…to split the top two awards between Best Picture and Best Director.
Going with One Battle After Another for Best Picture meant they could / should have gone with Marty Supreme‘s Josh Safdie for Best Director. Or vice versa — Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director and Marty Supreme–ola for Best Picture. At least that.
No one would dispute that both films, cultural period pieces with stylistic fervor and punchy technique, are prime examples of big-swing auteurist audacity.
I’ve never argued that OBAA, craft-wise, doesn’t have excellent chops — it’s the tribal rigidity of its social scheme (French 75 girlbosses brave and radiant, Sean Penn‘s Lockjaw ready to murder his own daughter over racial derangement) that brings it down. Supreme, to me and many others, is obviously more of a sweeping vision thing…a commanding, heebie–jeebie knockout.
Instead these obsequious little Critics Choice go-alongers have totally kowtowed to OBAA…Best Picture plus Best Director. Lefty circus elephants…no balls, no vision, no backbone.
At least Supreme‘s Timothee Chalamet won for Best Actor….deserved! Ditto Jessie Buckley‘s Best Actress trophy for Hamnet.
Methinks the Best Picture vote might have been close. If One Battle After Another had been an overwhelming favorite Benicio del Toro or Sean Penn would have won for Best Supporting Actor, no? But they didn’t. Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi snatched it away.
Handing their Best Original Screenplay award to Ryan Coogler for Sinners, a bloody, pulpy, under-lighted AIP exploitation flick (musical vampires, the primal joy of cunnilingus, machine-gunning the KKK) instead of giving it to Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier for their obviously exquisite Sentimental Value script was truly embarassing….totally driven by identity politics**. Where is the virtue signalling in saluting a pair of white Norwegians?
** If Clem Yeehaw had written the Sinners screenplay, there’s no way it would’ve been nominated.