Do you have your menu planned, signature cocktails designed, ballots printed? There is a lot to prep for an Evening with Oscar – let alone all the research that goes into who’s nominated, who should win and who will. We don’t have all the answers. But we can offer up our contributors’ thoughts on the 10 films nominated in this year’s Best Picture race.
BEST PICTURE BOUNTY
Hamnet
Amid a glut of movies dominated by male leads, it’s one of the few driven by a female protagonist – played by Jessie Buckley, who deserves the Oscar. Director Chloé Zhao introduced the TIFF world premiere of this film at Roy Thompson Hall by asking us to close our eyes and submit to a somatic breathing exercise. That may explain why I was a bit sleepy for the first hour of watching Mr. & Mrs. Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, Buckley) navigate their rickety art-life balance. Then the floodgates break with a horrific family tragedy, disarming us for the third-act catharsis of Hamlet’s premiere at the Globe Theatre, in a feat of stage magic that turns tears of grief into tears of joy. I never thought the words of Shakespeare, especially that play, could do this, but I cried a river to iambic pentameter. And as the Globe audience mirrored the one that surrounded me, I felt a lasting exhilaration quite unlike anything I’ve experienced in a movie – a thrill I’m reluctant to betray with a dose of critical second thought. As a critic seduced by a crowd-pleaser (it won TIFF’s People’s Choice Award), I worried that I might have fallen for an imperfect movie. And I was afraid to see it again. But I did, at a New Year’s Day matinee at TIFF’s Lightbox, with an audience that was absolutely rapt. To my relief, I liked it even more. Enchanted by depths of beauty and emotion I hadn’t seen the first time, once again it filled my heart and reaffirmed my faith in the theatrical power of cinema. –Brian D. Johnson
See also: Breaking down the four actors who’ve played the Bard on film in Shakespeare & the Big Screen
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson lights up the zeitgeist with a carnival of political misadventure that takes anachronistic delight in scrambling American history, as escapades of ’70s revolutionary terrorism are overlaid with contemporary scenarios of fascism and military overkill at the Mexican border. In the role of “Rocketman,” a burnt-out relic of the radical left, Leonardo DiCaprio gives a masterclass in stoned paranoia. Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro are brilliant in antithetical roles – Penn infusing caricature with high-wire conviction as the ramrod Colonel Lockjaw, and del Toro is effortlessly cool as the martial arts sensei and quicksilver fixer who guides Rocketman through the migrant underground. This is Anderson’s first action movie and thriller. But it’s as richly comic, and strangely relevant, as anything he’s made. –BDJ
Sinners
I first watched Ryan Coogler’s historic horror movie at home on TV. I tend to be queasy with graphic carnage and when all hell literally broke loose in the third act, with a biblical bloodbath of fountaining gore and delirious gunplay, it was too much. We are told the villains are vampires, but these aren’t your Euro succubi with fashionable fangs; they are carnivores that chow down on human flesh with such gusto they’re more like zombies. I thought I’d had it with zombies. However . . . a second, less casual viewing of the film for awards consideration – while wearing headphones – won me over. Sinners sank its teeth into me with the magnitude of its story, the passion of the performances, and the flat-out brilliance of its music – a firestorm that sweeps through an ancestry of sounds ranging from Delta blues to Irish folk, from Southern spirituals to West African griot. In yet another feat of cinematic repatriation, director Coogler has done for the vampire genre what he did for the superhero movie with Black Panther. But even with all its commercial success, Sinners is a far more subversive and challenging picture – and not for the faint of heart. –BDJ
See also: How Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ is Changing the Game for Black Cinema in Hollywood
Sentimental Value
Conjuring up a household of emotional landscapes that echo with Chekhov and Bergman, Norwegian director Joachim Trier crafts a family drama that unfolds with beauty, sly wit and complicated emotions. A faded auteur (Stellan Skarsgård) strives to make his comeback with a screenplay about his family. He miscasts a Hollywood star (a well-cast Elle Fanning) to play his daughter, an esteemed stage actor (Renate Reinsve) who has turned down the role. The entire film becomes a framing device, a magic box of memories. In a single shot, the camera takes us from a young girl being chased through a field by a German soldier, to a train window through which we are watching it, to a theatre where the auteur watches the scene unfold at a screening of a movie he made two decades ago. Trier directs all this with a sleight of hand so silky it’s imperceptible. And Skarsgård – positioned as a Best Supporting Actor contender for what is in fact a lead role – gives the performance of his life. –BDJ
