The Oscars For Most People 2022
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” -Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Americans went to the movies on average 1.4 times in 2021. And 61% reported not seeing a movie in the cinema at all, per a Gallup poll. More and more movies are becoming less a thing people leave their house to see and more what they do while folding their laundry. The pandemic hasn’t helped.
And yet, people are going to the movies. It’s a question of what kind of movie people are making that effort for. In the first ten days of its release, 38 million tickets were sold domestically for SpiderMan: No Way Home. That’s one ticket for every ten Americans.
Now, I don’t want to be simplistic here. The current state of cinema, how it got here, and how people choose which handful of movies they actually leave the house to see are extremely complex topics with a lot of factors. We’re talking a master's thesis level of examination.
But I don’t think it’s unfair to say many people choose to go to the movies only when they assume the film will be entertaining. We can just stream at home what doesn’t look flashy and exciting or isn't from a certain studio or isn’t part of a certain franchise, right?
The unfortunate flipside of that assumption is that if a film doesn’t look flashy and exciting or isn’t from a certain studio or isn’t part of a certain franchise, it won’t be entertaining and isn’t worthy of a moviegoer's time and money.
The result is that films assumed not entertaining fail financially. Producers are then less likely to spend money producing films like them again. And eventually, we may reach a point where movies like SpiderTwink are all you’re going to have the option to see when you go to the movies.
And that would be nothing short of tragic. Some of the best movies I’ve ever seen I imagine most would not consider “entertaining”, and those films were made to be seen in a cinema.
There’s no more consistent case study for this phenomenon than the films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Each year more and more forgo a wide cinematic release (unless, of course, it wins). It’s almost miraculous if any of them crack into the top-grossing films of the year.
For this year’s batch, four failed to even bring in $2 million in ticket sales. That’s about 200,000 tickets or about 1,000 total screenings (averaging 200 seats a screen) in the entire world. Of the other six, five were box office bombs and only one made it into the top 20 grossing movies of the year, at number 11.
And I can’t help but think these films’ box office failure is at least partially the fault of the assumption that the films wouldn’t be entertaining. Another unfortunate assumption I’ve heard most of my life is that any film nominated for awards is dull and made solely as bait for awards.
I loathe this state of affairs. I am a cinephile and an evangelist of actually getting out of your house and going to the movies. I love film both as entertainment and high visual artistry, so I want all kinds of movies as options at the box office. I want cinema to thrive again.
So my message to you today from the Demilitarized Zone of Film is that you don’t have to choose between something that’s entertaining and something that’s of artistic merit when you go to the movies. You can have both! And you can have both even with the movies that the film industry has deemed most worthy of praise with a Best Picture Oscar nomination.
Entertaining films like SpiderTwink can be full of superior filmmaking. At the same time, Best Picture nominated films full of superior filmmaking can also be entertaining. And they can be as worthy of the price of admission as anything else.
To prove my point, here are the 2022 Best Picture nominees, ranked in my estimation of what will be the most entertaining to the broadest audience. I’ve broken the list into three categories: Eat Your Damn Vegetables, Your Mileage May Vary, and The Charmers
My hope is that you’ll give one (or dare I hope for a few?) of the films near the top of this list a watch the next time you’re having a movie night. Or, even better, go see it at a movie theater if it’s still playing. The Cinemark chain is having an Oscars week from March 20th-26th, so you have a golden opportunity. And I hope that will inspire you in the future to not always rely on certain genres/studios/franchises when deciding what to go out and see.
(While I appreciate those who read through my ramblings, scroll to the end of the article for a TL;DR list.)
Eat Your Damn Vegetables
While there are amazing films here, these are as far from escapist entertainment as it gets. Still, fiber should be part of any healthy media diet.
#10 Drive My Car
After Parasite made history as the first non-English film to win Best Picture (and rarely have I agreed so much with the Best Picture win. I implore you to see it if you haven’t), the doors opened for more foreign-language films to crack into the Best Picture echelon. Last year included the sweet and charming Minari, which was American-made but had a strong Korean influence.
