2022 in movies

Here we go, my annual Oscars preview with links to every movie I’ve reviewed on this site. Throw your predictions, disagreements, snubs, and more in the comments.

Best Picture

All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

What will win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

What should win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

What was snubbed: Decision to Leave, Aftersun, The Eternal Daughter

I know there’s a wide chasm between folks who think EEAAO should win, like I do, and those who think it will be at best a below-median Best Picture winner, but I’m comfortable with my take. Not only do I think the film works extremely well, but it’s also tried to do the most – it’s an extremely ambitious movie on multiple levels, and succeeds at all of them. There should be a level of difficulty adjustment when considering movies for this honor. My second choice would be The Banshees of Inisherin, while Elvis would be the biggest travesty, although I haven’t seen Avatar.

Best Actor

Austin Butler, Elvis
Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brendan Fraser, The Whale
Paul Mescal, Aftersun
Bill Nighy, Living

Who will win: Fraser

Who should win: (pass)

Who was snubbed: Park Hae-il, Decision to Leave; Song Kang-ho, Broker

I haven’t seen The Whale or Living, since even people who praise Fraser’s performance don’t say kind things about the movie, and I’m not paying $20 to stream a bad film at home, even to hate-watch it. Mescal and Farrell were both incredible in their roles and weren’t doing an extended impersonation, like Butler did, but it seems like neither has any chance to win.

Best Actress

Ana de Armas, Blonde
Cate Blanchett, Tár
Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie
Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans
Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Yeoh

Who should win: Blanchett

Who I really want to win: Yeoh

Who was snubbed: Tilda Swinton, The Eternal Daughter

Best Actress is the strongest category this year, although the nominations don’t adequately reflect how good a year it was for actresses in leading roles. De Armas was not good in a terrible role within an even worse movie, and Williams, while a very skilled actress, gave an affected performance that barely qualified as leading. I could name a half-dozen better performances than de Armas’s, and did in my Blonde review. Of the contenders, Riseborough had no shot even without the controversy, and I’d give Blanchett a slight edge over Yeoh, but Yeoh is the sentimental favorite for many reasons and Blanchett already has one of these things.

Best Supporting Actor

Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway
Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans
Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin
Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Quan

Who should win: Quan

Who was snubbed: Gabriel Labelle, The Fabelmans

I think this is the lock of the night, and I’m good with it, although Gleeson did give something close to a second lead performance in Banshees. Quan is another sentimental favorite, since EEAAO marks his return to acting after a twenty-year absence, but he’s absolutely essential to that movie and his character has the most range of any of the four main ones. Hirsch has the weakest case, since he’s on screen for less than ten minutes, and this seems like a way to honor an older actor at the end of his life rather than an argument that this was one of the five best performances by an actor in a supporting role in 2022. He’s very good in that small role, though.

Best Supporting Actress

Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Hong Chau, The Whale
Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Bassett

Who should win: (pass)

Who was snubbed: Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness

I’ve only seen Banshees and EEAAO, although I’ll get to Black Panther soon – I loved the first one, like most people, but that has made me disinclined to see the sequel, especially given its running time. (Seriously, enough with the three-hour movies. Hollywood needs a pitch clock.) I also haven’t seen The Whale, so I can’t say specifically that de Leon belonged over her, but de Leon was the only truly redeeming quality her film had. Chauwas great in the underrated The Menu, though.

Best Directing

Todd Field, Tár
Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness
Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Who will win: Spielberg

Who should win: No opinion

Who was snubbed: Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave

This is my pick for the category where something wacky might happen. I could see any of these candidates winning, and while the betting lines have the Daniels as huge favorites, I’m not sure … is it not a serious enough movie? Is this the one place the voters honor Spielberg for making a movie about how great movies are? (They could do that with original screenplay, too.) Does that create a chance for one of the other three to sneak in? I don’t have a strong opinion on this award this year, despite seeing all five of the nominees; I would just say I don’t think Östlunddeserves it, because the movie itself isn’t very good, and the direction in the middle section is too weak.

Best Writing (Original Screenplay)

Who will win: The Daniels

Who should win: McDonagh

Who was snubbed: Jeong Seo-kyeong & Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave; Charlotte Wells, Aftersun

I’ll point out that these are the same five nominees as the five for Directing, and none are women, again.

Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, and Ian Stokell, All Quiet on the Western Front
Kazuo Ishiguro, Living
Rian Johnson, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Sarah Polley, Women Talking
A whole bunch of people, Top Gun: Maverick

Who will win: Ishiguro

Who should win: Polley*

I haven’t seen Living, so I qualify my opinion that Polley should win here with that caveat. Ishiguro is an actual Nobel Prize winner. I feel like that’s going to sway a lot of voters, even some who haven’t seen the movie. This would make him just the third person ever to win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, along with Bob Dylan and George Bernard Shaw, both of whom won the same Nobel as Ishiguro (Literature). Maybe I’m way off base, but I try not to overestimate the Oscar electorate.

