It's my 90th Oscars preview....

It’s one of those years where the films are so varied, and mostly of really high quality, that I just don’t know what I want to win Best Picture. I know Darkest Hour is the weakest, and I don’t want it to win, but beyond that…. So here’s a short take on each, in alphabetical order, in the hope that by the time I get to the end I might have decided.

Call Me By Your Name

A truly beautiful and moving film that I know is one of my favourites of the nine nominees, although it took a second viewing to really love it, which might be a tiny mark against it. It’s a strange thing – the first time, although it was gorgeous to look at and emotionally involving, it felt a bit meandering and aimless, and although I knew I really liked it, I didn’t quite get why it was being so raved about. But the second viewing really worked for me (I don’t think it was because one of the women behind me was fully sobbing for about the last third). Instead of being meandering, it felt perfectly paced and languorous, capturing the feeling that a long summer holiday doesn’t feel like something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, all perfectly paced out, but actually something that might go on forever, only for the end to suddenly come into view in a way that feels like all that time that stretched along was no time at all.

What is evident from the first second is how beautiful the film looks, it actually feels like the room has got 10 degrees warmer from the Italian sunshine radiating off the screen, you can practically feel the hot sweltering air.  It is incredibly evocative and despite being an unfamiliar locale, feels instantly warm and inviting. 

It is also one of the best acted films of the nominated films.  Timothee Chalamet is superb. Elio could easily be annoying, or distant from the audience, but he is convincing, captivating and heartbreaking. Elio may not always be sure what he is feeling or how to act, but we always understand him and believe the actions he is taking.  Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Caesar are also brilliant as Elio’s parents, perhaps a little idealised, but incredibly grounded and warm.  Armie Hammer is also very good as Oliver, and captures the know-it-all confidence that I’m sure lots of people can slightly cringingly remember having at 24. The only slight problem is he really doesn’t look 24 (I’m pretty sure he looked older than 24 in The Social Network when he was actually 23 at the time) and while it may have been partly to disguise that Chalamet was 22 playing 17, it maybe would have worked better with a younger actor.  However, Chalamet is so good at getting across a 17 year old who is sometimes so much more mature, and sometimes so very teenage, that it is only a minor issue.

Overall, it’s a long shot, and highly unlikely to win, but I wouldn’t be at all disappointed if it does.

Darkest Hour

Given I’m probably about to slag it off, I should probably make clear that I didn’t actually dislike Darkest Hour. It’s fine in a crowd-pleasing history pic type thing. It’s not badly made. The production values are very good. The acting is decent. It’s engaging, and at times it’s quite gripping. And I liked it even though I’m not exactly Winston Churchill’s biggest fan, and very much not a fan of the great man of the moment approach to history.

But it just doesn’t feel like it belongs in a list of this quality.  I mean, if it’s this year’s old white man war movie (there’s always one, it’s like they have a quota), then it is 100 times better than either Hacksaw Ridge or the utterly awful American Sniper. So there’s that. But it is, in my view, Joe Wright’s weakest film by a distance (and bizarrely the first of his to have a male lead character, although I don’t think that’s the reason).  The scene on the tube train is just ridiculous and nearly ruined the film.  Some of the interactions between Churchill and Lily James’ character also sometimes felt a little bit silly – it can just be a bit cheesy at times.  That’s not to say it doesn’t also have powerful moments.  And Gary Oldman is very impressive and committed in his performance. It’s just one of those performances where I’ve now seen the same few clips over and over again to the point that I’m remembering it as caricature. I’m sure when I watched it, there were many subtler or more powerful moments, as I remember being impressed , I just don’t remember what with. And maybe that is the film’s problem. Crowd pleasing and nicely made, yes. But memorable? Not really.

Dunkirk

I’m not sure if there has been an Oscars before where there are two films set in roughly the same short historic period. Interestingly, although these are two of the three most traditionally Oscar-type films on the shortlist, they are also very, very different films.  Darkest Hour is more traditional, Dunkirk felt, at least in terms of film making the more bold and groundbreaking (although to be fair to Darkest Hour it did do a better job of remembering that not everyone in the world is male or white – still want a film about those women’s auxiliary service telephone operators who were apparently amongst the last evacuated…. How good would that story be? Anyway moving on…._

Dunkirk is one of the more technically brilliant films on the list this year. I saw it in IMAX and it was an incredible cinematic experience.  The sound and score in particular were just utterly phenomenal. It was as visually stunning as you would expect from a Christopher Nolan movie (although I agree with those that noted his refusal to use much CGI meant it was a bit let down by beaches that were slightly emptier than they would have been).  However, the things the film did well, it did really brilliantly.  It got as close as probably a movie could in conveying the terror of the individual evacuating soldiers, the danger and bravery faced by everyone involved, from soldier, to airman, to sailors volunteering for the rescue. The intensity was incredible and I think had a real emotional pay off.  The time switch just about watched, apart from when the 1 week and 1 day segments started to overlap and one seen showed those rescued, followed by the preceding danger from which they were rescued, which caused a bit of a stutter in the tension. 

