Unless you live for CGI blockbusters, 2023 was a terrific year for movies. It was not only a solid time for indie movies, foreign films, and documentaries, it was the best year in many years for Oscar-bait pictures that were actually great. 2023 saw a few more releases than 2022 when the industry was still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, but multiplexes were still not over-crowded with new releases or devoting all their best cinemas to running the same big studio product on multiple screens. Thus, the unusual, mid-budgeted pictures stuck around in theaters longer, and people ventured out of their homes to watch more than two movies on the big screen again, in numbers we haven't seen since the lockdowns. These included Academy members, many of whom actually went out and saw more than a dozen or so films rather than half-heartedly watching their screeners.

One of the downsides of a strong year for prestige pictures is that the Oscar nominations can be a bit predictable. But I’m not complaining. This is the first year since the Academy went to the mandatory 10 Best Picture nominees that I didn’t despise one or more of the selected movies. Even though I’m not a big fan of either half of the year's Barbenheimer phenomena, I think both films belong on this list—in fact, Barbie and Oppenheimer probably belong there more than films I liked better, like Maestro and American Fiction. It's just always more exciting when some of the biggest films of the year get nominated for Best Picture. But in order for that to happen, studios need to release universally appealing one-off movies that can compete with the likes of The Super Mario Bros., or the latest installment in a franchise like The Fast & The Furious, or an entry in a particular superhero cinematic multiverse. For Barbie and Oppenheimer to be the #1 and #3 highest-grossing movies of the year is thrilling, even for someone like me, for whom neither of those films even cracked my top 75.

That said, the Oscar races are not especially exciting this year because it's practically a foregone conclusion that Oppenheimer will do the kind of sweep that hasn't occurred in over twenty years. Of course, the Academy is not a club. They don't all collude to ensure that certain films or actors get nominated over others. (And when they do, like last year's push to get Andrea Riseborough a Best Actress nomination, they get reprimanded.) But even though most members vote for what they like, the current members of most branches want to spread the wealth around more than the Academy of earlier decades. Since they now use ranked-choice voting, many awards will go to the majority of the second or third choice of most members. This pattern will make it unlikely for Oppenheimer to pull off a Titanic-level sweep—that film won 11 of its 14 nominations—although the 2023 film may still come close to the 1997 picture's tally.

Now, my track record as a prognosticator is pretty bad. I don't pay a lot of attention to the horserace or the social media chatter. I only know what people think because Film Twitter outrage is so loud and strident it’s impossible to ignore all of it. I know there are a lot of theories out there put forward by the woke and the anti-woke that Barbie could win because of guilt over Greta Gerwig not getting nominated for Best Director. But I don't expect an Argo situation or a Moonlight upset. I also don't think Oppenheimer peaked too soon. I think the academy will reward Christopher Nolan's flawed epic with Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Film Editing, Cinematography, Sound, and Score. There is no question that Robert Downey, Jr., will win for Supporting Actor, though I think Robert De Niro and Mark Ruffalo are more deserving. I'm also predicting that Cillian Murphy will nab Best Actor, despite the much-loved Paul Giamatti giving him a run for his money during precursor awards.

Two non-Oppenheimer wins that are almost guaranteed are Giamatti's Holdovers co-star Da’Vine Joy Randolph for Supporting Actress, whose sweep of nearly all other awards shows makes her a foregone conclusion, and Lili Gladstone as Best Actress for Killers of the Flower Moon. The Best Actress race feels like it could go either way between Gladstone and Emma Stone for Poor Things since both have been taking home multiple statues from various awards bodies. But I can't imagine the current makeup of the Academy will blow the opportunity to give this award for the first time to a Native-American actress whose quiet performance grounded her picture with such profound intensity in favor of again rewarding a prolific thirty-two-year-old who already has a Best Actress Oscar under her belt. 

