The Enthusiast Oscars Extravaganza, Pt. 1

Welcome to The Enthusiast, a newsletter for those who fall in love with everything and everyone. Every week(ish) I send love notes about the people, places and things I'm loving, from the latest in pop culture to random esoteric ephemera–all personally vetted and highly recommended by yours truly.

On Fridays, we talk about faves–and it's finally time for the real big game of the spring season, the mad tournament that's been on since January (but really since the summer of 2023, tbh)...Oscars weekend! Get out your bingo cards, place your bets, and plan your drinking games accordingly, babes!

I'm not sure why, exactly, but my mom used to let me stay up late to watch the Oscars with her all throughout my middle and high school years. As such, I've watched almost all of the live broadcasts since 1997 or so, despite growing consistently more jaded about the awards themselves after Crash (2005) and then Green Book (2018) won out over far better films, along with several dubious acting wins (GWYNETH). It's always been an up-and-down affair, my relationship with this Awards show that can be painfully predictable, but I've always been a movie fan and the Oscars haven't fully lost their relevance (yet), so I'm planning on watching the telecast this Sunday after seeing six out of ten of the Best Picture nominees, which is a pretty good track record for me.

In full transparency, however, I have not seen any of this year's Animated Feature or Visual Effects nominees, nor do I have any intention of watching Maestro, which might actually be my Oscar villain of 2023, nor do I have any interest in any of the Short categories, ever. My picks are definitely subjective and outright biased, but then I also doubt very seriously every Academy voter actually manages to watch every single nominee before they cast their votes... 🤗

Last year I was completely smitten by Tàr and Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I didn't have many faves in 2021 and 2020 after Parasite set the bar SUPREMELY high for all future winners (and subtly made up for Green Book's win). So here's part one for my picks to win awards usually handed out early in the telecast, when everyone is fresh and new and dazzled with optimism and red carpet glamour that this will finally be the year that it doesn't run past midnight! Let's go!

Best Supporting Actor

My Pick: Ryan Gosling, Barbie

• Likely Winner: Robert DeNiro, Killers of the Flower Moon

• Dark Horse: Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things

Best Supporting Actor was absolutely stacked last year, with Ke Huy Quan winning last year for Everything, Everywhere All At Once up against Brendan Gleason AND Barry Keoghan in Banshees of Inisherin. Absolutely no one was mad about Quan winning because he was so fantastic in EEAAO, but with only a few pictures getting the most nominations this year (Oppenheimer leads with 13, followed by Poor Things at 11, and Killers of the Flower Moon with 10), a lot of these nominations feel a little rote & predictable, especially with the bigger names on the ballot. 

Roberts Downey Jr. and DeNiro are probably the most likely to win with their parallel historical scheming, shitheel old white guys in power roles. And don’t get me wrong: both of their performances were among the best parts of both of those movies for me. DeNiro is also up for a record-tying three wins, so I'm sure that added some weight to the Academy's selection. But come ON: it is well past time for Gosling to get his due, especially since his Ken was both high camp and simultaneously emotionally vulnerable. The man has the range!

I would be completely remiss if I didn’t mention Mark Ruffalo’s hilarious scalawag in Poor Things, however—he’s another actor whose comedic skills are sorely under-appreciated. He plays smarmy, over-sexed cad Duncan Wedderburn with the perfect amount of sleaze and farcical fin-de-siècle male cluelessness, and his facial expressions throughout are priceless—he deserves an award for his terrifyingly good skill at banging his head violently on a bar, if nothing else.

Best Supporting Actress

My Pick: N/A (Sandra Hüller,The Zone of Interest)

• Likely Winner: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

• Dark Horse: Jodie Foster, Nyad

I don’t have any substantive thoughts about the Supporting Actress nominees, because I’ve only seen Barbie and Oppenheimer, and while America Ferrera was great, her performance wasn’t on the level of last year's winner Jamie Lee Curtis or co-nominee Stephanie Hsu in EEAAO. And Emily Blunt was barely in Oppenheimer, yet another of Nolan’s shamefully underdeveloped women characters, so I will call shade if she wins. Sandra Hüller was apparently only nominated for The Zone of Interest in my imagination, but she's still my pick.

I hear Da’Vine Joy Randolph is wonderful in The Holdovers, but never count out Jodie Foster in anything, ever. She's in the same situation as DeNiro this year for third win, so that will probably factor heavily into the result. I have no desire to see either of their movies, however, so I don’t have a primary pick among the actual nominees. I’d be pleased if Randolph got the win, or Danielle Brooks for The Color Purple, but that's another I have absolutely no reason to watch because the original was and is perfect, thanks.

