OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This post features two video essays responding to Oppenheimer, one by Kai after Kai and one by Ella Wright. Both focus in on the film's depiction of character, asking how we are meant to understand them in moral terms. I encourage you to pay particular attention to the sound in each piece, the careful dichotomies between loudness and silence in “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppeneheimer” and the menacing yet also space age-y melodies of Kai after Kai’s original music in “The Guilt of Oppenheimer.” Both essays use sound to reinforce their critical points, rather than simply to ground their audiovisual timelines--an example of the sophisticated analysis going on in the world of video essays and videographic criticism.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Feminist Frankensteins

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Feminist Frankensteins

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. In this dialogic post, Henry Jenkins and Kris Longfield dissect three recent feminist re-tellings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Lisa Frankenstein, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, and Poor Things. By centering women in traditionally male roles, these newer Frankenstein films ask different kinds of questions, renewing the story by mapping alternative meanings onto its core figures.They're continually asking “what are we taking from the past and what are we taking from the present?” so their leading ladies can solve problems.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”: Adaptation, Franchising, and 'Barbie' (2023)

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”: Adaptation, Franchising, and 'Barbie' (2023)

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. Barbie is nominated in eight categories in the 2024 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. This critical response has been provoked by the discourse surrounding its eligibility in the Adapted Screenplay category, rather than Original Screenplay, and explores questions of adaptation and franchising in Barbie. The Barbie doll’s perceived lack of story or character suggests that Barbie is an original screenplay, but it is still based on a pre-existing intellectual property and an opening title card recognizes that Barbie is “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”. As an adaptation and a franchise Barbie draws from a material, industrial and historical story that works in concert with the polysemic, ambiguous and open nature of Barbie as a toy. Barbie is therefore shaped by the creative interpretation of Barbie as a culturally iconic toy and ‘Barbie’ as a franchise property owned by Mattel.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'The Holdovers': A Crash Course on Using Vintage Sensibilities the Right Way

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'The Holdovers': A Crash Course on Using Vintage Sensibilities the Right Way

This is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. It is unbelievably easy for a film to come across as corny when attempting to put on the vintage aesthetic—also known in some fan circles as nostalgiacore. The term “nostalgia bait” has even been coined in recent years to signify works of new media that maraud retro sensibilities for the sheer sake of suckering audiences into a hollow experience. As frustrating and soulless as instances of nostalgia bait are, films that pull off the vintage look with purpose have the potential to be something quite special. Alexander Payne’s new witty coming-of-age drama, The Holdovers (2023), serves as a crash course in how to answer the crucial question every nostalgically aestheticized film must be asked: what’s the point?

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023)

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023)

This is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. It often felt to me as though Killers of the Flower Moon was being treated in press coverage like a referendum on the history of Indigenous representation in Hollywood cinema. Can a filmmaker with Martin Scorsese’s clout return to traditionally the most fraught genre vis-à-vis Indigenous representation (the western), tell a particularly devastating true story in the history of Indigenous-settler relations, and finally get it right? And, even if the film did “get it right” (which is destined to be a contentious claim no matter the outcome), would the industry at large recognize and celebrate it? Either way, the impending ceremony feels like an auspicious occasion to revisit precisely the way in which Killers of the Flower Moon actually structures its own approach to representation. Because, quite frankly, that might be the most interesting aspect of the film.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — World on Fire: Reflections on 'Oppenheimer' (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — World on Fire: Reflections on 'Oppenheimer' (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood

Welcome to the first of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This piece explores the timeliness of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), a biopic about the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, by relating the film’s story and imagery to the contemporary threat of nuclear war, judged to be greater than at any time before by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists setting its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight. In addition to indicating the film’s impressive success with critics, the piece explores the film’s chances at this year’s Academy Awards with regards to the Academy’s love of biopics and of Nolan. Oppenheimer’s surprising commercial success is situated within decades-long trends at the global box office. The film marks a triumphant return to the tradition of blockbusting historical epics, combines talking heads with spectacular visual effects imagery, places 20th century science and engineering within a mythological framework, and raises many questions about its protagonist, steadfastly refusing to provide clear cut answers.

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