sarah jae ranks the best picture nominees

or, the letterboxd review clip show version of this newsletter

happy erev oscars! here’s what i feel about all of the movies nominated for the biggest award of the night. necessary disclaimer: i did not get around to Dune 2 (i still haven’t seen Dune 1), and i tried to see I’m Still Here, but i mistook it for A Different Man and thought i could stream it tonight and i was wrong. i will update this list when i see I’m Still Here, and maybe also when i eventually see the Dunes.

another disclaimer: i’m framing this with thoughts i originally shared on Letterboxd, because writing has recently felt like pulling out my own nails and teeth. but i articulated myself pretty well in all of these posts. so. anyway.

last disclaimer: i only really liked a couple of these movies, which is abnormal for me and the best picture nominees. if i didn’t like a thing you liked, i still like and respect you, unless i didn’t before. justice for Challengers and I Saw The TV Glow and Between The Temples, all of whom make my personal best picture list. would love to hear all of your own thoughts in the comments or in my DMs.

alright! buy my book. okay here we go:

#8 - Emilia Perez

some of this is fun and creative, some of the (genuinely tuneless) songs are staged well, a bit of it is well-acted, a bit of it is thoughtful. the rest of it is pretty evil and hateful! i have nothing else to say.

#7 - A Complete Unknown

casting timmy here was a stroke of brilliance. it’s a layered and *physical* performance, rarely relying on a vocal impression alone to convey this character’s enormous interiority. i understand that early review’s “slides into” wording a lot better after seeing it. and it’s lucky he’s there sliding into bob dylan, because this would be borderline unwatchable without him. mangold wants to be carving his own art out of these giant artists but he settles for wikipedia factoid imitation. it’s not interesting to watch famous people react to bob dylan’s music so we also know it’s good! and a movie that doesn’t trust the songs themselves to get the point across is not a good movie. my least favorite moments of a complete unknown are the dozens of times the script winks at us, the dylan-aware audience. but those are my least favorite moments of every musician biopic.

the most narratively short-changed here is joan baez, who - yes - is among the greatest interpreters of dylan’s music, but a complete unknown doesn’t care about WHY that’s true. monica barbaro can sing but she is not singular, she’s not the most unique and affecting voice in music. and that results in a joan baez whose weapons (wit, artistry, that voice) are reduced to nothing special. she’s another pretty woman bob dylan treated badly.

james mangold wants to be making more marvel movies but for some reason he’s making biopics (why did we get the origin story of a train whistle) and he didn’t justify this one’s existence, especially given that he’s running his mouth about how walk hard didn’t kill the biopic, just trust me guys, i’ll do something different this time (he didn’t! at least walk the line was also a love story). i cannot believe flanderized pete seeger said “be careful on your motorcycle so you don’t get into a motorcycle crash, bob dylan.”

#6 - The Substance

deeply not for me! i love the practical effects, and i love demi moore and margaret qualley, and i can honestly say i’ve never seen a movie that looks like this before (besides the shining lmao). but like… is that all? idk. falls into a category of big shiny awards movie about The Violence And Horror Of Womanhood from the past several years (promising young woman, poor things) that just doesn’t work for me because it’s not willing to be either funnier, campier, or smarter. this is a satire! death becomes her is 33 years old and says so much more with this same premise because the satire is funny and streamlined. i laughed more at absurdity than astuteness here.

truly one of the most ham-fisted things i’ve ever seen, i think as a result of the sparse dialogue, which feels like an interesting choice until we’re seeing the same images dozens of times to MAKE SURE WE GET IT, DO YOU GET IT? and until the substance dude has to keep repeating the gremlins rules to elizabeth/sue/us like they’re the miranda rights. i hate dennis quaid’s performance, it feels like he’s being reigned in from going jewier. i enjoyed the third act twist. i get what this is going for! no physical change will permanently fix the deep spiritual rot created by self-hatred and perpetuated by societal beauty standards, and the more you change to fit that, the more you lose yourself. i just wish they’d started with a movie and not a vibe.

#5 - Wicked

if you’re also pavloved into crying every time you hear even the first couple of notes or “for good” proceed with caution. if the notes alone won’t get you there, oh my god, the performances will. cynthia erivo started singing “the wizard and i” and i had this full-body sensation of oh, this was always supposed to be sung in her voice. ariana grande’s theatre kid bonafides have always been available to us but it was so special to watch her embrace them. she is so funny! she’s doing such good work here! i hope she has a long career onstage! i hope the two of them do chicago when they’re in their late 40s!

it was so smart to put bowen yang in here to be a gay boy obsessed with ariana grande. i thought they made “popular” hers but i was honestly disappointed with the “defying gravity” riff they went with. i’m so glad ariana grande and cynthia erivo are annoying about this in the way they are because i don’t think anyone would actually want to watch an elphaba or a glinda who doesn’t take this material deadly seriously. i had only ever experienced jonathan bailey in that video of him singing “if i didn’t believe in you” and i was entirely won over by his fiyero. this movie understands charisma and vocals and that is all i need in a movie musical!

my big worry was this wouldn’t stand up to the practical spectacle of the stage show. in some ways, it did! i was so jazzed to see how colorful and filled-out this looks at times, how creative and fun the costumes and sets looked. but you don’t solve the “how do we get elphaba-in-flight to be as breathtaking as it is onstage?” problem by ripping apart the momentum of “defying gravity.” you don’t get to show me a ~realistic~ CGI talking goat and then ask me to suspend disbelief about a lady flying for the first time. it felt very odd to watch a story about industrialization as fascism while we were also sort of eluding the magic of filmmaking by taking computer generated shortcuts. i wish it was as practical and inventive as its oz film predecessors. but i can’t win everything, a movie with a marketing budget this big was never going to completely satisfy me in this way. also i was frustrated that chu went with the music video approach to musical numbers because sometimes, i want to zero in and watch these characters sing to each other. the scale worked, but it undermined the storytelling.

but! ultimately wicked is about doing so good at your bat mitzvah and kissing girls.

