The Favourite
First Reformed
Green Book (winner)
Roma
Vice
What’s Missing
It’s not often that I disagree with 100% of the slate for a particular set of nominations, and I’m not quite there with 2018’s list for Best Original Screenplay, but I’m pretty close. The Academy’s tendency to avoid caring about horror movies caused it to ignore Hereditary across the board, much to the detriment of this set of Oscars. Both Unsane and A Quiet Place could stand to be here as well. Foreign movies often have issues getting nominations in other categories, which leaves out the excellent Capernaum here. Isle of Dogs has the double-whammy of being both partly in another language and animated, a shame because it’s a dandy story. Oscar has started to embrace the weird much more regularly, but Sorry to Bother You might have just been too much off the deep end for consideration. The biggest miss for me is Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Weeding through the Nominees
5. I’m in a position where I’m not sure I want to put anything in last place, but I also don’t want to put anything in first. Everything feels like it deserves to be in third or fourth. But something has to go here, and so I’m putting the eventual winner, Green Book on the bottom. The reason is simple enough: it’s lazy. This is little more than an update of Driving Miss Daisy, a film that was also pretty lazy in its own way. I get why this won, but given the other nominations and potential nominations, it not only shouldn’t have won, it shouldn’t have been nominated.
4. Roma was quite the darling come Oscar time, and I still haven’t figured out exactly why this was the case. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Roma, but it’s also not that interesting, unusual, or different of a story. It’s written well enough and the characters are interesting, at least as far as they go, but I don’t know that there’s anything done in this story that hadn’t been done a few dozen times before. Again, I get the nomination, but I don’t think it belongs here, and certainly doesn’t deserve a win.
3. So what about Vice? It’s a fine enough story, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing. I can’t help but think that of all the people currently still alive and having been connected to the government who deserves a biopic less than Dick Cheney. The one saving grace of this film is that it depicts very clearly exactly how the American right has worked to destroy democracy, and this is shown clearly and without much commentary. Ultimately, I find it depressing that this moral sinkhole of a person gets this kind of acclaim.
2. First Reformed has problems in its third act, something I will not deny. That’s often a pretty major sin for me, but something I can overlook in certain circumstances. In this case, the performance of Ethan Hawke is something to hang onto, and gives the movie a little more credibility, just like the ideas behind Sorry to Bother You lift it beyond the fact that it goes completely off the rails in the last 20 minutes or so. I want to like this more than I do, but I can’t deny that the problems are in the screenplay.
1. What this means is that, like it or not, I’m left with The Favourite as my winner based on the nominations. I don’t honestly hate that result, since of the five nominations I’ve been given, it’s the one I would absolutely keep. In a perfect world, The Favourite would be in the mix, but probably wouldn’t rise above third place or so. It’s a fun screenplay, though, at times tragic but also frequently funny and trenchant. It’s the performances that sell it, of course, but they get there because of a good screenplay. But ultimately, it’s not my choice.
My Choice
My winner is Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a film that has all of the trenchant joys of The Favourite with a much more biting, cynical, and satirical edge. Sardonic humor doesn’t always go well, but having an unlikable main character and an unlikable accomplice scamming unlikeable people shouldn’t work as well as this does. It’s a great story and it’s well told, a film that doesn’t specifically want us to like its characters but does want us to sympathize with them, and in the main it succeeds. It should have been nominated, and had it been, would have been the class of the nominations.
Final Analysis
