A Year of Oscar Worthy Films & Performances

Dearest Reader,

I love cinema. Like many children of the 1980s I saw amazing films arguably at too young an age. One of the first films I remember watching was Brian De Palma’s classic Cuban gangster movie Scarface (1983) starring a menacing Al Pacino and resplendent Michelle Pfeiffer. I didn’t see it in theaters, but it still blew my mind. The film is like a thrilling, bloody, epic Greek tragedy. I was listening to a podcast the other day and the hosts, who are about 10-15 years older than me, were discussing how in the 1970s and 1980s there were many amazing films to see in theaters. Parents often consented to kids watching some rather mature subject matter. But one host made the point that although it’s more taboo today to present kids with mature films, it didn’t really scar us or anything, but it made us learn to appreciate excellent filmmaking and mature storytelling. It was like a gateway into the fantastical realism of adulthood. In the late 1970s and 1980s films began to target children more and the studio fixation with blockbusters (movies that are very popular and rake in a lot of cash) increasingly became the norm peaking with the Marvel cinematic universe. But on the flip side the quality of cinema diminished, or rather, our collective appreciation of quality cinema diminished as we gobbled up a spam diet of predictable stories, characters and themes. This year feels different. This year I think we found our way back to appreciating a diverse constellation of filmmaking that includes “unusual” blockbusters and arthouse masterworks alike. Here are a few films I saw that are nominated for Oscars in 2024.

Last night I watched Rustin directed by George C. Wolfe, starring the arresting Colman Domingo as civil rights legend Bayard Rustin and a who’s who of black Hollywood including Chris Rock, Glynn Turman, Audra McDonald, CCH Pounder, Jeffrey Wright, Alm Ameen (as a convincing MLK) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph among many other great diverse performers. I can’t quite recall when I first saw Colman Domingo, but I know I noticed him and every time I see him on screen I can’t look away. His performance in this film is genuinely captivating. Rustin, who I first discovered as an undergraduate, is well known in black scholarship but less so in popular culture for his indispensable role in recruiting Martin Luther King, Jr. to the civil rights movement and being a masterful strategist in community organizing. I highly recommend everyone to watch the film on Netflix. The feature is produced by Barack and Michelle Obama and director George C. Wolfe paints rich, compelling images of black life in the 1940s into the 1960s. The feature explores life  both in public and private, culminating in the 1963 March on Washington.

It’s electrifying to see Domingo inhabit the dynamism of Rustin who mobilized the public and legendary civil rights icons alike to literally change America over the course of the past 60 years. In fact, the visionary, more just world that Rustin and his ilk manifested so many years ago marks the world that most of us hold dear today. The film is not only a wonderful historical record of what and how change happens, but it also celebrates the unknown and lesser known figures of history including student organizers who were instrumental in assuring freedoms for so many of us today. Rustin was gay and to be a prominent black gay man in the movement was almost unheard of, but he took the homophobic and racist slings and arrows that made civil rights more inclusive in his wake. Rustin is a film I never could have imagined existing when I was a child, but I’m grateful we have the blessed opportunity to envisage it today. 

I also just saw the film Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer. It’s a quietly disturbing film about a well known Nazi officer, Rudolf Hoss, and his family. Hoss, executed by hanging after the war for his crimes, oversaw and resided next to the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in German occupied Poland. He later went on to introduce the chemical used in gas chambers and is responsible for murdering over one million Jews in Europe. Contrastingly, the film opens with a palatial scene of Hoss and his family enjoying a lakeside excursion. The film lulls you into the opulence and comfort of his family’s upper class lifestyle and the ways in which they casually accept a nightmare scenario as a matter of course and path towards class mobility.

The eerie manner in which death surrounds their every waking moment appears in Hoss’s mechanical office communiques detailing operations at the concentration camp or deliveries of clothes from the camp that are confiscated from those captured or murdered to the ashes of human remains that billow all around them, especially at night. Antisemitism permeates everything and appears in casual, dismissive statements about Jews, the use of Jewish labor to maintain their lifestyle and in one scene Hoss’s wife Hedwig coldly threatens an employee with extermination for a mistaken place setting at breakfast. It’s a well crafted, very timely feature that is worth seeing on the big screen. As producer James Wilson recently said upon winning the BAFTA award for best film not in the English language, “a friend wrote to me after seeing the film that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we choose not to look behind. Those walls aren’t new [and] it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen in the same way we think about innocent people being killed in Meriopole or in Israel.” 

