Ranking the 2023 Best Picture Nominees & Predicting Oscar Winners
Another look back on the films of 2023 before tomorrow night's Academy Awards
The 96th Academy Awards are upon us tomorrow night, and I think the nominees are actually pretty respectable this year. Not exactly what I picked as my favorites at the end of 2023, but there are a lot of great picks and possibilities across the board, and while I don’t have much interest in watching the show, I am curious to see who wins.
With that in mind, we’re doing two things in today’s piece: Ranking (and reflecting on) each of the 10 Best Picture nominees, which with two exceptions are a really strong group of films, better than the Oscars often collects. And after that, I’ll be going category-by-category to tell you who I predict will win, who I would vote for if I had a ballot, and who I wish had been nominated but wasn’t. So without further ado, let’s get to ranking…
Ranking the 10 Best Picture Nominees
10. Maestro
The only thing more offensive to me than Maestro getting a Best Picture nomination is Maestro getting a Best Makeup and Hairstyling nomination, because good God is the prosthetic work here distractingly over-the-top. But so is everything else. I passionately hate this movie, more than I’ve hated a Best Picture nominee in quite some time. It is the apotheosis of music biopics that don’t care a lick about the music, that can’t find any way to communicate why their subject mattered to history, and instead focuses on the kind of interpersonal drama that settles into the exact paradigm parodied so perfectly in Walk Hard sixteen years ago, as the artist drinks and cheats and loses favor with his family before being redeemed in the end. And lest it be left unsaid, the moral of the story as Bradley Cooper tells it here is just nauseatingly toxic, a “genius men are inherently good no matter their faults” narrative where the man never changes and the woman (Carey Mulligan) learns the lesson “shut up, love him, support him, and die gracefully of cancer when the time comes.” I hate this movie.
Honestly, if you wanted to learn about Leonard Bernstein by watching a movie, go watch West Side Story(either one). Watch On the Waterfront. Don’t watch the On the Town movie, because they tossed out all his music (I guess Maestro has a one-up on that film, at least). Go watch the copious clips of Bernstein conducting on YouTube. Do anything else. Just avoid this one like the plague, and please for the love of God don’t give it any Oscars.
Read my very angry Letterboxd review of Maestro here.
9. American Fiction
Unlike Maestro, I didn’t hate American Fiction, but I also think it’s barely a movie, and certainly a very weird choice for major awards recognition. It’s extremely televisual, not just in its bland aesthetic but especially in its structure, with a very meandering pace that has trouble ever building up a head of steam or focusing on any one thread for an extended stretch of time. It is built in every way like a TV show, and this is the rare case where instead of seeing an overlong streaming series and wishing it had been a movie, I wish we’d just gotten the 6-episode TV version of this, because it would be a much more fitting format. What’s here is worth watching mainly for Jeffrey Wright’s reliably wonderful performance, and because the movie is frequently quite funny, its satire fierce and on point. I enjoyed it fine moment to moment, even if the looseness of structure ultimately leaves it feeling like less than the sum of its parts.
8. Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is not my favorite film of this year or of Christopher Nolan’s career, and I think it carries some pretty significant limitations in its accounting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and, more broadly, Nolan’s continuing inability to write women), but it cannot be overstated how head-and-shoulder more ambitious, interesting, and historically- and thematically-engaged Oppenheimer is than 99% of biopics to ever come out in Hollywood. Certainly, sitting through dreck like Maestro in the time since Oppenheimer’s debut makes me look more kindly on Nolan’s film, which is striving not only to be a great movie, but a significant statement and conversation starter, rather than a vanity project or petty cultivation of a personal brand. This is a three-hour R-rated movie about dark and heavy real-world subject matter, mostly comprised of adults in conversation, assembled in the kind of challenging, editorially-complex fashion usually reserved for ‘art-house’ fare – and it is done on IMAX scale, created not to play for a few critics at festivals and scant audiences in New York and LA, but to be a massive popular hit. That Oppenheimer became such a monster success should not be taken for granted. Nolan and Universal decided to buck decades of Hollywood trends that assumed a film like this had to be a small award season player with a limited platform release – or, worse, a streaming debut – and instead worked to make it one of the defining film events of 2023. They trusted that audiences are smarter, more adventurous, and more invested in actual human storytelling than the industry has assumed for most of my life, and that faith was rewarded in such a way that it’s frankly shaken my entire understanding of what Hollywood could look like. So even though it wouldn’t be my vote for ‘Best Picture,’ I have no problem with the high probability that Oppenheimer sweeps the tables tomorrow night. It is, if nothing else, the film I most hope studios take lessons from going forward into 2024 and beyond: Make real movies, take big swings, and trust audiences to come along for the ride.
Read my first review of Oppenheimer here, and my second, more positive review here.
