Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a really good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”
Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that Ryan Coogler‘s writing and direction of the second half of Sinners…the blood-and-fangs section that begins with the arrival of the Irish vampires…I was increasingly annoyed all through that damn film. Honestly? I’m not a huge fan of the first half either.
How do the leading 2025 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? I’ll bang this out tomorrow.
I wish I could subject Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet to the Hawks test. All I’ve heard from admirers is that it ends with a really great scene (i.e., a performance of Hamlet inside the Globe theatre), but no one has mentioned two other standouts. Do they exist? I’d really like to know.