The 2023 Oscar nominations and what should be on the shortlist (2023)

If Oscar nominations were named after a film, this year's round-up would borrow one from Stanley Kubrick's first feature film, Fear and Desire. The news from the film industry over the past year has been the slump in the box office for almost everything but blockbusters, and the academy's response has been to mouth where their money is with nominations for best picture for the mega hits.Avatar: The Way of Water,,„Elvis, "e"Top-Gun: Maverick', plus one for the Force, Netflix, whose 'All Quiet on the Western Front' had an almost incomprehensible theatrical run.

Desire is in eleven nominations, more than any other film, for "Everything everywhere at once“, representing the common aspirations of strangeness and diversity; While its emotional reach isn't anything special (its slight sentimentality is its secret weapon), its finishes are more idiosyncratic than almost anything Hollywood has released in the last year. The cast is the directors' greatest achievement. Along with Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, great actors whose talents have been underutilized due to the lack of significant roles for Asian performersJamie Lee Curtis(who has endured the age discrimination of most actresses) and newcomer Stephanie Hsu deserves an Oscar in her own right. (However, there is no award for the Technical Casting category.)

On the other hand, the Hollywood releases in 2022 offered a great film that ticks both the boxes of commercial success and imaginative extravagance, namely "NO- and wasn't nominated for anything. Jordan Peele is the Rodney Dangerfield of Hollywood: He doesn't get any respect, at least not since he won Best Original Screenplay for "Go out.” Leaving him and his films is shocking and disturbing. It is also amazing that, although two prominent black actors, Angela Bassett and Brian Tyree Henry, were nominated this year, not a single film by a black filmmaker received a Best Picture nomination in a year that produced many great ones, for Director , for screenplay or in this case for the best international feature film.

Instead, the Academy threw its weight behind Nothing New on the Western Front: For those who regret not making more of it before, German director Edward Berger has proved them wrong. So does the bushel of nominations for "Como Banshees Finishing', with its folkloric theatricality and dark frivolity. (The nostalgia their success represents is especially true of the early Coen brothers' films: it captures some of their tone without their cinematic flair, humor or confidence.) The other international film to earn a Best movie won.triangle of sadness', is mostly in English and his sentiment is painfully simple.

On the other hand, that's the good newswomen speak“ received a couple of nominations, for best picture and for its screenplay, and that the daring and subtle “Marcel the Shell with Sapatos', a remarkable blend of stop-motion and live-action, appears as a nominee in the Animation category. (Also, I'm pleased to note that The New Yorker Studio produced or publishedfive of the fifteen short films nominated- the documentaries"to withdraw"e"stranger at the door, "that Live-Action-Movie"night tour, and animated filmsice cream vendor"e"the flying sailor.“)

I'm against individual industries making nominations in their categories; Cameramen, editors and actors all have knowledge and understanding of their fields, but this practice breeds a kind of collective protectionism that upholds the rules rather than rewarding expertise. Prizes must be given for aesthetic and artistic reasons - in the effects achieved - and must instead be nominated by all members.

This wagon ride during turbulent times, when the industry's financial uncertainties weigh heavily on their artistic daring and long-standing business footholds, suggests another theme for this year's Oscar nominees: "Back to the Future." With an open field of concerned pilgrims and no guidance for industry decision makers, the industries and the academy in general took a conservative, retrospective approach. Inasmuch as the Oscars are eminently ambitious -- a reflection of what the industry values ​​and where it aspires to be -- what the list of nominees promises for productions in the coming years is daunting.

best photo

„blessing”

„Amsterdam”

„time of Armageddon”

„Both sides of the leaf”

„A cathedral”

„the eternal daughter”

„get on the way”

„no bears”

„NO”

„San Omer”

I've revisited several of these films recently, and it reminds me why the release of Oscar-like films tends towards the end of the year: recent screenings are energizing, sometimes distorted, and no doubt members of the Academy are likely to prefer year-end films . . I watched 'Benediction' when it opened (little) in May, and then again a month later with even more enthusiasm: knowledge of the story and familiarity with the dramatic structure made its cheerful details stand out even more. Its liveliness sticks in the memory and makes it seem permanently new.

2022 was an atypical cinema year. It's been a great year as part of the best, but there hasn't been much depth on the bench. As of 2021, American independent cinema is on hold awaiting its next big hit, with many top international films finding it increasingly difficult to secure distribution. I acknowledge the utopia of picking my ten favorites of the year for Oscar-nominated roles. At the Oscars proper, few nominees for Best Picture are international films and non-English language films, and even fewer are ultra-low-budget independent films (like The Cathedral). I make my list in this fantasy land to highlight the gap between what's typically on the academy's radar and what's happening in the film world in general. Realistically, I'd love to see other notable Hollywood and non-Hollywood movies like "Bis"e"Maestro", It is displayed. (Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that "don't worry honey', one of the best star-centric Hollywood films of the year, is rejected by the academy as well as by critics).

best director

Terence Davies ("Blessing")

Alice Diop („San Omer“)

James Gray ("A Time of Armageddon")

Jafar Panahi ("Sin osos")

Jordan Peele ("No")

It would be strange if Best Picture and Best Director were so different anywhere, anytime. With the exception of 2012, all films except for three nominated directors (Bennett Miller for "Foxcatcher", Pawel Pawlikowski for "Cold War" and Thomas Vinterberg for "Another Round") were also nominated for the best film. Even in the 1940s and 1950s, when the studios dominated and the word "author" was unknown to American critics, the winners for best picture and best director were evened out in fourteen out of twenty; they only broke up once in the 1990s. The overlap indicates the very meaning of directing: the overall influence on the work of everyone who makes a significant contribution to the film in question, from the cast and acting style to lighting, costumes, and decorations. the script, whether the director is named or not. (The director's authority over commercial American films became clearer in the post-studio era, when there was no longer a style of house based on top-down production dictates, nor a cast and crew on long-term studio contracts. Duration and stable) . That profound influence was evident on Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch last year, and also on Terence Davies, who did something impressive, even considered a flop, with Benediction: he made a movie that almost seems normal .

The film is a kind of biopic about the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who spans half a century and filigrees his intimate drama into a large map of political and artistic history. Davies' style is no less adventurous than it was when his films were more choreographed and framed. But now, in the prime of his seventy-seventh year, he sees the meaning of Sassoon's story and the impact of Sassoon's time with a furious clarity that pierces in a way that is as transparent as it is exquisite. Charlie Chaplin said that comedy is life in long shots and tragedy is life in close-ups, and I've long thought that a director's sense of distance is just as important as timing. But in the case of Benediction, Davies' finely calibrated distances relate not just to the physical, to the characters in front of the camera, but to himself and the plot as he fuses the tragedy of Sassoon's life with a comedic disguise that eventually breaks together to a powerful effect. Davies dares to integrate his dramatic sequences with alluring, even visually intoxicating, special effects that open his meticulous historical reconstructions to astonishing subjective depths.