The New Yorker:

It’s a pleasant surprise to find some of the year’s best movies enthusiastically acknowledged by the Academy, but plenty of greatness has been left by the wayside.

By Richard Brody

The glass in this year’s Oscar nominations is more than half full. There’s always much to complain about (just wait), but the Academy did itself proud by recognizing the year’s best film, “Sinners,” in a record sixteen categories and giving multiple nominations to several other superb films, including “Marty Supreme” and “One Battle After Another.” Hollywood did unusually well this year with these big-budget, large-scale movies of unusually forthright and complex substance, and it’s a pleasant surprise to see the Academy respond enthusiastically to them. Or, to put it differently, they’re spectacular films, which helped to get their unusual elements through the gates. The same holds for the Brazilian film “The Secret Agent,” which takes daring dramatic leaps through time and plays subtly intricate yet deadly earnest games with its protagonist’s identity; it’s also a teeming, large-scale thriller, and the Academy paid attention to its multidimensional inventiveness.

In other words, it’s a year in which, unexpectedly, what’s great is also popular, and that’s a combination that Oscar-land finds hard to resist. Most of the year’s best films confront power in its many forms, especially political power, and the nominations reflect the Academy’s acknowledgment that this is the topic of the moment. This acknowledgment, however, is as much a matter of aesthetics as of politics: messaging alone counts for little, because method, form, and style are inextricable from ideas and ideologies, from the way in which principles are realized.

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