This Sunday will bring us the annual Oscar awards for films that we failed to see when first released or that we are now catching up with on various streaming services on television. Many nominated films include a round up of the usual suspects while others are odd one-of-a-kind entries.
Among the contenders is “Killers of the Flower Moon” directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring a cast that includes Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. It concerns the murderous exploitation of Native Americans whose land sits atop oil wealth in Oklahoma in the 1920s.This story was first filmed as part of “The FBI Story” starring Jimmy Stewart in 1959.
Two huge box office blockbusters are also among the nominees. “Barbie,” whose target audience is probably not geriatric gents, tells the tale of toys come to life starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken. “Oppenheimer” is the story of the race to create an atomic bomb to bring World War II to an apocalyptic end. The scientists, including Oppie played by Cillian Murphy, who unleashed the power of the atom realized once the first nuke was tested in the New Mexico desert that “the world was headed for sorrow.”
Ever since, we have lived under the looming threat of thermonuclear extinction. Robert Downey Jr. plays the malign Lewis Strauss who embraced the era’s Red Scare and smeared Oppenheimer as a communist fellow traveler despite having been the mastermind behind the arming of America with nuclear power.
Another film that deserves the recognition it has garnered is “The Holdovers” staring Paul Giamatti as an under-appreciated prep school classics teacher. It owes its power to writer/director Alexander Payne whose previous films include the dark comedies “Election,” “About Schmidt,” “Sideways,” “The Descendants,” and “Nebraska.”
I have yet to see Emma Stone performing a riff on the Frankenstein theme in “Poor Things” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Several more foreign films also gained recognition including a pair from Japan. I have yet to see “Perfect Days,” but found “Past Lives” a touching tale of a reunion between childhood friends separated years earlier when the parents of one, played by Greta Lee, moved the family from Tokyo to New York.
This year also introduced American audiences to the work of the German actress Sandra Huller who has starred in Europe on stage and in films. She is nominated for an award for “Zone of Interest.” She plays Hedwig the wife of Nazi commandant Rudolf Hoess. Grotesquely they raise their children cheerfully just outside the walls of the Auschwitz death camp over which he presides.
Huller also starred in “Anatomy of a Fall” nominated for several Oscars and winner of the Palme d’Or. She is the wife of a professor who falls to his death from their mountain chalet near Grenoble. She is accused of his murder and a trial ensues in which she declares her innocence.
Other films I have not yet caught up with include “May December” starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, “Nyad” about the long distance swimmer which stars Annette Benning and Jodie Foster, “American Fiction” with Jeffrey Wright, and “Rustin” with Colman Domingo as the civil rights activist. Finally, the animated manga master Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement long enough to direct another masterpiece: “The Boy and the Heron.”