A Multiverse of Madness: Oscar Predictions

Remaking classic films can be a dicey proposition. Exhibit A is probably A Star is Born. Powered by the incandescent Judy Garland, George Cukor’s 1954 musical was one of Hollywood’s greatest moments (admittedly it was a remake itself, but don’t distract me with facts). But disaster ensued when Barbra Streisand tried to recapture the magic in 1976, and even worse was 2018’s stinker starring Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper and (checking notes) Dave Chappelle, for some reason. So I was leery when German director Edward Berger ignored this cautionary tale and decided to remake 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front — which all these decades later remains the greatest and most powerful war film of all (we’re ignoring the 1979 TV version starring Richard Thomas of The Waltons fame).

But in this case Berger was right, because let’s be honest: Very few people in 2022 are likely to watch Lewis Milestone’s black-and-white classic (which incidentally won that year’s Oscar for best picture). Modern directors have far greater tools to viscerally recreate the battlefield experience, as we’ve seen in such epics as Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, and 1917. This allows Berger to render the devastating anti-war message of Erich Maria Remarque’s source novel in ways Milestone couldn’t dream of. Watching this new All Quiet is an unforgettable experience, by turns brutal and inspiring. The acting, cinematography and sound are all frankly incredible, and the message, unfortunately, is as timely as ever. It’s probably too sickeningly real and unrelenting to win best picture a second time, but you should see it. And don’t sleep on the 1930 version either: Watch either one of these movies and you won’t be the same afterward.

Avatar: The Way of Water
Like most of the world I saw the first Avatar, but 2009 is a long time ago. I remember digging the film’s message about mankind’s plunder of natural habitats before surrendering to boredom as the 162-minute running time took its toll. For the new film I made a rare foray to an actual movie theater, despite the daunting fact that 2022’s version clocks in at an even more punishing 192 minutes. There’s no denying that James Cameron gives you a lot of entertainment for your time and money. Immersive and occasionally jaw-dropping, the sequel is packed with wondrous images, riveting action and heart-rending emotion. It’s also a thematic mess with some of the most egregious mixed messages I’ve seen in any film.

Once again, the Na’vi tribe of Pandora must defend itself against an attack from Earthlings who want to colonize their planet, and human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully is forced to flee with his family when an avatar version of his old nemesis Colonel Miles Quaritch comes hunting for revenge. Jake’s clan takes refuge with the Metkayina, Pandora’s sea people, and must learn the “way of water.”

Here’s where Cameron’s peace-and-harmony message gets tricky. The tribes of Pandora like to espouse their oneness with nature while zooming around on the backs of nameless, winged creatures whose apparent purpose in life is to serve as their personal taxi service. Jake’s fondest memory is spearing fish to death with his eldest son, while another son makes a big deal of befriending a massive, whale-like creature who saves his life, but has no compunction about killing smaller, less useful fish. Elsewhere we’re given a wise, passionate speech about resisting the urge for vengeance, since killing only begets more killing — while the film builds toward a climactic battle scene where the bad guys are dutifully slaughtered. These ethical issues and the aforementioned running time are twin stumbling blocks in an otherwise impressive film. “The way of water has no beginning and no end,” one of the Metkayina tells a Na’vi at one point — about 130 minutes into this thing.

That’s the problem in a nutshell.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh snuck into 2017’s best picture race with the overrated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and he’s done it again this year with Banshees, a bizarre mix of light humor and deathly serious philosophizing that leaves a viewer wanting to plunge off the nearest Irish cliff. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star as Colm and Padraic, two longtime chums in a small Irish village in the 1920s. One day Colm abruptly decides life is too short to waste precious time chatting with a simpleton like Padraic, and informs his stunned neighbor that he no longer wishes to speak with him. Worried that he’s become a laughingstock in their gossipy little town, Padraic refuses to let it go, launching a feud that quickly turns grim before careening into outright tragedy. Banshees has its moments: The comic dialogue among the townees is funny for a few minutes, before the film turns a corner and deposits us into the black hole of its bleak world view. McDonagh seems to specialize in brooding dramas about weighty topics, but he handles these tragic themes a little too cavalierly for my taste. Unlike life itself, there’s really no reward for sitting through this dreary stuff.

