Contrary to popular consensus, I don’t believe there is such a thing as an “awards movie.”
Sure, Hollywood always does its darndest to churn out a comfy stream of prestigious dramas from October through January, many of which will invariably clog up the Best Picture lineup come March 15. But no matter how cynically geared toward awards season a film’s release is, a good movie is a good movie, no matter when it gets released.
People watching “Marty Supreme” 50 years from now won’t care whether it received a prime Christmas release window or got unceremoniously fished out of Josh Safdie’s recycling bin; it’ll be a classic either way, and anyone who’d dismiss it as pretentious or stuffy just because of its awards-oriented release would be missing out.
Classic or not, though — and the answer is often “not” when it comes to the Academy’s taste — a docket of daunting dramas still doesn’t exactly scream of fun Friday night plans for anyone trying to brush up on the nominees pre-ceremony. Plus, even if you do dip your toe in, the last thing you want to do is spend your time on a film that is ultimately little more interesting than your geology homework.
That’s why I’ve endeavored to watch as many nominated films as possible, to tell you which are the actual Best Pictures and which are best pictured anywhere but your living room. I’m skipping some obvious inclusions in favor of the sleeper hits and, well, sleeper sleep-inducers you might not have already heard of; if you haven’t seen “Sinners” yet, you’re about to be officially out of excuses. Now get watching.
Watch: “Sentimental Value”
When four performances get nominated from a single film, it usually means one of two things: one, it’s geared for a sensational Best Picture win — “One Battle After Another,” this year — or, conversely, it just contains a bunch of really great performances, which is the case with writer and director Joaquim Trier’s “Sentimental Value.”
Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas are the standouts of that quartet, but the entire ensemble wraps neatly around your heart to deliver an interesting, thoughtful portrayal of a fractured family’s relationship with art.
It may feel like the Oscar drama film to end all Oscar drama films at points, but that also means it’s consistently meaningful. And if there was any room for doubt, its showstopping final 20 minutes are a perfect demonstration of how Trier manages to invisibly verbalize internalized emotion unlike anyone else working today. All this is to say: plenty of value in this one.
Skip: “Train Dreams”
“Train Dreams” is a quaint, overlong and ultimately forgettable drama that never winds up saying anything of substance. And you know what? Sometimes that’s precisely what you’re in the mood for.
I have no idea what writer and director Clint Bentley thinks about this world, these characters or the time period in which the story is set; the only thing you get out of “Train Dreams” is the confusing, itchy sensation that he thinks everything will turn out all right, even if you never get to learn why or understand what made things so bad in the first place.
Maybe you want to feel that; I thought I did when I watched. But the film is ultimately worth little more than any of the other frivolous content in the Netflix sinkhole; in fact, you’d probably have better odds still holding out hope for “Stranger Things” Season 5, Episode 9, than wishing for “Train Dreams” to do pretty much anything worthwhile.
Watch: “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain”
With its delightful animated atmosphere, “Little Amélie” is a testament not only to the medium’s power to tell a pleasant, tearjerking story, but also its ability to make us view a movie in an entirely different way.
The film walks a high-wire act between its ambitious, toddler-eye framing and the catharsis of the simple childhood emotions it unleashes. In the end, regardless of whether its vague political ideas are realized to their fullest, “Little Amélie” achieves its much more important and sublime aim: to remind us that life is a gift to be cherished, no matter how confusing things may get.
It may not stand a chance against “K-Pop Demon Hunters” for Best Animated Feature, but a film this full of color — both in its wonderful visual style and unabashed thematic shine — is the best cure for seasonal blues that the Academy could prescribe.
Skip: “Sirāt”
At first glance, “Sirāt” looks like an eye-catching combination of “Mad Max” and “The Wages of Fear” — the story of a wandering father and son joining a bunch of outcasts on their way across an unforgiving desert to a faraway rave certainly sounds worth checking out. There’s even a distinctly European element of environmental alienation that comes from Spanish director Oliver Laxe’s portrayal of an unrelenting, half-hallucinatory hell.
