Oscar's Best Picture 2023

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Which gets your vote for Oscar's Best Picture?
0%
0 votes
All Quiet on the Western Front
7.14%
2 votes
Avatar: The Way of Water
32.14%
9 votes
The Banshees of Inisherin
7.14%
2 votes
Elvis
28.57%
8 votes
Everything Everywhere All at Once
10.71%
3 votes
The Fablemans
0%
0 votes
Tár
10.71%
3 votes
Top Gun: Maverick
3.57%
1 votes
Triangle of Sadness
0%
0 votes
Women Talking
28 votes. You may not vote on this poll




Finished Traingle of Sadness which puts me at 7/10 ... this is the one I was anticipating the most & I almost felt biased to love it coming in. I'm a huge Woody fan, but surprisingly he has a very minor role in this dark comedy. Nor is he needed. The film is divided into three parts—an introduction to our shallow influencer "couple", Yaya & Carl. Then my favorite sequence, The Yacht. Where never satisfied rich people do their best to enjoy a luxury get away.. until too much booze and unfortunate weather results in the demise of the ship landing a select few onto a deserted island. There are many hilarious sequences throughout, and the raw writing delivers over & over. Despite being a few generations of wealth removed from the oligarchs depicted, many little moments and banter felt very real to little anecdotes I've seen through my life. It was oddly relatable.

Dmitry- played by Zlatko Buric absolutely steals the show, his monologue on the captians speaker had me laughing till my abs hurt. This is really special film, and worthy in its place of nominees. My second favorite thus far

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I forgot the opening line.
I saw Women Talking today which means I've seen 10/10 of this year's Best Picture nominees - the first time in many, many years I've seen them all before the actual Oscars ceremony. Women Talking was okay, but it doesn't figure in my "films I hope win" category, which still consists of Triangle of Sadness, The Banshees of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All at Once, All Quiet on the Western Front and Tár.

I think I'm leaning towards favouring Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is picking up steam in everyone's 'favourite to win' estimations.
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Just watched Avatar The Way of Water,so I have now seen 9 of the ten nominated films and still haven't a clue as to which film is going to win this award.



I watched Women Talking today, so I have seen 9/10 of the nominated films. I am currently predicting Everything Everywhere All At Once to win picture (along with director and supporting actor), but if something else wins PGA and SAG ensemble I will likely change my predictions.



SAG ensemble isn't usually much of a correlator to Best Picture but yeah, PGA is a good indicator. Not DGA good, but good.

Just in the 2010s onward SAG ensembles that matched Best Picture were The King's Speech, Argo, Birdman, Spotlight, Parastie, and CODA but they missed on The Help, American Hustle, Hidden Figures, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Blank Panther, and Trial of the Chicago 7. 50/50 in the last dozen years. Not great, in and of itself.
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Just finished Elvis.. for some reason I've been putting this one off even though I've praised the work Luhrmann did with Great Gatsby adaptation in 2013. He was able to bring a modern touch & enthusiasm, using similar techniques here. Fun musical scenes, some modern rap songs, and lots of bright color... But I guess biopics just aren't my thing nor have I ever found the story of Elvis all that interesting. I was hoping perhaps I'd be given some additional perspective watching the film, but it was kind of just a recycle of information publically known and told. Not much of a fresh perspective. Ultimately it becomes pretty frustrating to watch him getting pulled back in, over & over & over.

I didn't really find Hanks overly compelling as that leading villain. For me it just looked like Tom Hanks in a fat suit and baldcap playing an Ashkenazi Jewish trope. Very little depth there

My least favorite of the nominees thus far

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Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
What's Missing:
In the book you grow very attached to the fleet and the different characters hopelessly fighting in it. The film never created such an emotional attachment, and at the end they feel as two-dimensional and numerical as any other soldier killed in the field. With the exception of the Stanislaus down-fall.
Isn't that the point, though? War is hell, there are no heroes, meaning no heroes heroes and no protagonist heroes. If anything, the movie takes too many liberties with sticking to the main hero, especially in the ending. The general idea should be that we're introduced to a bunch of people and then they die off like flies. The final attack is heart-breaking given what came before but seen alone, one could nitpick that it's a little bit too focused on the main protagonist.
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Finally saw Women Talking last night, so I have seen all the noms. Elvis is my favorite so that’s what I voted for despite it having no shot.

Weird year, in that I liked a lot of these, but nothing really slayed me this year. My favorite “movie” of the year was Irma Vep. Which I feel Assayas totally gave me permission to put on my top ten right in the show. I’m going with it.
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Since 1967 when Mike Nichols won Best Director for The Graduate but In the Heat of the Night was named Best Picture, there have been fourteen instances where the two big awards split. Fourteen times in fifty-four years is not a lot, only 26%. However, eight of those mismatches were from 1967-2011 and just in the last ten Oscars it has happened SIX more times. Eight times over four decades then six times in the last ten. That is a huge change. Whether it is tied directly to the run-off or preferential ballot system that was employed starting in 2009 or is simply some dissolution of the auteur theory over time, it is no longer a given that the Best Picture of the year will have the Best Director.

An even stranger trend is that, discounting the first few Oscar ceremonies before the number of nominees and the format of the awards took shape, there have only been four times that a film won Best Picture without its director even being nominated…and three of them are also during this last decade. Argo won Picture while Affleck went unnominated (Ang Lee won for Life of Pi), Green Book won Picture while Peter Farrelly went unnominated (Alfonso Cuarón won for Roma), and just last year CODA won Picture while Jane Campion picked up Best Director for Power of the Dog. Driving Miss Daisy/Oliver Stone for Born on the Fourth of July is the only other instance in the modern history of the Oscars. The other three recent mismatches where the director was nominated but lost were 12 Years a Slave (Alfonso Cuarón won for Gravity), Spotlight (Alejandro González Ińárritu won for The Revenant), and Moonlight (Damien Chazelle won for La La Land).




