These Oscars do feel sort of forgotten, though, and not only because most of us have already tried to move on from 2020. Joe Biden has ushered out Trump and ushered in all sorts of hope across the board, including the recent COVID aid package. Who wants to dwell on last year?
The Academy, that's who, as they forced an Oscar qualifying deadline that was perversely late. I was under the misapprehension that the nominations were supposed to come out on March 8th -- that was the deadline for this year's Flickchart Awards nominations, which are usually in sync with the Oscars on their timing -- but they didn't arrive until wee in the early hours of the Ides of March Los Angeles time.
Even with the extra time allotted me, I had only seen five of the eight best picture nominees. I'll remind you of how I ranked them back in January on my year-end list:
1. Sound of Metal (7)
2. Mank (39)
3. Promising Young Woman (40)
4. Nomadland (82)
5. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (99)
Wow, looking at that, I guess that makes me more out of sync with the Academy this year than I thought. I was going to say "The Academy managed a good slate of nominees despite the pandemic," but who am I kidding? Only one of them cracked my top 35 for the year. (I have complicated thoughts on Promising Young Woman, as do most of us I imagine.)
I did catch up on Minari this week, Tuesday night, sort of in celebration of the nominations. That was the first night after they were released when I could have seen a movie, and I opted for this over one of the two other best picture nominees I haven't yet seen, Judas and the Black Messiah, mostly because a different critic owes me a review for that and I thought I could get a Minari review out of the experience. Only then did I realize Minari has been out for a month here now, so that kind of goes against my usual review-posting timeframe.
Minari would slot in at #2 behind Sound of Metal. I liked it a lot but do not think of it as a "special favorite." The Father, the third I haven't seen, comes out here two weeks from today.
I'm also still having trouble shaking the notion that Judas and the Black Messiah is "really" a 2021 film. Because I was hearing awards buzz a lot earlier for The Father and Minari, I don't see them that way, even though they are more or less in the same boat as Judas. But I didn't even hear about Judas until 2021 and felt for sure that it was "always intended" as a 2021 release, rather than a 2020 release delayed for awards consideration, though really, I have no idea.
The nominees threw some other titles from 2021 into confusion. I thought for sure Ramin Bahrani's Netflix film The White Tiger, which I currently have ranked among my 2021 films, was a "pure" 2021 film, but there it was, getting nominated for a screenplay Oscar. I guess it's time for me to just throw out all my worries and count all these films, including probably also One Night in Miami, toward 2021.
There were a few unusual nominees that might not had made the cut in a normal year. For example, although I think Maria Bakalova's performance in Borat was great, it's not the type of performance, nor is that the type of film, that would get Oscar nominations in a full slate of releases. (That's right, plural -- it also got a screenplay nomination, strangely enough, and good on Priyanka Chopra Jonas for spitting out the whole 53-word title flawlessly, not once but twice, as she read the nominees.) Overall though, aside from the lack of big tentpoles dominating the technical categories, it probably looked pretty similar to most other years.
I'm sure I'll be there on April 25th -- or April 26th my time -- to watch the show, like I always do. But these Oscars still feel forgotten to me, and I kind of want to forget them and move on. I suppose I should get used to this, though, as the ten-month 2021 Oscar season might leave me in a similar place of melancholy consternation next year.
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