Oscar Worthy 

So as not to be accused of bad faith arguments, a disclosure: I did not watch the 2024 Academy Awards presentation ceremony. In fact, I don't think I have watched the thing in over a decade. This year, I second-screened — I know modern things! — while I prepared meals and watched Cocktail (1988) on Criterion Channel's pointedly curated collection of Razzie Award winners.

For those without access to Wikipedia, the Golden Raspberry Awards is an anti-Oscars ceremony dating back to 1981, wherein the "worst" cinematic achievements of a year are honored. The whole affair is more than a little tongue in cheek and history has corrected a number of its selections, down the decades. In fact, a number of Razzie winners have emerged as more significant, if not better, examples of the cinematic arts than their anointed counterparts.

As much as a gulf has grown between myself and the presentation of Hollywood's self-congratulation, I remain a sucker for the machinations of the industry, following along now more closely and maybe with a greater understanding than in my genuine fan-boy days. As much as the institution of The Movies, particularly in America, is an ever-more diffuse, corporatized shadow of what we — with equal parts hindsight and false nostalgia — believe we once were, it is still an elemental cultural institution. Populist and elitist, high art and commercial garbage, inclusion and exclusion, luck and talent and tenacity all encompassed in a single silly endeavor: It's the American experiment distilled.

And if we're honest, most of us still, perhaps in some secret corner of our psyche, see movie stars as our own perverted, slightly less insidious form of royalty. Love them or hate them or both, they (and their milieu) represent a rarefied, admittedly dumb version of the American Dream. While we know, consciously and academically, that the dream died probably a century ago, it's in our programming to be fascinated, even if appalled by it.

So on to what the purportedly much enlarged and diversified voting body of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got right and wrong this past weekend.

I only watched two of the nominated animated feature films. As much as I believe Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse to be a vital and enduring contribution to the form, I can't see betting against The Boy and the Heron unless Hayao Miyazaki made more than one movie last year. There is a balance to be struck between celebrating new talent and venerating old masters, of course, but Miyazaki may not make another movie. And, importantly, he has done more for animation than any other single person in the medium's history, barring Walt Disney, and he's done it without the questionable politics.

As an example of the same balance between stalwarts and fresh voices, I would have loved to see Jodie Foster win for Nyad, of course. She's more cinematic monument than icon, and her performance brought together everything we love and have loved in her work: humor, anger, world-weariness and sustained innocence. But Da'Vine Joy Randolph did something alchemical in The Holdovers (a movie I've mostly unwittingly overlooked here), rendering her character's indescribable loss and trauma as a challenge to strength, rather than as devastation. Mary Lamb is aged beyond her years but possessed of the resiliency of youth (and the continuously oppressed and disappointed).

Poor Things just about swept the craft categories (hair and makeup, costume design, production design) and rightly so. No one picture in recent memory has so successfully realized an imagined world not in service of noisy claptrap. The design and execution of the thing harkens back to Cocteau and the Technicolor extravaganzas of the 1950s, but with singular, consummately modern vision.

The Zone of Interest was recognized for sound, which is indeed a formidable element of an incredible movie, and for international feature. It almost seems like damning with faint praise but I suppose some recognition is better than none.

Cord Jefferson and Wes Anderson both won, albeit in sort of also-ran categories (best adapted screenplay for American Fiction and best live action short for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar).

And on to the other side of the ledger:

I celebrate Emma Stone's performance in Poor Things (and her entire career), but Lily Gladstone did something quietly unparalleled in Killers of the Flower Moon. Hopefully the general reception of her work will create space in the industry for Indigenous actors but, as my wife so succinctly put it, Stone is "a skinny white lady." So.

In a similar vein, Barbie was all but shut out, winning only for one of its less-enjoyable songs. I think Gerwig, Robbie, Ferrera, et al will enjoy ongoing career security, but the fact that a work of bright pink feminist propaganda that made $1 billion isn't considered "important" doesn't bode well for us.

Finally, the 800-pound gorilla: I don't have a problem with Oppenheimer, per se. As I've said, Christopher Nolan has been a major presence in my critical maturation. And the team he assembles, each time out, is among the best. But set against Killers of the Flower Moon or The Zone of Interest, movies that force us to confront the unresolvable in ambiguous, torturous, toweringly artful ways, Oppenheimer plays like an apologia, an assuaging of guilt that seems almost simplistic.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

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ARTHUR THE KING. TK. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

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