Lifting Fog’s Oscars 2024 Conversation Guide
You’ve seen all the nominees. But how do you *talk* about them??
Apologies for two movie posts in a row, but asking me to not write about The Oscars is like asking a vegan to stop telling you how much it actually tastes like a real burger. You’re better off just nodding politely and letting us talk ourselves tired.
Oh, and HEADS UP: This post is too long for email (“Write longer, not better”- me), so I advise clicking the header and reading on Substack!
HOLLYWOOD, CA — Well, folks, they’re back: THE OSCARS, Hollywood’s yearly celebration of film-craft, fashion, and the miracles of pharmaceuticals once intended for diabetes management but now helping the over 30-crowd keep it toight.
I love Oscar Sunday. It’s the Super Bowl for gays and gay allies, the culmination of months of competition and buildup that retroactively justifies all the time we’ve sunk into this forever hobby of Watching Movies. Just like the Super Bowl, it means everything and nothing. I mean yes, Super Bowl winners prove themselves in a (nearly) objective contest; the Oscars sometimes award ‘Green Book’ Best Picture. But neither event is really about excellence, however accidentally the latter sometimes gets there. Nope! These are American traditions primarily in the business of making people mad, generating trivia, and stoking argument for years to come.
Maybe you’re going to an Oscar party this Sunday. Maybe you’re hosting an Oscar party this Sunday, with finger foods named after all the nominees1. Either way, you’re about to enter the conversational gridiron and would be wise, whatever your viewing tally, to come prepared to friggin’ converse. And that’s exactly what the editorial team at Lifting Fog2 has in store for you today: defenses, critiques, and fun facts to throw around the living room like Patrick Mahomes tossing the football to Travis Kelce Taylor’s boyfriend. Go movies!
American Fiction
KEY WORDS: Satirical, Human, ‘‘Precious’: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire’
Defend it: ‘American Fiction’ stars American TREASURE Jeffrey Wright, who has been begging for a truly lead performance his entire career and finally got one in… well, a movie that sadly won’t win any acting trophies this weekend but really seems like it might take home Best Adapted Screenplay. A lively, timely examination of 21st century Black lives — and how they look different on- and off-screen. Sterling K. Brown (nominated)! Erika Alexander (not)! There is not a single person out there who truly dislikes this movie.
Criticize it: Does anyone actually love it? ‘Fiction’ lives in two worlds: New Yorker-style comedy, which the trailer (and poster above) lean into, and light domestic drama. They both work; I’m not sure either truly sings.
Pleading the friggin’ fifth when it comes to ‘Fiction’’s racial and class politics, which better minds than I have dug into with far more expertise, but a lot of the satire here feels oddly out of step, like somehow it was meant to be released in 2012 — at least somewhat in the orbit of, say ‘Precious’, or the early ascent of Tyler Perry. Did you know that the book Cord Jefferson’s adapting, ‘Erasure’, was written in 2001? Something to talk about over a big glass of wine at your Oscar party!
Anatomy of a Fall
KEY WORDS: Messi, France, the legal one
Defend it: Here’s where I’m forced to admit this is one of two BP noms I didn’t actually see, which I’m going to blame on terrible theater availability— even in America’s movie capital, Los Angeles! — and on an even more terrible streaming rollout. You’re going to drop this on Hulu two weeks after The Oscars (March 22nd)? Let’s try THAT in a French court, Jesus Christ. People seem to like the dog, Messi (un-nominated) and the speech about generosity concealing something dirtier and meaner. One of the lawyers is very HOT and the other is very MOTHER, or something, idk. Throw out all these movie fragments and see what gets people talking!
Criticize it: The French are famously messy in their romantic lives, so is a movie about a woman who may or may not have killed her husband all that noteworthy? The last time we all got so riled up about a movie dog was the Jack Russell from ‘The Artist’ and folks, that’s one of the weakest BP winners of the past twenty-five years. Do we really want to keep encouraging France like this?