Best Original Screenplay

My Pick: Anatomy of a Fall

• Likely Winner: The Holdovers

• Dark Horse: Past Lives

Of the Original Screenplay nominees, I’ve only seen one: the fantastic Anatomy of a Fall, which writer/director Justine Triet presents as an ostensibly sexy European case of Law & Order on the surface, but turns out to be a much deeper examination of marriage, women’s sexuality, the precarious nature of “fame,” motherhood, and courtroom culture itself. It’s somehow both matter-of-fact and yet awash in all the shades of gray imaginable. Personally, I think it should win every just about every award it’s up for: Original Screenplay, Editing, Actress, and Director —and honestly? I wouldn’t be upset if it won Best Picture, either. 

I’m guessing The Holdovers will most likely win because it seems like a movie that most of the Academy would think is the “best” writing and Paul Giamatti is in it, instead of a 2.5-hr French/German relationship courtroom drama from a writer/director whose previous movie was 2019's erotic drama/film industry satire Sybil (it’s great, go watch it as soon as you can).

I will be pleasantly surprised if Past Lives wins; it’s been sitting in my to-watch queue for months now, but I’m afraid it will be one of those quiet, emotionally devastating movies about Millennial regret for the things we did in our past that we thought would make our futures better, and technically they did, but then there’s all those what ifs that have never gone away, decades later. I’ll still watch it, eventually, but I feel like I might need to be in a really good, non-stressed out place when I do, or at least have a strong edible beforehand.

Best Adapted Screenplay

My Pick: Barbie

• Likely Winner: Oppenheimer

• Dark Horse: Poor Things

Adapted Screenplay is where shit gets contentious. And before you dismiss me as a rabid Barbie fan (joke’s on you because I know I am!), let’s talk about the source material Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach had to adapt to write this movie. You could see it as nothing—that it should technically be in the Original Screenplay category—given that there is no true great canon of Barbie literature or classical art to pull from, unless you count 30+ creepy direct-to-video CGI movies spread across the 'Aughts and 'Teens where Barbie and friends get into hijinks and learn lessons as fairies or horse girls. Barbie is literally anything you could want her to be; she has no set narrative, no consistent characterization besides that which we decide to project on her.

And so you could also look at Barbie as an adaptation of infinite possibilities: somehow Gerwig and Baumbach managed to craft a narrative and an entire parallel world that embodies some of the most universal childhood experiences one can have while playing Barbies. President! Mermaid! Rock Star! Doctor! Nobel Laureate! Sometimes all at once and sometimes all individually hanging out at the ice cream shop play set that included an actual ice cream maker that you forced your dad to make ice cream in once and it just turned out like weird cold sludge!! (Bless you, Dad.)

They took both of these concepts–that Barbie is both broadly individual and yet deeply archetypal–and crafted a smart, funny, heartfelt tale of self-realization previously undermined by binary gender (You know Weird Barbie is queer as hell, right? RIGHT?!) that also takes pointed jabs at the multimillion-dollar corporate overlords that financed the project—and yet there’s a sizable contingent that thinks a movie about a white man, written and directed by a white man, based on a single, existing published work also written by a white man should win instead?

I’m not naive—it’s very likely that Nolan will land an Oppenheimer trifecta on Sunday: Screenplay, Director, Picture (if not more). But in the same way that I’m an enthusiast, I’m also (for better and often worse) an optimist. I want to believe that the biggest global box office success of the year—written, directed, produced, and starring women—can also be recognized for its undeniable artistic merit as well. It’s only ever really happened with Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which did $1.1B at the box office, and the record-holder Titanic with $2.2B. And let's be honest: Barbie, with its $1.4B, is better than both.

Best Sound

My Pick: The Zone of Interest

• Likely Winner: The Zone of Interest

• Dark Horse: N/A

The good thing is that the Best Sound category should absolutely and automatically go to The Zone of Interest, periodt. I finally watched it last weekend, after much pre-reading and even more internal conflict. While there is a real possibility that people movie might think it’s just some straightforward biopic of a textbook evilly banal bourgeois Nazi bureaucrat/war criminal/murderer, after the first half hour most viewers realize that the real story here is in the background sounds and actions happening over the razor-wired concrete wall that backdrops most of the film. 

