Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photos by A24, Netflix and Fox Searchlight Pictures It has been a very long road to the 93rd Academy Awards, and we probably don’t need to remind you of the reasons why. This weekend’s delayed April Oscars was not producers’ original plan , and this will hopefully be the last time we stretch any awards season out this long.
The greatest trick the pandemic ever pulled was convincing the country that Borat was a thing again. The film is a predictable grab bag of regurgitated “Trump’s America” vignettes that we’ve been inundated with for four years and regurgitated gags from the first Borat movie. Maria Bakalova gives a good performance, no doubt, but blazing a path to an Oscar nomination by going viral with a Rudy Giuliani clip will hopefully be an artifact from 2020 that seems stranger with every passing year.
This year’s highest-profile animated short was co-directed by Will McCormack, a creative partner of Rashida Jones , and produced by Laura Dern. It’s a beautifully animated story of the estrangement of a married couple after a tragedy, but once that tragedy is revealed in flashback to be a school shooting, the film itself has trouble bearing the weight of its Important Subject Matter.
The prospect of another Roberto Benigni-affiliated Pinocchio movie certainly felt like a threat, but Benigni’s Geppetto takes a back seat in Garrone’s Gothic retelling of the classic fairy tale that is heavy on bizarre, unsettling imagery and happy to wallow in the darkness in this tale of a wooden child who longs to become a real boy.
When people talk about the Oscar-nominated documentary shorts being a relentlessly bleak experience, they’re talking about films like Hunger Ward, an up-close look at starving children in the midst of the famine in Yemen from the perspective of the hospital workers trying to keep them alive. Directors Fitzgerald and Shueuerman were given remarkable access to these hospitals, so a fair warning to anyone who might watch that there are dead and dying children on-camera.
The literary costume drama has been an Oscar staple for decades upon decades, and by this point you wouldn’t think there was much more you could do with it. But there’s such a freshness to Autumn de Wilde’s approach to Jane Austen’s story of a matchmaker who can’t seem to see her own life quite so clearly.
Da 5 Bloods is a bloody mess. Sorry. And Mulligan will win Best Actress.
I’ve seen two. The oscars aren’t exactly mainstream this year.