Hollywood’s best pictures?

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, January 26th, 2024. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Oscar nominations.

On Tuesday, we found out who’s up for an Academy Award. Oftentimes there’s a disconnect between what the Academy values and what’s prized by general audiences. Is that the case this year?

Envelope, please? Here’s arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino.

[Oscars Theme Song]

COLLIN GARBARINO: We all have our own ideas about what makes a movie “good.” And every year, Hollywood elites put on a series of award shows to let the rest of us know which movies they think were “good” this year. But “good” can mean different things. Is this movie good like eating ice cream? Or is it good for you like eating your vegetables? Is the movie entertaining? Or is it important?

So which movies does Hollywood think were the best from last year? Here are the ten nominees for best picture in alphabetical order.

American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor Things, and Zone of Interest.

I would guess the average American has probably only heard of two of these.

MUSIC: [Dance the Night - Dua Lipa]

Barbie was the highest grossing movie of last year, and for months pink was everywhere. Though it did get a best picture nomination, with only eight nominations overall, many people feel like this year’s cultural phenomenon got snubbed. Greta Gerwig failed to get a nomination for directing, and lead actress Margot Robbie got shut out. I didn’t care for Barbie’s humanistic subtext, but it probably should have gotten more nominations based on its originality and how well it connected with audiences. However, America Ferrera did get a nomination for best supporting actress … for delivering a painful monologue that’s probably the least entertaining part of the film. Barbie does have two nominations for best song: Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” and Ryan Gosling’s power ballad “I’m Just Ken.”

MUSIC: [I’m Just Ken]

I’ve had that song stuck in my head for about six months. It’s like the “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” of 2023.

The other nominee you’ve undoubtedly heard of is Oppenheimer which debuted the same day as Barbie.

MUSIC: [Oppenheimer theme]

Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s creation of the atomic bomb scored the most nominations this year with 13. In addition to Best Picture, Nolan is up for directing, and Cillian Murphy who plays Oppenheimer was nominated for best actor. But the role everyone’s talking about is Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss.

STRAUSS: I gave him exactly what he wanted… to be remembered for Trinity. Not Hiroshima! Not Nagasaki!

Oppenheimer is a really good movie. It wrestles with the nature of genius and ambition, and it asks us whether we should place limits on science and what we should do once we realize we’ve already crossed the line. I’m expecting it to sweep the competition when the Oscars air on March 10th. But if you haven’t seen it yet, be warned. It’s rated R because Nolan threw in a few jarring nude scenes. Barbie and Oppenheimer were the only two best picture nominees that attracted crowds. The rest of the nominees are fairly niche films that altogether made a fifth as much money as Barbie at the box office. And more than half of that came from Martin Scorseses’ three-and-half-hour movie about the murders of the Osage Indians.

TOM: I was, uh, sent down from Washington DC to see about these murders.

ERNEST: See what about ’em?

TOM: See who’s doing it.

Not only is Killers of the Flower Moon brutally long. It’s just brutal. It’s rated R for intense violence, but it’s otherwise light on objectionable material. It’s a good movie, if you can stomach the gore, showing how greed can deceive us and cause us to call evil good. It’s up for 10 Oscars including best director and best actress for Lily Gladstone who portrayed the Osage woman at the center of the story.

MOLLIE: You talk too much.

Gladstone is the first Native American to be nominated for best actress, and most people consider her the front-runner for the award.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tends to ignore family-friendly movies. This year is no exception. Only three of the ten best picture nominees were rated PG-13. The other seven were rated R.

Besides Barbie, the other two PG-13 movies are Past Lives and Zone of Interest. Past Lives is about a Korean immigrant who reconnects with a friend from her youth and wonders about what life might have been like had she made different choices. Zone of Interest is a German-language movie about a Nazi family living next door to the notorious extermination camp Auschwitz.

Clip from Zone of Interest: [Speaking German]

You can find full reviews of both Past Lives and Zone of Interest at wng.org.

But what about the R-rated movies? Most of them achieve that rating for foul language. And it’s a shame because a few of these movies, especially The Holdovers, would be pretty good otherwise.

But there’s one movie you should avoid at all costs, despite the Academy giving it 11 nominations. Poor Things is an extravagant fable about a female version of Frankenstein’s monster who takes a trip of self discovery. But this isn’t a morality tale. It’s an “immorality” tale. I won’t describe all the iniquitous things this movie celebrates. Hollywood elites are fawning over this reprehensible film claiming it’s about female empowerment, but that supposed empowerment actually disguises the worst sort of exploitation. Some movies are like ice cream. Others like broccoli. Poor Things is cotton-candy poison.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

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