#barbie itself got nominated BUT NOT THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THIS MOVIE?????

[frecklystars]

Don’t get me wrong I love Ryan Gosling’s Ken more than I love anyone else rn. I owe that character my life. I genuinely would not have lived through the last 6 months if I didn’t have that movie breathing life back into me when I was at my lowest point, he’s my number one go-to character when my flashbacks are happening and when I need support. I would genuinely have died without this guy and his dozen characters to keep me going and helping me feel safe self shipping again

But how the fuck did Ryan get nominated for an Oscar for being a supporter to Barbie while Margot Robbie whomst IS Barbie, she is EVERYTHING… did not…???? 😭😭 How did Greta Gerwig not get nominated for best director when she made history being the first and only female director to break the biggest opening at the box office????? What the fresh fuck is this

Ryan said himself it’s Barbie AND Ken… there is no Just Ken………………

The Barbie movie would not have happened if Margot didn’t get the rights to Barbie and trust Greta 100%. Nobody believed in this movie more than Margot did, because she believed in Greta, she knew it would be a powerful film. It would not have been half the story that it is if Greta didn’t direct this movie. Greta and Margot are the reason this movie 1) exists in the first place and 2) the reason the movie is as incredible as it is. Not to mention Margot had to convince Mattel that they needed to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable. They were allowed to get away with SO MUCH because Margot is an artist at putting her 110% into everything she does and that includes getting Mattel to allow any of this to exist in the first place when they are so careful with Barbie.

Margot and Greta are literally everything. Ryan is JUST. KEN. THAT HAS BEEN THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT

[thegeneralreturns]

IF I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO RANK THEM: The Academy Award nominees for Best Picture

10. Maestro - With its dialogue gaudily written in a style reminiscent of the Golden Age of Hollywood--keeping all of the cadence and none of the wit--kudos must be given to co-writer, co-producer, director and star Bradley Cooper for making a movie about the first great American conductor of classical music that's utterly fucking excruciating to listen to. And as an actor, he doesn't find a character here, getting lost in an impression and hiding behind prosthesis. He did give one of the best performances of 2023, but it wasn't as Leonard Bernstein, it was as Rocket Raccoon. Though I will say this film is impeccably made, and even though he can't make a connection himself, he did a great job in setting up Carey Mulligan to succeed. She gives one of her best performances as Bernstein's long-suffering wife. Bradley Cooper is a wonderful director, and he's a pretty good actor once he gets out of his own way. But could someone who loves him please tell him to step away from the typewriter?

9. The Holdovers - Da Vine Joy Randolph is the front-runner for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. And she deserves it, as the rest of The Holdovers can't keep up with her. Alexander Payne's early-seventies boarding school pastiche is all artifice and cliche (most of the time agreeably so, I'll admit), but when Randolph's school cook starts emotionally cratering in a very real, visceral, uncomfortable way, the movie seems to wake up... only to lull itself back to sleep once the camera is off of her. I have often said that one can only review the movie one is given, but, well, I'd have paid the premium price to go see the movie about Da Vine Joy Randolph's Mary. As it stands, I'm glad I caught The Holdovers on Peacock.

8. Poor Things - If Tim Burton suffered from a permanent hard-on, this is the movie he would make. Yorgos Lanthimos' feminist, socialist riff on the Frankenstein story has a lot of ideas and a ton of jokes that land, only for him to vanish up the prolapsed asshole of his own technique. It feels as though we're assaulted on the quarter-hour with iris shots and fish-eye lenses that seem to serve no other purpose than to inform the audience that this film is capital D Directed. I recommend this movie, don't get me wrong. It's smart, it's hilarious, the sets and costumes are impeccable, and Emma Stone gives an all-time belter of a performance. But it's really frustrating to have all this in the hands of a director that's the equivalent of an eight-year-old who wants us to watch him do cannonballs in the pool.

7. American Fiction - Cord Jefferson's American Fiction was sold as a biting satire of the inherent racial prejudices of the American literary industrial complex, from publishers looking for authenticity to the heaps of plaudits delivered by guilty white readers who want to bear witness to black misery without being told how much they suck for that. But I gotta tell ya, I think Jefferson could have gone farther. He could have been a little bit more vicious, went for blood, because what we're left with a satire that doesn't really seem to be mad at anyone. But the human drama and comedy that exists apart from that? That works wonderfully. Jefferson populated his film with real, loveable people that any audience would want to spend more time with. It's only surprising that Sterling K. Brown got nominated for an Oscar if you haven't seen the movie yet. And Jeffrey Wright's transformation into America's brainy, slightly depressed uncle continues apace.

