a better movie than I expected going in.

Emilia Perez.  Oy.  As a literary agent, I dream of having every book I sell published with the same marketing spend and marketing everything that Netflix gives to the few movies each year that it wants to seriously pitch for Oscar consideration.  And year after year, that money and that money alone manages to drive something, even a great many somethings, on to award ballots.  Often, as with Emilia Perez, for movies that don't remotely deserve it.

It's looking like Anora, which is fine. Movie amazed me the first time I saw it. 

My top two choices are Dune Part Two and The Count of Monte Cristo, and in some other world The Count of Monte Cristo had the Emilia Perez money behind it and was deservedly nominated in six or eight categories.  It's a three hour movie, and I've sat through ninety minute movies that felt a lot longer.  

While The Brutalist isn't a great movie, just a very very good one, I would love to see Brady Corbet win for Best Director.  The made this hugely ambitious movie for under $10M, filled it with good performances and vision, and put something on the screen that ain't like anything else we see on the screen very often.  Especially since Denis Villeneuve isn't nominated, this is a great time to have the Best Director not be the one who directed the Best Picture.

Speaking of brutal, that's the Best Actress category. Mikey Madison carries Anora. Fernanda Torres is utterly brilliant in I'm Still Here.  But how can I root against Demi Moore?  

Tim. O. Thay! Tim O. Thay! Tim O. Thay!  I'm all in for Timothée Chalamet for Best Actor.  I don't think Adrien Brody was the best part of The Brutalist; the movie carried him, you ask me, more than he carried the movie.  Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice is great, but this ain't a thing that's happening.  Ralph Fiennes, whatever.  But Chalamet is a great actor, talented and charismatic and here he gets to sing and impersonate a well known public figure.  And while we're at it, Monica Barbaro is the one Supporting that rules them all.  I don't know that she's expected to win for her portrayal of Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, but it is the best of the five performances by far.

More brutal - there are five super performances up for Supporting Actor.  Everyone says Kieran Culkin. But Jeremy Strong carries The Apprentice, and Guy Pearce comes on to the screen in The Brutalist with this great entrance and is never less than great.  Any of those three I would rank over Yura Borisov in Anora and Edward Norton in A Complete Unknown, but this category is locked and loaded.

Adapted Screenplay, process of elimination I put with A Complete Unknown. Original Screenplay, I don't know.   Most of the tech awards I'd say to flip a coin between Dune Part Two and The Brutalist. Animated Feature, let's go with the Flow.

I don't like too much getting into the whole "snub" thing.  Five movies only can get nominated, and besides the Netflix ones most of them are going to be deserving. And awards aren't only about the thing to hand but about all the other things that came before and all of the things that are in the aether.  Yes, Count of Monte Cristo deserves for sure an Editing and Score nomination, but it's a French movie that played on very few screens and did little business backed by a distributor that doesn't have the heft in awards season that gets things awards.  

But if I scroll down my moviegoing for 2024 releases...

Music by John Williams isn't just a documentary, but a way of life.  

WTF why did Warner bury Juror #2?  You don't bury Clint Eastwood's last movie, and there are people that would've gone to see it.  Well, it was less buried than the new Bridget Jones movie.  I loved Nicholas Hoult in this movie and loved Andrew Garfield in We Live in Time similarly.

Goodrich didn't make my list of the best movies of 2024, but it's a small gem.  The Order is another movie that feels underappreciated.

Saturday Night and September 5 were award movies that never made it very far.  Saturday Night you can kind of skip, but September 5 is well worth seeing.  Challengers had its fans. I wasn't one, and clearly neither was the Academy.

Didi deserved more love.  Got some at the Independent Spirit Awards.  See Didi.

And see Kneecap.  All of the movie on my best of 2024 list are worth seeing, but I'll give a special nudge toward Kneecap, and give some love to Didi even though it didn't make it on to my list.

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