 Give Husevik the Oscar, you cowards. I feel like I need to start this with something in the general vicinity of an apology to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Last year, when I broke down the nine Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I said on multiple occasions that there was no way that the voters would do the right thing and select the actual best of the bunch. And then they did. Parasite won Best International, of course. Then Bong Joon-ho got Best Director and then the film got Best Picture No Qualifier necessary. And I was shocked. We all were and many of us were ecstatic because this group had gone from never nominating a Korean film for an Oscar ever, not even once, to giving one the big win that it deserved like what a turnaround. And while South Korea is enjoyable but hardly groundbreaking 2021 entrance the man standing next isn't here, the country still does have some unexpected representation in the year's lineup and that's awesome. And honestly, I think the whole batch of Best Picture nominees this year is pretty great. Like it has been a long time since I have genuinely enjoyed everything up for the award. And while there are some deeply deserving movies that should have at least been in the remaining slots that the Academy never seems to use, I wouldn't be up in arms if any of the options took home the big prize the way I certainly would have been last year. Basically what I'm saying is that this year there's no Joker. Now I've only reviewed one of these movies before, had the year played out differently and movies released when and how they had initially planned et cetera, et cetera. I would likely have done more though. I guess it's hard to know. There are two in particular that I would have loved to really dig into but both dealt with subjects that deserved more than the surface level I could have given them at the time. Everyone should be well aware by now that my reviews are ultimately about me. Generally, not a problem. Like people get annoyed about it but I don't feel bad and that's what matters. However, when talking about subjects that I know very little about or that deal with communities of which I am not a part, I do try to ensure that what I'm saying about myself is still able to add to the capital C conversation slash capital D discourse in some way. And sometimes I just don't feel up to that especially in the past year. With a video like this though, I don't really feel that compulsion. There's no deep analysis or anything going on here. This is that breakdown of my thoughts on the nominees for Best Picture at the 93rd Academy Awards but also you're here, so that's fun. Now I'm going to go through them in alphabetical order but at the end I will do a ranking just for funsies so stick around for that or don't. I'm not your mom or your dad for that matter. That's such a good segue, right? Anyways, the first time I heard about the father was on the day it was nominated for Best Picture and I thought, wow, what a boring name for a movie. Like, don't we get enough movies about dads? Let's get never rarely, sometimes always in that spot, huh? Or if we're married to a the noun, why not the assistant? Classic Academy, bullshit, grumble, grumble, grumble. But I knew I was doing this video so I had to watch it regardless. And sorry I spoiled it for your earlier squad fan but TBH, this movie is really good. For one thing, it is short. We don't have nearly enough 90-something minute prestige movies. The next shortest nominee is 110 and the average is just under 120. And there's something psychological about that three-digit barrier that just makes coming into a movie like the father feel less like a chore than it otherwise would have. And also it's based on a play which makes the self-importance of the title slightly less grown-inducing because the father is exactly the sort of title you would expect to see on a Broadway marquee and you just kind of accept it. And even if the opening credits hadn't told me the film was based on a play I would have known. No, a lot of shade has been thrown at theatrical adaptations in recent years but I don't mean that this feels like we are watching a stage play with fancier camera angles. Rather, the narrative structure is intensely theatrical. Anthony, played by Anthony Hopkins, is suffering from dementia and the father is told primarily from his perspective but completely out of order or even context. We see the same scene play out multiple times without even realizing it until it's over and the whole thing creates a genuinely unnerving experience as we're never really sure where or when we are and also who and what is how it seems. The common stage practice of actors handling multiple parts is far more jarring on screen but that plays to its benefit here. I started feeling paranoid and wondering if actually maybe something far more sinister was going on at the exact same time that we saw Anthony becoming increasingly suspicious of the same and this makes it hugely effective at giving folks without dementia a little glimpse into what people with it are going through while avoiding the traditional descent into madness type of horror thing. Anthony is not dangerous and in fact he is in much more danger than he puts others in and also he doesn't really change only our understanding of his condition and the situation does. The realization of which makes it even more powerful. It's interesting that Fred Hampton, a person I had never heard of because the American education system is bad is featured in two of the nominated films and I am glad that I saw this one first and also just like in general it feels like a big deal that we have a biopic about a lesser known black revolutionary that actually acknowledges the socialist politics so often stripped from for example the stories of Martin Luther King Jr. Interestingly, it's also not the only biopic here to specifically espouse socialist policies even if it is underselling them here where they were oversold elsewhere. Yeah, the Black Panthers were Marxist Leninists and it could have gone way deeper but I'm not sure that doing so would have benefited the story that the film is telling. I don't know, Agnes Varda's 1968 documentary Short Black Panthers is on the criterion channel and you should watch that. Of course, maybe the story that they're telling is the problem here. I won't pretend like I didn't wish it was