Deep Dive: The 2024 Best Picture Nominees
Deep Dive: The 2024 Best Picture Nominees
Why they're the best nominees we've seen in over 15 years.
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The 96th Academy Awards will close the loop on another awards season tomorrow and put a firm full stop on the 2023 movie year. Host Jimmy Kimmel will make his safe and silly jokes, pandering and placating to the millionaires and billionaires in the room while also trying to connect, in his constipated way, with whoever is still watching from home.
Yes, it’s the most gratuitously glad-handing, phenomenally fake and supremely superficial night in all of Hollywood. Most people with a good sense of what intelligent and confident humor is and the clarity of mind to know what and who they’re watching will spend most of their time missing Ricky Gervais’ run as Golden Globes host.
The show is likely going to suck. But! There is a silver lining and it’s breaking through in the most unexpected category of all. The mother of all categories. The category that has time and time and time again never failed to disappoint cinephiles of good taste worldwide.
The Mediocrity of Recent Best Picture Nominees
The Best Picture has historically missed the mark so many times, with its nominees and/or its eventual winners, that it’s become a bit of a joke for serious film lovers. Merit and artistic quality have nothing on campaigns, socio-political trends and historical (over)corrections. Like William Munny (Clint Eastwood) says in the brilliant Unforgiven - winner of Best Picture and Best Director in 1993, 30 light-years ago - “Deserves got nothin’ to do with it”.
Don’t believe me? Let’s refresh our memories…
Apart from a few notable exceptions from each year1, this is as spectacularly bland a mix of forgettable and mediocre movies as you can imagine from the last decade. The same decade which coincided with, wellwaddayaknow, Oscar’s TV ratings tanking harder than The Marvels at the box office.
Cinematic masterpieces driven by riveting storytelling, characters that feel alive, innovative direction and hard-to-describe soulful performances prove to be exceptions to the rule. The one that dictates Best Picture Oscar nominees must be cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill, entirely unspectacular entertainment, destined to be forgotten within a year’s time if not less. Like Jimmy Kimmel and his jokes.
My generous math tells me a mere 21 out of the total 88 movies nominated between 2014 and 2023 have the cinematic weight of ‘Best Picture’ worthiness. This abysmal 23.8% success rate paints a very sad picture. Is it any wonder that TV ratings for the Oscars took a massive nosedive between 2014 and 2023, recouping some losses in the past few years but nothing for the suits to clink glasses and snort lines over?
It’s been four years since we’ve had a truly deserving winner (Parasite, 2020). After that, no doubt helped by the general malaise of the pandemic, to the proverbial question “What about the Oscars?” audiences simply said, “Eh..fuck ‘em”
I was one of those people. Losing interest with each passing year, tuning in (some years, just scrolling the news or Twitter the next day) just to see what happened to the one or two categories or movies I cared about.
Well, remember that silver lining? 2024 is different. After a dormant decade of hibernation, my interest has been piqued like a bear waking up to the smell of cocaine in a bad Elizabeth Banks movie.
A Promising Trend Emerges
Parasite winning in 2020 felt like a breakthrough, but 2021 was one of the worst years in a long time. Since then though, in 2022 and 2023, a promising trend started to emerge. For two years in a row, 30% of the films nominated were truly ‘Hall of Fame’ worthy. Drive My Car, Dune and Licorice Pizza were among the very best films of the year in 2021 - all making my personal top five - and The Banshees of Inisherin was my number one film of 2022. None of them ended up winning, but...looking at it glass half-full these were still good signs.
Now, in 2024, the glass is looking even fuller. Out of the 10 nominees, 5 are must-watch near or full-blown masterpieces fully deserving the nomination. The favorite to win the whole thing is among those five. From the remaining half, one is excellent, one is better than expected, one is very good and two are overrated, with only one of those being an of-its-time-destined-to-age-like-vinegar film.
In terms of pure cinematic craft, intelligent storytelling, genuine emotional depth and every other antithesis you can think of to the typical schmaltzy Oscar-baity dreck, this is the strongest year in Best Picture nominees since the category’s expansion from 5 to up to 10 entries in 2010. In fact, it’s the strongest group of nominees since No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton made up three fifths of the contenders for the prize in 2008!
After more than 15 years of mostly mediocre Best Picture nominees (The Post.. remember that one? Me neither) and mostly woeful winners (The Shape of Water beating Phantom Thread and Three Billboards sounds like an urban legend told around film campfires to scare young cinephiles to death), we have a cracking group of nominees.
