Nom Nom Nom: It's Time For The Oscars
This is the dumbest possible headline, but it makes me laugh.
“What is your favorite season?” “Awards.” —Moira Rose
Well, I guess we’re here.
As is tradition, awards season officially starts when the Golden Globes does something really stupid. And, boy, did the shady awards body up the ante this year. The 87 or so members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association didn’t even have a televised ceremony and they still managed to embarrass themselves by putting out a series of the dumbest possible tweets announcing their winners. The following is a personal favorite…
Apparently, there’s nothing funnier than teens murdering each other.
Apologies if I happened to spoil West Side Story or William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for you. But also, come on.
One week from today, the nominations for the Academy Awards will be released. It’s a magical time where anything’s possible: your favorite movie could sneak into Best Picture or perhaps everyone will finally see that Don’t Look Up is a smarmy, smug lecture that doesn’t deserve any validation. Most likely, neither of those things will happen, but if the movies have taught us anything, it’s to dream big (and never say what? to Samuel L. Jackson).
Being the insane person that I am, I put together and constantly update what I think will be nominated in the major eight categories. I’m very mediocre at Excel, so this is truly as basic as it gets. Did you know you could alphabetize in there? Crazy stuff.
Let’s go through the four main categories. Because why not?
Sidenote: Along with these four breakdowns, there will be an intermission and a movie rec at the end.
Best Picture
There seem to be four locks here with The Power of the Dog, Belfast, King Richard and West Side Story, and then three near-locks in Dune, Licorice Pizza and CODA following suit. Unlike in years past, there need to be ten noms here. Don’t Look Up is buzzy and chockful of stars, as is Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem’s Being the Ricardos, so let’s throw those in. Although it’s projected to be outside of the final ten, I have The Lost Daughter sneaking in. This awards body loves Olivia Colman and with her Best Actress momentum (we’ll get into that later), I think enough people will have seen this movie right before voting ends to have it eek through. I’m not-so-quietly pulling for the Japanese epic Drive My Car or the regal KFC saga Spencer to make some noise in this race, but it seems like that’s just me getting my hopes up only to be let down. But that’s what the Oscars are for, right?
Best Director
This is Jane Campion’s award to lose. Along with the one-time winner of this category back in 1994, Steven Spielberg seems to be the only other for-sure bet in this category. That guy’s got some hits. The other three are kind of up in the air, but I feel relatively confident with Denis Villeneuve getting in for Dune. It seems too chalk to have Kenneth Branagh and Paul Thomas Anderson in there as well, but I can’t pull the trigger with any of the other candidates. The one thing that’s giving me pause is that lately, this is the branch with the most out-there choices with Thomas Vinterberg and Paweł Pawlikowski both getting surprising noms in recent years. It wouldn’t be stunning to see another foreign director get that chance and if that happens, I could see Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Asghar Farhadi taking PTA’s much-deserved spot.
Last week, I took a cycling class in which the instructor played some of the Interstellar score. It was beautiful, all of us riding our bikes while not going anywhere listening to energetic yet melancholy music composed by Hans Zimmer.
This made me think of the question, “What would be the best film score to cycle to?” A very specific idea, I’m sure, but a critical one nonetheless.
So far, I have Grand Budapest Hotel, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Mad Max: Fury Road. Sports movies are most likely solid too, Rocky for example. Pixar has some bangers, of course. There are plenty (PLENTY) more, but those are the first few I thought of. If you think of any, let me know. Perhaps one day I’ll be a cycling instructor with only movie scores. I wonder if there’s an audience for that.
Okay, back to predictions and whatnot…
Best Actress
Remember a few weeks ago when I added West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler to the list of five? Unfortunately, I’ve changed my views on that one. That was more out of yearning than anything else, and there just doesn’t seem to be a path for her unless one of the runaway five unexpectedly drops out. Although Kristen Stewart was the favorite for much of this season, it seems like it’s now between Olivia Colman and Nicole Kidman. Unlike the SAG nominations, I still think Stewart has enough juice to get a spot here. Lady Gaga and Jessica Chastain are somehow both still very much in the mix. I would love to see Zegler or Alana Haim break into the Academy’s good graces, but Penelope Cruz and Jennifer Hudson both seem to have a better chance to get in there if any chaos occurs.
Best Actor
Although Will Smith is still the heavy favorite (and is as sure a lock to make the Oscars as anyone), I have a sneaking suspicion that what we really have is a three-horse race with Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Garfield hot on Smith’s trail. Cumberbatch is in the most well-regarded film and people just really like Garfield. Being part of the movie that kept theaters alive doesn’t hurt. Denzel is Denzel so he’ll be here. That fifth spot is a toss-up with Peter Dinklage as the majority’s choice. The problem is very few real people have seen Cyrano—I haven’t—and it’s certainly not as buzzy as Leo in Don’t Look Up, Bradley Cooper in Nightmare Alley or (my pick) Javier Bardem in Being the Ricardos. I like to think that Bardem is still playing No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh but he’s disguising himself in whatever movie he’s acting in next.
So, I’m going to take you behind the curtain for a second.
I actually started writing this post a week ago. Today is February 1st; I put together most of this newsletter on January 25th. I like starting early and not waiting until the last second. Yes, I’ve had to make a few changes in the Oscars spreadsheet and redo a screenshot or two, but it’s fine. It happens. I expected that.
What I didn’t expect is for a new movie to come along and blow up an entire segment here.
Seven days ago, I began a brand-spanking-new Aerial Shot section called And the best new movie of the year (so far) is… It was acronymed ATBNMOTYSFI, but there’s no need to memorize that now, as The Worst Person in the World screwed up everything.
The ATBNMOTYSFI segment—rolls off the tongue—featured a very good movie called Happening about a woman in 1960s France attempting to get an abortion during a time when it was incredibly difficult to do so. Not that it’s that much easier now, but we don’t have time to get into that bullshit.
Anyway, the plan was to keep a running tally of what my current favorite movie of the year is. This is how I described it just a week ago before my plan went to shit:
I’ve never watched the UFC or WWE but I know that there’s a belt of some kind—preferably one that goes with a nice suit—and that whoever is winning in a certain subcategory gets to keep that belt until they lose to someone else. It’s a ceremonial passing of the torch, and we love inane ceremonies here at Aerial Shot. As the year progresses, I will let you know what the best new movie I’ve seen so far is. There can be long stretches in which nothing changes or the No. 1 choice can be kicked to the curb the next day.
Well, we don’t really have to fret about week-to-week updates now that I saw Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, a Norwegian rom-com(?)/drama, which is one of the best films I’ve seen in the last few years. I don’t know if this is purely coasting on the high from the premiere, but I would be shocked if there’s anything more impressive than this one. Maybe a few in the same ballpark, but most likely nothing definitively better.
It may be the best new movie I’ve seen since 2019’s four-headed monster (for me) of Midsommar, Little Women, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Parasite.
You should watch this knowing as little as possible, but I can’t stop thinking about everything this movie does: what it represents, the ideas it’s dissecting, the literary feel, the score, the high-wire performances from leads Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie and Herbert Nordrum. This movie’s so good that I needed to scrap nearly 500 words.
That’s a monumental achievement.
By the way, next week’s Aerial Shot will most likely drop on Wednesday with the Oscar nominations being announced Tuesday morning. I’ll have to take a long walk and think hard about my hot takes. That’s what the greats do.
I don’t know for sure that Ernest Hemingway did that, but I’d like to think he did.