the Black Messiah and Judas that there was more time with Hampton than the narc who ate it in his death. There's not really a lot to the character of Bill O'Neill which you almost don't notice because of how good Liqueith Stanfield's performance is but it's a little weird to focus so much on this person with no clear ideology or even desire beyond self-preservation in a biopic of a revolutionary who was cut down before his prime. Which gets to the other oddity. Both Stanfield and Daniel Kaluya are fantastic and I get why both received Oscar nomes even if the categorization's a bit sus but when the title card told me that Fred Hampton was murdered by the United States government at age 21, I was confused. Daniel Kaluya sure didn't look like a 21 year old nor does Stanfield look like the 17 years old that O'Neill apparently was and this movie would have hit very differently if younger actors had been cast. Like Ashton Sanders who broke out in 2016 as the teenage Chiron in Moonlight and it would have looked more appropriate and we know that he was available because the dude is literally in this movie. No, these aren't unique criticisms and I think that there's actually a decent argument to be made that younger performers would have resulted in the anti-capitalist rhetoric we do see feeling childish and immature because of our collective and innate disrespect for young folks and their ideas but I think it's interesting how these choices affect the overall film because considered in a vacuum, this thing is good as hell. It is a hugely impactful piece of cinema that like several other nominees made me so fucking angry. It shows the corruption at the heart of our justice system and how deeply racist the response to the Black Panthers was and like, yeah, duh. But it's still important for us to see movies that hammer that point home, that show the US government as the villains that they have so often been while humanizing the people that they vilified. I know I complained earlier about the idea of celebrating old white men but I won't pretend like I wasn't looking forward to Mank though in my slight defense, it wasn't because of the subject of the film but the man behind the camera. Mank is David Fincher's first feature since Gone Girl and a new Fincher film is always exciting. In addition, this is a script written by his late father that he has been trying to produce literally his entire career and I was very curious to see what would come of that and it's fantastic. I don't know, what do you want from me? I know that there are people who find Fincher's incredibly technical style of filmmaking distancing. His craft is basically unmatched and his movies tend to feel perfect because every inch of every frame has been poured over to be so and while he has gotten a lot less in your face with his ability as of late, this movie does feel technically flawless which you may or may not enjoy about it. I think it's great and I highly recommend the New York Times profile about him and his impossible eye because it really gets into a lot of how and why he works the way he does. Anyone vaguely interested in the craft of filmmaking needs to read what he has to say. There has been some mild controversy over the fact that citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, the titular Mank, was not nearly as political as the film makes him out to be and so his rants against capitalism probably didn't happen. But I think that there's value in making the smartest man in the room say things that are good and that more people should believe. And yeah, maybe that's a horrendously slippery slope but TBH people who believe things that are bad are already doing the same thing on the opposite side and also Hamilton? But the reality is that Mankiewicz here is being given all of the credit for writing citizen Kane, a film that centers on the corruption of wealth and the damage that it can and does do on any and all scales. So regardless of his particular support for presidential candidates, the writing that he claims was his own matches with the man that we have been presented. So I don't really see a problem with making him philosophically coherent. I don't know, maybe that's just me. It is deeply ironic that Minari was categorized as a foreign language film at the Golden Globes because Minari is such a fundamentally American story and one specifically about being othered by people because you don't look or sound like them that just because you're American doesn't mean you're treated as one. And then these fucking people decided to say that this movie doesn't get to be seen as an American film because its main characters are bilingual. Like Jesus fucking Christ. That's missing the point by jamming it straight into your fucking eye. Like it is impossible to divorce any discussions of Minari from the dramatic increase in anti-Asian violence that we have been seeing recently in the United States and elsewhere. The other night I was walking through Midtown when I heard someone shouting on the sidewalk and I looked up from TikTok or whatever and I saw a man screaming at a group of Asian kids probably around college age saying that he was going to hate crime them, et cetera, et cetera. Only one of them even looked at him and the others just kept going. And while it became clear that this wasn't as targeted as it initially seemed because the man then turned his attention to a dog that he threatened to kill and then in turn to each new person who walked by shouting some vile thing about what should happen to them, it was a pretty shocking moment for me and seemingly not for them. As horrific as all this is it's not really new, just more visible to those of us who aren't directly affected by it. I highly recommend Eugene Lee Yang's video on the subject as well as Anna Akana's shorter but more pointed piece which feels like required viewing right about now. And I think Minari does too. As I said, it is a deeply American story. A man moves his family to Arkansas to start a farm to capitalize on an underserved market. Korean immigrants looking for fresh local produce that reminds them of home. It is inspired by the life of its director, Lee Isaac Chung and all of it just feels so true, especially in the small moments of conversation quite or otherwise and even just the looks that people give each other. And many of these moments center around othering which takes a variety of