Oppenheimer? Barbie? Past Lives? An expert’s pick for the Oscars 2024 best picture winner

By Ari Mattes, University of Notre Dame Australia

There are many factors that determine the Oscar winners and nominees each year. Seldom does the actual “best picture” win the award, and often the year’s best films fail to be recognised at all. Perhaps they’re not topical enough, not American enough, or not moral enough.

It’s hard to argue, for example, that Robert Zemeckis’ pleasant but forgettable yarn Forrest Gump was the best film of 1994, when Quentin Tarantino’s landscape-changing masterpiece, Pulp Fiction, came out the same year.

Nonetheless, the Oscars have until recently always celebrated Movies with a capital M: motion pictures made to be seen, first and foremost, in cinemas. These productions have almost always demonstrated incredible technical accomplishment, even if their narratives have been irritating or unnotable. Forrest Gump may be sentimental schmaltz of the most ludicrous kind, but at least it’s cinematic.

This year’s picks include some good, if not great, films. But they also reflect what most cinephiles already know: streaming is the last nail in the coffin in the shift away from cinema to television. The only nominees that feel like pieces of cinema (that is, movies committed to the cinematic form) are Oppenheimer and The Holdovers.

Equally rare for the Oscars, only a couple of nominees stick out as truly awful.

The good

Killers of the Flower Moon

Though director Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is overlong, its true story is riveting, a family crime odyssey in the tradition of James Foley’s exceptional neo-noir At Close Range.

The narrative follows the murderous attempts of a clan led by William King Hale (Robert De Niro) to rip off a family of Osage Indians who became extremely wealthy after oil was discovered on their reservation. The murders are so cruel and unjust that, in effective crime film fashion, we root for the federal police when they appear in the final third to bring the villains to order.

Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/oppenheimer-barbie-past-lives-an-experts-pick-for-the-oscars-2024-best-picture-winner-225264