This staggering pile of dung would be more at home at the Razzies than the Oscars. Let’s get right to the elephant in the room: Austin Butler looks NOTHING like Elvis. The King was a good-ole’ boy through and through: Those Southern roots were as essential to his vice-grip on our collective imagination as the deep voice and the swiveling hips. Butler was born in Anaheim and cut his teeth acting for Disney and Nickelodeon. He wouldn’t know a bowl of grits from a plate of alfalfa sprouts, and it shows. Another big problem is the film’s general ugliness. This is shocking coming from Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director whose chief claim to fame is his striking visual style. Those talents, which served audiences so well in films like Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby, are mysteriously lacking here. Caught between the sparse dustiness of Presley’s beginnings in rural 1950s America and the glitzy excess of the 1970s Vegas years, Luhrmann never fully commits to either aesthetic, offering up a hodgepodge of dark, washed-out images drained of any life. The screenplay is a similar inchoate mess, taking liberties with Presley’s supposed guilt at plundering Black music and his fecklessness at handling an alcoholic mother in clipped, unconvincing scenes that go nowhere. Mostly it dwells on the well-worn, Svengali-like dynamic between Elvis and his manager, Col. Tom Parker. Not helping matters is Tom Hanks as Parker, who hasn’t been this miscast since 1990’s Bonfire of the Vanities and gives one of his worst performances.

We’re in a “golden” age of big-budget musical biopics. Elvis joins similarly garish and factually challenged depictions of Queen, Elton John, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, et al. These films are almost universally terrible, but Elvis might be the worst offender given its subject matter’s outsize cultural importance. This film should have been returned to sender, and Luhrmann should have his visa revoked for such wanton desecration of an American icon.

I can’t prove that filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert got the idea for their movie from Rick and Morty, the but it suuuure seems like it. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan play a Chinese-American couple who run a laundromat in LA. Yeoh’s character is saddled with a demanding mother (a tired ethnic trope if we’re to be honest), challenged by her daughter’s lesbian relationship — which she worries will upset the family — and topping it all off, Quan is working up the courage to ask for a divorce. That’s already enough for most movies, but Kwan and Scheinert are just getting started: The plot really spins into motion when Quan is contacted by a version of himself in another universe and the couple is recruited to battle an evil force that threatens the entire multiverse. Despite the considerable good will earned by Yeoh, Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis in one of her best roles as a scary IRS agent hot on their heels for back taxes, I didn’t find Everything Everywhere to be the thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride most people did. It wears out its welcome a bit in the second and third acts, devolving into a rather tiresome slog of repetitive fight scenes and rapid cutting between realities that tax the eyeballs and the patience. It’s still a good movie, flaws and all. But for my money, the inter-dimensional cable episodes of Rick and Morty are still the gold standard of multiverse-based entertainment.

The most overrated director in movie history finally gets around to making a movie about his childhood, and it’s every bit the manipulative bore you’d expect. Directors have turned their own life stories into films for ages, notably Truffaut in The 400 Blows, Fellini in 8 1/2 and Woody Allen in Annie Hall. But those men were all willing to acknowledge at least some personal flaws and make that brutal honesty part of their art, while the Sammy Fabelman who stands in for Spielberg here is nothing if not the unadulterated hero of his own story. The film begins well enough as young Sammy develops an interest in cinema: The evolving technology of the 1950s and ’60s and Sammy’s burgeoning inventiveness make for The Fabelmans‘ best scenes. Before long, though, the story is waylaid by a lot of unwelcome dramatic baggage involving a loveless marriage and high school antisemitism, before the third act finally gets back to reminding us what a brilliant prodigy Spielberg was. The director notably waited until his actual parents were dead before airing their dirty laundry, while his three siblings are reduced to mere window dressing — the film barely bothers to tell us their names. Spielberg just wants us to know how lucky we are that all this domestic strife didn’t rob moviegoers of those indispensable cinematic masterpieces only his special genius could create.

