My very personal ranking of this year’s Oscars Best Picture nominees.

Hola,

One thing you should know about me is that I can be a NIGHTMARE companion when it comes to watching movies. Imagine hearing everything you’ve read here for the past year, but condensed into one hour of opinions right after I leave a movie theater. I take not only movies but the movie-watching experience so seriously that I once stopped dating the best sex of my life right after we saw The Tree of Life together, and the only thing he had to say about Terrence Malick’s three-hour masterpiece was simply: “It was nice.”

The second thing you should know about me is that I started university with the sole purpose of making movies, so I enrolled in film school in 2006. Two years later, one of my teachers said to me, “I think you should be a photographer.” I didn’t really ask why, but the next semester, I took a “Photography 1” class that I hated, but I got the best grade in the class. The same teacher came back to me after he saw my grades and told me I was ready to take a class called “Portraiture” from the photography minor that my school offered. Since I tend to listen to and do what older men tell me, I did exactly what he said and seventeen years later, photography has remained the only creative outlet I’ve used to provide a life for myself.

But back to movies!

Yes, photography has given me a career, a name, and it keeps providing me with everything I need to enjoy New York and pretend that it’s totally normal to pay $35 for pasta with cheese. However, movie-watching is a big source of ammunition to keep my incessantly stimulation-hungry brain busy. I try to watch a new movie every week, I listen to hours of podcasts and interviews about movies, their creators, and most importantly, I give my strong and passionate opinion about everything I see at every dinner party or coffee date I have here. This week, as I was planning on writing another sentimental story about personal achievements, I realized that since the Oscars are happening just a few hours after you get my newsletter on Sunday, why not use it as an opportunity to show you a side of me that you might not know? A side of me that might make you realize that I’m either crazy, narcissistic, or actually more emotional than the cynical thinker New York wants me to be.

But what is this ranking going to be based on?

Every media outlet has made one of these. So I’m sure that even if you have not seen all or any of the ten movies The Academy decided to nominate for Best Picture of 2024, you have at least heard something about most of them. What will be different about my reviews? I am basing every single description and like or dislike of each movie on my personal trauma and how my personal history made me see each story from a very vulnerable, funny, honest, chaotic, and full-of-spoilers point of view.

Here we go:

10.Emilia Perez.

Let’s be honest, the reason Emilia Perez is this year’s most nominated (13) film (or has even been considered as a serious movie at all) is because it was made by one of France’s most respected and celebrated directors of the past 20 years. The “Mexican”musical story about a transgender woman who starts her transition after building a life as a drug lord is a story that hits too close to home for me and for the trauma of a whole Latin American continent. There is absolutely no perception of reality in the story that this movie is trying to tell. I put Mexico in quotes because the movie wasn’t even made in Mexico, and none of its main characters are Mexican either. I know this might not be a big problem for most people because good actors can do anything, but do you know how many Mexican actors are waiting for this kind of opportunity in LA or France right now? I get it, this is an industry that needs to make money, but the problem for me is when rich people make money off of being ignorant and when they underestimate the intelligence of the audience they are inspired by to make that money. This is Hollywood’s and Europe’s uneducated version of what Latin America is (and that Latin Americans are tired of) and it cannot keep being produced. Drug trafficking trauma is not funny, is not heroic and it has so many layers that this movie did not explore. I do have to say that thanks to this movie I reconnected with a college friend who’s story of how she got a part on this movie will be in one of my upcoming posts of Things You Missed.

9.I’m Still Here.

Speaking of political violence and drug trafficking trauma, this year’s Brazilian-based, true-story drama about a woman who fights to keep her family together after a military dictatorship kidnaps and kills her husband is a perfectly fine movie. However, I found it impossible to connect with. Kidnapping and political violence are Colombia’s past and present. Many of the people I know and my family members have been affected by political groups who have killed, kidnapped, and illegally enlisted both rich and poor people for the past 50 years. The story in this movie focuses on the struggle of a wealthy family in Rio, and, boy, I’ve just found another subject to talk about with my therapist. None of what happened to the movie’s main character made me feel sad for her. I honestly think this is happening because the violence I’ve seen in Colombia was so extreme that seeing a movie about a political war against the people with no blood, or no exaggerated-crying-out-loud-explosive drama performances, made me feel like this might not be a story that deserved an entire movie. I’ll keep you posted on what my therapist says.

8.Nickel Boys

I wanted to love this movie so MUCH!!! But I am very shocked and embarrassed, as a very superficial person, to say that in this case, craftsmanship, breathtaking cinematography, and, in general, the overwhelming beauty of every single frame of this movie took me completely away from the plot. I am a defender of all things pretty; I wake up every single day with the goal of finding something beautiful around me to make myself feel better and believe that I am doing the right thing with my life. But I guess seeing that in this movie didn’t help me connect with the heartbreaking story of a Black boy who is unjustly sent to a youth prison in the 1960s American South. Every scene was so perfectly crafted that I didn’t listen to the dialogues. I found myself distracted and distant, and I hated feeling that way for something that I am 1000% predetermined to love. I’ve been thinking about the rejection I had for the beauty of this movie so much that I wonder if this is why my friend told me the other day that she gets anxious when we meet for coffee because she thinks she needs to dress nicer than ever just to have coffee with me.

