As we approach the 97th Academy Awards—as with all Oscars ceremonies—it's incumbent upon the dutiful film fan to at least make some good faith effort to try to see an appreciable fraction of the Best Picture nominees. (This is what has been described to me as "a prison of my own making," but if I didn't live in such a thing, whose would I live in?) It has been a harder task this late winter than maybe it's ever been for me, thanks to a somewhat moribund populist film industry and an Academy that has responded, contrary to their apparently abortive attempts to remain remotely culturally relevant, by veering as far out from the actually-popular culture as it has in years. It's a particular pity with 2022 and 2023 right there in the rearview mirror, perhaps the highwater marks for any modern—like, post-70s at least—efforts from the Academy at trying to care about what actual audiences care about. Hey, at least The Substance got nominated for BP. It ain't gonna win, and I don't know why I ever got it into my fool head that it would, except for that whole "moribund populist film industry" thing and, other than Dune: Part Two I guess, it's the only film with what feels like to me any legitimate cultural impact to have been nominated that also has any right to be there. (I am speaking incredibly out of turn about Wicked, I guess, and I will disclose that, though I feel pretty confident about it.) I'm increasingly worried it won't win anything for which it was nominated, which is going to be miserable for me, and then that misery's going to be compounded once the Internet gets mad about it and that anger takes its inevitable form.
In any event, this made for one glum Sunday, and at this point I cannot say with certainty I will continue this quest—with Wicked, for obvious reasons; with Nickel Boys, because I'm not sure I'm interested enough in the two and a half hour race-in-America movie inspired, formally, by video game let's plays, and I think it's not even about cool boxing matches like I thought it was, what the hell; with I'm Still Here because, uh, it's all the way over there; and with A Complete Unknown, because ha ha ha, oh my God, no I'd rather not. (These movies are also all between 138 and 160 minutes long.) But I do feel a little bound to do so. Not to be alarmist, but consider that the 97th Academy Award ceremony could be the last one to take place in a real country.
And yet, despite having been charged with that awesome responsibility, and confronted with that fearsome possibility, they gave us this anyway. Thhpt. Here's Conclave, The Brutalist, and Anora, which I somehow did in precisely reverse alphabetical order (because it's also in the order in which I liked them).
This is the shortest Best Picture nominee for 2025, in all but one case the shortest by a lot. It's still 120 minutes long.
But it is, accordingly, also one of the comparative few that seems rightly-sized, and this helps it, this thing that's pulpier than it thinks it is and would likely be better if it were much more. Despite its theatrical pedigree, director Edward Berger (of the year-before-last's most superfluous-seeming Best Picture nominee, the Netflix-distributed All Quiet On the Western Front) has delivered a film that looks "of streaming," but perhaps appropriately so, these crisp, sharp images from cinematographer Stefane Fontaine, of these semi-identically-dressed men standing or sitting in these sterilized surroundings, belied by the enormity of their institution's history and their readily-acknowledged potential for cruelty, deciding the fate of their religion. (And so Suzie Davis's production design and to an only slightly lesser degree Lisy Christi's costume design—because it's even more baked into the setting, though I did get a kick out of attending to its subtle variety—are both pretty reasonable Oscar nominees.) The story is very easy to summarize: the pope's dead and a conclave has been called to elect a new one. The College of Cardinals convenes in Rome under the administration of their dean, British cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), and thus begins the struggle between the liberal factions (fronted by Stanley Tucci), and the conservative factions (Sergio Castellito, dressed up like Guillermo del Toro for some reason), and the even more conservative factions, albeit representing the long-deferred possibility of an African pope (Lucian Msmati), and, finally, the factions of a mostly-ideology-free, just-wants-to-be-the-pope desire (John Lithgow). Meanwhle, there are terrorist acts afoot outside in Rome and conspiracies afoot within the Vatican, and there's some secretly-ordained cardinal no one's ever even heard of, from, get this, the archbishopric of Kabul (I feel like the practicing Catholics in an "archbishopric" should run into, at least, the double digits; Carlos Diehz), who keeps picking up what I assumed were protest votes. Lawrence, against his own nature, will have to intervene to unravel the webs of intrigue that have been woven, and put his thumb on the scale more than he'd have ever liked.
