The Post In Which I Hold My Own Oscars

For literally months I’ve been tinkering with new posts about actual science, like I keep promising, or my review of Oppenheimer which I also keep promising, but oops it seems those aren’t ready yet. And now it’s Oscars time.

I’m not a critic, I know very little about movies, none of my film opinions hold any value at all. But I do really like movies, and I do like thinking about what I liked about them and why. So every year I make my own lists of “Bests”, I even try to see as many of the Oscar nominees as I can.

So below is my picks for all the established Academy Awards plus a few of my own. Because I’m just some random guy with little knowledge of film-making, I add a few explanations after some categories about my reasoning, hopefully it’s sensible.

This is a work-in-progress post. I will be updating and making slight edits during the Oscars ceremony itself.

First, my top 10. In past years I’ve listed my 10 personal picks for Best Picture in alphabetical or random order because I don’t believe there really is one “best film” and since I’m not an awards ceremony I don’t have to choose a singular winner. But this year I really want to highlight my top choice. After that, though I’m fairly confident(ish) in the ordering of the top 5 (not so much 6-10). More detailed explanations and thoughts are at the end of the post.

Best Picture

1. The Zone of Interest
2. Barbie
3. American Fiction
4. All of Us Strangers
5. Godzilla Minus One
6. How Do You Live? (titled “The Boy & the Heron” in English markets)
7. Priscilla
8. Oppenheimer
9. Killers of the Flower Moon
10. The Holdovers

The irony is when my Oppenheimer review comes out, you’ll wonder how the heck it made my list at all. Well, it’s a testament to the technical merits of the film and the effectiveness of the scenes that did work for me. Overall I’m not a fan of the movie, but it’s too impressive for me not to consider one of 2023’s great works of film-making. Funny, innit? I would likewise caution viewers of Killers of the Flower Moon to seek as many responses by Native Americans, especially Osage people, as they can, because Flower Moon has both strong pros and big, big cons in how it presents the story (eg here and here and here and here).

Best Director

1. Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)
2. Greta Gerwig (Barbie)
3. Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers)
4. Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
5. Sofia Coppola (Priscilla)

Distinguishing “best picture” from “best director” is very tricky. So I’ve added extensive notes about these choices at the end of this post.

Best Lead Performances

• Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon)
• Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers)
• Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla)
• Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction)
• Margot Robbie (Barbie)
• Fantasia Barrino (The Color Purple)
• Kōji Yakusho (Perfect Days)
• Ryunosuke Kamiki (Gojira -1)
• Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer)
• Teyonah Parris (They Cloned Tyrone)

These are effectively unordered but if I had to pick a top two, I think Gladstone and Scott would be my choices. Scott had me in tears in the cinema, just bawling away like a baby.

Best Original Screenplay

• They Cloned Tyrone (Tony Rettenmaier & Juel Taylor)
• Bottoms (Emma Seligman & Rachel Sennott)
• The Holdovers (David Hemingson)
• How Do You Live? (Hayao Miyazaki)
• El Conde (Pablo Larraín & Guillermo Calderón)

El Conde is a super weird movie that I didn’t fully enjoy because I did not like how it handled some of its women characters, especially near the end, but I’m also just glad that this movie exists because “what if Pinochet was a vampire and his kids want him to die so they can inherit all that money he plundered” is a great premise. Do I recommend it? … I’m not sure I do. But as original screenplays go, is there a lot of merit to it? Yes.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)
• American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)
• Priscilla (Sofia Coppola)

While very difficult to choose, I think the choices Andrew Haigh made in adapting the novel The Strangers brought out some extraordinary emotional depth in All of Us Strangers. More notes on this at the end.

Best Supporting Performances

• Robert Downey, Jr. (Oppy)
• America Ferrera (Barbie)
• Robert de Niro (Flower Moon)
• Paula Luchsinger (El Conde)

I think these are three obvious choices and one head-scratcher, but I felt like, for the heck of it, throwing in a performance (Luchsinger in El Conde) that just kinda stood out to me in a movie that might otherwise get overlooked.

Best Sound

• The Zone of Interest (Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn)

It really should go without saying that the power of The Zone of Interest is in its sound. I strongly advise watching this with the best sound quality you can manage, what makes it so effective is while the Höss family are living seemingly normal lives, the sounds of the concentration camp are audible as background noise. We hear it, and we know they hear it, but to them it’s just background noise. They don’t care. It’s deeply upsetting but I maintain it’s a necessary watch. Sound designer Johnnie Burn was interviewed by PBS NewsHour about his work on this film.

Best Original Score

• How Do You Live? (Joe Hisaishi)
• Godzilla Minus One (Naoki Satō)

I’ve already said how Godzilla‘s score haunts me, but as usual Hisaishi knocks his composition so far out of the park I have to go with it for best score.

Best Cinematography

• Łukasz Żal (Zone)
• Hoyte van Hoytema (Oppy)
• Franz Lustig (Perfect Days)
• Eigil Bryld (The Holdovers)
• Edward Lachman (El Conde)

There were so many movies this year with just incredible cinematography, I feel like I’m not doing any justice to the category with my haphazard selections. Nevertheless, the very stark imagery of The Zone of Interest is a big part of what makes the film so impactful, I think it would be my top choice.