Best Animated Feature

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Puss n Boots: The Last Wish
The Sea Beast
Turning Red

What will win: GDT’s Pinocchio

What should win: The Sea Beast

What was snubbed: My Father’s Dragon

I haven’t seen the latest Puss n Boots cash grab, and I doubt I will. Pinocchio looked amazing but the songs weren’t good and the story itself felt wooden (yes, pun intended). I watched The Sea Beast last night on a flight home and was pleasantly surprised by many aspects of the story, while the animation was excellent. My Father’s Dragon is the latest film from Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers) and I can’t recommend it enough if you enjoy animation. I have Inu-Oh downloaded on my iPad right now to watch on a future flight, after it earned a Golden Globe nomination.

Other quick thoughts:

I’ve only seen three of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees, with Navalny my favorite, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed fascinating but also a little frustrating in its lack of focus, and Fire of Love a disappointment.
I’ve seen just two of the five Best International Feature Film nominees, de-prioritizing those once it became clear All Quiet on the Western Front was a complete lock, while my #3 film of the year, Decision to Leave, got the shaft. I also think All Quiet will win Best Cinematography and a bunch of other awards that are very important but that I don’t think I know enough to offer an opinion.

The Banshees of Inisherin is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s first film since 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was his most acclaimed movie to that point and took home the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. His latest led all films this year with eight Golden Globe nominations, and reunites the two leads from his debut film In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a dark comedy with two distinct, serious themes lying beneath the film’s absurdist surface. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)

Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) both live on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, where not much of anything happens, and as far as I can tell almost nobody ever has to go to work. Padraig and Colm are drinking buddies who walk to the pub every afternoon, with Padraig stopping by Colm’s house on the way, until one day Colm completely ignores Padraig’s knock, and ignores him at the pub as well, eventually telling him he doesn’t want to be friends any more. This unprovoked severing of ties, which Padraig can’t understand and won’t accept, even in the face of Colm’s threats and rather disturbing actions, leads to an escalation of hostilities that wrecks the peace of the island and leaves nobody better off than before.

McDonagh has a gift for language and crafting witty lines, starting off early on in Banshees when everyone asks Padraig if he and Colm are “rowin’” often enough that it becomes funny just by repetition. The comic elements here are a necessary reprieve from the film’s increasingly dark elements, including the deterioration between the two main characters, the insidious gossip that poisons the island’s culture, young Dominic (Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, and more. It’s the sort of story where its pervasive awfulness becomes even more apparent after it’s over, because the humor and absurdity mask the bleak story while you’re still watching it.

The film works on one level as an exploration of male friendship, and how fragile those bonds can be in the wrong sort of environment. It’s not so much a question of toxic masculinity, as neither character exhibits much in that vein; Padraig is probably too sensitive, at least when he’s not in his cups, and Colm’s reasons for shunning Padraig and subsequent reactions are more those of someone dealing with mental illness. One of them eventually takes their quarrel too far, pushing them past the point of no return, and a once-solid friendship, one that everyone on the island took as a given, is reduced to ashes.

It’s also a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Irish Civil War, which is often mentioned in the script, including in the final scene, and is nearing its conclusion as the movie takes place. This civil war began after the Irish War of Independence, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State as a “dominion” within the Commonwealth, giving the island – sans Northern Island, which exercised its opt-out clause and ~~became a free agent~~ remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Island – greater autonomy, leading to full independence in 1933. After the Free State was established, however, pro-independence forces who opposed this partial solution fought an armed rebellion against the new, provisional government, with former IRA members from the war of independence now split between the two forces. The Irish fought a war to kick out the English, won it, and then ended up fighting themselves, leading to nearly 2000 deaths and substantial economic losses. The conflict may have begun over a principle, but escalated into violence when a democratic solution was likely achievable. It led to decades of mistrust between the spiritual descendants of the two sides, one of which later split into the political parties Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The metaphor here doesn’t map perfectly one-to-one – I don’t think Colm is one side and Padraig the other, although a scholar of Irish history may see it quite differently – but it does speak to the pointlessness of war, especially when the two sides escalate hostilities in turn.

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen Colin Farrell do, requiring more range from him than In Bruges or The Lobster, as he makes Padraig feel completely three-dimensional – you know someone like him, someone well-intentioned but unable to get out of his own way, someone who’s probably not the most interesting guy to have a beer with, let alone a beer every day, but who would likely be the first person to show up if you needed help. Gleeson is also strong, as always, but his character is just not as well-written, and his complexity is, shall we say, a little harder to understand. Keoghan is fine as Dominic, who is probably developmentally disabled, although his story feels tangential and his main function seems to be to serve as a plot point for Padraig and Padraig’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), on whom Dominic has a crush. Siobhan’s life is even more stifled than Padraig’s, and an opportunity eventually arises for her to leave Inisherin, a move that completely unmoors her brother, already shaken from having Colm cast him off.

We’ve largely just begun our run through Oscar-worthy movies, so I can’t compare it to much, but I wouldn’t put this over Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is still the best movie I’ve seen from 2022, although I could take an argument for McDonagh’s script over the Daniels’ script for EEAAO. Both are outstanding, but McDonagh’s dialogue is better. The Academy has already nominated McDonagh twice before for his screenplays, which makes me strongly suspect he’ll get a nod for this one as well.

Oscars preview, 2023 edition.

The Banshees of Inisherin.

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