With Oscar nominations looming on the horizon, this year’s Best Picture guessing game is nearing an end. Despite impossible odds, these five movies deserve to earn a nomination.
What does it mean to “deserve” an Oscar nomination? Most people who pay attention to movies and the annual awards cycles surely have some sort of criteria — whether defined or not — that help them to answer that question. Of course, no universally accepted definition exists, which helps to explain why some people can absolutely despise a movie that ends up earning a plenty of nominations.
Not that squabbling over definitions matters much since most of us are not a part of the voting bodies that actually make the decisions. More to the point, the question of who deserves to be nominated for Best Picture is consistently undermined by the answer to another question: Who has enough money to be nominated for Best Picture?
There’s a reason terribly mediocre and forgettable movies end up on the final Oscar ballot year after year: money, money, money. If movie studios and distributors can afford to get their movie in front of more eyeballs, be it due to screenings, screeners, promotional materials, and even glamorous events, they increase their odds of being nominated. That’s the very simple, and admittedly rather reductive, reason that middle of the road movies like Green Book, Vice, and Bohemian Rhapsody end up as major Oscar players.
With less than 24 hours until this year’s Oscar nominations are revealed, imagine for a moment what the Best Picture lineup could be if only the very best films, the ones that represent the greatest and most genuine achievements in the medium, were nominated.
These five movies deserve to be nominated for Best Picture, even if they never stood a chance.
‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout’
Anyone familiar with the Academy Awards knows they are frequent and consistent perpetrators of genre bias. Sci-fi, horror, and action films are routinely ignored when it comes to major categories — especially Best Picture. They’re far more apt to receive nominations for visual effects, sound design, and editing rather than the Best Picture category. This is particularly shameful when movies like Mission: Impossible — Fallout exist.
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Fallout is a masterclass in big budget filmmaking. The movie is full of jaw-dropping practical stunts, impressively choreographed fight and chase scenes, and a tightly plotted and concisely written international spy story. It manages to accomplish all of those things while never sacrificing a strong visual style and clear direction. Fallout exists in the same vein as Mad Max: Fury Road and deserved to be seriously considered for Best Picture.
‘First Reformed’
Writer and director Paul Schrader has never been nominated for an Oscar. Given a career full of iconic and influential movies, this is particularly frustrating. Now, in 2018, Paul Schrader delivered one of his strongest movies to date and it seems poised to be almost entirely shut out by the Academy. Aside from a lingering chance at a screenplay nomination, First Reformed has been ignored by awards bodies despite being one of the year’s very best movies.
First Reformed has arguably the opposite problem to Mission: Impossible — Fallout. Whereas Fallout was mostly written off for being an action movie, First Reformed was taken too seriously to make it big with the Oscars. The film is oppressively bleak, a quality that no doubt contributes to its brilliance, but makes it a difficult movie to market to voting Academy members who are generally looking for movies that straddle the line between important and palatable. There’s nothing palatable about First Reformed, even if it does deserve to be nominated for Best Picture.
‘Happy as Lazzaro’
A lot has been said about Roma, the semi-autobiographical film from director Alfonso Cuarón about Cleo, a maid working for a middle-class family in Mexico City in the 1970s. While the movie touches on the inherent inequality at the heart of the story, it doesn’t fully commit to this narrative. Instead, Roma opts for a more romanticized look at the family dynamics. Alice Rohrwacher’s film Happy as Lazzaro, with similar stylistic elements and also released by Netflix, failed to receive the same treatment as Cuarón’s film.
This is especially disappointing given just how good Happy as Lazzaro is. The film depicts, with stunning beauty and sharp intellect, the divide between the working and ruling classes, rural communities and city dwellers, by telling a story that is both intensely real and disarmingly magical. Rohrwacher uses this rich backdrop to tell a story of inequality and exploitation, friendship and selflessness. The film is keenly aware of the tenuous relationship between empathy and exploitation, particularly how the absence of the former gives way to the latter. The movie’s use of magical realism allows this metaphor to be extended across time in a way a more traditional narrative would not. If Roma is strong enough to be considered for Best Picture, then Happy as Lazzaro should be in contention right alongside it. Unfortunately, Netflix didn’t spend nearly the same amount of money on Rohrwacher’s film as they did Cuarón’s. What a shame!
‘Support the Girls’
There’s an absence of strong indie films in this year’s crop of Best Picture hopefuls that should be filled by Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls. This is the kind of movie that feels so prescient and genuine that if it could only get in front of the people that should and need to see it, it would be an instant contender. Unfortunately, like so many movies, Support the Girls is simply too modest, too quietly distributed, that it just cannot hold a candle to the marketing budgets of bigger movies.
At one point late in the film, Regina Hall (who happens to lead a stellar cast of characters) says, “I started this day off crying, so if you ask me, laughing is progress.” It’s cheap to call things “relatable” in 2019, but there you have it. Support the Girls understands the tension between struggle and success that most normal Americans feel every day. Those experiences are rarely depicted as honestly as they are in Bujalski’s film. Support the Girls is neither overly miserable nor unrealistically optimistic. In another world, it would be a surefire nominee for Best Picture.
‘Private Life’
If Oscar prognosticators are to be believed, we are heading for an Oscar ballot absent films directed by women. This is disappointing, especially given the momentum around increasing gender parity in Hollywood. Last year, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird met with some success, but despite its five nominations, it went home empty handed. Despite a strong contingent of female directed movies, awards bodies have ignored those in favor of more traditional Oscar bait like Green Book.
Tamara Jenkins’ film Private Life remains a sublime choice for awards voters. It’s an incredible story about family — both the one we have and the one we want to build. Arresting performances from Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti, one of the year’s best screenplays, and pitch perfect direction should have made Private Life a shoe-in for Oscar contention. At some point in Hollywood’s ongoing wrestling match with change, there needs to be a conversation about how the Oscars are inherently biased towards films directed by men — even if the men themselves have a documented history of abuse, harassment, racism, and bias. Private Life was all but written off before it even had a chance to find its legs.
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