Just how cracking? Well…
A Closer Look at the 2024 Best Picture Nominees
It’s fun to try and connect thematic dots between any given year’s Best Picture nominees and see what form the shape takes. Like opening the door of culture ever so slightly for the rays of the Zeitgeist to shine through, looking at the ten nominees through that lens makes even the weakest of the bunch that much more interesting.
The theme that threads through all ten nominees is some shade of ‘the authentic self’. I promise this is the first and last time I get all academic and philosophical, but this concept was big with the existentialists, particularly Martin Heidegger.
As ChatGPT 4.0 tells us;
Heidegger's concept of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) involves living in a way that is true to one's own self, as opposed to conforming to the expectations or norms imposed by society. For Heidegger, authenticity is about acknowledging one's freedom and responsibility to make choices that reflect one's true being.2
The 10 films in the race for Best Picture this year all tell stories about characters confronting, confounded by or conforming to their true selves. Yes, yes, maybe you can make that case for every single film or story ever told - maybe! - but that is still the most tenable connection between these radically different films so I’m sticking to it.
The sense of freedom and responsibility is the engine that powers all of the character’s actions. Their choices - from the most heartfelt to the most vile - are at the core of each story.
I go through each one below, in a worst-to-best-according-to-yours-truly order - not according to their chances or expectations of winning the Oscar tomorrow. By the end of it, you’ll hopefully see why I think that, as a group, this is as good as we’ve had it at the Oscars since 2008.
Ranking The 2024 Best Picture Nominees Worst to Best
10. Barbie
Searching for the Authentic Self: A Plastic Satire
Barbie’s existential crisis in Barbieland and her quest to understand her true self is a brilliant concept on paper, but in reality suffers the delusion of thinking it’s satirising a contemporary real world, not an 1980s one.
Ryan Gosling - in a delicious bit of irony only the cosmos can provide - is the film’s MVP (and the film’s most deserving Oscar nominee). Though filled with good ideas and genuinely funny moments, the film just ends up perpetuating the stereotype of feminism, not the idea of it.
9. Killers of the Flower Moon
Authentic Americana and its disingenuous bonds.
Scorsese’s most pronounced film about identity politics where, sadly, the birth of the FBI (a big theme in the book it’s based on) is treated like an afterthought. Instead, the film’s epicentre is a hard-to-believe love story amidst the backtrop of the ‘Reign of Terror’ Osage Indian murders of the 1920s. Important history, for sure, which makes the film’s tonal shifts in the second act all the more jarring.
A good film, with great performances and moments of pure Scorsesian sorcery, but ultimately very much a mid-tier effort from the iconic director, who is sadly beginning to show his octogenarian wrinkles.
8. American Fiction
Searching for the Awfentic Self: A Basic Satire
Jeffrey Wright was born to play the role of Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, a serious author caught in the publishing world’s whirlwind of political over-correctness. His journey to finally getting published for a stereotypical caricature of the African-American experience is filled with refreshing takes, and quite the clever ending.
Unlike Barbie this is a satire that feels right for our time, but even with everything it has going for it, you always feel like it could’ve dug in just a bit more into examining America’s obsession with exalting the faux-authentic through race-colored glasses.
7. Maestro
A portrait of an authentic artist as a married man.
Never mind that Bradley Cooper’s become a bit of a self-generating meme when it comes to his eagerness during award season. If we separate his passion project Maestro from its doomed, slightly sad, Oscar narrative you get a pretty innovative biopic, similar to Oppenheimer in how it focuses on a singular man’s workaholism.
Cooper and Carey Mulligan knock it out of the park, and the unexpected move of putting Leonard Bernstein’s marriage in the foreground colors the whole movie with a Bergman-esque brush.
6. The Holdovers
Authentic Americana and its genuine bonds.
The easiest nominee to recommend to casual movie watchers, Alexander Payne’s nostalgia-infused Christmas holiday movie is a time capsule to a simpler time. A time when no one cared how offensive the comedy was, as long as it was funny - and The Holdovers is by far the funniest film in the group.
Paul Giamatti shines as a curmudgeonly professor in a reunion with his Sideways director, delivering zingers with the aplomb of a man who’s been cast aside by life and stopped caring a long time ago. Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, both fantastic, complete the trifecta for a truly touching story devoid of all pretension about how three strangers can form a bond that’ll last a lifetime. This one’s for all the outcasts, misfits and inbetweeners out there.
