For Your Consideration: An Analysis of the Best Picture Oscars Category through the work of Christopher Nolan
Every year, a bunch of tiny golden statues are handed out to commemorate achievement in cinema – capital F Films – as a tradition that has persevered and evolved since the film boom of the late 1920s. We’re coming up on 92nd annual Academy Awards after a remarkable year of films and part of that evolution can be seen in the nominations for Best Picture – the top award of the night – given to two films that were primarily distributed by partnerships with Netflix: Marriage Story and The Irishman. This is the Academy responding to the industry, right in line with the awards combining Best Picture from multiple genres and expanding how many films can be nominated for the prize after 2009. Another aspect of that evolution over time is looking back for context. It’s not just about the year in film, the votes can be skewed by other factors. For years people said “surely Leo’s earned that acting Oscar this year,” every time he pushed himself and nabbed a nomination. Many were confused when his eventual win was for The Revenant of all things. Or, “Guillermo Del Toro really should win for directing, especially with previous snubs and that body of work.” Just this year, Antonio Banderas is nominated for his first Oscar for Pain and Glory and agrees with The Hollywood Reporter that the nomination is a “celebration of an entire lifetime of work.” The Oscars are awards that are never just about one film or performance but a capricious sphere of context.
On the heels of a Best Picture win for Green Book, it’s easy to dismiss the Oscars as terribly misguided and racist regardless of changes, because that decision seems (and is) absurd. A tone deaf film about just tolerating racists and championing white allies from a white writer and director beat Black Panther and Blackkklansmen. But acknowledging that as an embarrassing decision and writing off the Oscars will never diminish the staying power that the Academy has because it’s rooted in wealth and status in the film industry; ignoring the Oscars changes nothing, but the Academy often expresses its power through what it ignores. Films are nominated based on the votes of all Academy members as an attempt to reflect the public conscious reception of the year in film, but how did they get it so wrong? Have they ever truly got it?
It’s impossible for everyone to be satisfied by Oscar nominations or wins as art is, of course subjective, limited runs films are less known, not every beloved piece even runs a campaign to be considered, and we can always squint at the party of people voting. When the nominations were released for this year’s awards many decisions were immediately divisive, including Todd Phillips’ Joker for Best Picture, a film truly undeserving of how much it gets discussed. But deeper than the question of who the Oscars are trying to impress, what does “Best Picture” mean to Academy voters? It’s not the biggest movie, by scale or box office winnings. Glenn Whipp for LA Times explains, while pitching 1917’s imminent victory:
“Voters will rank the nine nominated movies and … the movie with the fewest first-place votes will be eliminated, with its votes given to that ballot’s second-ranked film. The process continues — lowest-ranked movie eliminated, votes redistributed to the next choice down — until one film has more than 50% of the vote. The system is geared to reward not the “best” picture, but the least disliked.”
And that’s how Green Book beats even A Star is Born.
Joker isn’t the only 2019 nomination that baffled me when I saw the Best Picture lineup. In fact, about half of the nominations are films I enjoyed but surely don’t think are contenders for the best film of the year – they’re “the least disliked.” Joker is one of many of this year’s Best Picture contenders that are rooted in masculine personas and facades. The Irishman is an epic that paints the highs and lows of the gangster persona as well as the costs of living that life and DeNiro skillfully shows that in the nuance of his performance. I think Ford v Ferrari depicts masculine confidence within its leads, even if the shortcomings of it are mainly contained in a single fist fight where Christian Bale drops his groceries. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has Leo playing his career best showing that confidence completely bottom out and surge back.
To a fault, this year is incredibly bolstered with depictions of the masculine, both nuanced, critical, and glorified. This, in the context of the Oscars decision making, compelled me to look back at previous years’ nominees, mainly for two reasons: Joker and 1917. Both seem like possible winners from the field based on the awards they’ve won leading up to the Oscars. I’d love to see Parasite or Little Women take it, or have seen Uncut Gems on the list, but again, “least disliked.” 1917 and Joker both lean on depictions of masculine confidence in their narratives but don’t do anything address or unpack those assumptions within the text itself, and their nominations Best Picture and Best Director make it hard for me not to look back at the Academy’s history with nominating (or not nominating) the work of Christopher Nolan for these categories.
