{"id":3533,"date":"2025-02-28T13:29:21","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T13:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=3533"},"modified":"2025-02-28T13:29:21","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T13:29:21","slug":"oscars-2025-theres-something-weird-about-the-best-picture-nominees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=3533","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2025: There\u2019s Something Weird About the Best Picture Nominees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Then, there\u2019s \u201cDune: Part Two,\u201d a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it\u2019s easy to remain passive in the face of all that\u2019s weird about it. But look! It\u2019s Stellan Skarsgard, plumped, pursy and a-vape, as a baron whose kink, in part, arises from stadium-size gladiatoring. When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It\u2019s \u201c<a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/shop.mccormick.com\/collections\/lawrys?srsltid=AfmBOorr6sy4IRF9kZ0uDn9zvrFJfj4Gd_p8ypPpCc184zELm29D1joT\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Lawry\u2019s<\/a> of Arabia,\u201d \u201cLost in Spice.\u201d The race delivers double-feature Chalamet. In \u201cA Complete Unknown,\u201d he boldly reimagines Bob Dylan as a figure of tremendous petulance. Otherwise, it might be the most conventional thing you could hope to see about a once-in-a-lifetime weirdo; and that counts as kind of weird.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cNickel Boys\u201d unfolds during Dylan\u2019s ascent but in Jim Crow Florida as opposed to Greenwich Village, so, essentially a different planet. Colson Whitehead wrote a novel by the same name, yet this movie is less a feat of adaptation than a wholesale dreaming of what Whitehead composed. It\u2019s been shot so that we see only what its two protagonists experience, through their eyes \u2014 friendship, abuse, self-estrangement. That simple choice \u2014 to personify the camera \u2014 might be as close to \u201cavant-garde\u201d as a best picture nominee has come since whenever Terrence Malick was last on accolades duty.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">These films serve puke and pus and anal rape. At least three culminate in a wild plot twist that deepens the meaning of what preceded it rather than cheapens it. I lost count of all the witch imagery on offer. In \u201cDune,\u201d witches are a spice of life. \u201cThe Substance\u201d might be the grossest movie to come this close to topping the Oscar pile since \u201cThe Exorcist\u201d; although, really, by its final, watch-through-a-tarp minutes, it makes \u201cThe Exorcist\u201d look like \u201cThe Sound of Music.\u201d These movies sense, in their own ways, that we\u2019re past whatever used to pass for normal, including \u201cbest picture&#8221; itself.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Before 2009, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made the mistake of expanding the crop of nominees from five to as many as 10 and then just to 10, the quintets usually included what I had thought of as the Fifth Movie. It was artier or poppier, more indie and more from somewhere else (like Mexico or Sundance) than its fellow nominees, less of a hit or just a bona fide box-office sleeper, more likely to be directed by, say, Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson. Was it the one with <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">no<\/em> director nomination? Can I prove that, say, \u201cCrash\u201d was the Fifth Movie of the 2006 nominees? I can\u2019t. (Maybe that movie was \u201cCapote.\u201d) \u201cCrash\u201d willed its way to \u201csleeper.\u201d It <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">won<\/em>. But it\u2019s an all-time best picture upset because it reeked of squeaker. (It also just reeked.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Then, there\u2019s \u201cDune: Part Two,\u201d a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it\u2019s easy to remain passive in the face of all that\u2019s weird about it.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":504,"featured_media":3534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4679,4560,4676,4680,4677,4681,4318,4687,4682,4,4683,4317,3931,4684,4685,4323,4678,4686],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.5 - 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