The first thing you notice after the darkened-screen overture is a low-grade, dissonant mechanical drone permeating every shot of the bucolic Polish countryside. That’s because this little domestic Ayran fairy tale cottage is next door to the Auschwitz extermination camp, and those are the constant, grinding sounds of death and atrocity happening mere feet away behind that ever-present wall. The sound design makes this movie, and it is masterful. I don't think I've been so invested in a technical Oscar category since Mad Max: Fury Road won six of ten nominations back in 2016, but if any other film besides Zone of Interest wins in this sound category, it will be a tragedy on the level (or even beyond) of Crash beating Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture (aka the beginning of the end of American movie culture).

Best Score

My Pick: Poor Things

• Likely Winner: Oppenheimer

• Dark Horse: Killers of the Flower Moon

Usually, I do not care much about Original Score. Is John Williams, Hans Zimmer, or Alan Menken nominated? Yes? One of those guys is going to win, so let’s get on to the best song award, please and thank you. However, only Williams is nominated this year, and for (lol) Indiana Jones & The Dial of Destiny. 

For me, an overtly antagonistic or self-important score or soundtrack is distracting and annoying, and can sometimes ruin the whole experience for me if it's bad enough. The most recent example of this was the latest season of True Detective—every time a moment of horror or emotional resonance came to its apex, some chilly, minor-key cover of a popular song with a morose female vocal would fill the screen and ruin it completely.

The truth of the matter is that I do not remember the scores for Killers of the Flower Moon or Oppenheimer, which is a good thing in terms of not detracting from the movie itself, but the score for Poor Things was noticeable–weird and wild and emotional–without being overly distracting. In fact, it almost serves as a narrator in some ways; the score grows and evolves, just as our heroine Bella does. Dissonant clanks and clonks mirroring Bella's limited motor skills early in the film slowly start to coalesce into resonant melodies, eventually blooming into a fully-realized score by the final scene. It was a really interesting accompaniment and subtle storytelling tool that I actually didn’t notice until the credits rolled, a delightful little Easter egg that made me appreciate the film's obsessive attention to detail even more.

Don't discount Killers of the Flower Moon, here, either: the Academy loves a posthumous win once a decade or so, and it would be nice for Robbie Robertson to get some Oscars respect on his name after 10(!) collaborations with Martin Scorsese.

Best Original Song

My Pick: "I'm Just Ken" - Ryan Gosling (Mark Ronson), Barbie

• Likely Winner: "What Was I Made For" - Billie Eilish, Barbie

• Dark Horse: "The Fire Inside" - Becky G (Diane Warren), Flamin' Hot

Listen, at least we know that Barbie will win something at these damn awards. I cannot fathom listening to Billie Eilish’s abject tearjerker “What Was I Made For” for pleasure or entertainment outside of its context within the movie, but I am clearly old and still like music that makes me happy. “I’m Just Ken” is objectively a better song that also happens to be funny and smart without mocking the character who sings it so earnestly. We can rest in the satisfaction that Gosling is set to perform it live during the telecast, and hopefully Simi Liu will make a cameo appearance for an on-stage beach-off extravaganza.

If for some reason "The Fire Inside" wins and finally gets Diane Warren a real Oscar (she's the new Susan Lucci, with 15 nominations and no wins), I will not be upset and revel in the fact that a movie about Cheetos that premiered on Hulu can call itself an Academy-Award Winner while the world is engulfed in flames around us.

Best Cinematography

My Pick: Killers of the Flower Moon
Likely Winner: Oppenheimer

I may be a Barbie stan, but I’ll give credit where credit is due: Both Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer were gorgeously filmed. They reflect opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum, with Flower Moon’s epic sweeping landscapes opposing Oppenheimer’s close-up interiority, but one of these will probably win and I’ll be okay with that. Poor Things was beautiful and imaginative, but director Yorgos Lanthimos’s undying love of a random fisheye shot with zero context took me out of the narrative at times.

So that covers the first couple hours of the Oscars telecast, or thereabouts–stay tuned for the back half, where the really big categories are kept for those of us with the wherewithal to stay awake, if only to witness any scandalous slaps, egregious oversights, or surprise wins to wrap up the night (like we're not going to listen to it all get recapped on our morning podcasts).

And that concludes this edition of The Enthusiast! Thank you for reading and if you're not already subscribed, you should sign up (it's free!). Be sure confirm via email link to receive each post directly in your Inbox. If you're already a fan, forward this newsletter along to a friend and spread the love!

See you after the break!
LKH