It’s hard to single out any cast members as the performances were generally really good, with Mark Rylance and Barry Keoghan on the boat over probably being the standouts. But this is very much a director’s film and it is directed superbly. Best Director looks to be heading Guillermo del Toro’s way, but Christopher Nolan would be a worthy winner.

Get Out

Even about nine months ago, if you’d said an occasionally very violent comedy-horror-thriller by a first time director previously best known as a sketch show comedian would get nominated for Best Picture, it might have seemed like a stretch. But Get Out is so damn good, it doesn’t seem strange at all.

Not only is it funny, and gripping, and pretty scary at times (it really does work on the comedy, horror and thriller levels), it is also an excellent satire, managing somehow to reference an incredible number of elements of American racial history, but without ever being heavy handed. It’s a special achievement, which comes from the excellent script, assured and clever directing from Jordan Peele and excellent performances, particularly from Daniel Kaluuya.

Kaluuya does some pretty serious acting heavy lifting in there – the film goes to some weird places and at times is brilliantly uncanny and he manages to be both surprised and horrified by them, whilst making sure everything still feels convincing, making it easier to suspend disbelief and just go with the film.  Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford are excellent support, starting out as normalish-but-just-off and carefully and cleverly becoming increasingly sinister and creepy. Betty Gabriel and Lakeith Stanfield are also really good with reasonably small parts, a really excellent mix of strangely robotic and occasional pure, unfiltered terror.

After its win at the Independent Spirit Awards, Get Out is in with a shot of Best Picture. And I’d be very happy if it won. Very few small budget films have the huge commercial and cultural impact that Get Out has had. Even fewer even attempt to blend cutting edge satire with so many genres. I’m not sure any other has pulled that off in such an entertaining and impactful way.

Lady Bird

The only thing that probably lets Lady Bird down is the sheer amount of hype placed on it – which was pretty impossible to live up to.  But take that away and it’s a wonderful film, and (I think) the only nominee that made me fully blub. I think how much anyone likes this film may be down to how much you like the central character but I’m a sucker for films with difficult teenage leads (can’t think why….) and I found her wonderfully infuriating and sympathetic, often at the same time.  It maybe wasn’t my favourite Saoirse Ronan performance (but what could match Brooklyn) and there was the odd moment where for the first time ever I thought I caught Ronan acting, but even a slightly less good Saoirse Ronan performance is still better than 99.9% of other performances out there.  And to fair, given how much teenagers like to exaggerate, the little excesses felt true to Lady Bird’s character.

The relationship between daughter and mother was really well done – even though her mother could be unnecessarily mean, the film made sure there was enough background to her that you saw and felt where this came from, and that this wasn’t how her mother wanted to be. I also loved her relationship with best friend Julie, another relationship that could be fraught and melodramatic and not what either person meant it to be, but always real and true.

Greta Gerwig brings exactly what you want from any coming of age movie – a real sense of time and place, memorable characters, the right blend of humour and drama, and a proper emotional punch. I loved the way it was edited and flowed through the school year. It packed so much in to a film which doesn’t set out to be big or showy, but real and true and moving. I can’t wait to see it again, it feels like a film I could watch multiple times and get so much out of each time. And I think it may just be my favourite.

Phantom Thread

Of course, favourite doesn’t necessarily equal ‘best’. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but there is something about Phantom Thread that makes me feel like it is the best film this year. Maybe I was just in the right mood, but it ended and I just thought well that was extraordinary.

The easiest place to start is it is undoubtedly visually stunning – as you’d expect from a Paul Thomas Anderson film. Every shot, every bit of production design and costuming is perfect and rich and beautiful.  The performances are also incredible. Yes Daniel Day-Lewis is wonderful, when isn’t he, but his character and performance are so complex, in many and most ways, an utterly repulsive person without being a terrible one, a fascinating and compelling portrayal of the selfishness of artistic genius. And Vicky Krieps and Lesley Manville are also superb.  Both characters are not who they first present themselves to be, but as additional facets of their characters are revealed, it doesn’t feel like it’s coming out of nowhere, instead you find yourself suddenly reseeing previous interactions in a different light, utterly beguiled by these three intensely layered and complex but convincing characters.

