A Film Teacher’s Oscar Predictions

Insights from the Silver Screen and Behind the Oscars: A Passionate Exploration of Best Picture Nominees for 2024

Oscar season is my favorite season in the film course I teach. I randomly assign my high school students a Best Picture nominee to watch, research, and report back to our class with their review. These presentations are some of my favorite classroom moments, mostly because students are often watching movies they never would have chosen, but they glean important lessons from them, nonetheless.

Of course, this means that as part of my job, I watch all the nominees to assess my student’s work. I love my job and feel lucky every day to walk into a classroom, but I feel VERY lucky during Oscar season!

It is a ritual for me to see each movie alone so I can immerse myself in the experience of a good movie. There is a local theater near me in Chatham on Cape Cod that is my favorite. It has all the old-time charm of a renovated classic theater and a full bar and it is my favorite place to watch a movie. This year, I was lucky to see five of the movies playing at this theater this Oscar season. The nice older gentleman at the box office knows me well, as does the aspiring actor bartender.

Here are my thoughts on this year’s Best Picture nominees:

10 — “Maestro”(Netflix)- Directed by Bradley Cooper

I wanted to love this movie; I knew it was Cooper's passion project. His outstanding performance as Leonard Bernstein and the impeccable conduct he mastered, which Bernstein himself would envy, prove that Cooper’s Best Actor nod is well-deserved.

As we saw in A Star is Born in 2018, and Nightmare Alley in 2021, Cooper’s versatility as an actor and visionary as a filmmaker is unparalleled. However, the film moves slowly with a script that cannot keep up with the stellar performances of both Cooper and Carey Mulligan, who play Bernstein’s wife, Felicia.

The cinematography designed to distinguish various timeframes in Bernstein's life served to be more distracting than distinguishing. So, while the performances of both lead actors are nuanced and compelling, the slow-moving pace of this movie leaves it at number 10 as a potential Oscar winner for Best Picture.

And I’m sorry to predict that Cooper’s sharp competition for Best Actor this year will leave him once again without a statue for his mantle.

9- “Anatomy of a Fall” (Neon) — Directed by Justine Triet

While Sandra Huller is nominated for Best Actress for her subtle, detached, yet poignant portrayal of a murder suspect in Anatomy of a Fall, this movie belongs to the young actor Milo Machado Graner, who plays Daniel with a depth of emotion and torn loyalty between parents that only the most nuanced actor could play.

His love for his parents and, in particular, his mother is clear, but the moment he realizes that he has possibly poisoned his beloved dog in his search for truth becomes the defining moment of his performance and the movie. Life is ambiguous, and relationships are complex; while this movie explores this theme well, there is a quiet quality to the movie that puts it at number 9 for me.

I found myself not caring about innocence or guilt but only about what was best for Daniel. In a movie where much of the film takes place in a courtroom, the audience should care about guilt or innocence.

8- “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Apple)- Directed by Martin Scorsese

To say that I anxiously anticipate any film by Martin Scorsese would be an understatement. From Raging Bull to The Wolf of Wall Street to The Irishman and every film in between, Scorsese has proven himself an iconic American director; His place in film history is secure.

His ability to capture the complexity of the inner workings of Wall Street, the Mob, and now the Osage Indigenous people is simply an unparalleled achievement. When you add Robert De Niro to the mix — the pair have made ten feature films together since 1973- you have a winning combination, right? Add the ever-talented and versatile Leo DiCaprio to the mix, and it’s a sure hit, right?

This film does have all the makings of a hit movie and the story based on the Osage murders profoundly moved me. I both loved and hated the story of Killers of the Flower Moon and I didn’t mind the run time of 3 hours and 26 minutes. Yet, it landed 8th on my list of Oscar contenders.

Lily Gladstone is luminescent in her subtle, tortured portrayal of Molly Burkhart. Gladstone steals the show in this incredible cast — no easy feat, mind you; her nomination is well deserved. But the plot of the screenplay seemed like an Indigenous version of Goodfellas with tropes that may have made Scorsese famous and an icon, but the story of the Osage people should have surpassed the trope.

The missed opportunity to move beyond the trope landed the film in 8th place for me. My respect for Scorsese, Di Niro, and Di Caprio aside — and my love for Lily Gladstone’s performance can’t place this film higher than 8th in this year’s contenders.

