My Pre-Oscars Film Diary: Part II
The final update on what my Letterboxd would look like if I remembered to review every film.
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It’s finally here: Oscars Sunday, the last day of Awards Season, which means it’s time to give the final update on my pre-Oscars watch log.
Though I may have been a little too ambitious to believe I could watch every nominee and snub, I did make it through all of the major nominees (in Best Picture, Director, and all acting and screenplay categories). Some, like Nickel Boys, Sing Sing, and I’m Still Here, were unequivocal highlights. Other films, like Hard Truths and Better Man, felt like such egregious snubs it spurred me to create my own Oscars ballot.
As the ceremony looms, here’s my final tally of Oscar contenders: the best, the worst, and the actual nominees.
*Asterisks indicate category frontrunners
A Complete Unknown (Searchlight, dir. James Mangold)
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actor,* Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay
Summary: In 1961, Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) is a relative nobody when he befriends folk music icons Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woodie Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). But as his star rises over the next five years, he imagines a new kind of musical greatness—one that may put him in conflict with his beloved mentors.
Thoughts: At its best, A Complete Unknown is a solid vehicle for transformative performances from virtually its entire ensemble cast. At its worst, it’s too long, poorly structured, and more invested in making its audience feel good for already knowing the story than actually establishing its stakes. Director James Mangold’s only redeeming quality may be that these two truths miraculously do not impede each other. As Dylan, Chalamet’s performance is more than capable—and he’s still probably only the fourth most interesting actor on screen.1 If the film cared slightly more about her, Monica Barbaro’s turn as Joan Baez would easily have overtaken Zoe Saldaña as the frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress—but make no mistake: it’s a star-making turn either way.
Between the Temples (Sony, dir. Nathan Silver)
Snubbed for: Best Supporting Actress
Summary: A grieving cantor (Jason Schwartzman), questioning his faith after the sudden death of his wife, reconnects with his elementary school music teacher (Carol Kane), as she prepares for her adult bat mitzvah.
Thoughts: Part Harold and Maude and part The Meyerowitz Stories—with a tinge of Nora Ephron—Between the Temples is a delightful dramedy that feels like a long-beloved cult classic just six months after its release. Schwartzman and Kane are at their funny, poignant best playing off each other’s lovelorn neuroticism, and supported by a perfectly cast, perfectly utilized ensemble.
Nightbitch (Searchlight, dir. Marielle Heller)
Snubbed for: Best Actress (but not really)
Summary: Struggling with isolation and missing her once-thriving artistic career, a stay-at-home mother (Amy Adams) becomes convinced she is slowly turning into a dog.
Thoughts: Nightbitch never quite finds the right balance between horror and family drama, and in trying, lets the comedic elements of the original novel fall by the wayside. Sadly, that’s the least of its issues. Heller—in a betrayal of her past, excellent screenplays—fundamentally misunderstands the novel she’s adapting, transforming a haunting, surreal psychological horror about the perils of postpartum mental illness and isolation into a spineless girlboss manifesto. It’s a disservice to Adams, who would have been excellent in a smarter adaptation, but it’s an even greater disservice to the original novel, for which Heller seems to operate with active disdain.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Netflix, dir. Merlin Crossingham & Nick Park)
Nominated for: Best Animated Feature
Summary: Years after their savvy teamwork put penguin mastermind Feathers McGraw in prison, Wallace and Gromit live a peaceful existence at home, where Wallace swears his newest invention, the robotic garden gnome Norbot, will make domestic life a breeze. But when a revenge-obsessed Feathers learns about Norbot, he hatches a plan of his own for the seemingly innocuous invention—and Gromit may be the only one who can stop him.
Thoughts: Vengeance Most Fowl is, expectedly, the best of Wallace and Gromit, transmuting their perfectly tuned duo dynamic into surprisingly resnonant contemporary circumstances. It’s as much a movie about the dangers of AI as one about the dangers of mastermind penguins. Even coming 16 years after the last entry into the Wallace & Gromit canon, Vengeance Most Fowl feels well worth the wait.
Better Man (Paramount, dir. Michael Gracey)
Snubbed for: Best Original Song
Summary: Robbie Williams, reimagined as an anthropomorphic monkey, recounts the first three decades of his life, from growing up in working-class Stoke-on-Trent to becoming the biggest pop act on the continent. But life as a British cultural icon isn’t what it seems.