Now, Chris Nolan is a man with no shortage of power in the film industry; he’s a white guy who makes intellectually driven films for large audiences with tremendous success. I’d argue he does have a knack for it, though. He’s a British director but I don’t think that’s holding him back or what Bong Joon-ho meant when he dismissed the Oscars as “local.” His films are certainly not without repeated flaws and he has a following that can be militant about his work as it is, but he has truly changed blockbuster filmmaking in the past two decades. To many, it was a big deal that The Dark Knight wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor posthumously, the film won Best Sound Editing, but it wasn’t even in the running for the highest award of the night despite being such an obscenely large film at the time and we’re still in the wake of its effect on superhero flicks. Slumdog Millionare won that year with a considerably more forgettable impact and ever since they’ve expanded the Best Picture category to include 5 to 10 films a year. Since then for Nolan: Inception was nominated and lost to The King’s Speech and Dunkirk was nominated and lost to The Shape of Water.
I’m not here to tell you Inception should have won (because The Social Network should’ve) nor am I here to say Dunkirk should’ve (while I love it dearly, it was also up again Phantom Thread, Lady Bird, and Get Out – hard year). I am, however, here to say The Dark Knight should’ve and it’s strange that with all the bandaging the Academy does in its award giving that it hasn’t gone to Nolan – of all people. I say “of all people” because his work depicts large scale blockbuster filmmaking at some its highest scale and skill. Dark Knight and Dunkirk are examples of Nolan at his best and unlike the mirrored Joker and 1917, they depict Nolan’s brand of masculine confidence that is lovingly and inquisitively drawn as flawed, insecure, and defined by failure.
Nolan’s body of work is easy to read as just the sum of its parts, judge for its flaws, and write off as overrated, but he is good at crafting his stories and keeping them easy to read for large audiences. They’re sometimes pinned as confusing from certain audiences but I argue he keeps his films easy to comprehend but obscured just enough to provide satisfaction when it clicks. His films aren’t abstract or vague, barring maybe that Inception ending. His usage of contorting time and pacing the reveal of information within his worlds is deft and he’s always interrogating and analyzing confidence and the human experience with it.
But it’s not so simple as him showing confident men succeeding at difficult tasks with a dead wife in the rear view – he’s always interrogating where the confidence comes from, why, and the cost. Like his Bruce Wayne, most of his leading men have to wear a mask (literal or not) of confidence to simply exist how they want to. There’s always sacrifices that come with that and it’s not typically shown as personally rewarding or glamorous. His leading men perceive this lack of confidence, and in turn masculinity, as a flaw to overcome but the solution isn’t always to become an ideal form of masculine. To Nolan’s characters, especially Batman, donning this confidence can make you more than just a man, but it’s terribly destructive and harmful to the self and there are always consequences.
In Inception, Nolan depicts a masculine vs. a feminine within Cobb’s need to defeat the memory of his wife, but the wife is a feminine stand in for mistakes he made, so confident he could do anything – the feminine is what is sacrificed by the masculine confidence going too far. This leaves him completely inadequate to function while he hires a woman to make all his mazes for him as he’s skeptical of how quickly she’s learning. His shortcomings are best shown in a very quick scene where Tom Hardy’s character Eames appears as an attractive woman briefly to complete his job. Eames isn’t burdened by this chase of the masculine like Cobb and he’s a rock for Cobb the entire film for it. This is one extrapolated example but the masculine defines all of Nolan’s films: Memento is an analysis of this type of lead specifically that undercuts the story as a fabrication to stay in this persona, Insomnia, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight depict rival ideals that destroy everyone involved, and The Dark Knight Rises pits Batman against a masculinity even stronger than his own. Interstellar has Coop regretful of his choices in the film but I think the folly of boundless confidence is best depicted by Matt Damon’s character – referred to as “the best of us” – when he is so certain his survival is the most important thing that he kills himself trying to take control with no doubt or wavering whatsoever.
