Aestheticizing the Unserious: Best Picture Nominees Ranked
For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic experiences. --Susan Sontag
Of the ten films nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, over half of them tell stories based on stories that have already been told. Killers of the Flower Moon and American Fiction are both based on books; Maestro is based on the life of Leonard Bernstein; Oppenheimer manages to triply cover ground as a biopic adapted from the biography American Prometheus; and Barbie, well, I’m sure you've heard of her.
The remaining nominees include The Holdovers, Payne’s original screenplay that still manages to be a forgettable regurgitation of the Dead Poets Society-Good Will Hunting-Mentally Ill Prep School Boy trope I thought ended twenty years ago. Poor Things feels like Yorgos Lanthimos Lite, with a more mainstream, vaguely feminist coding of the filmmaker’s previous projects.
Past Lives is in some ways the closest this year’s nominees get to the “unique, unrepeatable, magic experience” Sontag writes of in her 1996 piece, “The Decay of Cinema”. A semi-autobiographical debut from Celine Song, Past Lives presents a story I haven’t heard before from (arguably) the most silenced perspective in American cinema, an Asian-American woman.
Zone of Interest is paradoxically the most and least unique of all the stories nominated. It is, yes, “another” Holocaust film, but its simple concept — to explore not the atrocity, but the periphery of it — is rendered radical perhaps exactly because it looks at a moment in history that is overwhelmingly only “allowed” when it doubles as an act of witness. We do not go out of our way to Never Forget the perpetrator’s lives and experiences, even when doing so critically illuminates the dark crevices of this historical gömböc.
Anatomy of a Fall presented a more personal paradox of the familiar story told slant. This erosion of a disastrous relationship was presented in such realistic gradient as to make anyone who has gone through the dissolution of a marriage need a minute. I needed more than a minute and, in fact, am not sure I’ll actually ever finish watching this film. However — can confirm this familiar story is told from the original lens inherent to any narrative conveyed from a culture not one’s own.
My point here is not that the film industry is at the end of ideas or that I’m tired of movies that recycle intellectual property (although it probably is and yes I am), but rather that there were a lot of excellent films made in 2023 that would have met Sontag’s demanding criteria for cinephilia. I’ve discussed most of these before, but, in short: May/December, Saltburn, Asteroid City, and Margot Robbie’s performance as Barbie, and — I’ll say it! — Eras are all wholly original in their entirety. Or, in the case of Eras, in its ability to do something even more difficult than be original: be unrepeatable and, for many people, magical.
So, I can’t help but note that what all of these famous snubs have in common is that they are very, very Campy. The Academy’s aversion to Camp seems to have grown as the motion picture industry at large becomes increasingly anxious about their own relevancy. As I’ve noted before, the expansion of the Best Picture category from five to ten films was intended to increase box office revenue by providing exposure for a larger number of films. And yet — the stories the Academy chooses to amplify are overwhelmingly stories that have been plenty loud.
Ever out of step, the Academy has failed to note that we are in a cultural moment that lauds the unserious. There is a stifling pressure, it seems, to make certain that Important Subjects are treated with sincerity, gravity, thoughtfulness. And they should be! But to reference the tagline of this Substack, which you probably have not noticed since signing up for this newsletter: Life is too important a thing to ever talk seriously about.
Some of us are at a post-cancel culture moment in which the unserious (Camp being the aesthetics of the unserious) facilitates our very ability to talk about Life. To note what is perhaps Sontag’s most famous statement of all, from Against Interpretation:
A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
Since the Academy is largely lacking in any sort of heuristic by which to compare it’s nominees (really — how do you contrast Barbie to Zone of Interest?), here is my ranking of this year’s nominees from least to most Camp. This isn’t a “worst” to “best” list by any means (in fact, the least and most Camp films on this list are tied for my favorites!), but rather an attempt at intellectual organization.
10. Zone of Interest
I’ve thought about this film for longer and on more levels than I’ve though about perhaps any movie I’ve ever seen. The production (it was shot on ten embedded cameras running simultaneously so no crew was present to make the actors feel observed); the content (as mentioned, a new perspective on the most discussed atrocity in human memory); and the composition (the story telling takes a fascinating turn at the films dénouement, which propels the viewer to present day for a brief look into the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum). The assiduous fidelity to recreating the setting and costumes of this time period are archival, anti-stylized, and for this reason alone (and many others) this film is decidedly un-Camp.
