While the last few years have been full of challenges and weird incidents for the Academy Awards (Will Smith’s slap to Chris Rock won’t be forgotten anytime soon), there’s real intrigue this year as far as the Best Picture winner is concerned.
To some extent, two of the fiercest competitors – “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” – resemble the situation in 2020, when the South Korean social drama “Parasite” fought for victory ” and the British war thriller “1917”. At that time, the first triumphed surprisingly, which marked a bright paradigm shift in the approach of Academy members to the selection of laureates, adapting to the new currents of the era. Will it be similar this year?
Without a doubt, the world has experienced dramatic, almost unimaginable changes during 2022 – the presence of a devastating war in the very heart of Europe cannot be ignored. However, the US is far away, and even though it has become Ukraine’s biggest supporter in the fight against Russian criminal terror, that doesn’t mean the Academy will follow suit. For the second year in a row, the organizers of the “Oscar” ceremony have denied Volodymyr Zelenskiy the opportunity to address the audience around the world, even despite the fact that before that he was allowed to speak both at the most prestigious film festivals and at the “Golden Globes” awarding ceremony.
It seems that such “Oscar” givers want to signal to the world that, in their opinion, politics and art do not go hand in hand, no matter how morally outdated and simply senseless such a belief may be. This does not mean that this confidence will also be reflected in the voting results, where unexpected surprises are always possible. Three years ago, the political situation was different, and although Sam Mendes’ one-shot World War I thriller “1917” seemed to be the favorite, the Academy members decided in favor of the bloody class struggles, infused with peculiar black humor, in South Korean Junho Bon’s surreal comedy “Parasite “. It confirmed that the conservative academy has finally “opened its heart” to foreign-language cinema, which is usually ignored in this nomination, allowing nations with a different cinema tradition and an alternative view of the world to triumph.
This year’s list of 10 nominations included an extremely varied cocktail of films – there was a place for Hollywood blockbusters that conquered the world, independent cinema with a modest budget, and even a laureate of the Cannes Film Festival. All in all, I would like to say that 2022, despite the global upheavals and the shadow of the pandemic still lingering in the background, has been quite interesting, satisfying both those seeking artistic challenges and traditional entertainment, and the nominations for the best picture of the Oscars this year have managed to concentrate the really best of for both worlds.
At the beginning, I will focus on those films that are most likely to win the Oscars this year, but whose creators can still feel very flattered about their nominations. We are talking, of course, about Joseph Kosinski’s military blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” starring Tom Cruise and James Cameron’s 13-year-old fantasy film “Avatar: Waterway”. The fact that both of these box office blockbusters, the two highest-grossing films of 2022, made it to the top 10 is more a thank you from the Academy for bringing audiences back to theaters and restoring faith in the magic of cinema.