Thoughts: How this film flopped everywhere but the AACTAs is a mystery. Better Man is, unironically, everything 2022 Best Picture nominee Elvis tried (and failed) to be, and more than current Best Picture nominee A Complete Unknown could ever dream of. It is beautifully ridiculous, surprisingly heartbreaking, unapologetically earnest, and irresistibly entertaining—all the things that made its subject an icon.
Babygirl (A24, dir. Halina Reijn)
Snubbed for: Best Actress
Summary: Unsatisfied with her outwardly perfect marriage, a tech CEO (Nicole Kidman) begins a dangerous affair with a 24-year-old intern (Harris Dickinson).
Thoughts: Yet another promising, cult-favorite screenwriter takes a disappointing turn. Babygirl isn’t nearly as much of a letdown as Nightbitch—it’s at least decently entertaining, beautifully shot, makes interesting commentary about female aging, and doesn’t kneecap any of the performances from its excellent ensemble—but it hardly lives up to its own promises. It’s an erotic thriller that’s not very thrilling and an age-gap romance with a love interest who, for most of the film, is comically unsexy.2 (That may be Part Of It, but not a successful part.) Had A24 marketed this movie more accurately—as a psychological horror about the perils of heterosexuality—we’d be having a much different conversation.
Hard Truths (StudioCanal, dir. Mike Leigh)
Snubbed for: Best Actress
Summary: Middle-aged and disappointed with life, Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) takes out her frustration on everyone in her orbit. But an impending Mother's Day celebration may force her to confront the real source of her anger.
Thoughts: Loudly funny but quietly rageful, this late-career highlight from Mike Leigh feels almost doomed to go underrated. But make no mistake—it’s one of the most profound films 2024 had to offer. Marianne Jean-Baptiste fires on all cylinders for all 97 minutes of this film and in the same breath makes doing so look effortless, creating a character who feels impossibly lived-in and endlessly complex.
The Last Showgirl (Roadside Attractions, dir. Gia Coppola)
Snubbed for: Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress
Summary: When her Vegas revue abruptly closes after decades, a lifelong showgirl (Pamela Anderson), now in her late 50s, faces an uncertain future—and discovers she may not know how to live off-stage.
Thoughts: The Last Showgirl is the kind of tragic moviegoing experience where everything is just South of perfect. If they’d been paired with slightly more nuanced writing (or slightly more writing, period) Pamela Anderson and Dave Bautista could have delivered two of the best performances of the year as a tragically delusional showgirl in arrested development and her sympathetic but inadequate stage manager/would-be love interest. If The Last Showgirl had been directed by a different Coppola (ideally, Sofia), its lovely visuals might have given way to something deeper instead of feeling like a facade put up in areas where the plot starts to thin.
The notion of a showgirl in her late 50s, steadfastly convinced of her own prestige but with little to show for a career that has left her estranged from anyone she might call family, seems to lend itself to haunting, tragic storytelling. But it needed more capable hands to guide it to greatness.
I’m Still Here (Sony, dir. Walter Salles)
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best International Feature
Summary: In 1970, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her family are living in Rio during the early years of Brazil’s military dictatorship when she and her husband, former congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), are abruptly arrested. Rubens is never seen again, while Eunice begins a lifelong fight for answers about her husband’s disappearance.
Thoughts: I’m Still Here is hyper-intimate—the story of one woman, one family, one marriage attempting to survive a massive, labyrinthine system—but it feels like an era-defining epic. It carries both writer3 Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s rage-tinted grief and Eunice’s unassailable but deeply burdened resolve to create both a singular family history and a treatise on the reality of dictatorship. Fifty years after the fact, it could not possibly feel more timely.
Flow (Janus Films, dir. Gints Zilbalodis)
Nominated for: Best Animated Feature,* Best International Feature
Summary: When a great flood wipes out the forest where they live, a solitary cat finds community in a group of misfit animals—a yellow lab, a lemur, a secretarybird, and a capybara—navigating their newly aquatic home.
Thoughts: Delightfully inventive, Flow rejects many of the animated children’s film’s typical conceits. Its animal ensemble is non-anthropomorphic and largely silent, but Flow feels no less emotionally resonant for it. Instead, this animal-led, post-human adventure keeps you captivated for every second of its heroes’ journey, and explores grief, adaptation, and renewal with unexpected nuance.
