This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at JCU chapter.
Here are my thoughts on this year’s Best Picture Nominees! Who’s excited for the Oscars on March 4?! As a reminder, there are nine (FREAKING NINE THAT IS SO MANY) movies nominated for Best Picture. They are, in no particular order: Dunkirk, The Post, Darkest Hour, Phantom Thread, Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Get Out. Great, since that’s out of the way, let’s get a move on…
The Good Three:
- Get Out. All right, so this is a horror movie, and horror movies NEVER get nominated for Oscars, but wow, if Get Out isn’t one of the best movies ever made, I don’t know what is. I am a weak little scaredy cat, so this movie absolutely terrified me (which is silly—as a white girl I literally had nothing to fear), but if you can get past the chilling terror, you are in for a wild ride. It kept me completely on the edge of my seat in the best way. More importantly, this movie says so much about race in America—messages we desperately need to hear right now. This movie by far wins the Diversity Award–but will it win Best Picture? Sadly, I doubt it, just because Get Out is not pretentious at all, and let’s be honest, Oscar movies are pretentious.
- Call Me By Your Name. This one was my personal favorite (because it’s about a gay relationship). WOW, this movie is poignant and moving and so so beautiful. Incredibly, the movie centers on two men falling in love but it’s not really about them being gay; there’s no disapproving parents, there’s no painful coming out, there’s no homophobic family/friends. It’s just a love story. It was so refreshing to watch this beautiful story unfold. I will be honest, though, this movie probably did not have the best dialogue—it’s the story that gets you.
- Lady Bird. This is a fun movie that follows a high school girl’s struggle to come into herself. All of the performances are absolutely wonderful, and I definitely give Lady Bird the award for Best Dialogue. But, in kinda the opposite of Call Me By Your Name, the story is just not that interesting. It’s a classic coming-of-age story, and all of the plot points are pretty cliché. But still, the performances are so raw and the script is so compelling that you stick around. It’s a good time overall.
The Boring Four:
- Phantom Thread. This movie is only relevant because it’s Daniel Day-Lewis’s “final performance” (don’t worry kids, he isn’t dead, he’s just retiring), and The Academy loves Daniel Day-Lewis. Phantom Thread is about a dressmaker who gets too into his work (wow, it must have been really hard for Daniel Day-Lewis to play a man that gets too into his work; how did he ever method-act that one?). This movie can get the Oscar for Best Costumes I guess, but it is super duper boring. A typical pretentious Oscar movie, I suppose.
- The Post. Oh man, this movie is trying SO HARD to win Oscars, it’s sad. We have Steven Spielberg directing Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep as they try to take down a corrupt government through hard-hitting journalism—and it’s based on a true story. Sound like Spotlight? It is. Sound like All the President’s Men? It is. Did you maybe see Bridge of Spies a couple years ago? Remarkably the same. Are you interested in seeing Tom Hanks in yet another Steven Spielberg movie? Probably not. Even if you haven’t seen this movie, it feels like you’ve already seen it.
- Dunkirk. In typical Christopher Nolan form, this movie is beautifully shot. The cinematography truly is excellent. But this movie is SO BORING. It takes place in basically one day (although in a completely confusing order), and follows some WWII soldiers trying to make it onto a boat so they can get off at—you guessed it—Dunkirk beach. There is no dialogue in this movie, I swear to you. There are no lines, it’s basically a bunch of guys getting onto boats, that boat getting blown up, and then some swimming, and then getting on another boat, until that boat gets blown up, etc. I’m sorry, I just did not enjoy this movie.
- Darkest Hour. The second movie about WWII nominated for Best Picture. Listen, I like WWII history as much as the next person, but this is too much WWII for one season. Darkest Hour follows Winston Churchill while he does a lot of talking and writing and political things. Remarkably, I cared about these people even less than I cared about the people in Dunkirk. The guys in Dunkirk were soldiers trying to get home, but this was literally just about Winston Churchill. And all he does is talk. And drink. And be a complete jerk (you know Winston Churchill was a total jerk in real life, right?) I did not enjoy it.
The Confusing Two:
- Shape of Water. SO WEIRD. I’m sorry but I hated this movie. A lot of people loved it and thought it was “enchanting” or whatever, but I just did not get it at all. There were SO MANY plot holes! Plus, the woman did, in fact, have sex with the Loch Ness Monster and no, I have not recovered. The whole movie is founded on the fact that she has this magical true love relationship with the water monster dude, but I did not feel that AT ALL. Did not enjoy the performances (when are we going to cast Octavia Spencer as something other than a wonderful black woman in the 1960s?), and the diversity here was a MESS. We’ve got a mute girl, a gay guy and a black lady, but the movie does not really show any of them as something other than those identities. Someone please explain to me why this movie is so beloved by The Academy? It’s the pretentiousness again, isn’t it?
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. OOF. This movie was a RIDE. I did not particularly enjoy it. It certainly was not pretentious. Basically every other word was the f-bomb, and you gotta get nice and comfy with violence to get through this one. I am 100% on board for Frances McDormand to win Best Leading Actress, but I did not think anyone else’s performance was noteworthy. In short, a grieving mother goes after the local police for not finding out who killed her daughter. Try to keep that in mind, though, while the movie throws a bunch of other junk in that is super problematic, including: throwing around words like f****t and n****r, portraying a racist cop sympathetically, having a suicide for no reason, some domestic violence just for fun, and the list goes on. This movie felt uncomfortably problematic and ended on a super weird note. I also would like someone to explain to me why this movie is so beloved by The Academy, cause I really don’t get this one.