Looking through the Oscars Best Picture nominations this year, I’m surprised to notice that I watched almost all the mentioned movies. As for the ones I haven’t watched yet, I profoundly feel that I’ll never do. It happened with Twelve Years a Slave, even when I knew it will win. It was one of those slipped Infos the night before the ceremony, which wasn’t a coincidence and it wasn’t a good movie either. I shall not watch Belfast, CODA, and West Side Story because I don’t resonate with any of them.
Best Picture Nominees in Alphabetical Order
Belfast
Laura Berwick, Kenneth Branagh, Becca Kovacik and Tamar Thomas, Producers
CODA
Philippe Rousselet, Fabrice Gianfermi and Patrick Wachsberger, Producers
Don’T Look Up
Adam McKay and Kevin Messick, Producers
Drive My Car
Teruhisa Yamamoto, Producer
Dune
Mary Parent, Denis Villeneuve and Cale Boyter, Producers
King Richard
Tim White, Trevor White and Will Smith, Producers
Licorice Pizza
Sara Murphy, Adam Somner and Paul Thomas Anderson, Producers
Nightmare Alley
Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale and Bradley Cooper, Producers
The Power Of The Dog
(won Golden Globe for Drama)
Jane Campion, Tanya Seghatchian, Emile Sherman, Iain Canning and Roger Frappier, Producers
West Side Story
(won Golden Globe for Comedy/Musical)
Steven Spielberg and Kristie Macosko Krieger, Producers
A Very Few Comments – Drive My Car
Something inconceivable a few years back is happening again. We have a foreign language movie as a nominee for Best Picture, the Japanese Drive My Car (Doraibu may ka). I remember only Almodovar‘s Volver and the Korean Parasite being nominated in both categories, as Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Picture. This is a very long movie, without being boring. Slow-paced, gently erotic, it’s about indecision and guilt, being artsy without smashing your retina with the specific Japanese artsy symbols: Sakura, sushi, and sashimi. When they eat in here, they eat in 3 inches diameter bowls, unpeeled potatoes with sticks, but we learn that those dishes are Korean, not Japanese.
Best Picture Oscar Nominee 2021 – Don’t Look Up! – Leonardo Di Caprio, Meryl Streep, Mark Rylance, Jonah Hill
[credits for all pics: imdb.com]
Don’t Look Up!
I found Don’t Look Up! very funny, despite some very competent critical opinions which were headed more toward Adam McKay, than against the movie itself. It created a little controversy with Meryl Streep’s distribution as the American President, where she actually played Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Her act showed to the outside masses Streep’s and McKay’s personal opinion about Donald Trump‘s Administration. Inadvertently she was in this film exactly how I picture Hillary as President. What those two-faced greedy capitalists from Hollywood, painted in progressive “socialist” colors will never understand is that Trump was the only President in many years who genuinely could push America forward, not pull it backward. Anyway, this can’t be grasped by the likes of Streep or McKay. If someone is useful in the field, you don’t have to like him, you don’t have to make friends with him. That’s the problem with Hollywood progressives, they were buddies with the Clintons and the Obamas, and they were kept in contempt by the other side. The others were not peers with small fry like McKay, they were the real deal. Clinton pair and the Obama smiled at everyone, skimming up to a billion each, just to be elected. Someone as incompetent as Hillary spent her billion freely, grossly underestimating people’s intelligence and losing the American throne in a landslide defeat.
Will Ferrell‘s business partner in Funny or Die, never hid his despise for the Republicans, he proved it in Vice, an “insider” fictional biopic of George Wilbur Bush and his future VP, Dick Cheney. Obnoxiously inaccurate, he omitted authentic dark facts and made fun of tragedies. I’m not a fan of them both, especially not of Cheney, but concerning Vice, in which both the President and the Vice President were made to look mentally retarded, it seems obvious that the retard is McKay.
Dune
Dune is spectacular, and it’s not yet finished. Very nicely acted as well. I praise Chalamet’s evolution, a Paul Atreides with a New York inflection who wasn’t bad at all. What else? Fergusson, Zendaya, and Oscar Isaac are everywhere these days.
Will Smith, Saniyya Sidney, and Demi Singleton in King Richard (2021)
King Richard
King Richard is impressive. Will Smith got a Globe for the best actor in a drama. Maybe the Jewish accent tailored on the usual Negro dialect did the trick. He is also the producer and director of this touching movie. I don’t believe that in real life Richard Williams told Serena she will be better than her sister, at a time when Serena didn’t even have a professional trainer, but let’s believe the romanticization. Serena is now considered the best woman tennis player of all time. She already made more than $90 million in prize money, more than double her sister made. If only 30% of that movie would be true, the people Richard dealt with had a lot of patience. Systematically refusing sponsors and letting the girls play when the fee from potential earnings was 15% took giant balls. Richard’s vision was right from the beginning. “We got champions here, let’s go to wo’yk”. It is a good movie, corny enough to make you cry, and dressed up for these shitty times.
To be continued…
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