By Tom Nicholson
There’s a lot of pageantry and tradition around Hollywood at this time of year, and one cherished custom has been on particularly clear display. As the race for Best Picture heats up, there’s always a backlash against one or more of the frontrunners as public opinion curdles. It’s as much a part of the Academy Awards as moaning about the host or watching the In Memoriam section for a titanic figure who’s somehow been forgotten.
Usually, there are a couple of movies in the hunt which get some snark directed their way – think of 2018 winner Green Book being accused of peddling a cosy white saviour story, or the close-but-no-statuette La La Land dismissed as saucer-eyed frippery which got jazz all wrong in 2016.
From left: Green Book producers Jim Burke, Charles B. Wessler, Nick Vallelonga, Peter Farrelly and Brian Currie pose with their Oscars after winning the award for best picture.Credit: Invision/AP
But even for Oscars backlash season, things have been particularly fractious this time around. In fact, it might be the first time we’ve ever had a clean sweep: all 10 of the hopefuls for this year’s Best Picture award have felt the wrath of critics, audiences, people who haven’t seen the movie but don’t like the idea of it, or all three. Let the hate – justified or not – begin:
Maestro by a nose
Maestro was out of the blocks first. It got a lot of heat from people who felt Bradley Cooper playing the Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein – and, in particular, the large prosthetic nose which Cooper wore for the part – was inappropriate. Cooper himself was insistent it was necessary.
“I thought, ‘Maybe we don’t need to do it,‘” Cooper told CBS Mornings. “But it’s all about balance, and, you know, my lips are nothing like Lenny’s, and my chin. And so we had that, and it just didn’t look right [without the prosthetic].”
Bernstein’s children didn’t mind – “Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well,” they said at the time – but Maestro’s makeup designer Kazu Hiro apologised for any upset.
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein.
“I wasn’t expecting it to happen,” he said at the Venice Film Festival last year. “I feel sorry if I hurt some people’s feelings. My goal was, and Bradley’s goal was, to portray Lenny as authentically as possible.”
Cooper has also been criticised (perhaps unfairly) – for appearing too needy on the campaign trail, having an unconvincing “loser face” and for crying on television over the loss of Leonard Bernstein – a man he never met.
And a more minor, adjunct backlash came against Cooper’s policy of not having chairs on set. “There’s no chairs on sets; I’ve always hated chairs and I feel like your energy dips the minute you sit down in a chair,” the director and star said during a Variety roundtable. “So apple boxes are a nice way to sit.”
As the Oscars have got closer, another critique has come through: that Maestro is simply a bit boring, and that you notice the acting is good because there’s very little else about it to notice. “I could barely get through it,” tweeted noted cineaste Meghan McCain.
Certainly, the relentless focus on Bernstein’s sex life – and a decision to lop out 15 years of Bernstein’s career as if it were, as the New Yorker put it “yada yada” – and bisexuality felt to a lot of critics like it did a disservice to a man whose achievements were interesting enough on their own.
Japan doesn’t find Barbenheimer funny
Christopher Nolan has long been a no-chairs ultra, and his Oppenheimer caused a few backlashes of its own. India’s information commissioner Uday Mahurkar called Cillian Murphy’s brief recitation of the Bhagavad Gita in a sex scene with Florence Pugh a “scathing attack on Hinduism”, and in India and the Middle East, a nude Pugh was digitally covered up with a dress.
The film became a billion-dollar box office juggernaut in part through the “Barbenheimer” social media phenomenon: that it and Greta Gerwig’s extremely pink, extremely peppy Barbie were slated for release on the same day made for some fun memes. But in Japan, where an estimated 200,000 people were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Barbenheimer wasn’t that amusing. When the official Barbie movie X account posted a fan-made image of Barbie in front of a nuclear fireball with the caption, “It’s going to be a summer to remember,” it had to issue an apology.
Cillian Murphy portrays Oppenheimer.Credit: Universal Pictures
“We find the reaction to this fan-driven movement from the official US account for the movie Barbie to be extremely regrettable,” it ran. “We take this very seriously and are asking the US head office to take appropriate action. We apologise to those offended by these inconsiderate actions.” Oppenheimer will finally be released in Japan in March.
On a related note, the film was also attacked by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament for its “tastefully, artfully presented” depiction of the effects of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for generally sidelining the suffering of the Japanese people. Of course, none of this has stopped Oppenheimer from being a dead cert to sweep the board on Oscar night.
Barbie is too big for its own good
Barbie, incidentally, got some entirely predictable blowback from the manosphere for its ridicule of the patriarchy, with right-wing blowhard Ben Shapiro moved enough to rant about it through a 43-minute YouTube review before setting fire to Barbie dolls with a lighter. “I felt men could take it,” co-writer Noah Baumbach told 60 Minutes. “I mean, come on.”
Gerwig added: “This is not man-hating anymore than Aristophanes’ ‘Lysistrata’ was man-hating. That doesn’t sound like a sick burn when you say it out loud like that. That will teach them!”
