Who Will Win — And Who Should Win — The 95th Academy Awards' Top Honours: Our Oscars 2023 Predictions |
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| THE 95TH ACADEMY AWARDS — aka the 2023 Oscars — are finally here. The ceremony will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday, March 12. [That’s 5.30 AM Indian Standard Time (IST) on March 13]. Jimmy Kimmel will host the show for the third time. His job won’t be easy, of course, because 2023 has the tough job of following the scarcely believable drama of “Slapgate”. A bit of spice won’t hurt the night, but there’s no denying that this is perhaps the most wide-open nomination field in years. Onto my favourite part of the season now — where I go through all the big categories and do some amateur crystal ball-gazing. Keep in mind that India has not one, not two, but three nominations this time. So if there’s ever a time to be hopeful and excited, this is it. — RAHUL DESAI |
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THE OSCAR REVIEW ROUND-UP |
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| Revisionist Charm Of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery |
EVOLUTION HAS NOT BEEN kind to the old-fashioned Hollywood murder mystery. Over the years, the genre has gone through too many iterations in its battle to stay relevant — and one step ahead of modern, cinema-literate audiences. It’s reached a stage where the simplest of stories are shaped by the most complicated revelations; multiple twists and red herrings seem to be reverse-engineered to outwit not just the viewers but the narrative itself. Logic is often sacrificed at the altar of interactive entertainment. Enter Rian Johnson. — R.D. |
| Close Is An Anguished Take On Male Friendship |
LUKAS DHONT'S CLOSE is the kind of film that seeps into your body, knocks at your heart and permeates it with grief. Then quietly, without concern or consideration, ruptures it. Yet, the cruelty of the act is offset by the compliance it evokes. The feeling is that of intent: As if you summoned the film, submitted yourself to it and when the time arrived, opened your heart as an invitation to render it asunder. Close is the kind of film that damages without bruising, haunts without terrifying. It holds you close only to bring you closer to your own self. — ISHITA SENGUPTA |
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RRR: How The West Fell In Love With SS Rajamouli's Epic |
WHEN SS RAJAMOULI's RRR released in India — hampered by many-a-delay — its box office blockbuster status wasn’t ever in doubt. What it accomplished internationally, however, could not have been foreseen by even the most ardent of Rajamouli fans, those worshippers at the altar of his loud, over-the-top cinematic grammar. As a phenomenon in the West, RRR has been propelled by sheer adulation and love, rather than by box office numbers. — MANIK SHARMA |
| The Luminous Heartache Of Charlotte Wells' Aftersun |
I FIRST WATCHED Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun at the 2022 International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). It was my fourth film of the day. The adrenalin was strong. The queues were long. The hype was palpable. Aftersun was already topping year-end lists everywhere. Personally, it was my most anticipated title of the festival. I entered the cinema hall hoping – nay, expecting – to be moved to tears by a father-daughter story. I needed a good, indie-fuelled cry. — R.D. |
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The Fabelmans Reveals The Man Behind The Fables |
WHEN THE MOST FAMOUS DIRECTOR on the planet turns the camera on himself, it’s not just an autobiographical film — it’s an autobiography of Film, too. It’s not just a personal story, it’s an ode to the personality of storytelling. It’s like watching the moment that cultivated our collective sense of time; it’s like seeing the past that shaped our language of flashback. The Fabelmans is a fictional account of Steven Spielberg’s own adolescent years as a boy, brother, son, aspiring film-maker. — R.D. |
| Avatar: The Way Of Water &The Blues Of Snapchat Storytelling |
AS ABSURD as it sounds, Avatar: The Way of Water — the hyper-expensive sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time — is the ultimate underdog. This is no longer the 2009 landscape, where James Cameron’s cutting-edge and corny ecological epic made box-office history in a blockbuster-craving world just about waking up to the sorcery of movie technology. Things have changed. It is now the still-standing hero, the last bastion of true-blue imagination and child-like wonder. By merely staying, Cameron's winning. — R.D. |
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Blue-Blooded Grief Of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever |
WHEN THE untimely demise of a lead actor forces a film — much less a superhero franchise — to pivot in its vision, tragedy is usually written in as an intangible footnote of history. As a mark of posthumous respect, the reel does not dwell on the real; the event has happened, the character is gone, and the universe has already been pushed into the future. But that’s not how director Ryan Coogler sees the loss of Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, opens with the actual moment King T’Challa dies. — R.D. |
| The Whale & The Dark Gospels Of Darren Aronofsky |
THE TITLE of Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Whale is a triple entendre. First, it is a sly nod towards its housebound 600-pound protagonist Charlie (Brendan Fraser) whose depression and self-loathing have pushed him to eat himself into an early grave. Second, it is a reference to a student essay on Moby Dick whose passages Charlie reads aloud to calm himself. Third, it alludes to Jonah’s fate in the Old Testament: grief is swallowing Charlie whole and the apartment he confines himself to starts to feel like the belly of a beast. — PRAHLAD SRIHARI |
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All Quiet...Western Front: Goes Where Few War Movies Have |
EDWARD BERGER'S German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel goes where very few World War movies have gone before. It’s a strange thing to say, I’m aware, given the prolific and proficient harmony between cinema and war. In an era where film-makers are successfully bending genre and form – the unbroken chaos of 1917, the narrative timelessness of Dunkirk, the visceral doggedness of Fury – can there possibly be another way to express the futility of war? The difference, perhaps, is that Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front isn’t looking for a new language. In doing so, it finds a more truthful one. — R.D. |
| What Triangle Of Sadness Adds To 'Eat The Rich' Genre |
IN A SCENE from Ruben Ostlund’s Palme D’or winning Triangle of Sadness, a middle-aged woman aboard a luxury cruise ship speaks to one of the female pool attendants. A conversation that begins with cursory introductions gradually devolves into the invocation of privilege as benevolent power. The woman urges, and then subsequently commands the attendant to join her in the pool. It’s probably the tensest sequence in a film that punches up, by quite literally punching at its rich characters at times. Ostlund’s point-blank cinema, is also the latest in a canon of entertainment that frames the rich as imbecilic, entitled, privilege-blind specimens. — M.S. |
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