Nickel Boys (Amazon MGM, dir. RaMell Ross)
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay
Summary: In Jim Crow-era Florida, promising Black high school student Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) is wrongfully arrested and sent to the infamous Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school with brutal living conditions where he befriends fellow student Turner (Brandon Wilson). Decades later, the abuses at Nickel are finally gaining national attention, and an adult Elwood must reckon with the truth of his past and the legacy Nickel left behind.
Thoughts: There is no film more wholly deserving of the “Best Picture” title than Nickel Boys, simultaneously a technical triumph and a vehicle for some of the year’s best performances. Like last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Nickel Boys is a blistering, gut-wrenching treatise on a not-quite-buried corner of American history that feels both painful to witness and impossible to look away from.
Sing Sing (A24, dir. Greg Kwedar)
Nominated for: Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song
Summary: A man (Colman Domingo) wrongfully incarcerated at New York’s infamous Sing Sing maximum security prison finds connection and purpose through a Rehabilitation Through the Arts theatre troupe. But the arrival of a new member (Clarence Maclin) throws his precarious status into orbit.
Thoughts: Colman Domingo falls into the Lily Gladstone, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor class of performers who are shaping this decade of film by putting out an Oscar-or-Emmy-worthy performance no less than once a year. In Sing Sing, he’s absolutely radiant, transcending even his own masterful body of work. But it’s Clarence Maclin who, like his character, steals every scene, bringing his own screenplay to life with a blend of explosive emotion and measured calm. Together, the two imbue every second of Sing Sing with vivid nuance and heartbreaking intimacy.
The Brutalist (A24, dir. Brady Corbet)
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor,* Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay
Summary: After surviving the Holocaust, a renowned Hungarian architect (Adrien Brody) immigrates to the United States, settling in Pennyslvania, but finds the American Dream increasingly difficult to reach.
Thoughts: The Brutalist dares you to call it too long, too self-indulgent, too boring. In reality, any of these would be the least of the film’s issues. But two truths can coexist: that The Brutalist is a landmark technical achievement facilitating perhaps the best performance of the year, and that it is a just fine movie.
As László Tóth, Adrien Brody is… exactly what he always becomes when given leading man status: a hollow performer digging as deep as he can to find a soul. Again, he comes up short. Brody starts the film at an 11, and has to slowly winnow down to something sustainable for its nearly four-hour runtime. The eventual result is solid, if not quite revolutionary, but after a while, he feels almost like a malignant presence in his own film. Under his care, the whole project becomes a 200-minute exercise in watching Adrien Brody Acting As Hard As He Can.
It’s Guy Pearce who saves The Brutalist, with a performance so powerful it creates the illusion that the film itself is something more profound. Pearce is magnetic as Harrison Van Buren, the film’s measured villain. He begins the film with what feels like a funhouse mirror take on James Remar’s character in Oppenheimer, but over time peels back layer after gruesome layer to reveal something horrifying underneath. By the film’s too-late climax, he’s brutally cold, terrifyingly hollow, and chillingly real. The Brutalist is a treatise on the American Dream, and he’s its darkest reality.
Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros, dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Nominated for: Best Picture
Summary: Still reeling from the death of his father, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) joins forces with the Fremen, but foresees a fatal prophecy that could alienate him from his remaining loved ones and crumble what’s left of his already-fragile world.
Thoughts: Visually stunning, which in the end is what the Dune movies are all about.
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Collage by the author.
Behind Barbaro’s Joan Baez, Norton’s Pete Seeger, and Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash, of course. As Sylvie, Dylan’s long-suffering girlfriend, Elle Fanning does her best with a painfully underthought character, but it’s not enough.
How Harris Dickinson managed to exude more sex appeal as the mullet-donning tragic younger brother in The Iron Claw, an arrogant Richard Attenborough in See How They Run, and a doomed nepo baby in The King’s Man is the true feat. But I will remember this ick for the rest of my days.
I’m Still Here is inspired by Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 memoir Aunda Estou Aqui, which details the forced disappearance of his father, Rubens Paiva, and his mother Eunice Paiva’s fight for answer.