2024 Oscar Nominees

Nominees For Best Picture for the 2025 Oscars

 

We'll forego the usual "Don't Make a Scene" feature for this Sunday, as it's Oscar-night.

 

When the Oscar nominations were announced on January 23rd, I was taken aback by how few of them I had seen. Some of that was due to the large number of "indie" films being noticed and I had seen few of them, so I was determined to see as many of them, even if they were being released "late" in the schedule as I could before the date of the Awards.

 

Which is tonight.

 

Most of them I saw them where you should see them—in a theater—but four of them I watched streaming. Amazingly, they're all available on some service or another and the rental prices on them dropped very precipitously very quickly. I'm old enough to remember a time when theaters kept nominated movies in their theaters after the nominations were announced and usually dropped "the losers" after the Awards show to capitalize on the "Best Picture's" newly won bona fides. Now, films, especially the "indie" ones, barely have a week to get attention before they're on VOD or streaming. It's like theaters are still operating in "pandemic" mode.

 

And I was a little nonplussed by the choices: they didn't look like they'd be enjoyable to watch at all. But, there's a reason these things get nominated (besides aggressive campaigning) and the quality shows through. 

It's an eclectic bunch: a couple blockbusters, one foreign film (although three of the films have French directors), two are musicals (and one has a musical subject), five are based on books (one even winning the Pulitzer) and they range from fantasy to sci-fi to biography to body-horror. Your favorite film of the year might not have been nominated for "Best Picture." Mine wasn't, but it's up for consideration in another category.

 

And I noticed a theme running through them. I had a talk the other day with someone who gave me the opinion that behaviors of merely enacting the roles society imposes on them. With the possible exception of Conclave (which also has elements of it), all the Best Picture nominees seem to cater to that theme.

 

Grab your popcorn. It's going to be a long night. 

Here are my reviews of the Best Picture nominees.

 

 

Anora

 

The Brutalist

 

A Complete Unknown

 

Conclave

 

Dune: Part 2

 

Emilia Perez

 

I'm Still Here

 

Nickel Boys

 

The Substance

 

Wicked

 

 

The Substance

Substance Abuse: An Exercise in Horror

or

"Oh, That This Too Too Solid Flesh Would Melt, Thaw and Resolve Itself Into a Dew! Or That the Everlasting Had Not Fix'd His Canon Against Self-Slaughter. Oh God!"
 

Submitted for your approval one Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a flickering fitness guru for the "beauty-is-only-skin-deep" believing house-bound. A body-suited drill sergeant, who kills with kindness and only for your own good. Every stretch, every kick, every high-step is designed to make you as good as you can be because, after all, it works for her and she's shy a half-century. 

But Time waits for no man...or woman, for that matter, and Elizabeth Sparkle is about to learn something that will shock her down to her leg-warmers and trainers. It's a little lesson in Inevitability, in Life and the Television Industry, and it will take her the way Ponce deLeon traveled for the fabled Fountain of Youth. It's a little known path between Desperation Street and the Avenue of Self-Deception, which are all just detours that spill out...into The Twilight Zone.

Apologies to Rod Serling

The DNA of The Substance is very much that of a typical episode of TV's classic "Twilight Zone" in that it takes a mercurial person comfortable with their situation and up-ends it to which they have to act in an atypical way, even fantastic way, which then, ironically, comes back and bites them in the ass.

Elizabeth Sparkle is the host of a television work-out program that she has been doing for years and years, long after her career as an Academy Award-winning actress. On her 50th birthday, she is given a card, a present, red roses...and the pink slip. She has been sacked. Her network (run by her cartoonish producer, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid) is (of course!) appreciative of her and her "long run" but, now, is another day and they're looking for a new host. A younger host. A sexier host. And, at 50, Elizabeth is not considered either of those things. She has lost some of her sparkle.

Most celebrities would consider product endorsements, a line of cosmetics or scents, maybe a tell-all book (how about a pod-cast?), but not Elizabeth. She stews. Then, a car accident—from which she emerges miraculously unhurt—lands her in the hospital, but bereft and in tears. A young orderly slips the sobbing Elizabeth a flash-drive with a note that says "It changed my life." The flash-drive has a presentation for "The Substance" and it's pitch is intriguing:

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can't escape from yourself.

That last bit probably serves as the warning of side-effects.

Elizabeth calls the number on the flash-drive and orders. She receives an address and a key-card and rushes to a run-down, seemingly abandoned site that discourages investigation. Inside, she comes to a pristine locker-room (it's amazing how the Substance organization runs like Amazon—except they answer the phone faster) and eagerly rushes back home to her posh condo to sample her wares.

The Substance kit has everything she'll need but it's an odd mix of syringes and tubing (lots of tubing), bizarre containers of "food" and sutures and bandages and vials, lots of vials. It's a bit intimidating, but Elizabeth takes the stuff to her "panic room" of a bathroom and injects herself with the "Activator," tripping out and falling like a dead lump to the floor.

