→ April 25, 2021
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Oscar picks, 2021 edition.

The Oscars are happening tonight, about two months later than usual, so I’ve put together this post with some loose predictions, my own picks for each award, and, most importantly, links to every one of these films I’ve reviewed. I’ve seen all of the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay nominees, and all but one of the films in the four acting categories, as well as all five documentaries and all five animated features, with 50 total films seen from the 2020 awards cycle (which ran fourteen months).

Best Picture

The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7

Who will win: Nomadland

Who should win: Nomadland

I don’t feel that confident in the prediction here; I’m a little concerned that Chicago 7 will win, as it’s such an actor-focused, Very Important Film that it might resonate with the same voters who picked Green Book two years ago. I’ve seen Minari, and loved it, but haven’t posted a review yet.

Snubs: A Sun didn’t even make the Best International Feature cut (it was on the shortlist), but it belongs here, as does One Night in Miami, the exclusion of which I simply do not understand. Never Rarely Sometimes Always would have been a good if out-of-the-box choice. I haven’t seen First Cow yet.

Best Director

Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)
Mank (David Fincher)
Minari (Lee Isaac Chung)
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao)
Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell)

Who will win: Zhao

Who should win: Zhao

This award and Best Picture used to be more closely linked than they are now, but I’m not sure I see them splitting the votes this time around. Vinterberg’s nomination seems inexplicable, unless it’s a sympathy vote, as his daughter was killed in a car accident during filming; she helped inspire the script and he dedicated the film to her.

Snubs: Regina King was supposed to be a lock for this category for One Night in Miami. I would have given Florian Zeller a nod as well for The Father.

Best Actress

Viola Davis, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Andra Day, The United States vs. Billie Holliday
Vanessa Kirby, Pieces of a Woman
Frances McDormand, Nomadland
Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman

Who will win: Mulligan

Who should win: Mulligan

Davis could win this, but I don’t think this is particularly close on the merits. Mulligan gave one of the two best performances I saw this year, and if pushed I think she gave the best one. I was very glad to see Kirby get a nomination even though she has no chance to win – she is that movie, and she’s clearly a star on the rise.

Snubs: Carrie Coon for The Nest and Sidney Flanigan for Never Rarely Sometimes Always would both have been better choices than Day, who does a fine job with a terribly written part.

Best Actor

Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal
Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Anthony Hopkins, The Father
Gary Oldman, Mank
Stephen Yeun, Minari

Who will win: Boseman

Who should win: Hopkins

Boseman’s going to win, obviously, and he was very good … but Hopkins was just better, in a more significant role. I wouldn’t want to see the reaction if Hopkins were to win.

Snubs: I’m good with these five. Dev Patel was great in A Personal History of David Copperfield.

Best Supporting Actress

Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Glenn Close, Hillbilly Elegy
Olivia Colman, The Father
Amanda Seyfried, Mank
Yuh-Jung Youn, Minari

Who will win: Youn

Who should win: Youn

I feel like this is a lock, and of the four I’ve seen – I haven’t seen Hillbilly Elegy and see no good reason to do so – I’d put Youn and Colman as 1 and 1A, Bakalova second, and would give Seyfried a participation trophy. Maybe Close gets some sort of lifetime achievement thing here, especially after losing to Colman a few years ago when she was supposed to win, but people forget that The Wife was actually a shit movie.

Snubs: Tilda Swinton was superb in The Personal History of David Copperfield, certainly deserving of Seyfried’s spot.

Best Supporting Actor

Sasha Baron Cohen, The Trial of the Chicago 7
Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah
Leslie Odom, Jr., One Night in Miami
Paul Raci, Sound of Metal
LaKeith Stanfield, Judas and the Black Messiah

Who will win: Kaluuya

Who should win: Kaluuya

I’ll say this – if Raci wins, it’ll be an amazing story, and I’ll cheer for him. But Kaluuya was slightly better in a much more significant role, and he’s one of the best actors going today. Of course, he was really the lead actor in Judas, but that’s another story entirely, I guess.

Snubs: I’m also good with these five, although Kingsley Ben?Adir was pretty amazing as Malcolm X in One Night in Miami.

Best Documentary Feature

Collective
Crip Camp
The Mole Agent
My Octopus Teacher
Time

What will win: Time

What should win: Collective

I just don’t know; I thought Time was the shoo-in here, but Tim Grierson thinks My Octopus Teacher – easily my least favorite of these – is going to win, and no matter what, Collective should win, because it’s the best story and it’s told so effortlessly.

Snubs: Transhood. It’s on HBO Max. You should watch it.

Best Writing, Original Screenplay

Judas and the Black Messiah
Minari
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7

What should win: Promising Young Woman

What will win: Promising Young Woman

The screenplay categories have become a way to honor a film that has no shot at Best Picture (or maybe anything else) with a little pat on the head to say, “good job, we liked your little movie.” In this case, though, I’m good with Promising Young Woman taking this award home but not getting Director or Best Picture; the script itself is daring and novel and gets at least some of the credit for enabling Mulligan’s performance.

Snubs: A Sun, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, The Nest.

Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
The Father
Nomadland
One Night in Miami
The White Tiger

What should win: One Night in Miami

What will win: The Father

I could go either way here with those two screenplays; The Father is a better movie, because of Hopkins and some directorial choices, but Miami gets a very slight edge for me in the writing department.

