With afternoons still dark, woolly gloves and scarves retrieved from cupboards; housefronts flickering with neon Santas and mulled wine recipes getting Googled, it is time for me once again to present the “Braddies”, my strictly personal movie awards list for the calendar year coming to an end (as distinct from the film section’s collegiate best-of-year list).
This means top 10s for film, director, actor and supporting actor, best actress and supporting actress, directorial debut, cinematographer, screenplay and film most likely to be overlooked by the boomer mainstream media (MSM).
In Britain this year we celebrated the unlikely phenomenon of #Barbenheimer, something that began as a social media gag but actually put bums on seats. People were going to see Christopher Nolan’s searing A-bomb drama Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s comedy Barbie – seeing them together, that is, and usually in that order with Barbie the emollient dessert after Nolan’s chewy main course. Those two films gave a rocket boost to UK cinema admissions and hinted that audiences were getting a bit tired of superhero films and wanted new stories from original storytellers.
Of course, the cinema scene had its share of water-cooler disputes and op-ed quarrels. Ridley Scott’s spectacular Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix, was coldly greeted by some. In interviews, Sir Ridley naughtily baited historians. They obligingly spluttered. I can only say this film’s inaccuracies were flagrant – and so was its excitement, energy, brio and glorious vulgar dash. It was nowhere near boring enough to be respectable.
But there was another more complicated film dispute to be found on social media: concerning Emerald Fennell’s movie of the jeunesse dorée Saltburn – a twist on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead with a bit of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. Now I wasn’t totally convinced by this film but if anything was going to bring me back round it was the clumsy attacks and quote-tweet putdowns aimed at Fennell’s privileged background. Her detractors seemed unmoved by or unaware of all the male posh people in the business. Emerald Fennell is posh. And? So was Visconti.
This was the year Hollywood’s actors and writers flexed their muscles with strikes, with actual industrial action: something rarely if ever depicted in a Hollywood movie, and only then usually as something tragically compromised or ineffective. And these strikes, unlike almost any other kind of strike, were treated more or less sympathetically in the media. The Writers Guild of America was out from May to September and the Sag-Aftra union, representing actors, from July to September. And they got a deal – securing understandings on residual payments from streaming services and restrictions on AI. It’s something that our British writers and actors, without that kind of industrial muscle, can only wonder at. The strike left behind a picture-gallery of #nofilter and #nomakeup Instagram shots of beaming, placard-wielding stars.
But a pantomime villain emerged from Hollywood cinema this year – a horrible baddie, what the world of American wrestling calls a “heel”, a snarling monster that everyone in the business was booing. And that was Mr David Zaslav, the man who last year had taken over as CEO of Warner Bros Discovery; he was initially praised for his avowed plan to pivot away from releasing films direct to streaming services. How we cheered Mr Zaslav when he announced his commitment to films in real-live cinemas. But our cheers died on our lips when it became clear that Mr Zaslav wanted to save cash by ruthlessly taking a tax write-down on a finished film: Batgirl. All that work, from all those creative professionals, simply locked away. And what made it worse was that Zaslav tried it again with another film, a Looney Tunes comedy, Coyote vs Acme – another piece of sweated labour that he wanted to lock away for ever against tax. This time, the uproar from the industry was deafening. Zaslav backed down, offering Coyote vs Acme to other distributors. He then defiantly insisted his move was “courageous”. The mood was clear. Don’t mess with your creatives’ hard work. It was a good message to end on.
Best film
The Eight Mountains
Godland
Past Lives
Killers of the Flower Moon
Wonka
Reality
The Fabelmans
Oppenheimer
Bottoms
Napoleon
Best director
Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer
Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon
Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall
Celine Song for Past Lives
Lukas Dhont for Close
Ken Loach for The Old Oak
Aki Kaurismäki for Fallen Leaves
Carol Morley for Typist Artist Pirate King
Todd Haynes for May December
Molly Manning Walker for How to Have Sex
Best actress
Margot Robbie for Barbie
Sydney Sweeney for Reality
Aline Küppenheim for Chile ’76
Glenda Jackson for The Great Escaper
Danielle Deadwyler for Till
Greta Lee for Past Lives
Monica Dolan for Typist Artist Pirate King
Mia McKenna-Bruce for How to Have Sex
Cate Blanchett for Tár
Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon
Best actor
Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer
Bradley Cooper for Maestro
Tom Cruise for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Teo Yoo for Past Lives
Michael Fassbender for The Killer
Michael Caine for The Great Escaper
Joaquin Phoenix for Napoleon
Nicolas Cage for Dream Scenario
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett for Femme
George MacKay for Femme
Best supporting actress
Rosamund Pike for Saltburn
Ebla Mari for The Old Oak
Cara Jade Myers for Killers of the Flower Moon
Michelle Williams for The Fabelmans
Carey Mulligan for Maestro
Emily Blunt for Oppenheimer
Vic Carmen Stone for Godland
Aicha Tebbae for The Damned Don’t Cry
Jessica Clement for Dream Scenario
Danielle Vitalis for The Great Escaper
Best supporting actor
Hugh Grant for Wonka
Ryan Gosling for Barbie
Aidan Gillen for Dance First
Robert De Niro for Killers of the Flower Moon
Emeka Amakeze for Mami Wata
John Magaro for Past Lives
Pascal Greggory for One Fine Morning
Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson for Godland
Sebastian Stan for Sharper
Ali Junejo for Joyland
Best cinematographer
Maria von Hausswolff for Godland
Lílis Soares for Mami Wata
Andrew Dunn for The Book Club: The Next Chapter
Timo Salminen for Fallen Leaves
Matthew Libatique for Maestro
Erik Messerschmidt for The Killer
Aaron McLisky for Talk to Me
Linus Sandgren for Saltburn
Ruben Impens for The Eight Mountains
Artur Tort for Pacifiction
Best documentary
20 Days in Mariupol
My Name is Alfred Hitchcock
Town of Strangers
Brainwashed: Sex–Camera–Power
Squaring the Circle
On the Adamant
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Anselm
Tish
Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege
Best debut
Savanah Leaf for Earth Mama
Molly Manning Walker for How to Have Sex
Cecile Song for Past Lives
Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping for Femme
Charlotte Regan for Scrapper
Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou for Talk to Me
Dina Amer for You Resemble Me
Lola Quivoron for Rodeo
Mary Nighy for Alice, Darling
Nida Manzoor for Polite Society
Best screenplay
Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon
Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott for Bottoms
Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman and Daley Pearson for Talk to Me
Celine Song for Past Lives
Carolina Cavalli and Babak Jalali for Fremont
Joanna Hogg for The Eternal Daughter
Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka for Sharper
Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin for Oppenheimer
Isabel Peña and Rodrigo Sorogoyen for The Beasts
Laura Citarella and Laura Paredes for Trenque Lauquen Parts 1 & 2