Best Production Design

• Barbie, I mean… duh, right? It’s incredible. (Production Design: Sarah Greenwood; Set Decoration: Katie Spencer)

Best Costuming

• Killers of the Flower Moon (Jacqueline West)
• Priscilla (Stacey Battat)

I would pick make-up and hairstyling too but I am just not sure. I’m so bad at this. And I swear the Oscars are too, looking at their nominees and it doesn’t make sense to me.

OK, a mid-Oscars edit: The choice by the Oscars to show the nominees alongside time-lapse footage of actors in the chair getting their make-up and hair done was so smart. I really have a better sense now of what to look for. I’m still a little sus, given that (to me) movies like Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 also have super impressive makeup and hair-styling, but I definitely get why Society of the Snow got a nomination considering what had to be done to make the characters look like they were suffering those conditions on the mountain.

Best Film Editing

• Killers of the Flower Moon (Thelma Schoonmaker)
• Perfect Days (Toni Froschhammer)

I also struggle to identify good editing. I know something of the principles of editing, I know about selecting the right shots and the right takes, and timing the cuts, and arranging the order of the cuts— I am aware these things are important. I know that editors are very often extremely influential in the final structure of a film. But it’s also a technical skill and I’m not that technical. Still, I felt like highlighting some editors in films that I felt had great shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene editing (to the extent that I even understand those terms, lol).

Mid-Oscars edit: In hindsight, Jennifer Lame’s editing of Oppenheimer is a big reason I thought it deserved a nod in my top 10 despite the many problems I had with it. So yeah, her win is very much deserved (in my, again, super ignorant unsolicited opinion).

Best Special and Visual Effects

• Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi, and Tatsuji Nojima)
• Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 (Stephane Ceretti, Alexis Wajsbrot, Guy Williams, and Theo Bialek)

G-1 has some very wonky CGI in a few shots during the attack on Tokyo, but the scenes in water blend visual and special effects so well it’s incredible. Sadly, a lot of the success here on a low budget is due to even worse conditions for the effects workers in Japan than in the US, I can’t let that go unstated. Whenever someone says “look what this movie accomplished for so much less”, remember that.

Most Fun I Had in the Cinema

• The Marvels
• American Fiction
• Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (or as I call it: Aquaman, Too)

On the whole The Marvels is pretty mid within the MCU but it’s just so much delightful fun I had an absolute blast. American Fiction is also incredibly hilarious, managing to have a high density of laugh-out-loud jokes while discussing complex social issues and providing space for the heavy dramatic scenes to breathe. And I’m never objective when it comes to Aquaman because those movies make extensive use of his ability to command fish and that’s just too cheesily awesome for me not to love.

Best Animation

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
• How Do You Heron

So I’m saying “best animation” rather than “animated film” because the Oscars category as is has the unfortunate side-effect of conflating the quality of animation with the quality of a film that happens to be animated. I would like them to be separate categories, because I think How Do you Live? is the better film, but that Spider-Verse is more impressive in terms of animation, or at the very least advancing animation in film.

And finally, I have to address that I just didn’t get to a lot of critically lauded films, there’s a lot of movies that might be extraordinary that I regret I didn’t see yet, such as

• Anatomy of a Fall
• Fancy Dance
• The Settlers
• Nyad
• You Hurt My Feelings
• Poor Things
• May December
• War Pony
• Bad Press
• The Iron Claw

Some more, quasi-rambling notes on my choices:

A Positive Review of Godzilla Minus One That Also Discusses The Film’s Misogyny

For days after, I was been unable to get the haunting score for Godzilla Minus One out of my head. Over a month later, it still creeps into my mind. Rarely popping in suddenly, but a quiet buildup before I realise I’m replaying it.

The word “haunting” is used quite liberally, it can evoke any manner of feelings in different readers. Here, I think it’s the most apt word to describe how the music is stuck in my mind. It’s not an uplifting theme I’m replaying out of joy. It’s not a sad piece I replay for catharsis. To be honest, I don’t know enough about music theory to even say if I like its themes or melodies or other music terms.

What I can say is it’s following me. It so perfectly evoked a sense of horror, isolation, desperation, death, calamity, and powerlessness. During the film I noticed the score and how good it was, but I really didn’t think I’d keep thinking about it. But it follows me. It really truly haunts me.

Godzilla Minus One is a remarkable, amazing movie with music, performances, scenes, and themes that will haunt audiences. Not simply as horror, either. There’s a struggle for life and community in the film that is positive and hopeful, but every bit as haunting as the horror because it is a struggle. Every scrap of connection, of purpose, of happiness, of life that the characters get is born out of pain and endurance.

This post is, overall, a positive review of Godzilla Minus One. It is one of the darkest entries in the franchise, yet has one of the most optimistic endings (if you interpret it that way, there is room for debate). It is a meditation on war: how regular people are used and their lives discarded, and the ruins they’re left to rebuild within.