This year we have the Japanese darling of the Cannes festival, Drive My Car. While this film is a moving examination of loss, grief, and how we use art and our connections to others to deal with that, it is also three hours long. And we’re not talking about an Avengers: Endgame experience. This film is quiet, slow-paced, thoughtful, and subtle. Which for most people I know means “boring”. Never mind that one of the film’s more interesting central features — dialogue in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Korean sign language — will be lost on most American audiences.
So while I did like this film much much more than #9 on this list, I cannot in good conscience say that anyone outside the art film circuit will enjoy this.
#9 Licorice Pizza
Y’all, I’m beginning to think I just don’t get Paul Thomas Anderson. In fact, the last time I made this list another PTA film, Phantom Thread, was up for Best Picture, and it came in dead last on my list.
Granted, I’ve yet to see There Will Be Blood or The Master so perhaps I need to do more research.
I had high hopes for this one, as it appeared that PTA had made a film for me finally: a quirky but charming coming-of-age story set in early 70s Hollywood. I was sorely disappointed, despite the film being full of excellent performances by its two leads and star-studded cameos (Bradley Cooper steals the entire movie in 15 minutes).
Still, this movie confirms what many people feel about awards-winning films: that such films are pretentious, navel-gazing, and obnoxious. None of this even gets into the extreme yikes-ness of the central idea: a 15-year-old boy eager to grow up pursues a romantic relationship with a 25-year-old woman who severely needs to grow up, and she doesn’t shut him down.
I know hardly anyone who I think would like this one.
#8 The Power of the Dog
Currently the oddsmaker favorite to win Best Picture, this provocative Western has recently ruffled the feathers of actor Sam Elliot. He called it a “piece of shit” and didn’t seem to love the “allusions to homosexuality” that run through it.
It’s true: The Power of the Dog flips the table of the traditional John Wayne-Clint Eastwood-Kevin Costner-and-yes-Sam-Elliot idea of the Western. It /looks/ like that kind of movie but is determined to question the traditional masculinity that defines the American Western genre. Not only that, it forces the viewer to wonder just how many gay and queer men have suffered in silence throughout history.
For me, it’s a brilliant examination of the violence wrought when men are forced into fulfilling the narrow gender definition the world insists upon. For others, it’s going to be a strain on their patience and interest. Power of the Dog is another slow and subtle film, brilliant though its ultimate thesis may be. To quote my dad, “That’s a weird movie” (He only lasted about half an hour).
Your Mileage May Vary
You may find this next batch entertaining depending on what your preferred genres of film are.
#7 Belfast
Admittedly, this was the first of this batch that I saw clear back in November, so my memory of it is a little fuzzy.
And I nearly stuck this one with The Vegetables, but there is something endearing and charming here that I can best describe as the older mature cousin of Jojo Rabbit. Like that masterpiece (why haven’t you watched Jojo Rabbit yet?), Belfast is about a specific place at a time when unrest, violence, and hatred were infesting that place as told through the eyes of a child.
Like the films before it on this list, this one is also slow, subtle, and thoughtful. What puts it above the others is a deeply relatable message in today’s troubled world. (Especially now with the crisis in Ukraine; that event may put this one over Power of the Dog to win.) That message being the key to surviving the terror that surrounds you is your family and the people you love.
If you’re a fan of films that feel like a memoir (you can feel how much director Kenneth Branagh drew from his own personal experience), this one could be for you. But, again, it is still slow, subtle, and thoughtful.
#6 - #5 - #4
I had to do a three-way tie for the next ones; I just couldn’t see any other way. These are the genre films — a satirical comedy, a sci-fi space opera, and a noir thriller. A person’s enjoyment of them will almost entirely depend on their enjoyment of that genre. So here they are in alphabetical order:
Don’t Look Up
There are two films this year that shocked me when the Academy tapped them for Best Picture. The other one is also part of this tie.
Look, satire is hard. When it’s done well (Dr. Strangelove, Blazing Saddles, Scream) it’s industry-shaking. When it’s done poorly it vacillates between inexplicable (jury is still out on whether Showgirls is meant to be that way) and revolting (Movie 43, anyone?).