9. Past Lives
Spirituality is often Campy (crystals, stained glass, the Sacred Heart), but Past Live’s exploration of inyeon is grounded in realism. Song’s examination of the nuance of romance and the challenges of “translating beyond language and culture” is emotionally gritty and aesthetically sincere.
8. Anatomy of a Fall
As mentioned, I couldn’t finish this one. I’m ranking it mid-Camp because while this domestic abuse legal drama has very little by way of Bad Taste in its plot, I did find Sandra Hüller’s drunken flirting with a journalist who has journeyed to her isolated mountain chalet pretty over-the-top, especially for Hüller, an actress lauded for her subtly.
7. The Holdovers
I’ve little to say about this film because everything about movies that have the phrase “curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school” in their description has already been said. I’m ranking it here for the prominent role a very Campy bottle of Grande Champagne “Louis XIII” Tres Villes plays in the movie.
6. Killers of the Flower Moon
(Am I the only person who just didn’t have time to watch this one? Thank you to Rachel Milligan for 1. Watching the whole thing & 2. Writing this excellent review. Here’s Rachel’s Letterboxd for more of her filmic insight.)
Any Camp rating of Killers of the Flower Moon needs to take into account the film’s relationship with its real-life inspiration. At first glance, the film’s narrow scope on irredeemable characters as an investigation of the filmmaker’s own complicated history with representations of evil and whiteness seems too grim to be Camp. However, Leo was so set on playing a villain in this that he, as a nearly 50 year old man, demanded to play a character who is supposed to be NINETEEN at the start of the film. Seems Camp to me. Also, this is my one chance to broadcast to the world my favorite blind item of all time, the theory that Leo maintains a secret basement museum full of ShowBiz Pizza Place animatronics. Camp as hell!
5. Oppenheimer
I detailed the ways in which Oppenheimer is Camp last summer, which you can read here.(TBH—watch Godzilla Minus One instead!)
4. Poor Things
I think this is one of those unintentional examples of Camp, of which Sontag includes Art Nouveau lamps and Busby Berkley musicals, art that “does not mean to be funny.” And, I admit, Poor Things probably is not that funny to the many viewers who saw it as an “off-key Victorian-era riff on Frankenstein.” Unlike Frankenstein, however, the film actually has nothing to say about monstrous bodies, creation, or death. In turn, it’s attempts to mash up softcore porn and vague Continental philosophy are sketched, cartoonish, and overwrought enough to be Camp.
3. Maestro
Bradley Cooper is such a Camp icon. He brought us a Lady Gaga infused A Star is Born and now this — a biopic that traces the full arc of composer Leonard Bernstein’s life from its capital A Artist years as a conductor for the New York Philharmonic through a decidedly Campy turn on Broadway. The scene that puts this film toward the top of my list is one in which Bernstein drives his sports car onto the lawn of a party while playing REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”. We get to watch Bernstein become “Bernstein” as he hears his own name in the iconic line “Mountains sit in a line, Leonard Bernstein.”
2.American Fiction
This film is such a fascinating mise en abyme of artifice embedded within artifice. American Fiction points to it’s own composition within the actual structure of the script through an ending in which author Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright) explains several possible endings to his own biopic. In the film’s final moments, Ellison drives off the studio lot of his own film, pausing only to nod to a Black actor costumed as a plantation slave. While this movie excels on many levels, what puts it in the penultimate place on this list is its complicated exploration of the manner in which identity is always in dialogue with representation.
1. Barbie
Gerwig brilliantly explores the double meaning of her titular doll in true Camp fashion. Barbie is not doubled in the “literal vs symbolic representation,” but in the true Camp sensibility of “the thing meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.” I’ve written elsewhere about the exceptional set and costume design that elevate this film from being a Mattel commercial about a doll confronted with the patriarchy to a highly stylized instant Camp masterpiece.
My Camp Rec for the month: My Own Camp Best Picture Nominations
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Kitsch! Camp! Schmaltz! Schlock! to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.