Parenting is an epic; just look at 2023’s best picture nominees

Anxious about having children? The 2023 Academy Awards tonight just might be the thing to ease your mind. The best picture nominees show that parenthood is an unbeatable source of joy and meaning, even an epic journey right up there with space operas.

Hollywood might be financially addicted to blockbusters. But taken together, this year’s Oscar-nominated movies make the case that children are the world’s greatest source of adventure and plot twists — even for a Navy ace like Pete Mitchell (Tom Cruise) in “Top Gun: Maverick.”

That uncertainty can be frightening, and humbling. No prenatal test can reveal a baby’s future temperament, aptitude or sexual orientation. Neither the warmest nor the strictest parent can shape their child’s path with certainty. And no book can prepare parents to raise the person their child turns out to be.

Nor can any one movie, of course. But some of the best films of 2022 succeed by channeling the awe of seeing who a child becomes and the satisfaction of rising to meet the challenge of parenting them.

Take best picture front-runner “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It dramatizes this unpredictable journey in absurd fashion. Evelyn, a daydreaming laundromat owner played by best actress nominee Michelle Yeoh, is disconcerted to discover that a version of her daughter from an alternate reality has become a nihilistic supervillain armed with a world-annihilating everything bagel. To save the multiverse, Evelyn has to become a braver, more attentive mother.

Kids bring surprise in wonderful ways, too. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the space Marine turned blue alien in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” is stunned and humbled when his teenage daughter is revealed to be a powerful mystic. In “The Fabelmans,” Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams) must figure out how to nurture a child possessed of artistic genius.

The best picture nominees also illuminate parenting as a source of meaning. It’s an arena in which ordinary people do heroic work; every small battle to help a child become a good person assumes significance.

Consider the abused, illiterate Mennonite women debating whether to leave their isolated community in Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking.” They’re no superheroes. But parenthood makes them incredibly courageous. One walks for days to get antibiotics for her daughter, who has been raped. When the women determine they can’t stay, they make the audacious decision to take their sons, rather than abandoning them to a warped culture. Even secular parents will recognize the intensity of devotion that these mothers understand as a holy obligation.

Indeed, parenting is in some ways the hero’s journey: No one is unchanged by becoming a mother or father.

For Evelyn in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the shock of her daughter’s depressive crisis puts an end to her longing for another life. The world Evelyn actually lives in, where she must do her superhuman work, is the reality in which she is the mother to her particular, miraculous daughter. Her victory comes when she rises to the task. It is a redirection of ambition, not an abandonment of it.

In “Top Gun: Maverick,” Pete is spurred to confront his self-destructive tendencies when he becomes a surrogate father to a group of trainee pilots. In “The Fabelmans,” Burt absorbs his wife’s volatile emotions and his children’s anger. His tenderness gives them all, himself included, a sense of ballast.

But parents can be villains — or antiheroes — too.

Bad parents, in the best picture nominees’ telling, are those who abuse their role to become their worst selves. In “Tár,” imperious conductor Lydia handles a schoolyard bully in the same ruthless way she handles her professional life: She threatens to destroy a little girl who is hassling her daughter. “The Banshees of Inisherin” illustrates the social dysfunction of its small Irish community with a local police official who beats and molests his son.

It’s no coincidence that so many of these best picture nominees reach their emotional climax when their central caregivers let go of their expectations and embrace who their charges have become: A lesbian. A filmmaker. An ace Navy pilot. Even a 7-foot-7 teal warrior bonded with an outcast whale.

That’s the essence of parenting: an intimate epic where wild hope triumphs over fear, even though we don’t know how the story ends.

Alyssa Rosenberg writes about mass culture, parenting and gender for The Washington Post’s Opinions section. Before coming to The Post in 2014, Rosenberg was the culture editor at ThinkProgress, the television columnist at Women and Hollywood, a columnist for the XX Factor at Slate and a correspondent for The Atlantic.