The Surprise Pick for Best Picture

For decades I served as movie critic for The Milwaukee Journal, rubbing shoulders with national film critics and understanding that the movie industry was interested in us only if a review could help their box office. We were free to speculate about insider behavior, such as the Oscars, where it was mutually beneficial. But what critics actually thought about movies didn’t matter unless we put “fannies in the seats” as one industry spokesman subtly told me, and had little influence compared to the members of the Motion Picture Academy who actually did the work.

This may have changed in 2021 when the choice of 10 films for best picture Oscar was clearly schizophrenic and desperate. In 2009, when Oscar decided to double to 10 the number of best picture nominees, that seemed to make sense. In 2021, however, several films were delayed a year by COVID, some were caught up in controversies such as the continuing #MeToo that snared Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin, both successful producers who ran intensive Oscar promotional campaigns for their films. No more, thank heaven, but Oscar still isn’t sure how to police itself from all the vagaries of social comment and split viewership between home screens and movie theaters, which may have lent more weight to the critics’ blather than in earlier years.

The impact of social comment was clear when two films by veteran director Ridley Scott, who has enjoyed Oscar nominations since the 1970s, failed dismally in Oscar voting – The Last Duel (nada) and House of Gucci (one nomination for makeup) despite favorable reviews and an A cast list including Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Mark Damon, Ben Affleck and Al Pacino. There’s a feeling that Scott did this to himself in an interview when he blamed millennials and their “f*ing cell phone” fetish for skipping out on traditional films.

So, this year out of 10 films there are just three with serious traditional Oscar sensibilities. Belfast, which not only emotionally remembers a family fleeing military conflict, but dovetails with similar emotions stirred by Ukraine – just as Putin tried to make this a conflict between Russians and Ukrainians while Belfast explores the effort in the 1960s to split Protestants and Catholics.

Then there is West Side Story, a remarkably fresh retooling of a 60-year-old musical favorite by the world’s most honored director, Steven Spielberg, leading a host of his acclaimed academy cohorts. And, to fill the slot of the offbeat creative director at full power, there is Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which has offended Old Western diehards and requires moviegoers to stick through a subtle opening psychological first half for a kicker of a payoff. Not a typical Oscar entry by any measure.

And then come two films that reflect appreciation of individual actors and family values (Coda and King Richard) and others that represent not the best work but at least solid work by admired directors (Dune, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza and Don’t Look Up).

That leaves the mystery entry with four Oscar nominations including best director and best movie, the nearly-three-hour Drive My Car, with limited availability in movie theaters and online at HBO Max (just choose the right language). Its young Japanese director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, does not have a strong American or Hollywood following. There was no major promotional campaign to include it. But it won best picture from the New York, Los Angeles and National Society of film critics – and this year that seems to have been enough.

Now I like the film, but think my fellow critics lost their sense of proportion and don’t recognize flaws in construction that the Oscar professionals will. It’s not the year’s best. It is the year’s most difficult to explain intelligently since it marries Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya, a world weary theater director, his late and deeply loved though unfaithful wife, the hypnosis of the family car and conversations (an obsession which the Japanese apparently share with Americans) and how coincidences of auditions and conversations, plus the constantly playing lines from Uncle Vanya playing on the car stereo in the dead wife’s voice — all connect a wandering storyline.

American film makers often smirk about sex scenes, but the Japanese have a way of combining erotica with character development, and the film shines in this regard. Oto, played by Reika Kirishima, is mostly seen during lovemaking while spinning her poetic ghostlike tales, pretending to be a lamprey sucking the bottom. She also dies early in the film yet remains its most important character. 

Her fanciful tales during lovemaking do more than hypnotize her husband, a modernistic theater director played by Hidetoshi Nishijima, who is off to direct a mixed-language production of Uncle Vanya (Korean, Japanese, English and even Korean sign language for the deaf).

One of the auditioners is the TV actor he knows slept with his wife and whose memories of her, plus his blatant appeal to women, figure in the conclusion. The director is forced by the Hiroshima theater company to turn over the driving of his car to a young woman of a different class and background. Their encounters also figure in the story.

Something unusual that I liked: The film waits till some 41 minutes in to flash the opening credits in Japanese and English during one of the many driving moments that are key to its pace and appeal. Curiously, the psychological shards of all this – Uncle Vanya, erotic memories, deaf mute power, and the hours traveling in the red car – do mount up to an involving drama, though the film is a half hour too long and its levers of coincidence become mannered. But it proceeds with an assurance of purpose that does set it apart from other nominated films, and while I doubt that the professional members of the academy will be as taken in by its plot intricacies as the film critics were, it’s a demonstrable case of outside social factors forcing their way onto the Oscar slate. The critics’ views and festival wins (often judged by critics) have a lot to do with Drive My Car getting nominations.

For other stories on Oscar nominees, you’ll find these published by Urban Milwaukee: West Side Story, Tragedy of Macbeth, Being the Ricardos, Spencer, The Power of the Dog, King Richard, Nightmare Alley, The Lost Daughter, plus a speculation on the richness of the supporting actress category and a consideration of the shorter Oscar format with fewer awards in prime time.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.