The Secret Agent
Don’t let the title fool you. The protagonist is no James Bond or Jason Bourne. He’s a mild-mannered former professor who has been driven underground in the waning days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. He’s played by a quietly charismatic Wagner Moura, who won Best Actor in Cannes, where the jury also awarded Best Director to The Secret Agent’s Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau), who has a gift for concocting slow-brew thrillers with a surreal edge. Evoking the sounds and colours of ’70s Brazil – and ’70s cinema, The Secret Agent conjures a time and place with a sense of languid authenticity, undercut by a playful, pulpy subplot involving a projectionist, the movie Jaws, and the leg of a hitman’s victim that is found in the belly of a shark. A strangely mesmerizing film, as original as it is compelling. –BDJ
Marty Supreme
Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it . . . My opinions on the supremacy of Marty have ping-ponged back and forth ever since I first saw it in a theatre, where I felt brutalized by the loudness of it all: the overbearing score, the slapstick mayhem, the brawling and screaming. Directed by Josh Safdie (sans brother Benny) it’s one battle after another and everything everywhere all at once. It has the blistering tempo of the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, but this is more like a splinter bomb of crown jewels. Imagine Marty Scorsese on nitrous oxide, scrambling to find his asthma inhaler. And does a ping pong movie need a car chase? Yet . . . the performances! Doing his damnedest to be unpretty and unlikeable, Timothée Chalamet acts his pants off as the ping-pong champ protagonist. And Gwyneth Paltrow is a dream as the faded movie star who falls for him. And the table tennis is astonishing. I just wish there was more ping and less pong. –BDJ
Train Dreams
In this seeming escape to the simpler times of the early 1900s, a hermit-like lumberjack meets a woman, starts a family and builds a cabin in the woods with the earnings made from clearing trees for the expansion of the railroads. And then there’s all the wonder of nature: majestic trees of the Pacific Northwest and the undisturbed riverside land that the family builds on. But when tragedy strikes – multiple times – there’s despair, and one of the quietest, most patient and mesmerizing paths to connection and peace seen on screen. Based on a Denis Johnson 2011 novella of the same name, the film feels literary, timeless, meditative and offers a chance to see Australian actor Joel Edgerton come out of the woods and give one of the best performances of the year. –Shanda Deziel
F1
Formulaic? Of course. This is OG Formula One, fuelled by high octane BP – Brad Pitt, the Hollywood golden boy reborn as true-grit sage after passing through the checkered flag of maturity. George Clooney may simulate himself as Hollywood’s last real movie star in this year’s Jay Kelly, but that title really belongs to Pitt. This is a sports movie with a story as fake as any Disney fable. But the race cars are profoundly real. And so is Brad, perfectly cast as an incurable romantic with a cynical wit, who flips playing cards alone in his room before every race, then steps in the golden light. It’s just an act, but he’s the genuine article. –BDJ
Frankenstein
Oscar-winning filmmaker and honorary Canadian (he’s a City of Toronto keyholder) Guillermo del Toro has frequently cited James Whale’s cinematic 1931 version of the Gothic and science fiction classic as the reason he became a filmmaker. His appreciative introduction to a past print edition proves him an avowed fan of Shelley’s unflinching 1818 novel. And his US$120 million passion project cements it as he explores the motivations of misunderstood Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), whose scientific hubris grafts the corpses of dead men into a grisly new creature (Jacob Elordi). Like del Toro’s 2017 Academy Award-winning fable, The Shape of Water, this adaptation is filmed in and around Toronto. As a bonus: there will be a book detailing del Toro’s intense attention to below-the-line craft, too. –Nathalie Atkinson
See also: Jacob Elordi’s transition from monster to moor dweller in I Don’t Care What the Critics Say, Give Me Moor ‘Wuthering Heights’
Bugonia
Weird and likely wonderful, the latest film by director Yorgos Lanthimos won’t win. But its star, Hollywood bright light Emma Stone, is always welcome at the Oscars. At only 37, she has five Academy Award acting nominations and two wins (for La La Land and Poor Things), plus the fashion plate regularly steals the red-carpet show. –SD
See: Golden Moments: Lights, Camera, Fashion
