the ocean

As I'm sure I've mentioned in the past, most years Ian and I make an effort to see all of the best picture nominees before the Oscars. Note that I say "most years," because sometimes there are nominees I know are not going to work for me, a la Avatar: The Way of Water, and I drop any pretensions of running the table. (I get a headache just thinking about the Avatar movies, and not from the 3D, just from the dialogue.) This year, we did attempt the sweep, but were two movies short by the time the ceremony rolled around; blame our incredibly rich social lives. But now we have caught up, and the results are not that impressive!

From the eight we saw in a timely fashion, Nickel Boys was my top choice, though I knew it had absolutely no chance of winning. Conclave looked prestigious as hell but was fairly ridiculous. Dune Two was way too tan and grainy, and The Substance was gross as hell. Emilia Perez we're supposed to pretend never happened now because reasons. Wicked was actually a really good movie and I don't even particularly love the source material, but probably not "serious" enough to win anything. Anora was fine but kind of won by default I think? Anyway, that was then and this is now.

A few weeks ago we finally blocked out the three and a half hours to see The Brutalist. It was really beautiful to look at and I like the score a lot, but good lord was it long and frankly pretty random in places. Also, I'm not sure if I was supposed to hate the main character? I mean, I get not wanting to make artistic compromises, but also maybe you don't want to subject your entire family to grinding poverty for your principles? And I do sort of hate that brutalism seems to be having a moment again. I refuse to accept that giant slabs of concrete are any sort of aesthetic at all.

And last week we saw A Complete Unknown, and wow. They just made a bunch of shit up about Bob Dylan, huh? Like, some of it seemed weird and then I was reading about it online afterwards and the director was just like, oh, it's not really a biopic, and I didn't want to have "fealty" to the facts. OK, then. Be on the lookout for my movie about Queen Elizabeth where she wins a hot dog eating contest and travels across the Pacific Northwest ingesting mushrooms. I mean, it was well acted and an interesting recreation of a period (I think, obviously I was not alive then) but maybe don't have Dylan bone Joan Baez during the Cuban Missile Crisis if they didn't actually meet until like a year after that? 

Whatever, I'm getting cheese fries.