#4 - The Brutalist

“The worst thing about being sick in America, Ethel, is you are booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for the sick. Look at Reagan: He’s so healthy, he’s hardly human, he’s a hundred if he’s a day, he takes a slug in his chest and two days later he’s out west riding ponies in his PJs. I mean, who does that? That’s America. It’s just no country for the infirm.” — Roy Cohn, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Perestroika

there is a lot i like about The Brutalist. adrien brody is one of the best onscreen smokers we have, and he’s great here otherwise. i can’t think of another actor i would’ve trusted to dignify this specific material. i love the score, i love the ways it describes and refracts the architecture we’re seeing. i appreciate that israel is not a glorious finish line in the distance, but the miserable endpoint of a miserable reality (i get why this is sticky for people, but i don’t read that as zionist at all)¹. i love what it has to say about art and patronage and capitalism and america, and i love the ways it echoes Sunday in the Park with George. it’s beautiful to look at, and there’s a lot to chew on.

but i don’t know. i think i understood that the van burens, in their WASPy incestuousness and their new money decadence, fundamentally mistrusted, reviled, and exerted their power over immigrants, jews, and people of color without two rapes. zsófia seemed to exist to have violence enacted on her (or to Represent any number of things, mostly unclear), and lászló was tokenized and disrespected to the point where i didn’t need to see sexual violence played out on his body to understand that he has been treated sub-humanly by this family. the cruelty is the point, but we had already witnessed so much cruelty. i don’t know. beyond my initial discomfort, i think i hate that choice because it mistrusts the audience’s capacity to empathize with a literal holocaust survivor. it’s all a little too on the nose, a little too telegraphed, a little bit DO YOU GET IT?², for it to work for me.

idk! lászló‘s artistic sensibility comes from the desire to reframe hostility; The Brutalist tells us that hostility is inevitable when you’re a guest in somebody else’s country in a world defined by nationalism shepherded by assimilation (as a jewish woman from philadelphia whose great grandparents never fully assimilated, i’ve seen firsthand the ways the following generations must atone to make up for their parents’ inability to become americans). you can tell because he can barely lift his head at a celebration of his life’s work. which is bleak! but at least it’s a clarity of purpose.

also why does joe alwyn play that guy like he’s in Wall Street????

#3 - Anora

i really liked this. mikey madison is captivating!!! i am not entirely won over by the fantasy of these bumbling, foolish men who talk about ani with venom they don’t follow with intentional violence (to the extent that’s even true), but i did like watching them bumble. i want to know more about what anora wants, what she likes, what makes her happy, and what would matter materially in her life besides money. but i enjoyed watching her maneuver this situation! i rooted for her the whole time, even in her relationship with vanya. i also wanted the fantasy to be real, for her sake! and i think it’s a credit to both madison’s open-hearted performance and baker’s script and direction that i believed in it, even as the red flags flew. i didn’t realize until that heart-stopping moment at the very end end that we never saw anora and vanya kiss during sex. i choose to read that as the start of her self-actualization, not as the start of a new romance. that’s the only way i can stomach it.

#2 - Conclave

i want to get a vape that i can put the movie conclave in and smoke it forever. i want them to do conclave for every religion even the ones that would make no sense having a conclave. i love all the president’s men. i love veep. i love character actors in little getups. i love people guided in every direction by faith and doubt. i love gossip. i love people living through the worst days of their lives. when ralph fiennes gets that news at the end he crumbles into a physicality i want to call “kermit the frog has just learned that miss piggy isn’t going to go on tonight,” which i adore. a crucial entry to the stressed-out stage manager cinematic universe. i love isabella rossellini. i love acts of god onscreen, i love bureaucracy in service of something insane, i love being surprised. i love when a movie is about faces and talking. a new joy in my life is the movie conclave³.

#1 - Nickel Boys

stunning. gorgeously photographed and color-graded, used visual perspective shifts like literally nothing else i've ever seen. there is no bad performance in this movie but aunjanue ellis-taylor is so wonderful here, her warmth and intelligence knows no end.

somewhere in the scene where elwood/turner runs into chickie pete in 1988, i looked into the back of daveed diggs' head and realized we are watching elwood from a ghost's perspective. i was already pretty sure turner was going to die, and their two fates were already intertwined, communicated through those shifts in point of view. but the reality — that we are watching turner live out elwood's life, and the ghost watching him is elwood himself — hit me so deep in my gut that i barely have words for it yet.

1. since writing this letterboxd review, i’ve wondered if i am giving this movie too much credit. the more and more i think about The Brutalist and its relationship to jewishness and to the immigrant experience, the more i think it’s dumber and less thoughtful about either of those things (and also zionism) than i previously thought.

2. see my thoughts on The Substance. my biggest problem with the oscar movies this year? their inability to trust.

3. Conclave is probably my favorite of these movies, and the one i’ll revisit the most (i have already seen it three times, lmao). but, where i think it’s a great movie, i also don’t think it’s breaking much new ground. i think Nickel Boys may define a genre; that’s why i ranked it higher.