Don’t Look Up lands on the better side of the spectrum, but suffers from two principal problems. First, it is simply trying to take on too much and is too on the nose about everything. Yes, given the dire situation humanity is in, we probably do need to be on the nose. But in comparison, Dr. Strangelove, the movie this desperately wants to be, went after one thing: nuclear warfare. Don’t Look Up, in trying to be about every ill of our modern society, isn’t as powerful as it should be in its central message: humanity is on the brink of extinction, and no one seems to care.
The second related problem is that this is a movie made by progressives for progressives. Those who need to hear what this movie has to say aren’t listening, and its Best Picture nom isn’t going to help that problem any.
And that’s what makes recommending this film to typical movie-goers difficult: those who need to see it want nothing to do with it, and those who would want to see it will gain nothing from it.
Get Blake London’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Do with that what you will.
Dune
Hello, officer? I’d like to report a robbery: Denis Villeneuve‘s Best Director nomination.
No other snub this year bothers me more. Villeneuve did what many thought impossible in adapting the unwieldy and so-dependent-on-text Frank Hebert novel into a visual medium.
Not only that, but he managed to somehow make a movie that is 2.5 hours of nothing but set-up and characterization into an utterly captivating experience. I’m not even joking: when the plot arrives in Dune (Part 1, of course) the movie is over, and I didn’t even begin to care.
In many ways, Dune reminds me of Mad Max: Fury Road. Many figured it would be good; I don’t think as many expected it to be this good. And like Fury Road, I imagine it’s going to clean up in the technical awards. (This makes not airing those categories even more baffling: people actually saw this movie.) And unless they completely botch the second half (looking at you, IT: Chapter Two), Dune will easily enter the ranks of one of the best sci-fi films ever made.
But, that’s the thing: this is as sci-fi as sci-fi gets; so sci-fi it borders on high fantasy. So if neither of those things are your thing, you might struggle with this one.
(And in case you didn’t realize, this is the sole nominee that actually succeeded at the box office last year.)
Nightmare Alley
You could have knocked me over when I heard this had earned a Best Picture nom.
Don’t get me wrong: I adore Del Toro films. The Shape of Water is in my top five. The rest of his oeuvre is some of the greatest filmmaking of our time.
But Nightmare Alley seemed more on the level with the likes of Crimson Peak, not Pan’s Labyrinth or Shape. And to be sure, this is the most not-like-his-other-movies movie that Del Toro has ever made: there are no “monsters”, there are no ghosts, there are no fish-men. I suppose this has a lot to do with the screenplay being adapted; in this case from a 1946 pulp novel. So the story is perhaps not as tight as it is when he’s working from nothing but his own imagination.
Still, I love it, and I grow to love it more with every subsequent viewing. It is exactly what you would expect a noir by Del Toro to be, with all his signature moves: dark (might be his darkest film yet); brilliant uses of light, shadow, and color; a mise en scène that is unmistakably Del Toro; an unforgiving examination of humanity’s flaws (this one tackling blind ambition and believing the lies you sell others about your self-importance); and a nostalgic love-letter to the aesthetic of a time gone by.
Plus, we get Cate Blanchett. We get Cate Blanchett as a femme fatale. If you watch this movie, you will ask yourself a dozen times why this woman has never portrayed a femme fatale before. And how is she not a time traveler because everything about her feels plucked from the 1940s.
If you love Del Toro (as you can probably tell I do), if you love noir, if you love dark and twisted films, if you just love the vibe of the art deco 40s, this is your movie.
The Charmers
There is not a single one of these last three films that I would not recommend to everyone and anyone. Please seek these out. I defy you to not enjoy at least one of them.
#3 CODA
This movie is a warm hug. I do not know what else to say about it.
Okay, okay, I’ll say a bit more. First of all, CODA stands for “child of deaf adults” which is the only thing about the plot you need to know going in.
And besides being a beautiful representation of the deaf community with three deaf actors (all three of whom are just stunning. I will riot if Troy Kotsur does not repeat his SAG for Best Supporting Actor on Oscar night), CODA speaks at a gut-punching visceral level to anyone who has ever felt like a stranger in their own family. Just try not to get teary-eyed when . . . well, you’ll know when.