Barbie
KEY WORDS: Patriarchy, Women/Woman, America’s speech
Defend it: It’s 1. the highest grossing movie of 2023 2. one half (let’s be honest, at least three-quarters) of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon 3. a triumph of idiosyncratic storytelling in a commercial shell… I mean, what else is there to say? Maybe it’s not the most sophisticated film of the year, we can’t all be ‘Zone of Interest’, but aren’t the Oscars to some extent about cultural reach? The very MISSION of the movies? Not since ‘The Return of the King’, maybe, have we seen a Best Picture whose quality matches its sheer popularity. If ‘Barbie’ doesn’t win, it’s because America (the country, not Ferrera) hates women.
Criticize it: There’s no more damning criticism I could make of this movie than Hillary Clinton coming to its defense on X.com,
which could very well cost the movie its Adapted Screenplay statue. On the subject of cost, and ‘Barbie’s “missing” nominations for Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig:
The Holdovers
KEY WORDS: Cozy, Overdue, prosthetic eye
Defend it: The little movie that could. Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Best Supporting Actress win is a lock, and in a just world Paul Giamatti would have already won for ‘Sideways’ and possibly ‘Win Win’, for which he is still awaiting a nomination twelve years later. ‘The Holdovers’ just works, start to finish, a melancholy New England trifle whose characters feel consistently prickly and therefore true. The kind of movie you could see watching every Christmas to make yourself the perfect balance of happy-sad. We used to get ten of these human-sized indies a year, and I’d see all of them at the Landmark Theater.
Criticize it: It’s only because we “don’t get ten of these human-sized Indies a year” anymore that we’re talking about ‘The Holdovers’ in the first place! Boarding school-ass Nepo whine-fest. Did you know that Paul Giamatti’s dad, Bart Giamatti was the president of Yale AND Major League Baseball? Some of us did, and also knew that Holden Caulfield was the villain of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’.
Killers of the Flower Moon
KEY WORDS: Complicity, Genocide, Lily Gladstone
Defend it: The fact that this movie isn’t more nominated just speaks to how uncomfortable it made Oscar voters, who already hated how viciously ‘May December’ nailed the psycho-sexual horrors of acting. So you know ‘Killers’ was doing something right. Lily Gladstone may not have the screen time but she absolutely has the presence, a morality that looms over the darkest shadows of Osage County. Robert De Niro gives one of the best performances of his career as a racist killer, hiding in plain sight, who absolutely would have one of those “In This House, We Believe in Science” signs on his lawn in 2023 while actively championing anti-homeless legislation. Leo has never been dumber, more pathetic; if he were a woman, we would absolutely call this performance “brave” for its lack of vanity.
Criticize it: “Is Marty too old? Has he lost his edge?” Pretend you’re talking about Biden OR Trump and really stir the pot. Lily Gladstone winning Best Actress is an act of atonement from the Academy but if she loses, we need to burn the whole thing to the ground. “Too long!” is of course an oldie but a perennial goodie.
Maestro
KEY WORDS: Thirsty, Snoopy, Nose
Defend it/Criticize it: The other BP nominee I didn’t… let’s say “get around to seeing,” but if we’re being honest — and if not here, then where? — I lost interest in this movie sometime around TIFF3 and have maintained that lack of interest right up to now, and probably forever. I doubt I will ever in my lifetime see ‘Maestro’ and feel totally fine about it.
I suspect it doesn’t matter, either? ‘Maestro’ has evolved into something beyond “quality,” or even “movie.” It IS Bradley Cooper. To watch ‘Maestro’ is to watch Bradley. To hear him talk about the movie is to hear him talk about himself. “Leonard Bernstein” is just a Sasha Fierce-type performance piece now, and Bradley is both straight and gay, Jewish and anti-Semitic, alive and dead.
…All of this so his movie could go on to win zero Oscars!
Oppenheimer
KEY WORDS: Scale, Ludwig Goransson, inevitability
Defend it: It puts the “heimer” in “Barbenheimer.” An undeniable cinematic achievement! Late 19th century audiences LEAPT from their chairs watching a train come straight for them in “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat”…
…and early 21st century Boomers DOVE under their seats at the sight of an atomic bomb test, painstakingly rendered by Christopher Nolan and Co. When it’s not blowing shit up, ‘Oppenheimer’ is three hours of people talking. It made a billion dollars. How can you not be romantic about the movies?