forms. Obviously the family gets stares and questions from the white folks but young David also lashes out at his grandmother for not being the kind of grandmother that he expects and wants her to be when she comes from Korea to be with her family. In addition, the primary white character Paul is looked down upon for the intensity of his religious devotion but the film treats him and everyone with genuine compassion. It is such a rare thing to see but it is beautiful and it reveals the complexity of people and the way they relate to each other while simultaneously emphasizing the resilience of the Yi family and the caste and the community and everyone else. It's unfair when a movie or any piece of art is forced to bear the weight of an idea rather than simply getting to be the thing that it is and oftentimes it can't stand up to the baggage society places upon it. But Menari can. If Hillbilly Elegy actually cared about representing hillbillies in a meaningful way, humanizing them and their struggles, it probably would have looked something like Nomadland. Many of the movies that were nominated this year and a whole lot that weren't are ultimately about the failings of our society whether justice, economic, healthcare systems, whatever. Sometimes these failings are dramatic. Political trials are straight up assassinations of American citizens. But for most people, the effects are much quieter and Nomadland is interested in those stories. It's why most of the characters are slightly fictionalized versions of the real people portraying them. Director Chloe Zhao has a habit of casting non-professionals and in doing so here, she is giving people the chance to tell their truth through conversations with one of the most interesting actors working today, Francis McDormand. And it is incredibly powerful and forces us to face the people who falter the cracks who we often forget about and see how they cope with that with a world that doesn't care about them or their difficulties. We see the communities that they build in response a quiet revolution that removes them from the system. But they're still a part of it on some level. And that gets to a small but also huge issue that I have with the film. During the pandemic, I spent a couple of nights working in a fulfillment center for an independent electronics retailer packing boxes into the backs of FedEx trucks. It was a huge facility taking five minutes at a decent clip to walk from one end to the other passing by millions of pieces of inventory as well as the massive machines that helped move them all around. It was an eye-opening experience for a lot of reasons. And in the same way that people say everyone should spend some time in a customer-facing position to make them a little more empathetic to the difficulties of that experience, I think that everyone should take a few shifts in a warehouse because you will see what all of that online shopping we do actually means. And it's a lot. But as big as that warehouse is, it is just a fraction of what Amazon's working with. And it was kind of wild to see the inside of Amazon's operations in Nomadland where Fern works during seasonal rushes. And I understand that people in the Nomadic lifestyle do turn to Amazon as a consistent source of work because it is the second largest employer in the US. And there are a lot of opportunities available at any given moment. But Fern's line about how good Amazon's pay is felt like something that came from corporate in exchange for that warehouse access. And it feels kind of insidious, especially in light of all the shit from the past couple of weeks. Like seriously, fuck Amazon. And I'm not gonna say fuck Nomadland for lionizing them like that, but it did make me sad. Promising Young Woman is the only nominated film that I actually reviewed. So if you wanna know what I think I've got 20 something minutes about it for you, my feelings haven't really changed since despite all of the criticism levied against the film in general and the ending in specific. There are a couple of things that I didn't really delve into that I arguably should have, the role other women played in Nina's suffering and just like complicity in general as well as the whole cop thing. But in my defense, I dedicated an entire video to the former when I discussed the assistant. And I actually didn't really expect the presence of police to be quite as controversial as it ended up being because I really don't think the film is as pro-cop as its harshest critics have made it seem. In any case, the film has created an unexpectedly deep divide between its fans and detractors because there's really no neutrality. Folks like me love it and the rest book and hate it. And I know a lot of the people in that latter camp have very specific experiences that inform those feelings and I am not here to invalidate them. That said, the admittedly small sample size of my YouTube comments section and the even smaller sample size of people who have directly messaged me outside of YouTube to tell me their thoughts on the film, make it clear that promising young woman was cathartic and meaningful for a lot of people. So maybe calling it the worst movie of the year is the real invalidation, Huzack? There are a few times a year where a film's credits will roll and I'm just unable to speak. By now you've probably realized that I'm very good at just saying shit. So the idea that I would be struck dumb is kind of wild, right? And it happens and you can actually tell when it's happened by following me on both TikTok and Letterbox. If you see a film get added to the latter with no 30-second hot take accompanying it on the former, it was just too much. Sound of Metal was one of those movies. The premise makes you expect something sadder than what you're actually getting. Rubin is a drummer in a metal band living with his life and musical partner in a bus when his hearing starts to deteriorate rapidly. In an incredibly short period of time he goes from fully capable of hearing to having nothing at all. And you can imagine how, for a drummer, that would be very bad. And the film depicts the fallout of this change, although fallout might not be the right word because it's not like this is a catastrophe. Rubin ends up at a community home for people with hearing loss and learned sign language and developed serious friendships. And honestly, it's all really beautiful and meaningful and felt