A Gender Justice Guide to This Year’s Oscar Nominees, Part 2

Photo credit: Instagram

Trying to decide which movies to escape into this winter? We’ve got you covered with not just one, but two guides to this year’s Oscar nominees (you can check out part one here). Whether you’re looking for a movie to transport you out of the onslaught of attacks on women and LGBTQI+ people, or films to help you understand it all, we’ve got recommendations for you.

Dune: Part Two

Review by: Kat

Nominated for: best picture, best cinematography, best production design, best sound, best visual effects

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about perspective in movies, and how often it’s gendered. Outside voiceovers, movies can’t directly tell you a character’s thoughts and feelings, but they can suggest perspective in subtler ways: which character’s face the camera goes to for reaction shots; which character is given space to articulate their emotions in dialogue; and which character’s inner conflict provides the emotional grounding for the story. In movies directed by men (read: most movies), we are often encouraged to experience the movie’s events through a male character’s eyes — even, and maybe even especially, when the movie is nominally about a woman. Recent cases include Licorice Pizza, The Worst Person in the World, and this year’s Anora — all are about an interesting, complex, exciting woman, but ultimately told through the perspective of a secondary male character. It doesn’t make these movies bad per se, but it does mean they reflect a societal bias: privileging a man’s experience of woman (how he sees her, feels about her, is changed by her) over the experiences of the woman herself.

Kudos then to Dune: Part Two for flipping the script — I would’ve never expected to hold up a visuals-heavy sci fi epic directed by a male auteur as an exemplar of female subjectivity, but here we are. The movie is nominally about Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a survivor of his doomed aristocratic family who leverages a lineage-based Chosen One narrative (read: I am the Messiah, you must follow me) to get support for his revenge plot. But the movie is told through the perspective of Chani (Zendaya), a member of the nomadic Freman people that Paul is trying to rally to his cause, who becomes Paul’s romantic partner and most incisive critic. As the movie goes on, it privileges Chani’s perspective more and more, focusing on her inner conflict as Paul exploits her people’s beliefs in order to support his militaristic ascension. Through Zendaya’s expressive face (which you should also check out in the sexy, sensational, snubbed Challengers), we are encouraged to experience her wariness, fear, and disenchantment as her partner becomes someone she doesn’t recognize. It is telling that the movie ends not on a shot of Paul’s triumph — but on Chani’s fury and devastation.

The Only Girl In The Orchestra

Review by: Michael

Nominated for: best documentary short film

Orin O’Brien lives her life as she wishes. The elevator in her apartment building has no air conditioning, so she brings a handheld fan. She plays Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, an internationally renowned work, but makes it her own by skipping some notes. She’s no longer content in her New York City apartment so, at the age of 87, she decides to move. “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” directed and produced by her niece and only living family member, Molly, focuses on her 55-year career as a double bassist in the New York Philharmonic: a career that started with her disregarding the status quo and becoming the only woman in the orchestra. The documentary explains how being such a pioneer was coupled with facing unwavering and pervasive gender discrimination. Despite hating the spotlight, she was required to do a photoshoot highlighting not her impressive experience, but rather her gender and physical appearance.

But the documentary does not focus much on her time in the orchestra. And of the time it does spend focusing on the philharmonic, even less is spent discussing the hostile gender discrimination she experienced. The documentary tells of her joy, resilience, and devotion to her art in spite of all this sexism. So, it’s no surprise that, despite one of her colleagues claiming that “a woman’s life in the orchestra is not as long as a man’s,” she still plays, teaches, and thrives as an “artist of [her] own mind.” The documentary is an inspiring and sobering story of how, in an industry that is still plagued by gender discrimination, with 83.2% of principal chairs being men, women in orchestral music are, and always have been, a force to be reckoned with.

A Complete Unknown

Review by: Hannah Oppermann

Nominated for: best picture, best director (James Mangold), best actor (Timothée Chalamet), best supporting actor (Edward Norton), best supporting actress (Monica Barbaro), best adapted screenplay, costume design, and sound

I went into A Complete Unknown with low expectations and no expertise, and I had a delightful time. The songs are poetic (I mean, they’re Bob Dylan’s), the performances are captivating, and the set design is immersive. But out of the 2.5 hours spent following Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, from his arrival at Woody Guthrie’s hospital room through 1960s Greenwich Village all the way to the Newport Folk Festival where he “went electric,” there is one moment in particular I cannot get out of my mind, and it has nothing to do with his music. It’s the scene when Bob Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning) finally says she’s tired of being one of the spinning plates Bob is keeping in the air like the street performer on the boardwalk. While on the surface this was her expression of frustration with what it was like to be in a relationship with the womanizing, self-absorbed musician, it can also double as a meta-critique of the way the female characters were treated throughout the film.

The two main female characters, Sylvie and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), are central to the film’s portrait of Bob Dylan as a “complete unknown.” Bob meets Joan when he first arrives on the scene, while she is already a famous folk singer in her own right, and we see her sing with him, take him on stage with her, and introduce him to folk crowds, watching as his fame eventually surpasses hers. Meanwhile, Sylvie’s role in the film is primarily to showcase how distant and aloof Bob Dylan is, his background a mystery he refuses to share despite her relentless interest in learning more about him. While we watch them literally and emotionally support him — giving him a place to stay, furthering his career, and even making his coffee — we learn next to nothing about either of the two women, what they care about, or who they are. All of the female characters are flat and underdeveloped, so by the time we get to Sylvie and Bob’s breakup, it feels like an apology for the complete lack of agency she’s had up to this point. Calling out movie-Bob Dylan for treating women like spinning plates in his show felt like an attempt to absolve filmmaker-James Mangold for treating them the same way in the script, and it didn’t work for me. So while I was proud of Sylvie for finally breaking free of Bob Dylan (and of Joan for kicking him out of her hotel room), her speech wasn’t the satisfying tell-off the filmmaker wanted it to be. For that, I had to come home and listen to Joan Baez’s 1975 masterpiece “Diamonds and Rust” on repeat.

Fun Movies Nominated for Nothing

Review by: Hannah

Nominated for: Nothing

Most years around this time I am scrambling to watch all the movies nominated for best picture before the Oscars. I’ll use my MoviePass (I’m an evangelist), hit up as many $7 Tuesday deals as possible, and see what I can stream to cobble together one fully-formed palate going into the awards show. This year, I wanted to do the same. I’d organically already seen some of the nominees (Wicked, The Substance) and started looking at showtimes and streaming options for ones I hadn’t, like The Brutalist and Nickel Boys. But every time I went to actually head to the theatre, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The best picture nominees I haven’t seen are all, well, kind of bummers. That doesn’t mean they’re not good, or not important, or not worth watching. They may be all those things! And I’m so glad my colleagues have talked about how good they are above.

But it does mean for me, in this moment where the world already feels pretty hard as someone who believes in reproductive rights, LGBTQI+ equality, and racial justice, I’m sticking to more light-hearted movies. If you’re in a similar headspace, here are some I recommend:

One of Them Days. One thing I know: if Keke Palmer’s on my screen, I will be laughing. This movie was no different. It was funny without being naive about the world. It’s about a day in Keke’s character’s life where literally everything goes wrong. And because she’s already living paycheck to paycheck this puts her on a collision course with eviction if she can’t find a way to pay her rent by the end of the day. A hilarious series of events with her roommate, played by SZA, ensues as they hustle to scour together enough money.