7- “Past Lives” (A24) Directed by Celine Song

Every person over the age of 30 has the “if only” person who haunts their dreams. If you’re saying that you don’t have that person, you should look back and reexamine your dating life- and your ability to be truthful with yourself. This common emotion makes the powerful film, written and directed by talented newcomer Celine Song, relatable on every single level to any person over the age of 30.

However, one may not want to watch Song’s tribute to a “what if” person with their spouse if their spouse is not as amiable as Arthur, Nora’s understanding husband by ever so subtly by the talented and, I think, underestimated John Magaro. The song brings life, nuance, and the idea of lost love to the big screen in a way that is not only relatable but also captures the emotional turmoil of the “what if” everyone has in their lives.

The love that Nora, played so deftly by Greta Lee, has for both Hae Sung AND Arthur presents the audience with a choice. But it is a choice no one wants to make. The choice between two things that make you happy and speak to your soul- but in entirely different ways.

While the performances, writing, and use of silence in the film are powerful, the film stays on the safe side of the street when it comes to relationships, leaving Past Lives at number 7 for this critic.

6- “Oppenheimer”(Universal) Directed by Christopher Nolan

Given that I grew up in the age of hiding in hallways during elementary school for nuclear bomb drills, I had a keen interest in exploring the history behind Oppenheimer. This movie did not disappoint, with Nolan’s talented directorial prowess giving the audience a complex narrative that not only explored the ethical questions behind the creation of the bomb but also the complexity of Oppenheimer himself, played expertly by Cillian Murphy.

In fact, within the Best Actor category, I’m quite glad I am not voting — there are too many powerful performances to simply pick one as the “best”. Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr. also give stellar supporting performances. Perhaps what I liked the most was the use of filters and black and white utilized by Nolan to separate the newsreel feel of the hearings from the stark, but colorful landscape of Los Alamos when testing the bomb.

There is so much to like in this film, but my favorite moment is one of the smallest moments that the audience isn’t even totally privy to — When Oppenheimer and Einstien share a conversation by the quiet lake. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that conversation. It is that kind of understated drama that propels Oppenheimer as one of my favorites this Oscar season.

5- “Barbie” (Warner Bros.) Directed by Gerta Gerwig

There is a collection of 1990s collectible Barbies in my basement; I’ve been a fan since I was a child and passed that fondness onto my two daughters. So, I wore pink and could not wait to get to the theater to see this movie despite the cries of “man bashing” I read about online.

Margot Robbie radiates as a Barbie in search of answers, but Kate McKinnon stole the show as Weird Barbie. Everything about this movie worked — the production design, costume, acting, lighting, and acting. The reason Barbie comes in at number 5 for me is the utterly predictable plot.

Everything works; nothing pushes the envelope. I suspect this is also why the Academy overlooked Robbie and Gerwig. I do not buy into the conspiracy that the film is being penalized for its commercial success or the gender of the director. It is a fine movie and one I encourage people to see, but fine is not Best Picture worthy.

4- Zone of Interest (A24) Directed by Jonathan Glazer

The inhumanity of proximity and isolation dominates this dark exploration of life next door to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Sandra Huller, nominated for her work in Anatomy of a Fall, plays the cold, self-focused Camp Commodant’s wife, Hedwig Hoss.

Her “zone of interest” is limited to her own life and family, ignoring the horrors around her. The level of inhumanity she shows in the face of the horrors next door leads the audience to fundamentally question her humanity. Can one be a human because they love their children but ignore the horror of genocide?

The film never really answers this question, which is perhaps the point. Glazer’s take on the holocaust reminds me of the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners — this film is not about horror but about ignoring horror right in front of your eyes. Glazer challenges the audience to fight against that kind of complicity.

Of particular note is Hedwig’s level of callousness in the early scene in which Huller models a fur coat delivered from the camp solely as a piece of clothing, ignoring entirely where it came from. Glazer, whose nomination is well earned, goes beyond the cliche Holocaust movie and creates a film that not only defines the horrors of the Holocaust but forces us to consider the price of complacency.

Nominated in both the International and Best Picture categories, Zone of Interest has a good chance of winning the double Oscar win that eluded Life if Beautiful in 1997.