7. Killers of the Flower Moon
The hardest of these for me to rank, and the one I most need to revisit and reassess, because my first viewing of Martin Scorsese’s massive historical epic prompted strong, but mixed, reactions from me: Awe at the scale of the production and intricate construction of the 3.5-hour narrative; sickening, incandescent anger at the atrocities depicted; amazement at Lily Gladstone and the rest of the Native American cast’s deeply naturalistic performances, low on affectation but high on humanity and impact; and frustration at Leonardo DiCaprio’s over-the-top work, which is all affectation all of the time. Overwhelmingly, though, I wanted to see the Osage version of this story, not because Scorsese was wrong to frame his version as a thorough dismantling of cinema’s unquenchable thirst for white savior myths, but because my favorite moments of this movie are the ones literally seen through Osage eyes. The film is at its best when it simply plants its camera and listens to the Osage speak, and my frustration comes not from the film imparting the wrong message, but because the more I heard those voices, the more I felt that the white characters were not the people whose souls I cared to see illuminated in 200 minutes worth of depth. But again – I have a lot of respect for the achievement, and a lot of interest in chewing on this one more in the years to come.
Read my full review of Killers of the Flower Moon here.
6. Barbie
The snubbing of Barbie’s Greta Gerwig in Best Director and Margot Robbie in Best Actress has been hotly debated ever since nominations were announced, and for what it’s worth, I’m definitely on team ‘there’s-no-way-in-hell-a-male-led-or-masculine-coded-movie-with-this-level-of-success-and-acclaim-would-be-snubbed-like-that,’ but let’s take a second to talk about the work. I’m not sure anyone in recent memory has made the jump to tentpole blockbuster filmmaking as gracefully as Gerwig has here, nor with as much of their voice in tact; and it feels equally appropriate to read the film through the actor-auteurist lens of Margot Robbie in the lead role. In a time when movie stars are either an endangered or extinct species, Robbie has spent the last decade carving out a space of stardom entirely on her own terms, working also as a producer with a great eye for projects and a wildly savvy sense of her own image. Barbie is a remarkable culmination of that project, a role only a genuine, old-fashioned movie star with weapons-grade charisma and singular screen presence could embody, and that only a truly talented actor with deep wells of humanity could sell in those moments Gerwig pushes things into more introspective territory. The film’s big climactic gesture is easily its most extraordinary: A symbolic (or maybe just literal) confrontation with God where Barbie confronts the emotive core of the human experience, which Gerwig communicates through superimpositions of home movies and found footage – the exact kind of personally expressive indie-film move Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach cut their teeth on, and which they have now smuggled Trojan-horse style into thousands of multiplexes around the world. It’s not only the film’s most interesting, astonishing moment, but the one in which Robbie the star/producer and Gerwig the writer/director are most clearly meeting one another on even footing, each empowering the other to go for broke. It’s a beautiful sight to behold.
Read my full review of Barbie here.
5. Past Lives
It’s not my place to judge the ‘authenticity’ of Celine Song’s Past Lives, a film about a married woman who reunites with a man she loved as a boy before emigrating to the US from South Korea, but it sure feels achingly authentic to me – and it’s undeniably one of the most deeply felt, passionately told films of the year. I love how slowly and methodically the film develops character, mood, and atmosphere, how willing it is to sit with uncomfortable emotions, and acknowledge how resolutely life doesn’t bend to clean narrative scripts, without ever making anyone out to be a villain or bad actor. Past Lives is about good people trying to process complex, messy feelings, and it feels like something of an emotional exorcism for everyone making it. And all of it is stunningly beautiful, with cinematography that calls attention to itself insomuch as the compositions are always telling a story, sometimes from unexpected vantage points.
4. Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet’s incredible courtroom drama is written, performed, and photographed with astonishing nuance and precision, taking the shape of what could be an intense legal thriller – a man dies falling from his house, with only his wife, Sandra, around when it happens, leading to her being put on trial for his murder – and instead making something slow and simmering, a film about studying faces and sitting with emotions. Rather than the simplistic ‘whodunnit’ lesser films might have offered, Triet delivers a dissection of a marriage and a family unit, and of all the difficult nuances of human behavior and relationships which create the unstable foundations society wants to project easily digestible cookie-cutter perfection upon. The world looks at Sandra and at the case surrounding her and wants to see something neat and binary, a one-word answer to a person and a marriage and a family of real everyday complexity. That is impossible, but the destructive ends of that impulse are very, very real.
Read my full review of Anatomy of a Fall here.
3. Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos’ profane and poignant fairy tale for adults is such a gloriously demented pleasure. The film is equal parts clever and childish in its sense of humor, frequently grotesque and graphic, brazenly sexual (though rarely erotic) throughout, and astonishingly beautiful in every moment. In its cinematography and design, yes, but also in the film’s enduring, disarming sweetness. Lanthimos has crafted a big-hearted movie about the strangeness of being alive, one that takes the Frankenstein-cum-Pinocchio idea of a person who is fully grown physically but tabula rasa mentally – portrayed brilliantly by Emma Stone in the best performance of her career to date – to explore what is ecstatic, hollow, violent, uncanny, and wonderful about life, and ultimately come to the conclusion that our messy, transient existence is, in sum, quite interesting, and therefore quite worthwhile.
