A Gentleman Rides Again!
With just a few hours until the Oscars broadcast, I wanted to take a moment to give some small sense of order to my thoughts on 2018 at the movies. I have a lot of apathy about this years’ Academy Awards, much (though not all) of which has to do with the fact that from my perspective 2018 was a pretty terrible year for movies, and certainly one of the worst that I can remember in my lifetime.
In lieu of writing the “best and worst of” breakdowns that I have done in the past, this year I’m just going to rank the Best Picture nominees in order from best to worst, give some thoughts on each, and then throw out a couple titles of other movies that I liked, or at least found interesting, from 2018.
Without further ado, then, the year’s Best Picture nominees from best to worst:
BlacKkKlansman
Honestly, I’m not sure if Spike Lee set out to make a movie this good, which is to say that there is a level of moral complexity and ambiguity in the film that I doubt it was ever envisioned to have. That being said, what set BlacKkKlansman apart from the field, to me, was the insight that the seriousness of its subject matter spoke for itself, and so telling its story as a comedy could allow it to push for deeper truths. It’s a bold piece of filmmaking, both grim and funny, and also a thoroughly entertaining movie to experience.
The Favourite
By far the James Smith-iest movie of this group, The Favourite reminds me a lot of Phantom Thread from last year in being a movie that left me intellectually engaged but emotionally cold. The performances of the three leading ladies are all, of course, fantastic, and the film works because of how effectively and wittily they realize the psychodrama playing out between their characters. I’m not sure who the protagonist of the movie is, and the fact that the movie works despite that is a testament to its achievement.
Green Book
An aesthetically uninteresting but cinematically effective feel-good film; basically, Green Book is just a really well-made, standard Hollywood offering. It’s also a film that I feel has been somewhat unjustly maligned for reasons that have very little to do with the movie that it is and very much to do with the movie that its critics wanted it to be. In an even slightly stronger year, I don’t think this movie would be nominated for much – it reminds me a lot of Hidden Figures from a couple of years ago, but not as good, and no one ever thought that movie would win Best Picture – but, here we are.
Bohemian Rhapsody
This movie works way better than it should, by which I mean that its structural issues are obvious and its filmmaking is often heavyhanded, and yet it still left me entertained and emotionally fulfilled. Much of this has to do with Rami Malik’s performance, to be sure, but the real star of the movie is the music; if Queen hadn’t written such great songs, I don’t think this movie would be anywhere near the Best Picture race. That said – there’s a lot to be said for knowing your strengths and playing into them, and I admire the audacity of the decision to end the movie with what amounts to a 10-minute Queen concert.
Vice
There are a lot of problems with this movie, of which the most obvious, but also most fundamental, is the fact that you really have to have completely bought into its political agenda for the movie to work. Basically, this is an anti-Republican propaganda film. That said, I give it a lot of credit for how far director Adam McKay pushes the envelope in terms of the film’s formal construction, which is why it’s above the bottom three on this list.
Black Panther
Black Panther is kind of the inverse of Green Book, in being a film that has gotten a lot of extra credit for qualities that it does not actually possess. This is probably about as good as a Marvel movie can ever be, but that says a lot more about the inherent limitations of the Marvel formula than it does about how good this movie is. Black Panther doesn’t ask any real questions because it’s not allowed to; it’s easy to see what this movie could have been, and that’s the movie that the Black Panther partisans pretend was actually made.
A Star is Born
I don’t understand the love for this film but I also am admittedly not a big music person. Great soundtrack, great performance from Gaga, the movie basically doesn’t make any sense at all.
Roma
I have to preface this by noting that Roma somewhat falls into a classification of movies that I have always disliked, which is movies about people suffering for no reason, so take my distaste for this film with that grain of salt. That said, the best descriptor I can come up with for this movie is “gluten-free neorealism,” which is to say, it pretends to be a successor to De Sica and Rossellini but it is made without the essential qualities of freedom and wisdom that characterize their films. Heavy-handed, manipulative, and boring. Man, I hated this movie.
So here’s hoping for, but not expecting, a BlacKkKlansman win tonight.