Awards season can now be considered officially to have begun with the announcement of the Golden Globes nominations list, the Globes being now evidently respectable once again, having addressed the various issues around diversity and kickbacks – although these scandals never stopped the Globes’ actual lists being really all that different from those of the other uncontaminated awards bodies. Devotees of the prizegiving world will incidentally savour the nomination here for best standup comedian on television going to Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage tour, this show being Rock’s extended thoughts on the experience of being slapped (and sworn at) by Will Smith while presenting the Oscars in 2022.
With nine nominations, Barbie rises above this year’s Golden Globes event like the giant Kubrickian, 2001-style Barbie doll in the opening scene of that massive and massively successful fantasy comedy. If the Golden Globes ever had any overwhelmingly important raison d’etre it was to reward the lighter side of things in its separate category for musical or comedy – these being traditionally overlooked by the Oscars – and Barbie is above all things a comedy. It enjoyed resounding, repeat business box-office success with audiences who absolutely loved it and Greta Gerwig (a nominee in the best director category) now graduates from indie fave to A-list industry player. I myself was agnostic about whether Barbie quite managed to transcend corporate branding, but there’s no doubting the brio and style and musical exhilaration of the film.
Below Barbie is the film which was its unlikely double-act feature, Christopher Nolan’s colossal biopic Oppenheimer – including a best male actor nod for Cillian Murphy who gave a notably haunted portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer and his agonised feelings about carrying on with the plans to bomb Japan after it became clear that neither Nazi Germany nor any Axis power had any credible nuclear capability. Nolan’s serious and artistically accomplished film deserves its showing here, although it may do less well than the sunnier, happier Barbie on the night.
Beneath the mighty #Barbenheimer duo are Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, both really outstanding films. Emma Stone’s performance as the Frankensteinian lost woman brought back from the dead by Willem Dafoe’s scientist in Poor Things might actually give Margot Robbie a run for her money in the best female actor (musical or comedy) category; both performances in fact are fascinatingly crafted, stylised and mannered. Killers of the Flower Moon contains three fascinatingly knotty, complex and uningratiating performances from Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro as the Native American woman and the two men who are on a mission to defraud her and her people of their oil rights.
Elsewhere, Celine Song’s heartwrenching romance Past Lives and Jonathan Glazer’s searing Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest are rewarded, as are Bradley Cooper’s fine study of Leonard Bernstein in Maestro and Todd Haynes’s psychodrama May December with its tremendous face-off between Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore (although there is a touch of category shenanigans in putting Portman into the lead actress list and Moore in the supporting list). Certainly it is a strong list, though I admit I am a partisan for Ridley Scott’s deeply enjoyable Napoleon, at which noses were turned up and is here unrewarded. But there are some very worthwhile films here.