The seeming predictability of an Oppenheimer sweep makes me wish some of the smaller categories, like the short films, were more exciting. But as great a year for feature films as 2023 was, the same can't be said for the short form. This year's crop of animated, live-action, and documentary shorts was hardly stellar. And just as this was a weak year for CGI blockbusters, the nominated animated features were also subpar. It's easily a two-film race between Hayao Miyazaki's highest-grossing film ever, The Boy and the Heron, and the year's only superhero movie not to under-perform at the box office, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Balancing the overall slate and adding interest, 2023 was a great year for documentaries. There were so many personality-driven biographical docs that I was sure at least one would be nominated. There were the docs that explored the legacy of departed pioneers—like Being Mary Tyler Moore, the first-rate career-retrospective about the iconic TV trailblazer; Squaring the Circle, an evocative and witty look back at the design team responsible for many of the most iconic album covers of all time; Aurora's Sunrise, which blends animated narrative and documentary retrospective to tell the story of an Armenian Genocide survivor who wound up starring in a Hollywood silent film that told her story; and The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a visually dynamic historical doc about the mysterious, influential, and all-but-forgotten feminist sexologist whose work challenged patriarchal attitudes about intimacy and female sexuality. Then there were those docs where the subject is still alive and able to take the stage for a touching Oscar moment—the clunky but effecting Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie; the warm, funny, and timely Judy Blume Forever; the comprehensive Liv Ullmann: A Road Less Traveled; the immersive Anselm; and the powerful Joan Baez: I Am a Noise. But none of those documentaries made it past the shortlist. The addition of so many international members to the Academy has resulted in more challenging films getting nominated, which I think is a good thing—though there are plenty of loud voices decrying that none of the fun, celebrity-driven documentaries get nominated anymore.

The International Feature category is also easy to predict this year since France submitted the wonderful (and unmistakably French) autumnal romance The Taste of Things instead of (in my opinion) the year's best picture, Anatomy of a Fall. Had the more acclaimed and popular Anatomy been nominated, it would be a lock. Since it's not, The Zone of Interest will take the prize. Zone was one of the International Features that caused a bit of a dust-up on Film Twitter, since the director of Germany's entry is a Brit, Jonathan Glazer. Even more controversial is that a German, Wim Wenders, directed Japan's entry, Perfect Days. Still, as controversies go, these are weak conflagrations.

Unlike last year's entertaining kerfuffle over the Andrea Riseborough nomination, the insipid Internet outrage this year was no fun at all. Social media was up in arms about the “snubbing” of the year's biggest box office winner, Barbie. But these tired and tedious hot-takes only succeeded in illustrating the sheer ignorance and hypocrisy of most people who disparage the Academy Awards on Twitter and other mediums, where thoughtful commentary goes to be stoned to death. Rather than celebrate the many nominations of women, especially women of color and non-Americans—the lack of which is usually the cause for Oscar uproar—the social media warriors largely ignored the nominations of Lily Gladstone, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, America Ferrera, Celine Song, Justine Triet, Samy Burch, Kaouther Ben Hania, Maite Alberdi, and Yegane Moghaddam (some historically noteworthy nominations) to focus on the fact that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were not nominated for Barbie.

Of course, both women were nominated for Barbie, just not in the categories their crusading fans wanted. Since we live in a film culture forever poisoned by the Auteur Theory, Gerwig's nomination for Best-Adapted Screenplay (along with her partner Noah Baumbach) feels to many like some kind of consolation prize. But it's hard to feel sorry for Gerwig, who has had literally 100 percent of the movies she's directed nominated for Best Picture. As for Robbie, people seem to think when an actor has a producer credit it must be some kind of honorary title signifying nothing. Folks, I assure you, Margot Robbie was a creative producer on Barbie, with input into virtually every aspect of that film. If it wins, she'll be up there.

But how often does the #1 box-office movie get nominated for Best Picture anyway? Since 1980, only four movies were named Best Picture that topped the box office charts—The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Titanic, Forrest Gump, and Rain Man. So much of the outrage about Oscar nominations has to do with ignorance about how the Academy operates. Each individual branch nominates films for each category, and the only category everyone in the Academy votes for is Best Picture. Thus, we should expect some inconsistencies from branch to branch since the Academy is not a monolith. Reading and listening to the vitriol about the nominations makes me think that what many people want is the woke equivalent of the old smoke-filled room, where a body of elites sits around and decides how best to divvy up the goodies in ways that will ruffle the fewest feathers and make the organization look good. That's not how the Academy works. (That is pretty much how the LA Film Critics Association works!)

The director's branch is one of the least diverse segments of the Academy since most American directors are still predominantly old white guys. It would be great to see that branch expand, as others have in recent years, inviting in more youthful and international representation. But if the goal is to get more films made by women directors, and that is a goal I certainly share, then people's “activism” needs to start by buying tickets to the movies that women direct. In a capitalistic (and a Democratic) society, complaining at the end of a process doesn’t do nearly as much good as getting actively involved at the beginning. I wonder how many people who were outraged about Barbie getting “snubbed” by the Academy, themselves “snubbed” Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, Past Lives, Showing Up, Earth Mama, You Hurt My Feelings, Priscilla, A Thousand and One, Blue Jean, Reality, The Royal Hotel, Bottoms, Scrapper, The Unknown Country, Birth/Rebirth, and many other women-directed films that, in my humble opinion, were superior cinematic works to Barbie.

