Concluding my rundown of personal 2023 Oscar nominations, today I’ll look at the Best Director category.
Great movie direction is even harder to assess than great movie acting. How do you weigh the wide range of skill sets needed to successfully helm a movie, whether it’s working with the actors, deciding where to put the camera and when to move it, or setting the overall tone of the piece?
Continuing my rundown of personal 2023 Oscar nominations, today I’ll look at the Best Actress category.
This year’s Oscar race is shaping up to be an exciting showdown between three very different but equally strong performances. All three made it into my lineup as well.
My honorable mentions include Julia Louis Dreyfus’s meaty turn in Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings and Natalie Portman’s mesmerizing performance in Todd Haynes’ May/December. I also have to mention the duo of Ayo Edibri and Rachel Sennot in Emma Seligman’s hilarious Bottoms.
Continuing my rundown of personal 2023 Oscar nominations, today I’ll look at the Best Actor category.
I found this group had less depth than most of the others, so I have only two honorable mentions to call out. One is Michael Fassbender, who brought an icy cool — but also a dash of parody — to the titular role in David Fincher’s The Killer. The other is Jason Schwartzman, who had an excellent year overall and did some of his best work yet in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.
Continuing my rundown of personal 2023 Oscar nominations, today I’ll look at the Best Supporting Actress category.
First, a few honorable mentions.
It’s criminal that no actor has ever been nominated for a performance in a Wes Anderson movie. Among those who seemed to have a decent shot based on precursors are Bill Murray (Rushmore), Gene Hackman (The Royal Tenenbaums), Ralph Fiennes (The Grand Budapest Hotel), and Jeffrey Wright (The French Dispatch). This year, I wish Scarlett Johansson had received some love for her work in Asteroid City.
Also… Niecy Nash did a lot with limited screen time in Origin, as did Maura Tierney as the stoic mother in The Iron Claw.
As part of my 2023 movie wrap-up, this week I’ll be presenting my own nominations for the acting and directing categories (if I ran the Oscars). First up is Best Supporting Actor.
This was a very good movie year, with so many films jockeying for the top spots on my year-end list and so many performances worthy of singling out. In the interest of spreading the love, I’ve tried to lean toward performances that haven’t been recognized by the Academy when compiling my acting nominations. In some cases, though, I had to go with the favorites.
Meet Me In Montauk 