Dunkirk, his most recent, is no exception. It’s my favorite of his films because it condenses all of his strengths – interrogating this masculine confidence, using various temporalities to perfect the pace of the story delivery, casting Tom Hardy – into a tight runtime that doesn’t let up the tension from start to finish. Dunkirk’s closing scene rejects the machismo war hero image and depicts young men accepting that surviving is enough; Harry Styles’ character is ashamed of having come home after he and others managed to survive a horrific assault only to be genuinely surprised at a warm welcome perfectly demonstrates the analysis that Nolan is after. That emotional crescendo accomplishes more than anything within 1917 to me. And while both movies are very intentional with how they depict time’s passing in war, Dunkirk uses it to ground you in how long or short moments feel to elevate its story while I feel 1917 is hindered by how time works for real and the story is lessened by its leading gimmick.
Nolan is best known (and primarily an Oscar discussion topic) for The Dark Knight and it’s why I look at him when I see Joker nominated. The Dark Knight is a Nolan neo noir that happens to have Batman characters in it – Nolan’s Heat set in Gotham – and is primarily focused on how much Wayne’s ideals and the ideals of the entire city (across divides of class and power) can be pushed before breaking. It does this by skillfully depicting contrasting ideals between four leads, both in its story and in how these leads are shot and directed. It’s especially effective within how well Heath Ledger’s iconic performance foils Wayne’s masculinity, including the fact that he, like Eames in Inception, uses the feminine as just another tool on his belt. Both Batman and Joker use exaggerated depictions of gender as a means to an end but the Joker is a response to Batman’s absurdity and his decision to use his tools and confidence to uphold the already powerful. On the other hand, we have Todd Phillips’ Joker, a movie about the Joker, which is a film in which its thesis statement is clumsily built into its climax as dialogue and it’s stated roughly as “I can’t do what I want to and that’s bad.” It’s not connected to or built from his conditions or the systemic problems oppressing him. Arthur is a man who is struggling financially, has been abused, takes some non-specific medication, and can’t afford more when public services get defunded. But in the end, this white man just wants to be lauded by the masses and exacts vapid revenge on a public figure. Phillips doesn’t analyze the effect of that sensationalism, or grapple with what Joker’s first murder means or that the anti-rich movement in his wake is an accident within the text. He knows how to show the violence but he doesn’t truly tell a story with it. It’s as shallow as it is bleak.
Nolan’s masculine figures fail and that’s what makes them worth a damn in his stories. There’s a line that echoes throughout the Batman trilogy that says: “why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up,” and this core idea is behind Nolan’s idea of confidence. Nolan isn’t revolutionary for showing men failing and their masculinity being the death of them, but his depiction of less destructive ways to stand back up are valuable and an underappreciated aspect of his incredibly successful and well made films.
Forgive me for jumping to this conclusion but if Christopher Nolan can’t win for his directing, who are the Oscars for? I’m not claiming he’s the greatest filmmaker of our time but his movies are easy for many people to love. Challenging but not too challenging, fantastical and heady stories that are accessible to large demographics. They’re massive financial successes and critically loved. There’s a believable world where I’m writing about how he wins too often but that’s not what happens. Even with the drive to correct the past and the critical consensus of The Dark Knight being snubbed, he’s never won “Least Disliked,” even if a few nominations maintain his oscar worthiness to some.
Now I turn back to this year’s nominees; 1917 is a mostly gorgeous movie, so gorgeous that it’s almost incongruous with its core thesis: war is really, really bad. I don’t think it says much, but I enjoyed it. It might truly be my least disliked film of the year. Joker, on the other hand, is a morally bankrupt and ungrateful pastiche emblematic of a man who will put anyone down and take anything he can to get above where he is right now but without targeting the actual issues therein. I can’t help but view these films through a Nolan lens but in the end, they’re not up against those films for the Oscar.
It’s unknown to me if either of these films will win but they were deemed good enough to be nominated. Todd Phillips could take it home for his Scorsese cosplay, or Sam Mendes could win for the first time in 20 years following American Beauty. Maybe in a year I’ll be swearing that Nolan was again snubbed when Tenet isn’t recognized – or worse, it’ll be his weakest yet and finally take home the gold. Who knows with the Academy.