All the sound and fury around the nominations has largely died down, which is a relief. Still, the barrage has colored the writing that accompanies my semi-annual ranked list of the nominations. This year, my order sometimes seemed absurd to me. The apples-to-oranges (to single grapes) comparisons were especially wild in a year when there was a 180-minute celluloid IMAX historical film that became an international phenomenon and a simple 7-minute animated short about fabrics. But I am placing these movies in order of how well I felt they succeeded at what they were attempting to do. That is always my criteria.

So, with one missing film—the animated feature Robot Dreams, which I was unable to catch during NEON's nationwide one-night-only pre-Oscar screening—here is my complete list of the 2023 Oscar-nominated films.

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52: THE AFTER - 1 nomination ★
Picture the worst offering from a night of thesis films from a second-tier film school in the early 1990s, but with a major movie star in the lead and a Netflix-level budget, and you've got The After. Director Misan Harriman's film about grief and loss begins with an act of violence so absurdly staged that one can’t help but be shocked, not at its depiction of random urban savagery (did Fox News co-produce this?) but at the astonishing preposterousness of the conception and execution of the act. David Oyelowo plays a British businessman who loses his wife and daughter and spends the following years driving an Uber and carrying the weight of his grief until one fateful ride, which provides the film with a climax almost as embarrassingly overblown as its opening.



#51: THE CREATOR - 1 nomination ★
The latest from Rogue One director Gareth Edwards was considered the best science fiction film of the year by many, but it failed to be a major box-office success—maybe 2023 wasn’t the best year for a work of pro-AI propaganda. The film blends the hackneyed clichés of a dozen superior sci-fi films with stale tropes from a half dozen Vietnam movies to tell this story of a 2055 Earth where the US is fighting a war against artificial intelligence. The twist here is that these are not the type of murderous interconnected operating systems that most dystopian future fiction predict; here, the robots and synthetic organisms are asking, "Can't we all just get along?" None of the endless world-building Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz labor at stands up to even the most basic scrutiny. The nominated Visual Effects barely register because the whole thing is presented in the typical dark, muddy style we now expect of contemporary blockbusters.


 
#50: FLAMIN' HOT - 1 nomination ★
The “inspirational true story” of how Flamin' Hot Cheetos came into existence was the dumbest (though not the worst!) of the eight or nine 2023 films about a commercial product or business phenomenon. There might have been a compelling film in this rags-to-riches tale of a Frito-Lay janitor who harnessed his entrepreneurial spirit, his faith in himself, and the buying power of his Mexican-American community to revolutionize the snack market. Unfortunately, the writing, direction, and cheeseball approach to the material sinks any interest the story might generate. The only reason this film is an Oscar contender is because many Academy members are determined to get Diane Warren a competitive Oscar for Best Original Song. "The Fire Inside" is her fourteenth nomination, and it would be a real shame if the songwriting legend won for such a generic ditty. Since she won a lifetime achievement award from the Academy last year, I hope they'll not be silly enough to reward her for such disposable fluff.

#49: WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko - 1 nomination ★
Veteran Pixar animator Dave Mullins, previously nominated for the 2017 Best Animated Short Oscar for Lou, delivers an overcooked but half-baked tribute to the titular John Lennon and Yoko Ono song about giving peace a chance. Set in the trenches of WWI, the film envisions a chess game played between two soldiers on opposing sides who communicate their moves via carrier pigeon crisscrossing no man's land. Co-written by Sean Ono Lennon, who executive produced with Yoko, the film has a sizable budget and a lot of high-end talent, including a score by Thomas Newman and visuals by Weta FX. In a year where multiple complex armed conflicts are raging in the world, this simplistic, cartoony platitude, with its cutesy, sanitized depiction of one of the bloodiest wars in human history, rings nothing but flat, false notes.



#48: EL CONDE - 1 nomination ★
The great American cinematographer Ed Lachman, who shot Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan, David Byrne's True Stories, Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich, Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, and Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, lenses the utterly unimpressive black-and-grey visuals of Pablo Larraín’s latest picture. The director of No, Jackie, Spencer, and other notable pictures squanders a terrific premise and the opportunity to blend political commentary with genre tropes. The film supposes that Chili's former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, is an immortal vampire who, after sucking the lifeblood of the proletariat in many continents for over two hundred and fifty years, is finally ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. Larraín’s dreary satire makes us wish “The Count” would just hurry up and get on with it. After two richly deserved nominations for Far from Heaven in 2002 and Carol in 2015, it would be a shame for Lachman to win for an effort this monochromatic—in every sense of that term.