3- “The Holdovers” (Focus Features) Directed by Alexander Payne

The Paul Giamatti/Alexander Payne magic created in the classic film, Sideways, is once again on full display in The Holdovers. Admittedly, I have a special fondness for this film not only because I’m a huge Paul Giamatti fan, but I have also been a Boston private high school teacher for twenty-five years, so the St. Marks, Deerfield Academy setting was familiar from my own daughter’s basketball games when she was a high school student back in 2010.

The nostalgia of the movie is also nostalgia for me. But the brilliance of cinematographer Eigil Bryld in utilizing one camera to create the look not a movie set in the 70’s- but the look of a movie filmed in the 70’s should have earned him an Oscar nod. That distinction sets this film apart.

The discerning movie audience realizes that Paul Giamatti will always be a good watch, but in The Holdovers, Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s portrayal of the no-nonsense head cook who keeps the grief of her son’s death in Vietnam ever so subtly under the surface is the lead story. For me, everything about this picture works — landing it at an almost indistinguishable third place in my choice for Best Picture.

2- “Poor Things” (Searchlight) Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Lanthimos once again breaks the dystopian tropes as he did with The Lobster in 2015, to provide a thought-provoking look at what happens when one pushes the limits of science too far. After I finished watching Poor Things, I thought — if Mary Shelley and Stanley Kubrick wrote a screenplay together, that could be Poor Things.

Indeed, the screenplay written by Tony McNamara and Alasdair Gray comes eerily close to something Shelley would have sanctioned herself — with a nice shout-out to Shelley’s father, William Godwin, in the name of Bella Baxter’s father, Godwin (God for short) Baxter.

The cinematography that serves as the backdrop to Bella Baxter’s awakening is vibrant and dystopian at the same time. It is not an easy thing to do as a Production Designer and cinematographer. Emma Stone as Bella Baxter and Willem Defoe as “God”, however, steal the show. Stone’s ability to play the childlike Bella and then slowly age her character both in physical and mental abilities is unmatched in this year’s Best Picture nominees.

Emma Stone should be a shoo-in for Best Actress. The number of sex scenes, however, I found to be more gratuitous than they needed to be, with almost an hour devoted to graphic sex scenes. This critic thinks that Bella Baxter could have explored her independence and sexual awakening in a more restrained way, but perhaps that is my provincial voice speaking. In any event, Poor Things is an easy number two for my Best Picture picture.

1 — “American Fiction” (Orion/Amazon MGM) Directed by Cord Jefferson

American Fiction is one of the finest films of the last decade. Not only does it explore complex issues around race in our country, but Jefferson also does so with heart and humor, which is something that anyone on any side of the political spectrum can learn from. And do we need people learning from each other in this polarized landscape?

This fact alone would place this movie at the top, but to watch the complex family dynamic between Jeffery Wright’s Monk and Sterling K. Brown’s Clifford Ellison solidifies American Fiction firmly at number 1 in my book. Sterling K. Brown is magnificent as he steps outside of his known, comfortable, and stable “Randall” persona of This Is Us fame to portray a complex, flawed, yet loveable man struggling with his sexuality and proclivity for cocaine. The depth of the sibling relationship portrayed through both actors also places them as winners and my favorites to win in their respective categories of Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.

And my final- but most important- accolade goes to talented icon, Leslie Uggums. At eighty years old, she stole each scene she was a part of. This film captured every nuance of this talented actress, proving that at 80, she is just getting started!

Final Words and Takeaways

Since I’ve taught this film course, I’ve made it my mission every year to see each Best Picture nominee. This ritual has become something I look forward to every year.

Ten years ago, when I began, I would find friends to come with me to join in the conversation about the nominees. But, what I’ve realized over time is that the love I have for film is something that I hold so close to my heart, that I prefer to go alone. And as much as possible, alone at the Chatham Orpheum Theater.

For me, the Oscar quest I pursue is deeply personal and I have strong opinions. For example, I’m still not over Three Billboards From Ebbings Missouri losing out to Shape of Water in 2017. Should Maestro win this year, you can be assured, I will harbor feelings about that as well!

I encourage everyone to pick an Oscar category and make it your quest. I chose Best Picture because, as you can see, it often gives insights into all of the other categories.

A highlight for me this year in class was two of our star football players reviewing Barbie. While they never would have watched this movie on their own, they learned a lot from it and are grateful. That was a great teaching moment for me.

I will leave you with this final piece of advice — push yourself and immerse yourself in the art of film. You will not regret it.

Enjoy the show!

You might also check the predictions of Aiden (Illumination Gaming).