How the Oscars Are Coming this Year's
When I play the imaginary 2022 Oscar montage in my mind, I visualize scores of young people. A cherubic Northern Irish boy running in the cobblestone streets; a New England fisherman’s conflicted daughter belting onstage; two determined Compton-born girls pummeling their competition on the tennis courts; a pair of stubborn star-crossed adolescents finding love and fighting death on the streets of New York City. If 2020’s best picture lineup — featuring Parasite, Joker, The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — collectively spoke to men’s fears about society leaving them behind, and 2021’s contenders — among them Mank, Minari and Nomadland — jointly questioned the mythology America tells about itself, then you might have expected 2022’s Oscar roster to similarly biopsy modern life in a further effort to determine what is slowly killing us. Yet, the Academy’s most prized films of the past year are not just another array of treatises on sociopolitical or emotional withering. No, quite conversely, after close to a decade of walloping global events that could leave any artist cynical about the future, most of the 2022 best picture nominees mutually allude to a somewhat verboten concept in this day and age: hope. In particular, a majority of these 10 anointed films center on coming-of-age stories that grapple with the triumphs and tragedies of growing up in a tumultuous family or society. Far from nihilistic, they underscore the ways we can either take joy from reflecting on our pasts or derive optimism about creating a better world than the one we’ve been handed.
Even outside pervasive anxiety about creeping autocracies and accelerated climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic in and of itself has deepened the existential crisis many people around the world feel about what’s next. The pandemic also has wreaked unique havoc on the film industry, and some fear movie theaters and profits may never truly recover. After all this Sturm und Drang, I don’t blame Oscar voters for elevating stories about innocence and the loss thereof. After all, even lost innocence can show us we can survive through immeasurable agony. The hopefulness reflected in these nomination choices appears to rebuke the grimmer prestige films of recent years.
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Some of this year’s best picture nominees specifically explore the nostalgia of their directors’ childhoods. The semiautobiographical black-and-white drama Belfast, set in the late 1960s, showcases the Irish Troubles from the perspective of a little boy, Buddy (Jude Hill), a stand-in for writer-director Kenneth Branagh. Buddy views the world through the lens of his beloved American Westerns — in his mind, his Protestant working-class father (Jamie Dornan) is a white hat hero who stands up to the black hat anti-Catholic villains of their neighborhood who try to strong-arm their family into becoming grassroots terrorists. Both Licorice Pizza and West Side Story also revel in cinephilic reminiscence, though less memoiristically than Belfast. Paul Thomas Anderson did not directly base the comedic teen romance Licorice Pizza on his own Hollywood-adjacent youth, per se — instead, it’s modeled on the anecdotes of former child star turned film producer Gary Goetzman — but Anderson’s life growing up in the San Fernando Valley during the hazy 1970s is still echoed throughout the film. Similarly, the flush of childhood memory stirs emotions in West Side Story, another ultimately hopeful tale of youthful folly. Director Steven Spielberg chose to re-adapt the classic Romeo and Juliet-inspired 1957 stage musical to fulfill a childhood dream. He first listened to the cast album when he was 10 years old growing up in Arizona and was so transported, he imagined the entire production in his head. He never forgot it.
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