Read my full review of Poor Things here.
2. The Holdovers
I love this movie like it’s a person. I love it from the most basic layer of shape and texture – from its pitch-perfect 1970s celluloid aesthetic to the production design that is absolutely miraculous in its unassuming verisimilitude – up through the story and the characters, who by the film’s end feel like old friends the viewer has known for ages. The broad strokes of the narrative are simple and archetypal – a cranky Professor is charged with looking after a promising but behaviorally delinquent student over the Christmas break, both warming up and learning about themselves and each other as the days go by – but The Holdovers is singular. In its boundless love for its characters, and the pervasive empathy used to illustrate their world; in its engagement with the prickly realities of class, and the indignities many of us are wrongly taught to view as invisible; in the ways it understands people as unique amalgams of myriad contradictions, flaws, and virtues, and thus renders even the most fleeting of characters fully three dimensional and human; in its humor and its wordplay and its sharp, incisive wit; in its absolutely remarkable performances by Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph; in its gentleness and its open heart, there are very few movies like The Holdovers.
Read my full review of The Holdovers here.
1. The Zone of Interest
In The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer asks if it is in the capacity of the human soul to build one family’s Eden and a million families’ Hell in the same space – and to recognize how acutely this slice of history Glazer illustrates is a synecdoche for a pathology so many of us share in, tending to our gardens while the sky above darkens with blood. Glazer’s film is sharp, insightful, and precise in the ways it implicates Rudolf Höss and his family, but it is great, haunting, and enduring for the ways it implicates the viewer, for how it asks us to sit in reflection of the banal sins we too commit, and for how it in turn calls us to some kind of action. I would show and teach this film in several different settings, and I think I would pair it with Alain Resnais’ seminal short documentary Night and Fog, the first film there to provide the vital history, context, and moral outrage, the second to invite the just-as-vital contemplation of this evil and how we continually fall prey to it. For there will always be atrocities, and there will always be gardens to tend; as long as we commit ourselves to the latter while ignoring the former, both will grow in turn. The Zone of Interest is a masterpiece.
Read my full review of The Zone of Interest here.
Predictions & ‘If I Had a Ballot’ Picks:
Best Picture
My Prediction: Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: The Zone of Interest
Who I Wish Was Nominated: The Boy and the Heron
Directing
My Prediction: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron
Actor in a Leading Role
My Prediction: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Jason Schwartzman, Asteroid City
Actor in a Supporting Role
My Prediction: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Charles Melton, May December
Actress in a Leading Role
My Prediction: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
If I Had a Vote: Emma Stone, Poor Things
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Natalie Portman & Julianne Moore, May December
Actress in a Supporting Role
My Prediction: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
If I Had a Vote: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
My Prediction: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach, Barbie
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Michael Mann, Ferrari
Writing (Original Screenplay)
My Prediction: David Hemingson, The Holdovers
If I Had a Vote: Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik, May December
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Jay Raymond & Kelly Reichardt, Showing Up
Production Design
My Prediction: Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Barbie
Who I Wish Was Nominated: John Wick Chapter 4
Film Editing
My Prediction: Jennifer Lame, Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Thelma Schoonmaker, Killers of the Flower Moon
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Eddie Hamilton, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Cinematography
My Prediction: Hoyte van Hoytema, Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Robbie Ryan, Poor Things
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Christopher Blauvelt, May December
Costume Design
My Prediction: Jacqueline West, Killers of the Flower Moon
If I Had a Vote: Jacqueline Durran, Barbie
Who I Wish Was Nominated: April Napier, Showing Up
Makeup and Hairstyling
My Prediction: Maestro
If I Had a Vote: Poor Things
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Blackberry
Sound
My Prediction: Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: The Zone of Interest
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
Visual Effects
My Prediction: The Creator
If I Had a Vote: Godzilla Minus One
Who I Wish Was Nominated: The Wandering Earth II
Music (Original Score)
My Prediction: Ludwig Göransson, Oppenheimer
If I Had a Vote: Robbie Robertson, Killers of the Flower Moon
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Joe Hisaishi, The Boy and the Heron
Music (Original Song)
My Prediction: “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie, by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell
If I Had a Vote: “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie, by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt
Who I Wish Was Nominated: “Spinning Globe” from The Boy and the Heron by Kenshi Yonezu
Animated Feature Film
My Prediction: The Boy and the Heron
If I Had a Vote: The Boy and the Heron
Who I Wish Was Nominated: Just The Boy and the Heron five times
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