The Best Picture

 

Tonight the Motion Picture Academy will present its awards for the 2025 films they choose to honor.  In truth, all the nominated films have received their honor; this is about the show, and I have to admit that I am a total sucker for it. Somehow, the drama of this entertainment vehicle that has a little entertainment (Conan O'Brien this year) and a lot of tension and time-wasting gets me emotionally involved.  I know, not everyone feels that way. 

Anyway, the scuttlebutt this year is focused on the award for Best Picture, which is deemed to be a battle between voters for Sinners and those for One Battle After Another (hereafter OBAA).  It's gotten serious lately with lots of invective thrown around by backers of one against the other.  It seems to boil down, among the litigants, to some questions about which is more cool, more hip, more woke.  OBAA is accused by Sinners-backers of cultural disrespect of blacks and, well, Sinners is, in part, what they say it is, a violent celebration of vampire culture. 

Sinners is more than that, and in fact is worthy of serious attention in many ways.  I abhor the vampire trope and have had more than enough of it, and I'm not going to make allowance for Sinners' attempt to humanize or celebrate it.  It's simply not part of actual human experience, and never will be. On the other hand, Sinners is drenched in the blues, which I can always handle, and in the reality of Depression Era South.  The acting performance as Smoke/Stack by Micheal B. Jordan in it is profound, Oscar-worthy to be sure, much different in its complexity than his supposed main opponents for Best Actor, the rogue table-tennis freak played by Timothee Chalamet or the burnt-out rebel freak played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Remember, we're supposed to be voting for the skill of the actor, not the fame of him, the unusual nature of the charactor, nor the incredible lengths to which Chalamet goes to perform a role.  Though Chalamet's is the kind of role that wins, at least in the old days. 

No, back to Best Picture--that award-upon-award can not be reduced to two films; ten are nominated, including some foreign ones, and even ones not in English..  Spreading the candidacy among so many worthy films will water down the numbers, so that voters are not all funneled into one camp or another.  The result, in the modern days, is that the award for Best Picture has become one that can be unpredictable, even so unanticipated that it was read incorrectly off the card once.  That uncertainty has made that particular award less anticlimactic (usually). along with its going to some extremely unusual recipients lately (Parasite, Moonlight, Childhood, Everything..you know the rest). 

My choice, and it is unambiguous, with due regard both for Sinners and OBAA, is Hamnet.  I will give credit to Adam Baidawi, in an article about the film that focused on its lead actor, Paul Mescal, that it is "a body blow of a film"*.  That understates it--it goes through the heart, deep into the soul, and pulls it out.  It is unquestionably "best", in the sense "more good than any other", because it is about being a better person, about love, in a way that those two leading movies fail to represent. It will make its viewers better, and thus the world. It is only accessible to anyone who has been a father, a son, a daughter, or especially, a mother, or any woman, not to mention fans of The Bard. It is not out of bounds to claim it to be at least on the same film-making level as the other two (maybe not box office, or special effects). In particular, lead actress Jessie Buckley, in an unforgettable series of careful, fetching nature and close-up shots, is considered by most to be a sure bet to win Best Actress.  Chloe Zhao, the director, has won an Oscar before (though that's not a positive), and she has worked magic with the story of Hamnet, which I can't wait to read.. 

I don't guess Chloe will win, and I will grieve for that, but we can only celebrate the successes of the eventual winner, who will be either Paul Thomas Anderson for OBAA (often nominated, never a winner) or Ryan Coogler for his incredibly creative realization of a bizarre, but in its own way,  grounded story. That Best Director winner usually lines up with the aforementioned overall winner.  Sinners is the favorite, because there is a strong historical correlation between nominations and winning (and Sinners has a record 16 of them).  But just remember also this:  there is no best picture--we're talking about art here.   

 

*Really an excellent article in GQ magazine--something I'd never see--that came to me out of the blue on my phone.  Mescal is a highly-trained and awarded actor who was superb in his role as "Will" but was not even nominated for Supporting Actor.  That is an extremely competitive category with, besides Mescal's, four "sure thing" kinds of performances:  both Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn for OBAA, Delroy Lindo for Sinners, and the unheralded possible winner (he won the Golden Globe) Stellan Skjarsgard (sp).