Forever and always this movie is what I will point to when people try to argue that all artsy indie movies are “weird” or “boring” or “bizarre”. This little gem won every award it possibly could at the 2021 Sundance film festival. It did so being nothing more than a spectacularly well-made family feel-good.
Seriously, pay for a month of Apple TV Plus, sit down with your parents (or teenage and older kids), and watch this one. Yes, with your parents if you can. This movie is like Field of Dreams — you should watch it with your parents.
#2 West Side Story
Nothing is more frustrating to me right now than all the people I see on social media finally watching West Side Story on streaming and going crazy over how unbelievably good it is.
I. TOLD. YOU. SO.
Here’s your reminder that Cinemark is doing an Oscars week so PLEASE do yourself a favor and go see it.
I have said it once I will say it a million times: this is without a single doubt the best movie musical ever made since Moulin Rouge! twenty years back. Spielberg is so at-home in the genre you would think he has been making them forever, and you wonder why he’s never done this before.
I will die angry that this flopped at the box office, that so many lumped it together with other flimsy musical adaptations, or that some even dared to utter it in the same breath as Cats. That because we just had to have another Marvel movie so few people have seen Arianna DeBose’s Anita or Mike Faist’s Riff (a Best Supporting Actor nomination snub I am not happy about).
This film was not some greedy producer trying to make a quick buck on theatre kids and wine moms. West Side Story is, from that opening whistle to the final tragic shot, what cinema is all about. When the first trailer aired during last year’s Oscars, I remember thinking, “Oh please, Spielberg. Please. I need you to do what you do best and make the movies be the movies again.”
And he did.
The only reason this isn’t number one on my list is I know musicals are not for everyone.
Still, I’d encourage you to give it a try if you think musicals aren’t your thing. West Side Story might make a believer out of you.
#1 King Richard
So what could top West Side Story as the Best Picture nom I deem most entertaining to your typical moviegoer? Well . . .
Listen. I hate “true story sportsball” movies. There are just too many of them. Between them and “true story about a horse” movies (why are there so many of those) my hackles raise the moment a film begins with the words “based on a true story” fading into the screen. Blerg.
So imagine my surprise at King Richard. Given the hype that surrounded it, I expected a film that bucked the conventions of the “true story sportsball” movie. Maybe even subverted them completely. Maybe this would be a dark, Whiplash-style film about the price of ambition, or maybe an unflinching look at the realities of racism in sports, or maybe a social commentary with the beating of Rodney King and the L.A. riots as the backdrop.
And well, it is those things. But it is also a feel-good sports movie. And while what I just described sounds like Green Book level of yikes, Will Smith and crew, especially Smith’s performance that is all but certain to win him his Oscar, made it work. If anything, it proves what should have been obvious all along: Black people should be the ones telling Black stories. Because this movie is about racism without being heavy-handed. It is about what growing up in Compton was like without being exploitative. It is about two stunning Black women who overcame the odds of success in a sport that before them was for rich white people without feeling condescending to an entire race. And it does all this without the obnoxious tropes of the Emma-Stone-Viggo-Mortensen-Sandra-Bullock “good” white person fighting all the “bad” white people.
And it’s a feel-good “true story sportsball” movie. There’s not a movie I’m more likely to get people to watch nor that is more likely to entertain most than that.
Conclusion
So there you have it: my ranking of the 2022 Best Picture nominees in order from least to most entertaining to the broadest audience. I do hope you’ll take a chance on at least one of the higher-ranked ones if not all of the top three.
And if nothing else, for the love of art, go see something in the cinema this year that doesn’t star Tom Holland. I’m always happy to give recommendations.
Eat Your Damn Vegetables: Some are good, but they are not fun
#10 Drive My Car
#9 Licorice Pizza
#8 The Power of the Dog
Your Mileage May Vary: You might enjoy if you like the genre
#7 Belfast
#6 #5 #4 Three-Way Tie: Don’t Look Up, Dune, Nightmare Alley
The Charmers: I defy you to not like at least one of them
#3 CODA
#2 West Side Story
#1 King Richard
