Oscar Choices

Having seen all the contenders except Bugonia (the sour taste of Poor Things still lingers), I’m ready to anoint my Oscar choices for 2025, limiting myself to the official nominees:

Best Actor
Ethan Hawke. An easy decision. He held the screen the entire movie, captivated us although he wasn’t attractive by any measure, and so inhabited the character that I had no idea who the actor was for much of the film.

Best Actress
Jessie Buckley. Also easy, although not for want of competition. Any other time I would be happy with a win for Rose Byrne, Renata Reinsve or even Kate Hudson, but Buckley was radiant, acted with range and carried what otherwise could have been a limp, albeit beautiful, film.

Supporting Actor
The supporting cast of One Battle After Another was uniformly superb, but Sean Penn, as he often is, was in a class by himself. Although you knew it was Sean Penn, you believed in him as a character every time he took the stage.

Supporting Actress
I thought I discovered Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas among her more heralded co-stars, only to see the Academy acknowledge her as well; but if the Academy wants to recognize Amy Madigan for her bizarro role, I will too.

Best Picture
Only two of the ten Oscar nominees made my personal Top Ten, and neither was near the top of the list. I will go with Sinners for its artistic achievement, a movie about music, the South, race relations and, yes, zombies.

Director
Ryan Coogler gets my nod over Paul Thomas Anderson. Both took ambitious, daringly big swings–Anderson’s a little too much so.

International Film
Sirat was the most convincingly original film of the year, in its setting, its cast, its score and its emotional shock.

The Technical Awards
I don’t hold myself out as competent to judge these awards, and I wonder if many Academy members do either, as year after year the nominees are drawn from the Best Picture slate. In other words, I suspect many people just vote for their favorite films, without considering some mediocre film that had really great costumes, say, or sound editing. How, for example, could someone say Marty Supreme, with a number of bumbling amateurs, was one of the five best Casting films?
With that caveat, I thought Frankenstein the most sumptuous film of the year, so I’ll give it the Oscar for either Costume or Production Design. F1 had great race scenes that didn’t overwhelm the rest of the movie, so I’ll throw a bone there, although I won’t complain when One Battle After Another wins the award. Cinematography could go to anything other than Marty Supreme; many people loved Train Dreams, and we felt we missed a lot by watching it on the TV screen. The director of Sirat made a strong case for the Best Sound nod; it was certainly the loudest, most percussive, and most instrumental to its story. Sinners had the best music, and Ludwig Goransson usually wins the Original Score, so no problem there. I don’t know any of the Original Songs, but our granddaughters love the Kpop Demon Hunters. Original Screenplay–Blue Moon. Adapted Screenplay–One Battle After Another. That’s all I know.