Over the past month, I watched all ten Best Picture nominees for the 97th Academy Awards, and I will review and rank them in this paper. My first three reviews are already out, so please enjoy reading them over the next few weeks.
№ Nine: Emilia Pérez (2024):
Read the full review on the Hamline Oracle website.
Best Picture Nominees Ranked: № Ten: Nickel Boys (2024)
“You think anyone cares what’s going on in Nickel? This is just one place. There are Nickels all over this country.”
When Colson Whitehead published his 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys,” it was met with great critical acclaim and received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book was inspired by the closing of the historic Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a juvenile reform school in Florida, and the reveal of multiple civil rights violations and unmarked graves on the campus. Although this is a fictional story, real people and real suffering happened at schools like these all over the country, so it is important that people become aware of this.
The plot follows two boys named Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse) and Turner (played by Brandon Wilson) who are sent to the segregated Nickel Reform Academy in Florida. They meet and become good friends and endure discrimination and hardships from the white students and teachers. Eventually, Elwood realizes that nothing will change without direct action, so he secretly takes notes of their illegal actions to bring them down through the legal system.
One of the most notable things about the picture is that the entirety of the movie is shot from a first-person perspective, where the camera is positioned at the eyes of a character. While this setup does allow for several inventive framings, I felt that the characters were too static for the gimmick to be fully effective. Still, I hope that more films take more creative risks like this in how their stories are visually told in the future.
One large criticism I had with the film is that the occasional flash-forwards were unclear on what timeframe they occurred in. The television sets looked like they were from the 70s, but the computers and news articles were dated from 2018, which would put these events almost 50 years after the main story. While Daveed Diggs gives a good performance as the older version of Elwood, he is too good-looking for me to believe that his character would be 70.
This film only got two Oscar nominations: one for Best Picture and one for Best Adapted Screenplay. It is extremely unlikely to win either, but they always say that it is an honor just to be nominated.
Although this may have been my least favorite of this year‘s Best Picture nominees, that does not mean this was a bad film. I still enjoyed my time watching “Nickel Boys,” and my final rating for the film is a 7/10.