So…how to handicap this year’s Best Picture? The five nominees who do not have a correlating Best Director nomination are Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, All Quiet on the Western Front, Women Talking, and Top Gun: Maverick. Is one of them poised to join Driving Miss Daisy, Argo, Green Book, and CODA? It doesn’t seem as if any of those five has the momentum to do so. Elvis seems to have nearly as many detractors as admirers, hardly anybody has seen Women Talking, and All Quiet on the Western Front would seem to have Best International Feature Film sewn up but will not join Parasite as the second foreign film to win. Avatar: The Way of Water seems a polite nod to James Cameron and justification for their having nominated the original Avatar over a decade ago (which lost to The Hurt Locker).




Top Gun: Maverick is getting a lot of credit in the industry for saving movie theatres, or at least staying their execution a bit longer. And despite being a pretty silly story on paper it was surely a crowd pleaser that worked much better than it probably had any right to. But is that enough to award it Best Picture? There have been a handful of movies to win without any acting nominations, most recently Parasite and before that Slumdog Millionaire and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King but all three did win Best Director and Maverick’s is not even nominated. Seems unlikely, a lot of history to overcome, though of the five movies without Director nominations it may have the best chance (as slim as that chance may be).



Triangle of Sadness did win the Palm d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and three Palm d’Or winners have gone on to win the Oscar for Best Picture: The Lost Weekend (1945), Marty (1955), and Parasite (2019). It ain’t gonna happen for Ruben Östlund this year, but it is always encouraging to see the Cannes champ in the mix (Amour and The Tree of Life were the previous most recent entries in the Best Picture pool before Parasite).



Todd Field is three-for-three as a director, certainly judging by how much the Oscar voters like nominating his films, including his latest Tár which got five other nominations to go with Best Picture. Bradley Cooper’s upcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic may have a better chance of actually winning next year than the tale of Fields’ fictional protegee this year, but he has very quietly become kind of a big deal.



Martin McDonagh’s rise to filmmaking stardom has been a little quicker than Todd Fields’, and with The Banshees of Inisherin he is once again within a breath of winning Best Picture. His previous flick, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, lost out to The Shape of Water. That one seemed to be an early favorite and then fade come Oscar night. Will Banshees do the inverse, seem to be an also-ran at most of the other awards shows but finish with a surprise Best Picture win?




Steven Spielberg is no stranger to the Best Picture race. Although only one of his movies has actually won Best Picture – Schindler’s List – eleven others have been nominated before this year: Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, War Horse, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The Post, and West Side Story. And The Fabelmans now makes a baker’s dozen. It is Spielberg’s most obviously autobiographical and personal film, and that subject matter could be the one that finally nets him a second Best Picture win after so very many nominations and films that have already been informally awarded titles like modern classics.



As detailed in the Best Director and 2023 Hollywood Guild Award threads, The Daniels are heavy favorites to win Best Director having won the Directors Guild of America’s top award over Spielberg and McDonagh. If they DO win that category, will Everything Everywhere All At Once win Best Picture, too, or will it be yet another of the recent and increasingly common splits? EEAAO also did win the PGA Award, yet another point in its column and why it is the favorite heading into Oscar night.



I voted for the Banshees. But it just might be Everything, Everywhere All at Once. But a win for Triangle of Sadness wont surprise me.
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Saw Women Talking yesterday so I have now seen all 10 Best Picture nominees. Still have no clue as to which film is going to win, but if I had to say something, I would like The Banshees of Inisherin TO win, but I think Everything Everywhere All at Once is probably going to win.



I've seen most here now and put in a vote for the best film of the year: The Banshees of Inisherin. But Everything Everywhere All at Once will probably win. Bleh. Didn't really care for it...except Raccacoonie! As others have mentioned it's a shame Aftersun wasn't nominated. Great film and I can't wait to see what this director does next.
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Seen 8/10, but not Everything or Women Talking. I fully expect Everywhere to win to continue my streak of 3 straight winners that I haven't gotten to yet.



I've seen most here now and put in a vote for the best film of the year: The Banshees of Inisherin. But Everything Everywhere All at Once will probably win. Bleh. Didn't really care for it...except Raccacoonie! As others have mentioned it's a shame Aftersun wasn't nominated. Great film and I can't wait to see what this director does next.
Ditto most of this. Banshees is my favourite from the nominees, Everything Everywhere is my least favourite and I'd go further than you in saying that I really disliked it, I feel really pretentious saying this but I really struggle to see why people are so easily impressed by it, it's as if they've watched nothing unordinary before.

Aftersun was brilliant and it's a shame Mescal doesn't seem to have a chance in his category.
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I've honestly had more fun on the fringe nominations than in the ones for Best Picture, such as Glass Onion, GDT's Pinocchio & RRR.

How I'd rank the Best Picture nominees that I've seen:

Tar
Women Talking

Expectations for the other 8 nominees from high to low:

Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Banshees of Inisherin
Top Gun: Maverick
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Fabelmans
Elvis
Triangle of Sadness
Avatar: The Way of Water





The momentum kept right on rolling like a rock with googly eyes off a cliff for Everything Everywhere All at Once in this universe as it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.