Criticize it: We talked about Christopher Nolan here just the other day, a guy I argued is much goofier than we allow ourselves to think of him. ‘Oppenheimer’ feels almost like a corrective to that? Sure, there’s time-jumping — would it be a Nolan movie without it? — but by and large we’re looking at a down-the-middle Oscar biopic. I’m not saying it was engineered that way4! But, you know, here are.
My hope is that, much like winning Best Actress for ‘La La Land’ freed Emma Stone to make much WEIRDER (‘Poor Things’, coming up…) choices in her career, Nolan winning Picture and Director — and he will — might provide a similar creative unbinding. A musical next? A horror movie? A COMEDY? The best thing that could happen to Christopher Nolan would be shedding the image we’ve grafted onto him.
BONUS: tell any Nolan-heads in the room “I bet Nolan’s happy ‘Dune Part II’ isn’t in the race this year” and watch their faces unload their own Trinity tests.
Past Lives
KEY WORDS: understated, A24, in-yun
Defend it: At their best, movies cast a spell that outpaces both time and space. Years become minutes. Oceans become sidewalks. Real-life impossibilities become movie certainties, and not for nothing a chance for all of us to, in the comfort of a movie theater5, live completely different lives. Maybe even… past lives.
Three mature, intelligent performances from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and A24 Indentured Servant John Magaro lend real weight and stakes to a story that, on paper, I might not have been drawn to but occasionally watched with bated breath.
Criticize it: Remarkable restraint on the part of these star-crossed lovers not hooking up after sitting with complicated feelings for two decades but… maybe hook up? Maybe yell something? I’m not going to say someone needed to be hit by a car, or poisoned — this isn’t Saltburn — but at a certain point two people staring at each other looks less like yearning and more like a radical experiment in non-action. If nothing else, that cab should have started honking.
BONUS: Turn to someone at your watch party and, with the same inflection as “‘Die Hard’ is actually a Christmas movie,” tell them ‘Past Lives’ is in fact a multiverse movie not unlike ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ or ‘Dr. Strange in the Mulitverse of Madness’.
DOUBLE BONUS: Turn to the most coupled-up person and tell them you’re “in-yun.”
Poor Things
KEY WORDS: Nudity, Bravery, “So weird”
Defend it: No one goes harder than Yorgos Lanthimos and his demented little circus troupe, who made a genuine hit movie on the back of a Frankenstein story rife with graphic sex, Marxism, and fish-eye lenses. It’s a coming-of-age, fractured fairy tale as only the demented Greek could conjure, with a visual style you couldn’t possibly confuse with any other movie on this list. It’s ‘Barbie’, but R-rated. It’s ‘Barbie’ for steampunk girlies. It’s ‘Barbie’ but… dare I say it, a little weird.
Criticize it: Go full Gen-Z and ask your friends if all those gratuitous sex scenes were really necessary to the plot. Can we please empower women without disrobing them? ‘Poor Things’’s ostensibly “radical” politics amount to one scene of Bella witnessing human subjugation, then crying into Jerrod Carmichael’s arms. Is the movie really that weird? You guys ever heard of a little thing called German Expressionism?
The Zone of Interest
KEY WORDS: The sound, banality of evil, it’s what you *don’t* see
Defend it: Listen, I’m tired, I wasn’t expecting this post to go on so long, I’m just going to copy/paste my Letterboxd thoughts.
This ISN'T your mother's 'Mean Girls'.
It's funny (wrong word) to think of how much more harrowing, how much more *evil* something just out of sight -- or earshot -- can be than something right there in front of you. A fiery smokestack over the wall. A muffled gunshot. Was that a scream I heard whilst eating my traditional German breakfast? There's not a single moment of direct violence in this movie but there's also not a single moment of relief, in a great way. Pretty flowers wilted by sound design that feels like black bile belching from the depths of Hell.
Criticize it: Wow, the “banality of evil,” I’ve never heard that term before. Did you recently take AP European History? If I wanted to watch Nazis get humanized for two hours I’d just watch FOX News.
Phew! We made it. No more movies for a while, guys, let’s all just watch ‘Shogun’ and see each other in 2025.
Barbie-coa tacos; The Calzones of Interest; Boar’s Head Things (deli meat platter)
Me, always just me
that’s the Toronto International Film Festival! Just call it “TIFF” at your Oscar party and don’t explain yourself
*cough* Bradley Cooper
or I guess your PHONE