2022 Oscars Best Picture Nominees Ranked
5. Drive My Car
The year’s slowest-moving Best Picture nominee, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Japanese drama about personal and national grief, told through the lens of a playwright and his personal driver, is an inspired, moving film that in the past would have wrongly been consigned to the International Feature category.
Unfairly compared to the much faster, more Hitchcockian, South Korean offering Parasite (which won Best Picture in 2020), Drive My Car is a more steady unravelling of inner turmoil than its Korean counterpart, and is a lot more in the mould of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscars-nominated films Ida and Cold War in terms of its outstanding visuals and unobtrusive storytelling of characters quietly on the brink. As events unfurl, characters make decisions you wouldn’t usually see in the much more black and white (good and evil) version of cinema presented in the English language, and yet each character choice is entirely believable. Here, more than in any other Best Picture nominee from 2022, the characterisation and screenplay work in harmony to explore humanity through its nuance as much as its action, through what goes unsaid just as much as what is said. It truly is an outstanding screenwriter’s film.
Drive My Car’s 41-minute prologue will prove a shock for western audiences used to being thrown into a film’s second act by the 15-minute mark, and it won’t be for everyone (especially considering the film’s overall lack of action), but for what it does to explore humanity through grief and through acceptance, Drive My Car speaks to something in each of us that can be found by those patient enough to find it, and will repay such faith with photo-film visuals and a cleverly constructed, year-topping screenplay packed to the brim with detail.
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4. Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are rarely short on detail and they never fail to look anything other than pristine. Licorice Pizza is one such a film, and with a project this teeming with quality, with artistry, it was always going to be a Best Picture nominee.
It was as if Anderson was testing his filmmaking credentials when putting together Licorice Pizza. He centred his plot on a 15-year-old boy (played by the untested son-of-a-friend Cooper Hoffman) romanticising a 28-year-old woman (played by the untested daughter-of-a-friend Alana Haim) and filmed it all on traditional film stock. The premise itself proved to be controversial, but it was as if the controversy was there as a self-imposed hurdle Anderson intended to clear with the quality of his direction. His Best Director and Best Picture nominations speak to his success in this regard, Licorice Pizza spanning some distance in terms of topics and events but never losing sight of creating a believable relationship between two floored characters who are nevertheless worth rooting for (individually and together).
Told in vignette form over the course of a number of months, and including nods to famous Hollywood stars and controversial figures alike, Licorice Pizza is an interesting albeit at-times disjointed all-Hollywood affair perhaps most comparable to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood in how it fictionalises real-life events and people to tell an alternate reality tale of a period in Hollywood history (in this case the 1970s fuel crisis). In this sense, Licorice Pizza is very of-the-Academy, its nomination playing into the trope that Hollywood loves films about Hollywood. Even so, few could argue that its nomination is not deserved, Licorice Pizza being a deeper, more layered and much improved coming-of-age offering than fellow 2022 Best Picture nominee CODA and comparable to the iconic offerings of Texan filmmaker Richard Linklater; Anderson’s work on this film and across his previous releases being at the forefront of the form on a global level, his contributions to world cinema arguably incomparable to any other United States filmmaker in terms of overall output in the 21st century.
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3. The Power of the Dog
The Power of the Dog is as important as any film released in 2021, Netflix’s post-modern western from 1994 Best Director nominee and Best Screenplay Oscar winner Jane Campion transitioning rules of the genre from the hyper-masculine perspective of its past and towards a new era, incorporating LGBTQIA+ themes into a tale as tense as it is relevant to our times.
Using cinema’s oldest and most reliable genre, and inherently its most patriarchal, Campion hyper-focuses The Power of the Dog on presenting and then deconstructing toxic masculinity, using this most manliest of genres to comment on the massively important societal topic of gender inequality. Here, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee play three different masculine archetypes, Cumberbatch being the most aggressively hyper-masculine in that he never cleans himself and treats women as if imposters, Plemons as a more traditional gentleman who marries the woman he desires, and Smit-McPhee as a less traditionally masculine and arguably more modern representation of manhood. Campion then uses these three archetypes to create tension, examining them as if examining the evolution of masculinity and forms of misogyny in the process.
Kirsten Dunst is the film’s most present woman, and through her experiences with these three men Campion paints the picture of a world that is wrongly oppressed by the toxicity of men of every type, whether they be traditionalists or open-minded modern “woke” men. Oscar-nominated Dunst is sensational, as are the rest of the cast (not least Best Actor nominee Benedict Cumberbatch and Supporting Actor nominee Jesse Plemons), and Campion photographs each of them against a backdrop to rival any contemporary western.
The Power of the Dog isn’t blow-away good, more intriguing in a way that you’d like to dive deeper into analysing, but for those willing to dive a little deeper there is a rich tapestry of meaning to be uncovered; meaning that speaks of our current societal evolution perhaps better than any on offer in 2022’s Best Picture race.
