2024 Oscar Nominees (pt. I)

Killers of the Flower Moon

American Fiction

Well, readers and distinguished members of the Academy, it’s Leap Day, the Oscars are imminent and I, for one, am exhausted. You know how much I love watching movies and dissecting them, but even a cinephile has their limits. This awards season has felt never-ending but it’s also been less predictable than in years past. Todd Haynes’ instant-masterpiece May December is nominated for best original screenplay but not a single acting performances is nominated (and I’m sorry to say but it likely won’t win because of the Academy + the highest-up players in the industry’s complicity in the exact exploitation depicted in the film.) I don’t understand how actors like Margot Robbie, Zac Efron, Rachel McAdams, Charles Melton, and Greta Lee are without nominations. I don’t understand how writer-directors like Celine Song, Greta Gerwig, Sofia Coppola, and Cord Jefferson are left out of the conversation. I know it may seem odd for me to go out of my way to cover the Oscars when I, personally, do not necessarily respect or approve of the Academy and what informs their decisions. Nobody’s perfect, and Hollywood, well, has to work it, again and again til they get it right (but they rarely do.) For those of us who are less-than-enthusiastic about this Awards-based movie mumbo jumbo I am happy to report that like last year, I’ll only be doing two weeks of Oscar-nominated movie reviews this time around. I can understand why both of tonight’s two films are nominated for Best Picture, but I can’t say that for all the nominees! If I had it my way, Theater Camp would win best picture, best screenplay, best original song, and Ayo Edebri and Rachel Sennott would win in a tie for best actress for their masterful performances in Bottoms. I don’t get to make these choices unfortunately, so I had to choose a handful of Oscar-nominated movies that seemed most-pressing to be seen. I am not an athlete of any kind, but I stretched and hydrated my way through the marathon of watching tonight’s first film: Martin Scorsese’s 3 hour and 26 minute long epic Killers of the Flower Moon. My dad and I watched this film in two sittings, which actually feels impressive in hindsight—not because it is boring or uninteresting, but because its subject matter is so devastatingly heavy and endlessly heartbreaking. It is, of course, still a story that should be told and known by all, as all dark chapters in US history (aka all of it) should be known. I’ve long-avoided long movies, even by auteurs as beloved as Martin Scorsese, because I love movies too much to sit through one that will exhaust or infuriate me. I knew I’d eventually need to see KOTFM though, because I am fascinated by American history and I was curious as to how the horrific Reign of Terror would be handled. As far as a white man making a movie about indigenous people go, KOTFM was filmed as ethically and accurately as possible. Inspired by journalist David Grann’s book of the same name, KOTFM and its budget of 200 million dollars it is the most expensive movie to ever be filmed in Oklahoma. (And it is also Scorsese’s last collaboration with his dear friend and talented musician Robbie Robertson.) Throughout the filming process, Scorsese consulted with Osage experts on the topics of clothing, language, art, funerals, ceremonies, and other facets of their culture, and many Osage people acted as extras in this film. At every turn, it would appear that Scorsese tried to be as respectful and authentic as possible, but the fact that his film is still set from a white man’s point of view makes things complicated. Osage people are a bit divided when it comes to their reception of this film, and reasonably so. They need not be educated or reminded of the horrors committed against the Osage people in this story, but for the predominantly white audiences viewing this film, it is necessary, likely new information. KOTFM transports us to 1920s Oklahoma—a time of budding industry, prohibition, and the discovery of oil in the territory that the Osage call home. We’re then shown the sudden rise in riches in Oklahoma, indigenous Osage people wearing fur coats and playing golf, painting a picture that these people were an entire new class of wealthy—which is partly true. What we soon come to find out is that these riches come with a monstrous and deadly price, as we witness several Osage people of all ages, turn up mysteriously dead. The white man’s law requires court-appointed white guardians that are assigned to each Osage man and woman, to manage the money of “full and half-blood” members, assuming them "incompetent.” Enter stank-faced, wrinkled baby-cheeked Leo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, who’s just returned from the first World War to live with his brother Byron and his uncle William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro) on their cattle ranch in Oklahoma. Ernest’s uncle requests that he be called “King”, since that’s how everyone in town knows him, and basically and easily convinces Leo to find himself an Osage woman—in this case a woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone)—so he can marry her, kill her, and inherit her money. That is the plot of the film and the entirety of this disturbing chapter of American history summed up into one sentence, but the film takes nearly four hours to get this across. If you want to know more I suggest you watch KOTFM or read on this topic yourself because the details of this murderous scheme are even more disgusting and unsettling than I can list here. I was somewhat aware of this period of American history, but I had no idea the specificity of its darkness because I was given a good ole public Texas education and we hardly even learned how to spell “indigenous.” History books and scholars likely brush right past this bloody period in Oklahoma’s legacy because the local, state, and federal government were all complicit in the violence and destruction. From the time colonizers set their diseased feet on this fertile land full of potential, they squandered it, raped it, demolished any semblance of goodness that it had to offer. I applaud KOTFM for depicting these white murderers as manipulative yet idiotic, powerful but weak, played by legitimate actors who have never looked more repulsive in their lives. But I mostly applaud Lily Gladstone, who, after watching this movie, I am certain deserves that Best Actress win, for their incredible talents. I mean Lily had to not only endure the centuries’ worth of manmade pain depicted in this film, but they had to act like Leo DiCaprio still had his boyish good looks here—which can’t have been easy to stomach, and is the most impressive part of her already immense acting abilities. To watch all of these ugly men systematically destroy the lives and spirits of these hardworking, intelligent, empathetic Osage people was nothing