And the winner isn’t … where the Academy Awards nominations got it wrong
Peter Bradshaw, Catherine Bray, Ellen E Jones, Jessica Kiang, Danny Leigh, Steve Rose and Caspar Salmon
How on earth did The Green Knight get passed over for any Oscar nominations? This visionary drama, directed by David Lowery, stars Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander and is incidentally coproduced by the achingly trendy company A24 – currently the toast of indie Hollywood. It is a freaky folk horror, or prog-rock hallucination, based on the 14th-century chivalric poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Dev Patel is Gawain, challenged by the mysterious Green Knight to a sinister game. Gawain is allowed to take a free shot at the knight’s head with his sword, on the understanding that in a year’s time the knight can do the same to him. Gawain chops the knight’s head off, and this unearthly figure simply picks up the head – which reminds Gawain to seek him out next year for the rematch – and strides off. The resulting quest is as disturbing and beautiful as anything I have seen in the cinema in the last 12 months. Why couldn’t the Academy see it?
Peter Bradshaw Zola
The Academy usually goes gaga for an interracial buddy film involving a lot of driving around – see best picture winners Driving Miss Daisy (1990) and Green Book (2019). Yet, somehow, Janicza Bravo’s outrageously entertaining road movie about a part-time pole dancer (Taylour Paige) and her crassly charismatic new pal (Riley Keough) has been overlooked. The main difference between those award-winners and Zola is that Zola is actually good. It doesn’t traffic in trite racial reconciliation fantasies and the performances are uniformly excellent – Colman Domingo! Cousin Greg from Succession! Best of all, Bravo’s agile direction successfully translates a phonescreen-scale Twitter drama into a bounteous bigscreen odyssey. This is an urgent task for contemporary cinema that’s barely been attempted by Hollywood’s more feted “auteurs”. Zola deserves noms in everything from best bad accent to best twerk. But it has none. Proof, yet again, that the Academy has no taste. Ellen E Jones
Red Rocket
If you had to pick a film that really summed up these crazy times, you would struggle with this year’s nominees, most of which are set in the past or 20,000 years in the future. By that measure alone, Red Rocket deserves a shout. It’s bang on the money about modern-day America without being obvious, grandstanding, preachy, weepy, joyless or dumb – which probably explains why it got no Oscar love. Its protagonist is the epitome of masculinity in crisis: a washed-up porn star whose economic and sexual impotence are inextricably linked. Simon Rex plays him with a manic (Oscar-worthy) brilliance, and as with director Sean Baker’s previous films (Tangerine, The Florida
Project), Red Rocket goes places Hollywood doesn’t: this time an endof-the-road Texas refinery town. You could call it realism – Baker uses found locations and non-actors – but the screen bursts with garish colour, and the story is as hilarious as it is grim.
Steve Rose 7 Prisoners
It came as no surprise that the electric Brazilian social thriller 7 Prisoners went missing from the Oscars. It’s not that the film isn’t a knockout (it is) or didn’t impress the festivals (it did). But somehow, Alexandre Moratto’s loaded account of modern slavery and moral