It’s no accident that Spielberg’s best work — Jaws, Duel, the “Murder by the Book” episode of Columbo — occurred when the subject matter forbade any excess sentimentality. We all remember the greatness of Saving Private Ryan‘s D-Day battle sequence, for instance, but watch it again and you’ll cringe at the desperately maudlin framing scene that opens the film. It’s a sickness with him, and it’s one audiences and critics have been enabling for nearly a half-century. Watching The Fabelmans is like eating a giant funnel cake infested with worms: It’s bad for you, and it’s not much fun going down.

Despite is pretentious title, Triangle of Sadness is actually a comic satire about a bunch of millennial models and influencers booked on a luxury cruise that goes hellishly wrong in some pretty hilarious ways. It’s written and directed by Sweden’s Ruben Ostlund, whose 2014 film Force Majeure was a memorable slow burn of domestic tension. Unlike most American films, Triangle doesn’t use music cues or familiar editing beats to telegraph when something bad or funny is going to happen — it just happens. There are pros and cons to this approach. The greater verisimilitude can be offset by a tendency for the film to drift a bit, not unlike the ship. This spiraling calamity eventually crests (spoiler alert) and the ship’s surviving passengers and crew wind up marooned on an island, where the second half of the film concerns their efforts to survive amid the inevitable Lord of the Flies-style power struggle. The social order, which was so strictly adhered to aboard the ship, does a sharp 180, allowing Ostlund to make some rather obvious points about hierarchies and hypocrisy and so forth. It’s low-hanging fruit, but he does it well. Triangle is a fine film — and you can definitely count me in for Ostlund’s next effort — but I think its inclusion here is a bit of a stretch.

I can’t imagine a title more perfectly designed to chase off certain elements of the male audience. (How many women would flock to theaters to see a movie called Men Punching?) This depressing tale concerns an isolated Mennonite colony where some of the men systematically drug and rape women for years, including children, only for the colony’s male leaders to demand that they forgive their attackers if they want to enter the kingdom of heaven. So yeah, not exactly Bridesmaids II. Adding to the fun, most of the movie takes place in the hay loft of a barn, where a subset of the women gather to debate whether or not to leave the colony and strike off on their own. This makes Women Talking sort of like a female 12 Angry Men, which is apt since watching the film feels a bit like jury duty. Writer/director Sarah Polley tries to build tension into the characters’ debate over the concepts of faith and forgiveness. That’s all well and good for the Mennonites, but movie audiences are conditioned to expect a little vengeance with their rape, and the men’s crimes are so egregious that anything short of a noose is a clear miscarriage of justice. Stylistically, Polley delivers a dour movie filmed in muted tones meant to invoke the Mennonite life — i.e., no fun, for them or for us. The film’s camerawork is frustratingly plain and unimaginative: It lacks the crackling elan of other close-quarters dramas like 12 Angry Men, Glengarry Glen Ross, or Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, to name a few. Women Talking is only in the best picture category because of its subject matter — a clear case of virtue signaling undermined by the inconvenient fact that it’s just not a very good film.

Steven Spielberg, Elvis Presley and Tom Cruise are some pretty imposing cultural tent poles, but this is 2023, and nothing wields more power these days than identity politics. That will translate to a victory for Everything Everywhere All At Once. Not that’s it’s a particularly political film — it’s not — but voters will see it as a chance to throw light on overlooked segments of the audience, mainly the massive Asian population, which has been so drastically under-represented in American film history, and immigrants, whose stories have been well-represented since the silent days, but who will always garner plenty of sympathy. Then there’s Michelle Yeoh. She’s come to symbolize the deserving, the overdue, the aggrieved, and I think her presence in the best-actress category will carry over to the best picture vote. Throw in a gay-themed subplot, a shout-out to the beleaguered small business owner and a trendy gimmick like the multiverse and you’ve got a solid recipe for a gold statue.

Maybe in another universe Spielberg walks away with his second best picture prize and more acclaim in a career whose cup runneth over long ago. But in this reality, the one-time boy wonder will have to content himself with a Golden Globe, while the Oscar goes to Everything Everywhere All At Once.