Ryan Gosling, in a scene from Barbie with Margot Robbie.Credit: Warner Bros Pictures/AP
The bleating about Barbie being a misandrist screed did nothing to dent its box office returns, as it became the highest grossing film of 2023 with $1.4 billion ($2.12 billion) taken at cinemas. But that, now, is becoming a bit of an encumbrance in the Oscars races: in the last 20 years the Academy has tended not to chuck garlands at films which have made stacks of money. Barbie would be the biggest-grossing Best Picture winner since The Lord of the Rings took $1.2 billion back in 2003, and that also functioned as a kind of cumulative pat on the back for Peter Jackson et al. And, underneath that, there’s a feeling that despite its critiques of patriarchy the overall Barbie vibe is just too much like upbeat popcorn fare for the Academy to truly love.
Poor Things isn’t as feminist as it thinks it is
There have also been arguments about the feminist credentials of Poor Things, starring Emma Stone as the reanimated corpse of a young woman who travels the world. In the i, Isolde Walters called it “one of the most misogynistic movies I’ve watched in recent years,” and questioned how much Stone’s character Bella was a male fantasy. She lamented “a woman’s journey from childlike innocence to worldly maturity boiled down to, pretty much, just sex”. And there is a lot of sex in Poor Things, something which some viewers felt squeamish about given that Bella is given the brain of a newborn child. “If it helps,” Stone told the Times, “as the person who played it and produced it, I didn’t see her as a child in any of those scenes.”
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things.Credit: Searchlight Pictures
Anatomy of a Fall becomes a diplomatic incident
Anatomy of a Fall’s backlash was less against the film itself – an absorbing courtroom thriller in which a wife is suspected of pushing her husband out of a window – than against suspected politicking within the French film authorities. When the film won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, its director Justine Triet took the opportunity to attack the “neoliberal” French government over its handling of pensions protests, which she said were “denied and suppressed in a shocking manner” and over its “commodification of culture”. Come the Oscars nominations Anatomy of a Fall was passed over in favour of The Taste of Things as the French entry for Best International Film, and Triet shared an Instagram post in which another user declared The Taste of Things “boring/annoying”. Mon Dieu.
Sandra Hüller plays Sandra Voyter, who is accused of murdering her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) in Anatomy of a Fall.
The Zone of Interest shies away from hard truths
There have been rather heavier criticisms levelled at other contenders. While The Zone of Interest has been lauded for its portrayal of the horrors of Auschwitz and the everyday cruelties needed to keep it running, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody declared it “an extreme form of Holokitsch”.
Director Jonathan Glazer’s movie, which follows SS officer Rudolf Höss and his family outside the walls of the camp, he wrote, “shrinks from portraying the horrors of the real-life Höss’s character, too, and, as a result, he trivialises them”.
Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig Höss in The Zone of Interest.Credit: Madman Films
Killers of the Flower Moon is too white
The sense that it might be basically impossible for a film to truly reveal the scale and depth of the terrible events at its heart touched Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon too. It’s nominated for 10 Oscars, and its depiction of American Indian life was declared by Osage Nation Chief Standing Bear to have “restored trust”. But it still drew criticism from American Indian audiences for the way that Scorsese decided to frame the story, and the levels of violence shown in the murders. The actor and Mohawk nation member Devery Jacobs concluded that he didn’t think “these very real people were shown honour or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths”.
JaNae Collins, Lily Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillian Dion as members of the Osage.
Christopher Cote, the film’s Osage consultant, had mixed feelings about Killers of the Flower Moon: on the one hand, it was a good representation of Osage culture; on the other, as he told the Hollywood Reporter, the film wasn’t “made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody, not Osage”. Most of all, he objected to how kindly the film looked on Leo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart.
“They kind of give him this conscience and kind of depict that there’s love,” Cote told the Hollywood Reporter. “But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love. That’s not love, that’s just beyond abuse.”
Lily Gladstone, who’s up for Best Actress for her role as Mollie Burkhart, empathised. “Chris and I have had that exact conversation in his living room,” she said. “Marty is a titan, but he’s not bigger than history. He’s a major shaper of it though. It’s the tricky nature of a story like this.”
Some viewers looked askance at how central the relationship between DiCaprio’s Burkhart and Robert De Niro’s William Hale is to the bulk of a story purportedly about the cruelties inflicted on American Indians, and felt it pushed them out of their own story.
The Holdovers leans on caricatures
The Holdovers, too, had some heavyweight criticisms: its director Alexander Payne was accused of sexual misconduct by Rose MacGowan in 2020 (an accusation he denied), and it’s also drawn some fire from some viewers who felt Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s character Mary traded in a “mammy” archetype – that of a black woman who’s unfailingly cheery in her servitude – which made them uncomfortable.
Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti in The HoldoversCredit: Courtesy of FOCUS FEATURES
Past Lives is simply too nice
Even Past Lives, a deeply lovely and mild-mannered relationship drama about two old flames who keep in touch even as their lives pull them apart between South Korea and New York City, has come in for some backlash. It’s an accessible, moving portrait of a tender love persisting despite the odds – and its sheer straightforwardness has got some people feeling that it could be forcing other, more obtuse and difficult films out of the way. Despite the craft in its making and the beauty in its performances, its sheer inoffensiveness is offensive to some.
Greta Lee and Teo Yoo in Past Lives.Credit: A24
In that sense, it’s got its own honour, and one which is awarded to one Best Picture contender a year: that of the nice movie that gets beaten up on by cineastes for being too middlebrow.
At the time of writing only American Fiction has managed to avoid any kind of pushback. But there’s still time.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.