But amidst all those striking, prominent identifiers, “Sirāt” gives you nothing to grab on to. By the time you adjust to its train of thought and get a sense for where it’s going — even if where it’s going wasn’t all that interesting, anyway — the film tosses it all away on a whim. As soon as you’ve acclimated to that subversion, it does it yet again.
Its limited stylistic palette gets stale before long, and it’s certainly not enough to prop up such a forced, arbitrary thematic premise. It’s not unheard of for a Best International Feature nominee to lean on bleakness, but spare yourself and save the gut punch for a film that actually earns it.
Watch: “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Many things are unrealistic about the life of Rose Byrne’s character Linda in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Her daughter has a strange, unexplained illness. There is a hole in her ceiling that seems indicative of a lifetime of trauma welling up. Oh, and her therapist is Conan O’Brien.
But somehow, the most unbelievable aspect of the film is how fabulously writer and director Mary Bronstein winds that fraught, surreal premise into something visceral and unquestionably real.
In a performance that will likely fall undeservedly short to Jesse Buckley for Best Leading Actress, Byrne sinks masterfully into Bronstein’s story of a woman who just cannot catch a break. It’s both devastating and comedic how out-of-control things feel, but the director and actress manage to jointly hold things steady and deliver one of the most tightly-executed character studies I’ve seen in years.
It’ll make you chuckle, sniffle and, most importantly, challenge you to empathize in even the most stressful and outlandish of situations. If I had legs, I’d be running to see this again.
Skip: “Song Sung Blue”
Just like the titular Neil Diamond song goes, “Song sung blue, everybody knows one,” so too does everybody know a generic biopic with a mid-sized release that somehow sneaks its way into one of the acting categories every year. And if you know that, you should also know that “Song Sung Blue” isn’t worth a second glance, either in the Oscars race or in any wider artistic sense.
Kate Hudson’s nominated performance is a sleepwalker of a rise-and-fall arc with an overbearing Wisconsin accent tacked on; the whole narrative is similarly plain, which makes the fact that relatives of the real-life singers have denounced the film even less forgivable. You can watch it and emerge unoffended, but let’s face it; if you’ll watch this, you’ll watch anything. I should know.
Watch: “The Secret Agent”
As much as I may dog on the Academy’s choices, this year’s Best Picture lineup has some undoubtedly heavy hitters. That means when I say that “The Secret Agent” is not only the strongest nominee for Best International Feature but also my clear-cut favorite for Best Picture, you can be certain it’s something special.
This critically unseen Brazilian gem is more than a plain Jane historical drama about the country’s 1970s military dictatorship. Bizarre hitmen, addictive needle drops and disembodied legs populate a rich, rewarding story of cultural memory; the vibrancy, beauty and tiny touch of absurdity that colors “The Secret Agent” makes its deeper tragedy all the more crushing and immediate.
Even if you watched the film solely to see Wagner Moura’s nominated lead performance, you would be far from disappointed. He embodies a fascinating character across three unique stages, each serving as a walloping allegory for the country as a whole. If there’s any film on this list you watch before March 15 — or any time, really — let it be this one.
Skip: “F1”
If you were excited at the prospect of director Joseph Kosinski using “F1” to deliver another throwback action crowd-pleaser with a big star like he did in 2022 with “Top Gun: Maverick,” don’t even think about it. Or rather, you’d hardly be able to think, since this is one of the loudest, dumbest and most insidious Best Picture nominees you’d ever have the displeasure of watching.
There’s not a flicker of life to be found across “F1”’s aching 154-minute runtime; for all the fancy camera rigs and drones Kosinski was granted access to, he’s doing little more than shoveling globs of money and boardroom-approved plot points in front of the camera.
I frankly cannot even fathom the appeal of a film whose only reasons for existing are to convert new F1 acolytes and rehabilitate the image of Brad Pitt, and in the end, the only remotely interesting question it prompts is which shallowly-conceived goal it does worse at.
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.
