89Kelly in Bombshell. It’s rough
on the indie circuit, where
Awkwafina (The Farewell),
Mary Kay Place (Diane), and
a career-best Alfre Woodard
(Clemency) must jockey to
be noticed. If Oscar voters
would stop turning a blind
eye to horror, they’d see
that the indisputable best in
this category has been there
since Jordan Peele opened Us
in March 2019. It’s there in
the sheer physical and vocal
artistry displayed by Lupita
Nyong’o in the dual role
of a wife and mother who
encounters what appears to
be her evil doppelgänger. Her
scary-brilliant performance is
the year’s best. No contest.Best Supporting Actor
It’s high time for Brad Pitt to
collect his first Oscar. And his
part as a stuntman embroiled
with the Manson gang in Once
Upon a Time... in Hollywood
is movie-star acting at its
finest. That’s the problem.
Pitt, standing toe-to-toe with
co-star Leo DiCaprio, isn’t
supporting anyone in Quentin
Tarantino’s love letter to
1960s Tinseltown. Minus
the category fraud, Joe Pesci
would win this prize in a
walk as an old-school Mafioso
in The Irishman. Kudos to
Jamie Foxx (Just Mercy), Song
Kang-ho (Parasite), Wesley
Snipes (Dolemite Is My Name),
and Pesci’s Irishman cohort
Al Pacino. But Pesci’s return
to film after a decade-long
sabbatical defines what it
means to play the hell out of
a true supporting role.Best Supporting
Actress
Cheers to the deserving Laura
Dern, killing it in Marriage
Story as a divorce lawyer
with a shark’s smile and a
killer defense. Florence
Pugh, just 24, is revelatory
in Little Women. And Margot
Robbie beguiles as Sharon
Tate in Once Upon a Time...
in Hollywood. But let’s not
laugh off Jennifer Lopez, who
breaks out of rom-com limbo
to play a stripper hellbent
on taking her objectifying
Wall Street clients to the
cleaners in Hustlers. Lopez
potently exemplifies what it
takes for women to survive in
a predatory man’s world.Best Director
Tarantino rocked the house
with Once Upon a Time...
in Hollywood. But Martin
Scorsese (The Irishman) is the
man, except at the Golden
Globes, where 1917 director
Sam Mendes took the prize
and declared, “There’s not
one director... that is not
in the shadow of Martin
Scorsese.” Take that without
ignoring the explosive talentsof the Safdie brothers (Uncut
Gems) or the revolutionary
spark ignited by South
Korea’s Bong Joon-ho with
the stinging satire of Parasite.
And, oh, the drama of Greta
Gerwig (Little Women) and
Noah Baumbach (Marriage
Story) — tagged by The
Hollywood Reporter as “The
First Couple of Film” — duking
it out in two categories.Best Screenplay
Gerwig’s faithful but free-
wheeling version of Little
Women, from the 1860s
novel by Louisa May Alcott,
sets a new gold standard for
literary adaptation. And she
is matched by the originalRodrigo Prieto paints
so vividly in The Irishman.
But camerawork as an art
is best appreciated in the
play of shadow and light
that Claire Mathon uses to
illuminate two romantic
dramas, Portrait of a Lady
on Fire and Atlantics.Best
Animation
Given the
rote sequelitis
afflicting Toy Story
4 and Frozen
II, the startling
originality of I Lost
My Body shines
like a beacon, as
a severed hand
crawls across
Paris to reconnect
with its owner.
No animation
this year can touch it.Best Documentary
Honeyland tinds rare wisdom
in the tale of a Macedonian
beekeeper. Apollo 11 uses
new footage to bring vivid
life to NASA’s 1969 mission.
American Factory watches
as a Chinese company
takes over a closed General
Motors factory in Ohio. But
what music junkie can resist
Rolling Thunder Revue: A
Bob Dylan Story by Martin
Scorsese, a rollicking record of
the masked Dylan touring the
U.S. in the 1970s and fudging
facts to reach a deeper truth?Best Picture
It’s war. The Golden Globes
skunked Netflix — one win
out of 17 film nominations —
indicating a larger Hollywood
animus toward the streaming
giant that releases its films for
only a few weeks in theaters.
That’s bad for business.
Last year, Oscar fired off
a volley by denying a Best
Picture prize to Netflix’s
Roma, preferring the big-
studio Green Book. Can the
Globe-winning war film 1917,
another studio product, help
knock down Netflix’s new
pins — The Irishman, Marriage
Story, Dolemite Is My Name,
and The Two Popes? Hell, it’s
all politics, which has nothing
to do with quality or the fact
that The Irishman is a new
Scorsese classic no matter
how or where you watch it.Time... in Hollywood
that hits the sweet
spot as peak work
from a firebrand
who sees the world
like no one else.Best Cinematography
It’s not just pretty pictures.
Behold the brutal grandeur of
life in the WWI trenches that
Roger Deakins achieves in- Or the gritty evocation of
1960s Los Angeles that Robert
Richardson attains in Once
Upon a Time... in Hollywood.
Or the prowling darkness that
screenplay that Baumbach
devised for Marriage Story,
a seriocomic portrait of a
broken marriage that never
obliterates love as an integral
reason for being alive. Still,
it’s Tarantino’s fierce and
funny fantasia about life,
death, and the healing power
of cinema in Once Upon aTarantino gives
the word to Pitt for
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.
Old Masters:
Scorsese directs
De Niro and Pesci
in The Irishman.The Gator Movie That Oscar Forgot
I ASKED Quentin Tarantino about Oscar’s ritual
snubbing of pulp. “Come on,” said the mae-
stro, whose 1992 debut with Reservoir Dogs
was stiffed. What he’d like to see honored:
Crawl. It’s a B-movie about a swimmer (Kaya
Scodelario) trapped in a storm-beset Florida
home as gators run free. Tarantino praised
Alexandre Aja’s film for its “heightened
tension,” superior design, and rewatchability.
“How many Oscar winners do you want to
CL watch again?” asked Tarantino. Point taken. P.T.
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SONYPICTURESThe Spoiler:
Can 1917,
with MacKay,
win big?Gerwig (left) and
Ronan on the set
of Little WomenScodelario
crawls her
way out of
gator hell.Doc Dazzle: Rolling
Thunder RevueLET’S HEAR IT FOR ‘CRAWL’