Like most drugs, The Substance should come with warnings. Like, watch it somewhere in a chair that has something to grip onto. Because "The Activator" sequence is a horrific exercise where Elizabeth's naked body starts to roil and heave and mutate until the skin of her back starts to split like a busted seam and from it's zippered wound emerges..."Sue" (Margaret Qualley)—as she will call herself—who is literally "Born Sexy Yesterday." Sue stumbles about the bathroom, taking it all in, but once she reaches a mirror and sees herself, she calms down, stretches, and gets down to business. She has work to do.

Like clean up the mess. She sutures up Elizabeth's back (filmed in excruciating detail), hooks her up to the "food matrix" package—Elizabeth's going to be unconscious for a week—and experiences some head-spins and nose-bleeding, so she instinctively goes to the "Stabilizer" package, pulls out the hypodermics and inserts a needle into Elizabeth's spinal column and withdraws some liquid from the "matrix". Once she injects herself with it, she is good to go.

That is, go to the audition for Sparkle's old job, which she wins handily. Producer Harvey agrees that she can be allowed to work every other week (she explains that she has to take care of her elderly mother, which is true in a way), and everyone starts prepping for the new exercise show that will be flashier, sexy, and more provocative with other things on its mind than just body management. Elizabeth's happy. Sue's happy. Even Harvey is happy. What could go "worng"?

Everything, if you believe the altered cliché of "Nothing exceeds like success." Although Elizabeth and Sue "are one" they are experiencing different realities and so become of two minds about the situation, which results in bent rules, missed deadlines, and adverse effects on their twin. Things turn nasty very quickly, and given "The Activator Sequence" (which will seem tame in awhile) that nastiness is going to become bloody, gooey, and, at times, painful to watch.

Yet, you giggle throughout The Substance, not because it's inherently funny—maybe ironic—but because of the sheer verve of the thing...and the nerve. The twisted nerve. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is not playing subtle here, but her playbook is spot-on with some arresting images and a boldness that you can't help but admire. It will ultimately fall apart (heh) as the third act will descend into a frothing, spewing gore-fest that is so over-the-top, you'll feel the need to shower afterwards. But, before it goes down the drain, it revels in its satire and makes its point about society's age-adverseness and obsession with form over substance. And the lesson that even fitness gurus should know something about karma.

Fargeat settles the look of the film directly and comfortingly in the sci-fi realm with a steely one-person perspective with wide-angle lenses, emulating Kubrick, but more directly from John Frankenheimer's similarly-themed Seconds. For some reason, that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. And, thematically, she has aspects and far-away echoes from dissimilar films as All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The reverberations of past films are all over this, but Fargeat keeps it fresh and innovative.

And the performances are quite good—Quaid's over-the-top, but I think that was deliberate, with Qualley providing just enough of that Manson-girl predatoriness that she seems to inhabit. And Demi Moore does some of the bravest image-flagellation since Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Kudos. Brava.

We should all be so brave. But, like any pharmaceutical ad, we should probably end with some warnings. The Substance is not for the squeamish. The Sunstance is not for those who are offended by extensive nudity, whether attractive or not. Or react to needles, or open wounds, or festering sores, or a vast amount of red-colored Karo syrup being sprayed like a fire-hose, use caution. Or if you don't like being taught "lessons" in movies that run the danger of changing your encrusted attitude (but don't worry, there's a lot of scary stuff at the end).

 

Always read the label and make sure you read the possible side-effects. Do not take The Substance if you're allergic to The Substance. Nor, should you take it if you don't know yourself very well. And, of course, you should always take it...with a grain of salt.

Nickel Boys

Walk a Mile in My Shoes

or

"Not My Elwood. Not My Elwood."

Impressionistic and impressive, Nickel Boys tells its story of Elwood Curtis, from Tallahassee, Florida ("Frenchtown" he'll add), who hitchhiking to attend a technical college in New York, is picked up by a car-thief and arrested as an accessory and sent to "Nickel Academy" a segregated reform school with a checkered history.

 

Raised by his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

), Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse) had received exemplary marks at school, got a scholarship to that college, and had been active in civil rights actions, but being sent to "juvie" merely by association has derailed his life and his prospects, and somewhat his spirit. 

But not his conscience. Sticking up for a weaker kid being picked on, he is punched in the face by the bullies, knocked out, and sent to the hospital. 

And he has one friend. A good friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson), who is as cynical as Elwood is principled, and the two kids bond, help each other out and talk out their problems, confiding in each other. One seems to complete the other.

Our first glimpse of Elwood, reflected in his grandmother's iron.

Which is interesting, considering how the movie's filmed. It's all shot from a first-person singular point-of-view, initially Elwood's, but then once the two boys meet, the movie will switch off from one to the other.*  Sounds like it could be confusing, but director RaMell Ross manages to clue you in even if it isn't obvious which of the kids' eyes you're seeing the world through.

Elwood watches Dr. King in a store-front window.