7.Wicked

Musicals are not my culture.

6.The Brutalist.

Context:

“Escaping postwar Europe, a visionary architect comes to America to rebuild his life, his career, and his marriage. On his own in a strange new country, he settles in Pennsylvania, where a wealthy and prominent industrialist recognizes his talent ".

When I read that short synopsis and saw the trailer for The Brutalist, starring the face of drama, Adrien Brody (The Pianist), I thought to myself, This is finally the movie that will make me cry again, which is something that hasn’t happened since Bambi.

I walked into the theater thinking, This is it, this is the type of movie that made me believe in the US as the place for dreaming. A lot of us immigrants want this to be our story; we want the American dream, blah blah blah. And even though we have seen this type of movie before, this seemed like the first time I would see a story about a man escaping violence, moving here, and building a life as an artist—not just as a family man. That’s precisely what made the first two hours of this movie an absolute masterpiece filled with, yes, crying, a bombastic soundtrack, tension, but above all: ARTISTRY. However, after that fifteen-minute intermission, everything goes south, and the movie almost felt like it didn’t know what to do with its main conflict. It becomes a parade of let’s please or give something to all the types of people that are watching the story unfold. Unnecessary rape, unnecessary and sometimes even funny abuse of drugs, and a last hour that felt more focused on shocking the audience than making us feel even closer to the end of such a complex and wonderful character. Nonetheless, this movie is an incredible achievement, and that first half is truly one of the best things I’ve ever seen.

5.Dune Part 2.

Denis Villeneuve is one of the few directors who has the ability to make me feel small in every single one of his movies, and that is a challenge I enjoy and am willing to accept under his beautiful creations. This is a monumental movie that showed me that budget is important, and that movies can also provide escapism, fantasy, and aspiration. This is a movie that made me feel that any idea is possible, and that I better start meeting more rich people so I can get the money to make those dreams come true. lol

4.The Substance.

Do you know how many times a female director gets the opportunity to be this free and disruptive in an industry driven by money-making formulas? The answer is probably: Only once, and Coralie Fargeat really took that opportunity to be BOLD and to make a movie about what women in entertainment have to experience to stay relevant and young. I don’t particularly enjoy body horror, but seeing people leave the theater, laughing uncontrollably, vomiting, and screaming at the screen made me think about how much images can do to people and how much more space there is for me to step out of my pleasing self and stop being afraid of saying what I want to say. This is a movie about freedom, and we should all take notes from it.

3.Conclave.

A Catholic telenovela, in beautiful places, with gossip, treason, and old people fighting for power? This is the history of Latin American television, and I ate it all up! Edward Berger's two-and-a-half-hour, star-cast drama about the election process of a new pope has all of the elements that I love about a well-constructed plot: DRAMA, DRAMA, DRAMA, and quite honestly, GAY DRAMA. The only reason this movie didn’t make it to the top spot is because of that disastrous plot twist at the end, which made me remember that Hollywood and telenovelas are not really that serious.

2.Anora.

Speaking of telenovelas, Anora was the best one this year! A gorgeous, intimate young-love story about a sex worker in Coney Island who marries the teenage son of a Russian millionaire after meeting him for the first time, is as entertaining as it sounds. Incredible cast, funny, violent, loud, and extremely familiar — hence why it is hard for people in Latin America to connect or commit fully to a movie like Anora. I asked all of my friends back home, and their reaction was not much different from that of the guy I dumped years ago: “Yeah, it was nice.” However, in this case, that answer led me to think that cinema and the TV industry in Colombia have shown us this story many times. The poor girl who falls in love with a rich kid controlled by the power of his family is honestly the history of Latin television. So, in that way, Anoradidn’t feel surprising to me, but it truly deserves all the recognition and praise it’s receiving. It’s good for the US to celebrate movies where honesty and simplicity win over movies with super-powered models flying around a city and rescuing cats.

1.A Complete Unknown.

This movie was it! This is why I moved to the US. I came here to see and experience everything we don’t do culturally in other countries, or at least in mine. A biopic about folk/rock’s enigmatic musician Bob Dylan, performed by the biggest Hollywood star in the world right now, accompanied by other big famous actors, with wonderful clothes, lighting, and good MUSIC? Absolutely yes! Not only did this movie teach me so much about American culture through the story of one person, but it also showed me that the best thing this country has is the power to fund talent. And by that, I don’t just mean Bob Dylan’s career — I also refer to the people behind this movie and how these kinds of projects can only happen with this frequency in this country, and I LOVE THAT. Also, seeing the pop and intellectual crowds getting together around a movie like this is something that Hollywood has always known how to do better than many other movie industries around the world.

What made this movie powerful to me was not really the plot or the character development, which are usually the things I look for in a movie. What this project did was show me that it’s okay to be silly, to dream, and to let myself be enchanted by a simple and beautiful song that doesn’t have to challenge me. This movie showed me that earnestness is as valuable as delusion, and that it’s okay to connect to our everyday lives through emotions and not just with the goal of being right.

If I’ve managed to be likable to you after showing you my most audacious and entitled self, then please share or leave a comment if you agree or have any thoughts on this totally biased ranking of preferences. I promise I will listen and debate every single one of them.

Chao,
Andrés