One film’s a shoo-in, but there’s no such thing as ‘best’ picture
There’s an obvious winner for this year’s top prize in the Oscars, but Graeme Tuckett is crossing his fingers for an upset on Monday.
Ireckon the 96th Academy Awards is going to be the most predictable and safe event in years. But I wish it wasn’t going to be that way. Some years, the Oscars throws up a massive surprise, although I don’t think there’s any chance this is one of them. When Best Picture is announced at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony on late Monday afternoon (our time), the statue will go to Oppenheimer and the team who made that film. You can bet on it.
If Best Picture went to any other film, it would be an upset like we haven’t seen since 1999, when Shakespeare In Love somehow pipped Saving Private Ryan.
And that’ll be fine. Oppenheimer is a mighty achievement that ticks every box and then some. It is an epic film that takes a look under the hood of some fairly recent and morally complex American history, arriving at a time when America – like the rest of the Western World – is perplexed about its place and continued relevance as the 21st century unfurls.
The production values the crew brought to Oppenheimer are as impressive and sumptuous as a hundred million dollars will ever buy you. And the craft and performances at the heart of the film are uniformly terrific.
Just as the film is an unbackable favourite to win Best Picture, I reckon nothing and no-one is going to stop Cillian Murphy from winning Best Actor, or Christopher Nolan from taking home a Best Director statue. Even though Nolan has – unbelievably – only been nominated for Best Director once before, it’ll still be an overdue recognition.
And yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a story in Hollywood that after that night in 1999, when Shakespeare beat Private Ryan, a letter was sent to the members of The Academy, reminding them that the Best Picture award shouldn’t just go to the film people liked the most – and that the Oscars were supposed to be an assessment of quality, not just popularity.
That’s all well and good. And it has led to the Academy Awards usually going the way the bookies are picking in the years since, unless there’s no clear and overwhelming favourite, and a gorgeous wee film like Moonlight or Parasite can come through and make my day.
And, yet, I really wish to hell that 2024 does go down as the year that throws up the biggest upset of all-time.
Not because Oppenheimer isn’t a terrific and worthy film. Of course it is.
It’s just that it seems to me that if you make a decent film about a famously tortured and complex man, who literally carried the fate of the civilised world on his sinewy shoulders and then lived with the consequences for the rest of his life, then of course people like me will call that film “important’’ and “a masterpiece’’ and even “one of the key films of the century’’. Because it is.
But how much more of an incredible achievement is it to make, say, a movie about a 20cm high plastic doll, sold in a cardboard box with a cellophane window, which arrives without facial expressions or genitals – and then somehow spin a yarn out of that unpromising clay that has men and women all over the world leaping out of their seats, spilling bubbly on their neighbours and yelling “Hell Yes!!!’’ at the screen? All of which Greta Gerwig achieved with Barbie.
Yet, Gerwig couldn’t even score a Best Director nomination this year. And while Barbie is nominated, it’s not even being talked about as an upset contender to win. All this tells me is that we overestimate the importance and the philosophical underpinnings of angsty middle-aged men in this world and don’t give nearly enough respect to brilliant young women who are just trying to survive and look after their friends.
And yet, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t give Best Picture to Oppenheimer or to Barbie. And I wouldn’t give it to Poor Things, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon or Anatomy of a Fall either, brilliant though all of those films are.
Nope, I’d give the Oscar to The Zone of Interest. Simply because I cannot get that film out of my head, it haunted my dreams during a bout of Covid that poleaxed me all of last week and if you ask me about it in 10 years’ time, then I reckon I will still be able to tell you how I felt watching that film and describe whole scenes to you in forensic detail.
All of which is maybe just a long way around to telling you what you already know: That there really is no such thing as ‘‘best’’. On some days, best might mean the film you liked the most, or respected the most, or which moved you the most. Or, it might be the film – as The Zone of Interest was with me – that shifted your whole appreciation of time and existence on its axis a little.
What I am stoked about is that there are 10 blisteringly good films up for Best Picture this year – and that all of them are worth taking the time to watch, hopefully on a real movie screen, the way the filmmakers hoped you would.
And that as long as Robbie Robertson gets a posthumous Oscar for his music for Killers of The Flower Moon, then I’ll be happy whatever the results are on Monday afternoon.
The 96th Academy Awards will be handed out on Monday afternoon (New Zealand time) with live coverage for Kiwis available via Disney+.