Drive My Car, West Side Story – The Hollywood Reporter

General Thoughts

There are going to be 40 million fewer potential viewers of this year’s Oscars because they’re busy being bombed and massacred and chased out of their country [Ukraine], and there’s something a little bit odd about gathering in tuxedos and gowns and congratulating ourselves while all hell is raining down on them. However, the Oscars have been a through line, for almost a century now, through all sorts of hell, from the Second World War to Vietnam to 9/11, and I guess there is something about that continuity which is important. That being said, I sure wish that some of these studios would take some of the millions that they spend pursuing Oscars and instead buy some stinger missiles for the Ukrainians. I’m not sure how to address it all during the show. I think that Amy Schumer was well-intentioned in trying to get Zelensky to make an appearance, but the Oscars are so petty, comparatively, to what they are going through, that I’m glad that didn’t work out.

Best Picture

If The Tragedy of Macbeth had been nominated, I might have voted for it because what Joel Coen did with that film was just brilliant. The same with the documentaries Flee and Summer of Soul. Anyway. The Power of the Dog took me, without exaggeration, 10 viewings to get through. I think the Academy’s Screening Room [a members-only streaming service] is absolutely fantastic, but it does make me wonder if the results are skewed when so many people are not seeing movies on a big screen and with others. Roma, for example, if seen on a small screen, was always going to put you to sleep, and the same thing would have been true years ago if that had been a way to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. I understand The Power of the Dog’s artistic merits, but I did not find the topic of repressed homosexuality to be original or daring anymore, and I thought the movie was very slow. I’m not quite in the Sam Elliott camp — Sam Elliott, by the way, may be the only person in this town who could be unabashedly homophobic and completely get away with it, just because it’s sort of what we expect from our crazy old uncle — but I do agree with him that it didn’t have the aura of an authentic Western. What Benedict Cumberbatch is to an authentic cowboy, New Zealand is to Montana — it just doesn’t add up. The topography is off, the extras are off, and I’m just kind of surprised that it has been the frontrunner up until now. Without the critics’ awards, I don’t think a single Academy member would have checked out Drive My Car. A three-hour Japanese movie about Uncle Vanya with long shots of driving cars? I knew, going in, that it was going to be tough for me, and if I’m being honest, I couldn’t get through it. To me, Don’t Look Up was a one-note flippancy; its only virtue was its stunning cast. I suppose it’s entertaining, but as much as a genius as I think Adam McKay is, and I really do view him that way, I believe he is in a self-plagiarizing mode of the highest order at this point, and there wasn’t anything that was particularly innovative about this film. Dune is just not my kind of movie; I find fantasy and science-fiction films to be outside of my realm of personal interest, so I didn’t really go for it. I have an affinity for Paul Thomas Anderson — I’ve loved most of his stuff — and this one [Licorice Pizza] has lots of great stuff in it, but there’s literally no story, and I found the central relationship to be extremely odd and not believable. How is a 15-year-old running a business? We never see him in school at all. And I didn’t see how Bradley Cooper, as Jon Peters, could be absolutely obliterated by these kids, yet we don’t see him seeking revenge for the rest of the movie. Every scene, I guess, is very good, but it didn’t add up for me at the end. I wish that Belfast had been a half-hour longer. I think its 90-minute running length made it too slight of a movie — I didn’t quite have enough time to be as invested in these characters as I wanted to be — but it is a very good movie. There’s no movie that I was rooting for more than King Richard because I think that the story of the Williams sisters is one of the greatest stories in all of sports history. And the more you think about it, the more interesting it is: You have a character who you root for, even though his flaws are considerable — I mean, he both loves and exploits his girls. The lack of cinematic flourish is what prevents me from putting it at the top of my list; I want my best picture winners to advance cinema. CODA is also a whimsy of a movie, without any cinematic brilliance, but it is the movie where I was most invested in the characters of the film, and it is the only film of the year that left me weeping at the end of the movie. Sian Heder truly managed to get me crying like a baby, and in a good way. I was so caught up in this love for family, and I just found it extremely…