like something I'd never seen on screen before. Sure, there have been deaf people in movies but giving the community this level of specifically positive representation is unexpected and oh so necessary. And of course, the beauty doesn't last but it says nothing about the community at large and everything about Rubin specifically. And we are experiencing the entire thing through some of the most intricate and impactful sound design I have ever heard. Like generally, you just want sound to be there well produced and mixed to keep you in the story without drawing attention to the construction. Like if you were thinking about the fact that those footsteps were almost certainly added in post, then you're probably not paying enough attention to what's going on. The sound of metal brings you into Rubin's experience through a number of methods from the expected filtering and distortion and just cutting out of audio that we're used to hearing as well as using entirely different kinds of microphones on set to capture the sound itself differently. It all comes together to make a film that is overwhelming both executionally and emotionally. I initially put off seeing the trial of the Chicago Seven because of the Aaron Sorkin of it all. His incredibly specific, very verbose style of writing is something that either clicks with you or it doesn't and at the time of release, I wasn't sure where I stood and didn't feel like finding out the hard way. And then Mank came along a month later and scratched that quick-witted dialogue itch I might have had so I didn't really see any reason to go back and then TBH had just sort of forgot about it until the nominations were announced. But it turns out now was actually the perfect time because Fred Hampton shows up and I had a lot more context for him than I would have at release. A few years ago, I did my civil service as a citizen of the United States and went to the Manhattan Courthouse for jury duty or at least the selection portion of it. I had had a prior commitment out of state during the multiple weeks that the trial was expected to take place and I appreciated that the lawyers were willing to just let me leave town. Though frankly, it was an injury case involving someone's leg and at the time I walked with a pretty severe limp that I didn't sue anyone over so I was probably going to be booted anyway. Regardless, even seeing that process of the justice system was fascinating and made me understand a little bit why things work the way they do. Stories like the trial of the Chicago Seven though make all that feel completely irrelevant because if you get a conservative judge overseeing a case, there is only so much that even the clearest eye jury could get through and frankly, we're way past the point where civil disagreement can exist but I already talked about that in a rap song so we can move on. The trial of the Chicago Seven is one of those movies that feels great by default and probably would have been a shoe-in for the win a few years back. Like, it's got an A-list cast of actors giving typically great performances of a well-written script that feels oh so timely and directed competently by the man who wrote it. It is well-paced and keeps you engaged even as I think aspects of the narrative falter by virtue of condensing this many months-long story into just a couple of hours. The biggest issue is that there's no clear sense of time passing until someone says, ugh, been doing this for six months and I'm like, what? And then they move on. And Asurkin is notably a centrist and that shows up in his work. He is against obviously bad things like overt racism and governmental abuse but isn't here to say that the justice system itself is bad just the way it was utilized here. However, I think with the world as it is the film is making the argument he didn't want it to. Even one bad judge indicts the entire system and we are seeing the ramifications play out across this country with the huge number of 45 appointed justices resulting from a refusal by the former majority leader to confirm anyone in the final few years of a majority backed presidency making all kinds of horrendous calls that will indelibly damage the fabric of our society. It is genuinely horrendous that we have to worry that completely nonsensical legal arguments could end up becoming law because the so-called Supreme Court that deserves no respect whatsoever is chanting at the bit to dismantle the regulatory system. Aaron Sorkin is a bit more optimistic about all of this than I am, probably because he's old and has a lot of money but I don't think his movie is and I like that about it. So yeah, that's it. Them's the nominees. Look at us getting through it together unless some of you skipped the ending just to see the ranking like a bunch of jerks. Definitely let me know in the comments both how you would rank the films yourself but also how you expected my ranking to have been based on what I said here. Last year folks were generally six for nine in their guesses with slots two to four being a little less obvious than the others. Honestly, I'm not sure how y'all's expectations for me will go this year but I would be surprised if anyone were to nail it both because I spent a lot of time not talking about the movies and because I'm not even convinced I've got it right. Numbers one and eight easy but basically every other entry could have moved at least a slot or two and I would have felt equally good or bad about the whole thing and I know this because I switched two options that are on very different parts of the list at the last minute and felt nothing. But anyway, it is too late to back out now. So here is my official ranking. Number eight, Trial of the Chicago Seven. Seven, Nomadland. Six, The Father. Five, Judas and the Black Messiah. Four, Mank. Three, Promising Young Woman. Two, Sound of Metal. And one, Minari. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons. My mom, Hammer and Marco. Kat Saracada, Benjamin Schiff. Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton. Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina. Liam Knipe, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, Iron the Sword, Tomatown and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, great, if not, oh well. If you wanna see more, please subscribe. Maybe in the next one, I'll have an actual set. I don't know, I moved, we'll figure it out. Bye folks.