Come Together

In which I am lukewarm about another movie that was up for Best Picture

The Oscars were last night, with Anora emerging as the biggest of the winners. I was slightly dismissive about it in the recent pop-culture roundup, but it seemed a reasonable enough choice. Of course, given that I’ve seen all of three of the Best Picture nominees to this point, and one of those was Dune Part Two, which was never seriously in contention, nobody should take my opinion all that seriously.

The third, for the record, I watched yesterday— the weather turned bitterly cold after a couple of days of rain, so skiing was Right Out, leaving riding the stationary bike in the basement as my only real exercise option. I’m not super enthusiastic about any of the streaming TV shows I’ve got going at the moment, and given the fact that the Oscars were being handed out, I decided to look at the streaming film options, and ended up renting Conclave from Prime:

A great film for people who like it when they say the title of the movie during the movie.

I debated firing up the Bob Dylan biopic instead, but it’s half an hour longer and $25, where the Pope movie is a tight two hours and $6. (Which, as a child of the 80’s, I think of as the objectively correct price for a movie ticket…) I think they also had The Brutalist available, but it’s three and a half hours, and I wasn’t planning to be on the bike that long¹.

This was kind of interesting because it’s what I think of as absolutely classic Oscar bait. It’s not technically a period piece, but it sorta-kinda is because it’s set in the Vatican which exists in its own little bubble outside of normal time, and everybody is in robes more or less all the time making it a Costume Drama even if the characters own cell phones. (As an aside, I definitely recommend this NYT interview where the costume designer says catty things about how the actual College of Cardinals dress and how they had to spice things up for the movie.) It’s full of capital-A Actors delivering capital-M Monologues and looking tortured by faith or conscience or the lack of one or both of those. Everything is richly detailed and beautifully shot, so it looks great on screen.

It’s also… kind of dopey? The intrigues among the Curia are a little too sanitized to count as Ripped From The Headlines material, but they’re very on the nose, and the big twist at the end is just sort of ham-handed and silly. It’s based on a thriller novel from 2016, which makes sense, because the whole thing feels like an airplane-book version of a Novel of Ideas.

But, then, making a lushly produced film of a shallow person’s idea of Deep Thoughts is a very traditional path to an Academy Award, in much the same way that simony is a well-worn path onto the Throne of St. Peter (#JusticeForTremblay). It didn’t work out, but you can easily see how it might’ve.

And, you know, I probably would’ve been fine with that. It’s a very nice movie to look at, and Ralph Fiennes is really going for it in a way that’s pretty enjoyable in a Classic Oscar Bait kind of way. I don’t think it’s significantly dumber than Anora, though it’s definitely less flashy.

I will almost certainly watch the Dylan movie at some point (when the price comes down a bit…), because I really like Bob Dylan. I’m less certain that I’ll see The Brutalist given the run time, but I probably ought to give it a shot given the kinds of praise it’s getting. None of the other Best Picture nominees seem likely to be of interest, but then if we get an extremely protracted stretch of terrible weather, who can say?

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There’s my latest bid to be your go-to source for middlebrow Takes on pop culture. I’m kicking around something more substantive, but it might need too much finessing to make it safe to post, so you get this instead. If you want either more lukewarm movie reviews or to see whether I go out on a limb with a chainsaw, here’s a button:

And if you’d like to make a hard pitch for any of the other Best Picture nominees, or something that should’ve been nominated but wasn’t. the comments will be open:

1. I pedaled my way through the first half of Conclave, give or take (there were some wi-fi glitches), then took a break for lunch and walking the dog before finishing it on my Chromebook upstairs.