Now, I haven't read Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel (entitled "THE Nickel Boys") from which the film is based, but I'm getting the impression its not from a first person narrative.So, this re-imagining of the film is a pretty radical shift, boiling the novel down to just dialog and leaving the descriptive to be handled by the director and cinematographer (which you'd think would be natural—it's a movie, made of visual storytelling *duh*), but Ross does it with such discipline, one is never confused and only disoriented when the subject is disoriented.

Turner, from Elwood's perspective.

And Ross presents these unique perspectives in an almost-stream-of-consciousness way. He presents impressions of scenes. Glimpses of details that the characters' perspectives latch onto, whether it be their own reflection or in how you can tell someone's nervous by how their knees shake. In that way, it reminded of no other movie so much as The Tree of Life, but with a much-more controlled narrative structure and ...an actual story, rather than fleeting memories played at seeming random (as Tree does).

Elwood, from Turner's perspective.

And POV perspectives rarely work in movies, except for brief sequences where the sight of the actor on screen talking right at the audience is arresting. Here, the entire movie puts us in Elwood's—or Turner's—skin and we see what they see. We see their world and what attracts their attention. This is the sort of cinema I love...where the visuals tell the story more than the circumspect dialogue does. And Ross respects the audience enough to not resort to narrative hand-holding to explain what's on the screen (so many movies over-explain). It's all right there to see, if you're paying attention. It's a rich narrative dance that Ross creates, and it's one of the best films of the year.

* Director Ross does this in an interesting way. He first shoots Elwood meeting Turner sitting across a cafeteria table from him. THEN, Ross repeats the sequence all from Turner's point of view. There is really no differentiation between how the two perspectives look, but if you see Elwood, you know you're seeing things from Turner's point of view and vice versa. And if you're not looking at one or the other, you're given enough clues to figure out which character we're seeing the world through.

I'm Still Here (2024)

All I Have is a Photograph (And I Realize...)
or

"Hey, Hey, Dee Dee, Take Me Back to Piaui"

 

Rubens Paiva was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by armed men on January 20, 1971 for questioning about seditionists to the military dictatorship in power at the time and about a recent spate of kidnap cases involving foreign ambassadors to Brazil, including the representatives from the U.S., West Germany and Switzerland.

 

He never came home.

 

In fact, despite his car being found at a prison facility run by the military, there was no sign that he had ever been taken there, and officials denied he was in custody. It was like he never existed. Except that he left behind a wife and five children, one of whom, Marcelo, grew up to write about the incident in his 2015 book "Ainda Estou Aqui". 

That translates to I'm Still Here, and Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles—he made On the Road—has made a film of it, to put a face on one of the people "disappeared" due to governmental malfeasance throughout the world. The Paiva story is just one of thousands; there were 434 such "disappearances" during Brazil's military dictatorship alone.

Salles doesn't sensationalize things. He starts with family activities, the kids interacting on the beach not far from their back door, playing volleyball, finding a stray puppy, while mother Eunice—her full name is Maria Lucrécia Eunice Facciolla Paiva—(Fernanda Torres) floats in the ocean, peaceful and calm, when a military helicopter passes not far overhead interrupting the tranquility. Salles cuts between his footage and recreated 16mm "home movies" that the kids make to document their lives, serving as the movie's "B"-roll. They'll become important later. 

It's every day life. Parties, new dog, music, dancing. But, there's an under-current of politics. The party is for daughter Vera who's going off to London for school, partly because she has friends with leftist leanings who are being tracked by the government. Dad Ruben has returned from his own self-imposed exile after some months as a liberal councilman put him on the military's radar. But the ambassadorial kidnappings have intensified the military's presence in the streets and the father is keeping close contact with his friends in the Brazilian Labor Party. It's only a matter of time before that presence arrives at their door-step.

When it does, it comes quietly but assertively. Men in plain clothes and suspicious looks show up one day, armed, while the family is going on about their normal lives. But, the normalcy ends immediately. Ruben drives off in his car with a couple of the guys to be taken in for questioning. The family, particularly Eunice, take a "wait and see" attitude. But, then Eunice and her next eldest daughter Eliana are driven to one of the military prisons for their own questioning. Eunice will stay there for twelve days; Eliana just one. No mention is made of the whereabouts of her husband, and eventually all information about him dries up, and the military denies they have them. Then why is his car still in their lot?

I'm Still Here tracks the family's progress and the stoic Eunice's change from victim to activist and her quest for answers about what happened to her husband. It will take decades of effort as she also raises her children, but always keeping an eye on that empty chair at the dinner table. With her stores of pictures and films she has the evidence that her husband existed, while the government continues to deny his existence or their part in his disappearance. She will fight until she gets the one piece of paper that will expose the whole thing—his death certificate.

It's an amazing movie, much more so for the fact that it seems so ordinary, so focused as it is with the mere act of surviving a trauma, and building a family out of tragedy. Despite the hopelessness of the circumstances, the movie comes out filled with hope.