Awards Season

CultureMap film critic's guide to the 10 Best Picture Oscar nominees of 2022

Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog is the heavy favorite at the 2022 Oscars, nominated for 12 awards, including Best Picture.

Photo by Kirsty Griffin/courtesy of Netflix

The nominations for the 2022 Academy Awards have been announced, with 10 films vying for for Best Picture. Unlike the system that had been in place since 2009, where anywhere between 5 and 10 films could be nominated, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences has established a rule that 10 films will now be nominated every year.

The Power of the Dog led the way with 12 total nominations, while Dune was close behind with 10 nominations.

Take a look back at what CultureMap's film critic, Alex Bentley, had to say about each of the nominees (listed below in alphabetical order) when they were originally released.

Belfast
Writer/director Kenneth Branagh's semi-autobiographical film about his childhood in Northern Ireland, which earned seven nominations, is a brilliantly told story about a time that only those who were there know well, with Branagh managing to make the city of his youth come alive again. In addition to the Best Picture nomination, Branagh is nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, Ciarán Hinds is nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Judi Dench picked up a surprise nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

CODA
Perhaps the least "Oscar-y" film of the 10 nominated films, CODA is a heartwarming movie that presents the traditional story of a young person finding herself couched in a non-traditional setting, making the most of that combination. Nominated for three Oscars, its most notable aspect is the three Deaf actors playing the family of lead actress Emilia Jones, including Oscar winner Marlee Matlin and now Oscar-nominee Troy Kotsur, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Writer/director Sian Heder also picked up a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Don't Look Up
Writer/director Adam McKay has made one of the more interesting pivots in Hollywood, turning his comedic eye on real world topics. The film, nominated for four Oscars, is ostensibly a satire about the lack of a belief in climate change by certain segments of society, but it also may just be the best movie about the COVID era without ever mentioning the disease. McKay and co-writer David Sirota are also nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

Drive My Car (not reviewed)
International films rarely get nominated outside of their designated category, so the three-hour Japanese film earning a Best Picture nod was somewhat of a surprise. Not only that, it received four nominations total, including one for Ryusuke Hamaguchi for Best Director and another for Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe for Best Adapted Screenplay, nearing the strong support of 2019's Parasite, which was nominated for six Oscars and won four.

Dune
The highest-grossing movie among the 10 nominees, taking in a little over $100 million domestically, Dune is a visual splendor but is strangely inert on the storytelling side. Delivering part one of what will be a two-part film, Denis Villenueve, nominated for Best Director, seems much more interested in portraying the scale — both literally and metaphorically — of everything in the film, forgetting to make the audience care about the people involved. The film received 10 nominations, mostly on the technical side, although Jon Spaihts, Villeneuve, and Eric Roth did nab an adapted screenplay nomination.

King Richard
This film, which earned seven nominations, tells the story of the early years of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams, shepherded by their headstrong father, Richard. Starring Best Actor nominee Will Smith, the film has all the markings of a classic underdog story, showing how much the sisters and family had to overcome just to be given a chance by the cloistered tennis society. Aunjanue Ellis, who plays the matriarch of the family, is nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and writer Zach Baylin is nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

Licorice Pizza
The latest film from writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza is a coming-of-age story as only Anderson can tell it. Nominated for three Oscars, the film comes off as more of a lark than most of Anderson’s films, but because he has a unique approach to filmmaking, it’s also more interesting than maybe it has a right to be. Anderson is nominated for both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Nightmare Alley
Another film whose visuals outshine its story, Nightmare Alley — nominated for four Oscars — had the possibility of getting star Bradley Cooper another acting nomination. But he and most of the cast are held back by a noir story that writer/director Guillermo del Toro wants to pretend is way more intriguing than it actually is. The film's three other nominations were in technical categories, including the expected Best Cinematography.

The Power of the Dog
Probably the most confounding story of the 2022 Oscars season is the love being showered on Jane Campion's first film in 12 years, which garnered a leading 12 nominations. Featuring a fiery performance by star Benedict Cumberbatch, who's rightly nominated for Best Actor, the film as a whole is nonsensical, with a baffling narrative made only slightly watchable because of the pretty New Zealand scenery. Nonetheless, Campion is nominated for both Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jesse Plemons are nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Kirsten Dunst is nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

West Side Story
A lot of people were skeptical of Steven Spielberg remaking a film that won 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, but Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner updated the story and songs in all the right ways. Nominated for seven Oscars, the film puts real thought into the treatment of all of its characters and reworks a variety of songs to great effect. Spielberg is nominated for Best Director, and Ariana DeBose is favored to win for Best Supporting Actress, the same award co-star Rita Moreno won for the same role 60 years ago.

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Movie Review

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gives horror a surreal twist

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing with it a new subgenre - the slasher - that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death - a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask - may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference - Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard - to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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