short of stomach-turning and viscerally-upsetting. I mean, Scorsese turned this film into a horror film at several moments by underscoring the blood and guts and gore that was involved in these planned deaths, which is no doubt accurate, but still extremely unpleasant to watch. Even the lazy white folk sitting on their asses while the land around them is ravaged by drills and impending industry was a challenge to watch. As much as I feared that this film would drag on, it really doesn’t in the way you’d think it would. It is by no means dull or boring, but it is incredibly, increasingly fucking sad. And you may be thinking, “aww poor little white girl is sad to witness what white people have done” but I was fairly conscious of the atrocities committed by white people throughout history and to this day, what was unbearably sad were the details of these atrocities—played over and over and over again with little-to-no justice for nearly four hours. And truthfully, the bigots and colonizers who need to be educated by this film the most will not see it, will never see it, and that just infuriates me more. So kudos to Scorsese for bringing this story to mainstream audiences who may or may not have slept through it or missed the point, kudos for Jesse Plemons for showing up halfway through just to play the character he always plays well, but mostly kudos to actors like Lily Gladstone who made this film so palpably horrific and hard to forget. (And Lily has quite the frown nailed down, coming for Florence Pugh’s gig.) I didn’t love to see Brendan Fraser play a bad guy, and it was positively unnerving to hear Robert De Niro do a higher-pitched, sweet-twanged voice that I’ve never heard him do before. I feel that, as a jaded white film critic, there is nothing that I need to add to the conversations around KOTFM, but I will say that I would’ve been even more invested and compelled in this story if it were told from Mollie’s perspective. Tonight’s next film was equally ambitious, equally as confrontational, but far more light-hearted in comparison, Cord Jefferson’s debut film: American Fiction. American Fiction is adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, but this story could’ve been written last year, ten years before it, and likely, another twenty years in the future. American Fiction follows a Los Angeles-based writer and professor Theolonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) as he’s just been let-go from his college gig after offending a white student for the usage of the n-word in a book he’s teaching. He’s placed on a leave and reminded of the fact that he hasn’t published anything in many years, just ahead of his attendance at a writer’s conference in his hometown of Boston. He speaks on the phone with his literary agent to discuss why his latest book keeps getting passed on, to which his agent says “they want a ‘black book’” But, as Monk exclaims, “I am black, I wrote the book, so it is a black book!” Unfortunately the publishers are not looking for a book written by a black person, they are looking for a book written by a black person that tokenizes and stereotypes the experience of being black. As his book keeps getting rejected, Monk is dealing with the loss of a family member, his mother’s (icon Leslie Uggams) recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis, his freshly-out-of-the-closet brother’s (Sterling K. Brown) chaotic new life, and the fact that he’s been asked to serve on a book-judging panel with the author of the most offensively stereotyped book he’s ever read, “We's Lives in Da Ghetto”’s Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) Monk is at the end of his rope, enduring microagressions and blatant racism everywhere he goes, yet not seeming “black enough” for the white people with the money, and so he pours himself a drink—or several—and begins to type out a new novel titled “My Pafology” Monk’s agent is reasonably confused and concerned by this out-of-character writing, to which Monk says “It’s got deadbeat dads, killers, rap, and in the end he gets shot by a cop—how much more black can you get?” His agent warns him, “This scares me, white people think they want the truth but they don’t, they just want to be absolved.” But because white people are dumb and ignorant and unaware of satire or in-your-face exaggerated tropes, My Pafology is accepted with a very large sum of a book offer for Monk. A lady with an RBG poster behind her calls the book “raw and real”, despite the fact that the life Monk illustrated in his alcohol-and-rage-fueled novel does not reflect his experiences at all. The book becomes so popular that it eventually catches the attention of a wannabe-edgy director played by Adam Brody, and as the book grows in success so does Monk’s disillusionment with the career path he’s chosen, and the intelligence and empathy of the people in the world around him. Jeffrey Wright is consistently funny, charming, and believably exhausted by the nonsense occurring around him, and he fully deserves his Best Actor nom. Sterling K. Brown was a standout, so it makes sense why he is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of an audacious, recently-out-of-the-closet gay man with a lot of catching up to do. These two had far more sibling-chemistry than Lily Gladstone and Leo DiCaprio had romantic-chemistry, and I was consistently smiling at their interactions. The entirety of this script is brilliant and impossibly well-written—at times I couldn’t type fast enough to document each beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking turn of phrase. The cast also includes Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Keith David, Raymond Anthony Thomas, and Myra Lucretia Taylor—and every single one of them gives a knockout performance. I expected American Fiction to be funny and disappointingly-real, but what I didn’t expect was its poignancy. But given the film’s twisted sense of humor, it only makes sense that this comedy would be wrapped up in tragedies as well. Life is one long, great comedic tragedy, or tragic comedy, depending on how you look at it, and the phenomenon of white people demanding something limiting and offensive from black people is unfortunately a tale as old as time. I thoroughly enjoyed American Fiction’s genius cultural critiques and its bold sense of humor, it was even better than I was expecting. And to say that I enjoyed KOTFM doesn’t feel appropriate, to say that I didn’t like it is just reductive and stupid, so I’ll just say that I did watch it, and now I have seen it, so there you go!! My job as an unpretentious film critic is to watch critically-acclaimed movies so that you don’t have to, but both of these movies are worth your time, especially if you’re white. Thanks for reading along my fellow jaded movie fans, let’s chat next week when it’s time for more Oscar-nominated movies and more incoherent opinions from yours truly. Ta ta!