Snubs: A Personal History of David Copperfield. You may remember the original.

Best Animated Feature Film

Onward
Over the Moon
Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon
Soul
Wolfwalkers

What should win: Wolfwalkers

What will win: Soul

Pixar just has such a huge advantage in this category that it seems contrarian to predict any non-Pixar film to win, but I’ll pull for Wolfwalkers, another hand-drawn film from Cartoon Saloon, even knowing it probably has no chance. Soul might be fourth for me among these nominees.

Snubs: The only other eligible film I saw was A Whisker Away, an anime film you can see on Netflix, which offers a far better story than Onward.

Best Animated Short Film

“Burrow”
“Genius Loci”
“If Anything Happens I Love You”
“Opera”
“Yes-People”

What should win: “If Anything Happens I Love You”

What will win: “Burrow”

“If Anything Happens I Love You,” available on Netflix, follows a couple after their only child has been killed in a school shooting. It’s devastating, and the style of the art further evokes those emotions. But I always assume Pixar is going to win this category. (I haven’t seen “Opera,” which appears to only be streaming on the subscription site ShortsTV.)

Snubs: “Cops and Robbers,” also on Netflix, can’t quite match the animation quality of “Yes-People” or the style of “Genius Loci” (which bored me), but the story, told as spoken-word poetry, is more relevant and more powerful. I don’t think dialogue gets you far in this category, though.

Best International Feature Film

Another Round
Better Days
Collective
The Man Who Sold His Skin
Quo Vadis, Aida?

I’ve only seen Another Round and Collective here; I’d vote for Collective of the two, but I think A Sun was better than both. The last two are now both on Hulu, so I’ll get to them eventually.  

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→ April 18, 2021
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Collective.

Collective has repeated the feat of 2019’s Honeyland by earning nominations in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature categories at the Oscars, and if I had a vote, I’d at least give it a nod in the first one. It’s an amazing story that became bigger and more impressive well after the filmmakers had already chosen their subjects, as a small group of investigative reporters helped bring down an entire government, only to have the same party voted back into power less than a year later.

Collective (Colectiv) was a nightclub in Bucharest, Romania, that was the site of a deadly fire caused by the use of pyrotechnics at an indoor concert, which ignited the soundproofing in the venue – the same cause of the Station fire in Providence, Rhode Island, about 12 years earlier. Where the Collective fire differed, however, was the lower death toll at the site; 26 people died at the scene, but 38 more died later in hospitals, with 146 people injured. An journalist at a daily sports newspaper, The Sports Gazette, saw the number of deaths in hospitals as worthy of further investigation, and the work he and his colleagues did uncovered a massive corruption scandal that included a supplier of disinfectants to hospitals diluting the solution ten times, rendering it ineffective, and the refusal to send some patients abroad to burn units for fear it would reflect badly on the ruling party. The technocrat who takes over the Ministry of Health after the government collapses discovers that the state-run health system is rotten to the core, and there is no straightforward way to fix it or root out corruption. In the end, therefore, little really changes, and we are left to think that the corruption will resume with the restoration of the Social Democrats to power and the government’s failure to replace incompetent hospital managers. In parallel, we see parts of the journey of one of the survivors, Tedy Ursuleanu, who was very badly burned, losing parts of both hands and suffering burns all over her body, as she tries to reclaim something of her life, creating an art installation that provides the movie with some of its most central imagery.

Collective works as a documentary more than anything else because the story is so incredible and so vast in scope. What must have seemed at first to be just a film that followed some investigative reporters looking into irregularities around a major tragedy turned out to be a scandal that reached the top levels of the Romanian national government – something the documentary makers couldn’t have anticipated. They also received what appears to be unfettered access to meetings held by the technocrat Minister, who comes across as a would-be reformer who wants to be as transparent as possible with the press and public, but whose hands are tied by existing regulations and contracts and realizes he can’t do anything he’d want to do to try to fix the system. Meanwhile, the reporters keep uncovering new angles to the scandal, enough that you would think Romanian voters would have had no interest in voting for the same party that oversaw the erosion of the state hospital network, but they did so, the one event in the film that probably could have used some more explanation. It means the film ends on something of a hopeless note, which I suppose was unavoidable – documentary makers can’t choose their endings – but it’s a gut punch to watch all of the survivors and victims’ family members for nearly two hours, only to see that the state and the voters just don’t care enough to act on it.

I’ve seen all five nominated documentaries, and Collective would be my choice for the award, with Crip Camp second. This film does what I think great documentaries need to do – it stays out of the way of the story it’s telling. That’s not always possible, depending on the circumstances of the film’s subject, but in this case the filmmakers’ access to the reporters, press briefings, and eventually the Ministry’s internal meetings obviated any need for narration or other structure. It can be very hard to watch in the early going, because the camera doesn’t shy away from the details – we have footage from inside the concert venue, and we see plenty of burn victims, including one stomach-churning shot of a victim in the hospital whose wounds contain live maggots – but this film, more than any of the other nominated ones, has the power to force changes, if not in Romania, then perhaps elsewhere in the world. We need more documentaries like this, and more reporters like those who broke the story, and Collective should be an inspiration to anyone who tells stories for a living.

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