5. The Zone of Interest
Authentic detachment
The paradox of watching Jonathan Glazer’s new film rests on balancing two opposing truths simultaneously.
First truth: you’ll probably never want to see it again. A Holocaust movie told from the perspective of a Nazi officer’s family (including their very happy dog) living next door to the screams of the gas chambers is as mortifyingly morbid and chilling as it sounds. Especially because of how true to their evil selves mama and papa Hoss are.
Second truth: The film is a goddamn masterpiece. Glazer hasn’t made a full feature since Under the Skin (2013) – another unforgettably uncomfortable experience dripping with genius – and with The Zone of Interest he has reminded the world just how good he is at using the language of cinema to send shivers down to our very core.
4. Past Lives
Authentic attachment
On the polar opposite end sits Celine Song’s directorial debut Past Lives. Unlike American Fiction, it’s harder to believe that this movie can be anyone’s first. It packs an incredible amount of emotional intelligence and lasting power thanks to a refreshingly mature screenplay (which Song is, deservedly, nominated for) and three soulful performances from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro.
It's a love story, but not that kind of love. A deeper love than the kind of love we’re used to seeing on screen. An attachment that can only be properly expressed through the power of art.
The most touching slice-of-life film of the bunch, and a good reminder that epic set pieces, complex narratives and cerebral cinematic innovation aren’t mandatory ingredients for a top tier film.
3. Poor Things
Searching for the Authentic Self: A Fantastic and Based Satire
I’m famously (if you know me) not big on Yorgos Lanthimos. He’s been a festival darling among critics ever since he broke out with Dogtooth (which was, until recently, my favorite of his) but I felt like his pretentiousness as a “look at how weird and cool I am” filmmaker always overshadowed anything meaningful he was trying to say with his movies. Until Poor Things.
An inspired take on the Frankestein story, where instead of critqueing scientic ambition it aims at social norms, Poor Things is a hilarious, gorgeous, intelligent and absolutely fucking insane satire. Emma Stone gives the performance of her career, and Mark Ruffalo is (unsurprisingly) perfectly suited to playing a narcissistic dick. But the secret sauce to why the film works so well is how much Lanthimos’ pretentious style fits the story he’s telling. Fantastical, unforgettable and very much alive.
2. Oppenheimer
A portrait of an authentic scientist as a haunted man.
Christopher Nolan looks to be well on his way to finally winning Best Director and Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It’s been a long time coming. But what makes this one especially sweet is that it goes against the trend of awarding people for subpar work only because they’re overdue (see Leonardo DiCaprio and The Revenant). In terms of Nolan’s formidable body of work – read my deep dive into that here – Oppenheimer is very much above par.
A near-three hour epic with lots and lots of talking that passes by in a flash and keeps you glued to your seat is no easy task. The Fusion/Fission narrative construct, its play with timelines, its black and white IMAX innovation, and so much more gel so well together to create a complex portrait of one of 20th century’s most important figures.
1. Anatomy of a Fall
Dissecting the authentic.
Much like The Zone of Interest, the inclusion of this international film (both, coincidentally, starring Sandra Huller) in the Best Picture mix adds a lot of sophistication to this year’s race, and cements the nominees as the best we’ve had since 2008. You wouldn’t know it from all of the Barbie outcry but a woman is nominated for Best Director this year – and it might just be because she directed a good movie and not because - cue audible gasps - she’s a woman.
Justine Triet won the Palme D’Or for Anatomy of a Fall – an absolutely mesmerising story of a woman accused of her husband’s death – and, just like Bong Joon Ho and Parasite, that success has withstood the test of awards season time and translated into the biggest Oscar nominations.
A gripping did-she-or-didn’t-she tale – excavating the theme of the authentic self in ways that will make you think about the bonds of relationships and marriage, the nature of parenthood and doghood, and all the individuals and creatures in those orbits, deeper still.
2014: 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, Her
2015: Boyhood
2016: Mad Max: Fury Road
2017: Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea
2018: Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Phantom Thread, Three Billboards
2019: The Favourite…barely
2020: Parasite, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
2021: Mank
2022: Drive My Car, Dune, Licorice Pizza
2023: The Banshees of Inisherin, Tar, Top Gun: Maverick
My apologies to the memory of Martin Heidegger, who is probably rolling in his grave at the idea of his concepts were (probably badly) being interpreted by AI chatbots in 2024. Take comfort, Martin, that no one is probably ever going to read this.