This “Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot,” which is the first in a series that THR will run ahead of Oscar night, reflects the votes — and candid rationales for them — of a male member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 867-person short films and feature animation branch, as communicated to THR in return for anonymity. THR does not necessarily endorse these views or suggest that they are representative of anything other than this voter’s perspective.
Best picture
I would have preferred to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as a nominee over Maestro — it’s an incredible feat of animation and storytelling. American Fiction and The Holdovers were enjoyable, but very old-fashioned — meaning, not edgy — in terms of their stories and their filmmaking. When I first heard about Barbie, I couldn’t even imagine that it would be here, and then after seeing it I couldn’t imagine that it wouldn’t, and that’s because Greta [Gerwig] nailed it. Killers of the Flower Moon had a lot of great stuff in it, but no movie needs to be three hours and twenty-five minutes — like me, a lot of people had to watch it at home, and unlike me, a lot of people probably didn’t make it to the end. If it was made by anyone other than Martin Scorsese, a studio would have said, “You’ve got to cut that, we don’t need to see the landscape for two-and-a-half minutes.” But I guess he earned that. Past Lives was beautifully simplistic — I love movies like this, that tell you a human story, have so much going on beneath the surface and really don’t have an antagonist other than time and space. Poor Things is some of Yorgos’ [Lanthimos’] best work, the whole cast was phenomenal, and I can’t wait to see it again. Anatomy of a Fall grew on me over time — that monologue where Sandra Hüller tears her husband apart is just incredible. But for me, choosing between Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest was so hard….
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