The main character, who appears in very nearly every scene, is Kōichi. Near the end of the War, in mid-1945, he is a kamikaze pilot. But he feigns a malfunction with his plane in order to fly off to a mechanics’ base on Odo Island and avoid the fighting. If you know Godzilla movies, Odo Island is probably a tip-off.

This is the character of whose point-of-view almost every second of the film is told. Someone who wasn’t able to go through with acts of war, especially suicide attacks, and yet who is blamed for Japan’s losses. One woman in the rubble of Tokyo, who has lost her family and informs Kōichi of his own parents’ death, yells at him that “cowards” like him are why they lost.

Godzilla Minus One is about ordinary people, in the aftermath of a devastating war they were led into by a fascist government, learning how to want to live. All of the characters struggle with going on with life, but Kōichi especially feels the guilt imposed on him that he didn’t kill himself in an attack that wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.

The movie spends time showing a slow rebuilding of lives from late 1945 to 1947. Many neighbourhoods of Tokyo remain rubble, even as small new houses are build up. Characters make friends, move in together, raise children, but still remain distant. Kōichi has PTSD and night terrors.

By the time Godzilla, irradiated by nuclear weapons testing, starts devastating Japan and threatening what very little these people had managed to piece back together, it’s easy to feel like the struggle isn’t worth it, that it’s time to go down. Go down fighting, but still go down.

But that is not what this film is about. These characters, in all their pain, have to pull together, and the final act of the film is a beautiful call to live, in the face of catastrophic horror. They are forced to ask themselves whether giving their lives is really dying for what they love. If they’re not willing to at least try to live, is a death a noble sacrifice or is it a waste? The movie makes them ask what they’re willing to live for.

I might sound like I’m over-hyping the radioactive lizard movie, and I am. There’s a few effects shots that don’t quite work that detract from some of the tension in a few scenes. Not all of the scene transitions work, with abrupt cuts that feel misplaced. Oh, and there’s the misogyny.

That’s right, it’s time for another round of Trevor Rains On Everyone’s Parade By Criticising A Thing That’s Universally Praised.

Noriko and Sumiko are the only two adult women characters. Both are introduced with the potential to be fascinating as they develop. Sumiko is the woman who slaps Kōichi and says he was a coward for not dying in a suicide attack. Her arc follows the same themes, painfully coming to terms with the cruelty of the war and slowly accepting Kōichi. But so much of that development is hidden behind her maternal role.

Noriko appears as a woman who has lost her home and her family and has rescued an orphaned baby. Kōichi allows her to stay with him, and she goes through the movie as little more than a mother figure for the child and a love interest for Kōichi. And since neither of them know how to raise a baby, Sumiko is largely reduced to a babysitter. While this does help advance Sumiko’s arc, it nevertheless means that the two, and only two, adult women are predominantly there to be mothers, and we get very little more of Sumiko’s development.

Let’s be honest: However beautiful, effective, and quite often brilliant the rest of the film is, it doesn’t at any point think that women could be more relevant characters. I truly want to recommend the movie for its reflections on war (though I have a caveat about that I’ll get to in a moment), but we have to admit when movies do some things right and other things wrong.

I don’t want to get into spoilers (yet, that will come a little further down, and there will be advanced warning) but the treatment of women goes beyond them existing just as mother figures. What happens to Noriko (because she has little agency, the movie largely happens to her after her first scene) is Kōichi’s primary motivation in the final act. She exists to propel the male characters’ journeys.

It is so frustrating just how often I have to say “this movie is brilliant, oh but the writers didn’t think women mattered just fyi.” And, to be honest, I think we shouldn’t say movies are brilliant if they treat women like this anyway. We can say aspects of those movies are brilliant, but it’s too easy, especially for men like myself, to overlook how writers and directors ignore or deny agency to women characters.

So while I still say this is a positive review, I think anyone who is really sick of women characters existing as mother/wife prizes for men to come home to, and upon whom physical pain is inflicted to make the men sad, should know that up front going in. Or, hey, don’t see it. There are lots of brilliant anti-war movies out there, if you read this and think “oh that sounds pretty shit, count me out,” you’re not missing some irreplaceable. No movie, ever, is irreplaceable.

There is a lot to love about what the movie gets right. I was weeping at some scenes in that third act. But damn, especially after Shin Godzilla gave us multiple developed, complex, and plot-integral women, why did Minus One have to go backwards?

You might say that however many points I give this film for the positives, I have to give it a minus one for it’s handling of women.

Hahaha.

I’m a delight.

With that, it’s time to dig into spoilers.

I’ll start by explaining more explicitly what I did not like about Noriko and Sumiko’s arcs. If you don’t want spoilers, but you do want some clarity about what I mean by “treating women badly”, I’ll cover that, and then get into spoilers about what I think is good.

That way if you decide you still want to see the movie, you’ll have some nice surprises while being fully prepared for the bad.

OK. Ready for spoilers?

Let’s go.