It’s hard to describe the plot of Phantom Thread, but it certainly did not go where I thought it would.  I’m not normally a fan of cinema that tries to unsettle, usually because it feels like that is the main or only trick the director has. But in this, Anderson unsettles the viewer in order to completely pull them in and have great fun in deconstructing tropes around the male artistic genius and the put upon female support in his life. He teases out every inch of pettiness and thoughtless cruelty and then flips the film around so that you don’t know where you are, or what you want for the characters, or what you think they deserve.  It really is an indescribable film (at least for me) but left me astonished and compelled by its brilliance, even if Get Out or Lady Bird are films that I loved more.

The Post

The Post is possibly the second weakest film in the list – another historical crowd pleaser, although a much more accomplished and memorable one that Darkest Hour.  The great thing about The Post is that it does exactly what you’d want from a film about the Pentagon Papers, directed by Spielberg and starring Hanks and Streep, to do. It’s slight let down is it doesn’t really do much more.  Unlike Lincoln, which went beyond what I think I’d seen from Spielberg and felt like a really masterful film, the Post is just very good.

It feels like a proper Hollywood film, with a fantastic supporting cast, and two dependably watchable performances from the leads – although neither feel like they are particularly stretching themselves. It just about handles the message it wants to give of the importance of power to account, and that the means for doing this need to be protected, but sometimes tips over into the unsubtle.  It manages to construct a reasonably exciting plot from something that we roughly know the end to – which is not always the easiest thing to pull off.  It’s a fun but serious take, but never quite catches fire in the way that something tonally similar such as Hidden Figures does. 

The Shape of Water

I really, really liked the Shape of Water but there was a tiny thing stopping me from genuinely falling in love with it.  Having thought about it, I think it was that in being a sort of fairy tale, it did the fairy tale thing of telling you that character x and character y are now in love and this will overcome everything and drive the story, but like in a fairy tale it just tells you that rather than making you believe it. I just don’t think enough was devoted to that early on to make you really believe in this world-defying romance. But it was only a small quibble, in what is an imaginative and visually wonderful film.

Sally Hawkins is reliably brilliant in the central role, and stops her character from becoming annoyingly twee, by putting some grit and sadness and defiance into the performance.  Octavia Spencer is always watchable, but it did feel like she was rehashing her character from The Help – I suspect that was more the script than her fault.  And Michael Stulbarg in particular stood out in the rest of the supporting cast.

I would not be surprised to see The Shape of Water to take quite a few of the technical awards. The visual detail and flair is what elevates the film from a slightly strange fantasy fairy tale into a really good film. It cleverly feels both period specific and just that little bit different to the real world, which is perfect for the story it is trying to tell.  There was clearly a lot of love and care went into creating the world and the backdrop blends really well with the story, and is almost a character in of itself.

It would be one of the more unusual films to take Best Picture if it was successful, but I wouldn’t resent its success. It’s not at the top of my list, but the imagination and visual brilliance it has make it deserving of its place on this list.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The smart money seems to be on Three Billboards winning (though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Get Out sneak it). And it is up there for me with any of the films there, even accounting for the understandable reservations people have about the way it uses racial politics as a convenient backdrop for the plot and then sort of it ignores it when convenient.

I’ve seen the odd thing suggesting people don’t like the film giving redemption to some of its characters or that they don’t like the moral of the film – which was slightly confusing to me as I don’t think this is a film which particularly trying to get a moral across or redeem any of its characters (that would certainly be new for a Martin McDonagh film….). As usual, he gives us a tableau of likeably unlikeable characters plus some slightly more innocent bystanders, which doesn’t tie up neatly, and barely resolves at all.

It didn’t quite have the sheer oh my god what is this smack in the face of In Bruges, and I slightly resent how much it was promoted as a comedy as, although it is very funny, much of the humour was in the trailer and I wasn’t quite prepared for it being more of a drama, and a very dark one at that. Still, that is not the fault of the film, and I have tried to look past it.

The script is what you’d expect from McDonagh, ridiculously black humour and no desire to stick to  mainstream Hollywood storytelling, with no-one really learning or acting particularly heroic. But at the same time, the characters are ones whose stories you really want to see and to see where they go next. With a cast as good as the one in the film, of course the acting is excellent. Frances McDormand feels like possibly the only actor who could have played Mildred and of course she is brilliant doing so. It would be nice to see Woody Harrelson getting as much recognition as Sam Rockwell – both are really good, but Harrelson’s feels like the harder one to get right, and he pitches it perfectly.

Although there’s no clear favourite this year, Three Billboards has probably had the most awards success this year, and with its at time properly nasty black humour, lack of neatness and messy characters would be an interesting and worthy winner.

So who do I want to win? Ermm, argh, I think just because it made me properly cry and because it is just so my type of film that doesn’t always get the critical recognition it deserves, Eleanor’s Best Picture goes to Lady Bird.