I saw Barbie and Oppenheimer last year in theaters and I found both films to be expertly made. Barbie co-written/directed by Greta Gerwig and starring (and produced) by Margot Robbie with America Ferrera and Ryan Gosling is a humorous and innovative look into the life of Mattel dolls discovering feminism. Oppenheimer written/directed by Christopher Nolan with a tour-de-force performance by actor Cillian Murphy alongside Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr. is a powerfully executed exploration of the “father of the atomic bomb,” all the chaos in his mind and the chaos that surrounded him which he failed, in many ways, to put in order. Rather than detail the merits of each film which are pretty much evident in their huge box office success and cultural impact--“Barbenheimer” lives!--I think it’s important to recognize how audiences devoured the combined quality of excellent, well financed filmmaking with brilliant, insightful writing.

But I will say that similar to Zone of Interest these films felt to me, as an African, as an attempt by Westerners to reconcile deeply problematic parts of history and culture with untold negative consequences by reimagining how to tell the complicated, unresolved truth of a thing. We are still suffering from the atrocities of the Jewish holocaust, Barbie is a product that gives girls wildly unrealistic expectations of beauty or self-image and Robert Oppenheimer is very much, though not solely, responsible for our current reality of nuclear proliferation and the precedent of killing huge populations of civilians with nuclear arms as with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan where the emotional, physical and environmental fallout persists. Nevertheless, the world of cinema allows us to explore, contextualize, reflect upon and perhaps reimagine these various narratives of history. 

When Killers of The Flower Moon came out a few months ago I rushed to theaters to see it. I’m a huge fangirl of Martin Scorsese both as a fellow New Yorker and a lover of filmmaking. The feature stars relative newcomer Lily Gladstone, Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio (who co-produced with Scorsese). Certainly DeNiro and DiCaprio deliver amazing performances, but I’d like to spend time celebrating the work of Native American actress Lily Gladstone. After sweeping the awards season, Gladstone is on track to be the first Native American woman to win an Oscar for lead actress in a feature film. This is a welcome, overdue big f*cking deal. No matter the outcome, Gladstone should be very proud for shouldering and owning a very difficult role in this film about the diabolical pattern of Osage murders in early 1900s Oklahoma. The feature, meticulously based on source material and in cooperation with the Osage people, recounts without restraint the pattern of assassinations of wealthy Osage by greedy white interlopers coveting their stupendous oil wealth and land.

Gladstone and DiCaprio depict a real life, interracial married couple, Mollie and Ernest Burkhart. Ernest was a man who conspired to kill his wife’s entire family and slowly poison her to death all while claiming to love the mother of his children. Thankfully Ernest and his cronies were caught and served lengthy prison sentences, but the carnage they wrought beforehand is astounding. To shoulder such a role where she spoke in an ancient indigenous language alongside English, embodied a real-life matriarch of a well known Osage family and contended with deeply sinister material that unearths past, as well as, ongoing atrocities against Native Americans as a Native woman herself is really something to behold. Like all challenging Scorsese films I was shocked, deeply disturbed and rapt in the filmmakers near three and half hour western of colonialism and genocide. I cannot recommend it enough for people both within and without the United States to see this dark, but almost entirely true retelling of how European Americans treated their neighbors after the indigenous mistakenly welcomed them in through racist laws and a genocidal culture. Scorsese’s masterpiece is up for a best director and best picture Oscar plus several other nominations for DeNiro and the original score by Robbie Robertson. 

There are a number of films I have yet to review that are nominated like Poor Things (which I LOVED!), The Holdovers and Past Lives, all of which have garnered a great deal of excitement for smart, beautiful storytelling. Two other Oscar nominated films I saw and reviewed in the newsletter are American Fiction written/directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Erika Alexander and Sterling K. Brown--check out my review here. And I wrote an even longer piece on The Color Purple which was an amazing musical reconstruction of the original feature film starring Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover along with the Broadway hit starring Fantasia and Danielle Brooks. Brooks boasts the only Oscar nomination from the 2023 feature which is a surprise, even though obviously very well deserved. To be fair it is a very competitive Oscar race this year. Then again the 1985 film was nominated for eleven Oscars and holds the record for a film with the most nominations that didn’t win an award. I’ve loved watching the Oscars as much as I love watching the nominated films, but it is a very political process that sometimes garners uneven results where films, actors, directors, producers, crew etc. who should be acknowledged for their excellence are totally snubbed or lose out for inexplicable reasons. It’s not exactly a popularity contest, but it kind of is one too. Regardless, I will be in attendance from my living room and cannot wait to watch all the regalia go by. See you at the Oscars! 

With Love During End Times,

Agunda