The Oscar nominations were unveiled this morning. And for the most part, they avoided any big surprises.
Best Picture nominees were:American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor ThingsandThe Zone of Interest.
Oppenheimer led all nominees with 13 noms. The surreal dramedy Poor Things earned 11, and Killers of the Flower Moon received 10. Barbie—the biggest movie of the year, financially speaking—snagged eight.
And right there, we’re tipped off to what a strange year 2023 was for film.
Massive blockbusters aren’t normally up for Oscars. It’s just not done. The last time a huge film also scored a Best Picture nomination? 2018’s Black Panther. The last time it actually won? You’d have to go back 20 years, to when The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King earned nearly $1.2 billion globally and walked away with 11 Academy Awards.
Sure, some Oscar winners have been financially successful, too. Last year’s Everything Everywhere All At Once earned a respectable $141.2 million worldwide. But I’d say that 2020’s Nomadland—which earned $3.7 million in the United States, or about what Barbie spent on hairspray—feels more normative. Artsy Oscar darlings typically aren’t box-office draws, just as Transformers XXVII: Revenge of the Ball Bearings wouldn’t qualify as Oscar bait.
But Barbie, with a $1.4 billion worldwide gross and an 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes, checked both boxes, making it a rare Oscar frontrunner that people have actually seen. And it’s not the only one. Oppenheimer, the second half of this summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon, earned nearly $1 billion worldwide itself along with its 13 Oscar nominations. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon landed in our weekly Movie Monday feature plenty, earning $156 million globally before attracting yet more eyeballs on Apple TV+. Three of the year’s top four contenders for gold also made a lot of green.
Sure, having three financially successful films in the Best Picture race doesn’t exactly qualify as a populist uprising. But it’s interesting.
Another thing to point out with Barbie: It’s PG-13. It’s joined by fellow PG-13 films Past Lives and The Zone of Interest in the Best Picture category. That said, you could argue that none of those films qualifies as family friendly. Past Lives encourages us to root for the collapse of a marriage. Barbie comes with plenty of pink baggage. The Zone of Interest is almost devoid of explicit content issues—but the fact that it’s a searing movie about the Holocaust should give anyone pause. Again, Oscar is hardly cozying up to families this year—but some of its nominees showed a modicum of restraint.
Even some of the R-rated films in the Best Picture category showed a modicum of restraint. Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon kept their language issues largely in check, even if they had big problems in other areas. In the case of The Holdovers and American Fiction, the main content concern that kept them from a PG-13 rating was the language. (Of course, Poor Things made up for that restraint by showing none of its own.)
A couple of other tidbits to ponder: Three of the 10 Best Picture nominees—Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest—were foreign-language films. Streaming services continued to flex their muscles, too. Netflix led all distributors with 18 nominations, while Apple Original Films landed another 13.
Alas, some of my favorite films were roundly ignored. Freud’s Last Session—about a fictional meeting between the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Oxford professor C.S. Lewis—failed to score a single nomination. The Mission, a thought-provoking and moving examination of a missionary’s ultimately fatal attempt to bring the Gospel to a people who didn’t want to hear it, went without recognition, too. And where, pray tell, is Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget?
We’ll be talking more about this year’s crop of Oscar nominees in the weeks to come, in addition to unveiling our own Plugged In Movie Awards contenders. We’ll tell you everything that you and your family need to know.
6 Responses
I’m a little disappointed that “Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse” was overlooked for the Best Picture nomination.
Yeah. It was one of the very few superhero movies to perform well this year and was widely beloved by critics and audience members, rightly so. Its lack of a true ‘ending’ may have hurt it, but expect a nomination for Beyond The Spider-Verse … whenever that comes out.
My final 2023 film ranking:
– Barbie (100% – preachy film, but a tremendous amount of it needed to be heard, including in the church, where I saw way too much misogyny growing up; while the film is filled with adult subject matter almost from the start, I felt like almost all of it was generally used well and for a necessary purpose instead of being pretentious)
– Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (95% for Chris Pine’s unconvincing costume and a minor plot contrivance regarding his daughter at the end but a deeply likable cast and story)
– Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (95% for lack of true ‘ending’ but superb character writing)
– Oppenheimer (90% – great movie that’s far too long and Christopher Nolan’s audio balancing of dialogue versus action scenes is still way too uneven, plus I couldn’t decide if the movie wanted us to be ‘excited’ by Florence Pugh’s more lurid scenes or appalled at them because of their unfaithful context and because of the movie’s willingness to be critical of the morality of many of its main character’s other actions)
– The Boy and the Heron (85% – awful story far beneath Miyazaki’s capabilities and legacy, with way too much emphasis on symbolism over character development, but incredibly gorgeous artwork)
– Mission Impossible 7 (80% for some big plot holes regarding willingness to use internet-reliant technology and the main character being overly trusting of his “friends’ ” identities in a series where fake faces exist; stellar music, though)
– Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (80% for horrific subject matter and disproportionate focus on Rocket and Peter at the expense of most of the rest of the cast; excellent use of 4DX motion-simulation, some of my favorite since Top Gun: Maverick)
– Godzilla Minus One (75% – I like the idea of a character-driven Godzilla movie, but the most of the actual characters except for the fishermen weren’t as interesting as the movie thinks they were; if you want a politics movie, I highly recommend Shin Godzilla instead; I will say that the special effects and the motion simulation – when it was there – were generally incredible)
– Super Mario Bros. Movie (75%, and it’d be a 50% if not for the excellent soundtrack; the script wasn’t enjoyable, but the numerous jokes about suicide most definitely didn’t help, and on a minor note, Princess Peach felt like the best and most important character in a movie that on paper wasn’t supposed to be about her)
“Poor Things” : It won’t get Best Picture, but maybe some of the more artistic categories. I thought it was visually astonishing. A steampunk feminist fantasy. And the score was rather sublime. Not for those with delicate sensibilities, but 9 out of 10 stars for me.
I don’t know that I agree Black Panther was the last huge movie to be nominated. Joker became the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time, that’s pretty big.
Yep. Between that and Oppenheimer both making enormous amounts of money (one broke a billion [without a China release!!] and the other came close, neither had a PG-13 rating or below, and both of them made ~90% of The Passion’s US-only take), we can see that Best Picture noms and massive box-office takes aren’t mutually exclusive even among films that aren’t family-friendly. Does Dune count as a “huge” movie? Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water most certainly did, and both of those got nominated for Best Picture. Everything Everywhere All At Once made a huge return on its tiny budget and actually did win the award.