As usual for a few years now, Netflix is a big player on Oscar night. The streaming company produces a lot of original content, and many of its productions manage to sneak in among the nominations for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards in Hollywood. And in this year’s edition, which takes place this Sunday 12, there are five very important titles that are fighting for a statuette and are available to watch on the platform.
No news on the front
Perhaps Argentina’s great rival, 1985 in the category of best international film, is a heartbreaking anti-war story, anchored in the First World War. Directed by Edward Berger, All Quiet at the Front starts from a generic premise: four friends go to war in search of glory and adventure and, of course, encounter hell. In the friendships lost in battle and in the transformation of their fresh faces into rough masks, lies the emotional resonance of the film, especially through protagonist Paul (Felix Kammener) and his protector/father figure Kat (Albrecht Schuch), who are the soldiers who manage to exhibit more than one defining trait throughout the plot.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
After the success of the film Between Knives and Secrets, Netflix was able to exclusively release its long-awaited sequel, Glass Onion: a Knives Out mystery. This time, the detective played by Daniel Craig is immersed in a very special weekend organized by an eccentric millionaire named Miles Bron (Edward Norton). Every year, Miles invites his group of friends to his private island, and there they all participate in mystery games created for the occasion. The homeowner’s idea is to fake his death so that his guests will have to speculate who the murderer might have been. But the dark past of the group, added to the dependence and the pending accounts among them, will give the host’s idea a tragic reality check.
Blonde
After a long wait, the Marilyn Monroe biopic, starring Ana de Armas, finally hit the screen in September 2022. Based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, director Andrew Dominik constructs a biography that is characterized by deliberately blurring the boundaries between fiction (or dream), and a rather blurred reality.
Norma Jeane, Marilyn’s birth name, wants to escape from that prison of apparent reverie that is Hollywood stardom as her existence moves towards the momentum of another inexorable confinement. The men she encounters in her life will never understand her need to escape and they will sink her even deeper, especially as they never understand the idea of family to which the iconic actress clings so tightly in her private life.
Bardo: false chronicle of a few truths
With four Oscars to his credit, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu will seek a new consecration this Sunday, through this ambitious attempt to summarize the spirit of his country, from the conquest to the present day. Here the driver of the story is the journalist-turned-documentary star Silverio Gacho (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who is about to receive an important award from an international journalism association. This generates a commotion in Mexico and his relatives that will lead the protagonist to revisit people he left far away and long ago, when he decided to emigrate with his wife Lucía (Griselda Siciliani) and their young children to the United States. Throughout this journey, the character will also carry in his suitcase the ever-present mourning for a baby of the couple who died a few hours after birth.
Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro’s name is widely recognized thanks to a series of very personal films featuring all sorts of creatures as marginalized as they are fascinating. And his take on Pinocchio is no exception. Tender and macabre, joyful and sad, sensitive and defiant, the Mexican director achieves here a vigorous fairy tale seasoned with humor and some effective songs, composed by the great Alexandre Desplat. Last but not least, the original voices of Gregory Mann, David Bradley and Ewan McGregor add great dramatic density to this animated gem that should not be missed.