6. Barbie - It was a cultural juggernaut that made all the money in the world, and spawned enough thinkpieces to choke a team of Clydesdales. Did its admittedly lofty ambitions jibe with its tone and approach? Not always. But did its jokes land? Yes, Barbie was the funniest movie of 2023. But I don't think I can say what hasn't already been said... Except America Ferrera was really good. I'm serious, I saw people get all butthurt about her Best Supporting Actress nomination, but these people couldn't reason their way out of a wet paper bag that was open already. And this isn't even about that monologue, either. Ferrera provided an oasis of plausibility in the middle of all this neon pink madness. Never once does she wink at the camera, or dive in and join the scenery chewing. She's funny, but funny in a real way that provides much needed counterweight to the musical numbers and jokes about Skipper dolls with expanding boobs. If it weren't for America Ferrera's work, Barbie would have been caricatures bouncing off of one another, and any weight this movie has is a testament to her skill. She was given a truly thankless task... Or it would have been, if she didn't get that nomination. Good for her.

5. The Zone of Interest - One does not explain Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, one can only experience it. A man and his family settle down into their new house, only the man is the commandant at Auschwitz, and the twentieth century's greatest evil is happening just beyond the garden wall. We never venture into the camp itself, we never see what goes on, but for one-hundred-and-five minutes, we hear it. This family idyll is constantly underscored by gunshots, screaming, barking dogs, and the ever-present drone of the crematorium. This is one of the most unsettling experiences I've ever had watching a movie... the first time around. I don't think it would work dramatically for a second viewing. For as much mileage as Glazer gets out of his approach, it's still a gimmick. Not a cheap gimmick, mind you. It's a free-range gourmet gimmick from a place that's hard to pronounce, but a gimmick nonetheless.

4. Anatomy of a Fall - I don't know whether to ding Justine Triet's plug for the website didshedoit.com before even the studio's logo at the beginning, or to commend her for it. It tells us what kind of movie we're in for. A man falls from the balcony of his French chalet, and it's determined that it was either suicide, or he was pushed by his wife, and we spend the next two-and-a-half hours going through interrogations, investigations, re-enactments, and a full-blown trial trying to get to the bottom of a question that we were told at the beginning, through the mention of that website, that we weren't getting an answer to. It's only arrogance if Triet can't pull it off, and she very much does, presenting us with information in a way that leads us to question how we got to our conclusions. I'm usually resistant to movies that try to get us into a dialogue with ourselves, but the answers I got from... uh... me, were quite enlightening. I think it's odd that the Palme D'Or went to a simple courtroom movie, but as far as simple courtroom movies go, it's the best I've seen in decades.

3. Oppenheimer - Those who claim that Oppenheimer glorifies the life of the father of the atomic bomb quite frankly haven't seen it. I have never seen a biopic that holds its subject in such lively, blistering contempt as this one does. Cillian Murphy's J. Robert Oppenheimer is a man blundering towards a scientific breakthrough that will irrevocably worsen the world, and the only one who can't see it is him. Christopher Nolan's usual icy disregard for the people at the center of his narrative mazes comes off, in this case, as a kind of deadpan disapproval of a man who, brilliant though he may be, just can't see the train coming. Geniuses are still just men, only their mistakes are an entire magnitude larger, and virtually unfixable.

2. Past Lives - What a wonderful movie this is. A boy and a girl in Korea separate after her parents emigrate to America, only for them to reconnect decades later in New York, after she's married someone else. But the held breaths and things left unsaid aren't just romantic, but encompass the entirety of both their lives. It's not just about lost love, but lost opportunity, and being a stranger to themselves had one other thing gone different. Boy loses girl, and the realm of possibility winnows down to one for both of them. More than what these people say to each other in Celeste Song's marvelous debut, but what they don't say. What they can't admit to themselves. What they think the other can't take. Past Lives is quiet and delicate, but boy is it powerful.

And the Best Picture of the Best Pictures is...

Killers of the Flower Moon - This is a master working at the height of his powers. This is a top-shelf effort from the greatest filmmaker the United States has ever produced, depicting in minute detail the slow-motion genocide of the Osage people for oil money in the 1920s. At the center of this is Leonardo DiCaprio's Ernest Burkhart; a dimwit roped into this evil by his charismatic uncle, played by Robert DeNiro. It is through the lens of Burkhart that most of this story unfolds; a man whose grief and good intentions and convictions melt away once someone stronger and wealthier than he is tells him to do something that violates them. Now, there are some who recoil at this approach, preferring instead to center more on Ernest's Osage wife Mollie (played in a performance for the ages by Lily Gladstone). And I want it known that I'm sympathetic to this view. The movie they want may very well have been a great one, and it may very well have been better than this one (Hey, anything's possible), but it wouldn't have been this movie, which I wouldn't trade for anything. Mollie Burkart is the kind of character that would be the hero in another film, but Martin Scorsese doesn't make movies about heroes. He makes movies about weakness and failure. Hell, his movie about Jesus centered on a hypothetical moment of temptation. If Ernest Burkart hadn't existed, Scorsese would have had to invent him.