What do the Oscar Best Picture Nominees Say about Us?

The biggest night in the cinematic calendar is nearly here: the Academy Awards, where the alleged best of film is celebrated. Cinema has always been an excellent medium for capturing and evaluating human experience. Movies are only ever limited by the imagination of their makers, covering grand tales of wish fulfilment and small, private windows into the soul. This breadth of storytelling means cinema functions beyond pure entertainment. It can be a powerful psychological tool. Portraying stories of the marginalised can educate, and recognising the self on screen helps us feel validated. 

However, the whole of cinema can’t be represented by the Oscars. It can’t be, with only ten films nominated for the coveted Best Picture award, the pool is too shallow. And the films that are nominated have always been a mixed bag. Big budget celebrity-driven tales of heroes vs villains are often chosen, bolstered by a few independent films, where it’s the human story and not special effects that packs an emotional punch.

This year the Academy has nominated films in the Best Picture category covering a broad spectrum of issues and perspectives, rendered in utterly different forms. These films are so accomplished and speak clearly to human experience. Trying to find an overarching theme isn’t easy. Perhaps the reason why ten films have been nominated this year (rather than fewer nominees) is to highlight how we’re not all the same, and that’s okay. But with a little delving into these stories, common concepts are revealed.

Double Meaning

As a palate cleanser, irrespective of the different plots, there’s an interesting commonality in the names of the movies nominated. These movies employ a kind of deception in their titles.

Barbie, Maestro and Oppenheimer all point to one person as the subject matter, yet performances from all three films (Ken, Felicia and Strauss) are also being celebrated by The Academy. This speaks to the idea that humans are never an island, their actions impact others. The remainder of the titles use both a literal and secondary meaning, each of these films has a meta narrative. With movies, just like with people, there is always more to them than meets the eye.

There’s No One Collective History 

There’s usually at least one nominee for Best Picture which explores a pivotal moment in history. In fact, two of this year’s nominees deal to some extent with the very same subject (WW2 and fascism). However, they cover this in such different ways, it illustrates clearly how two groups of people can interpret the same events differently (a facet of the psychology of eyewitness testimony).

Oppenheimer deals with human fallibility, confronting an historic turning point in the battle of the allied forces against Hitler. The film explores the father of the atomic bomb’s thought process which led to the creation of our most dangerous weapon. Oppenheimer thought he was protecting, and not harming humans. Whereas, The Zone of Interest looks at the human ability to look the other way, as a protection of the self against danger. The banality of evil – where people can lead untroubled lives adjacent to the origin of unspeakable events (here, at Auschwitz) – is frightening, even though the film is based on a fictional novel, it represents a harsh historic truth about humanity. And with war still ongoing in 2024, the film’s message remains resonant.

We should learn from history and not ignore the tragedy on our doorstep.

Similarly, Killers of the Flower Moon deals with the spread of insidious evil, and in this film, most of the events depicted really happened 100 years ago. The story details how white men destroyed the lives and livelihoods of Native American Osage tribes in a seemingly guiltless way, enabled by how we can bury unsightly history.

Nominating these films forces us to confront and try to understand our difficult past.

However, these are big problems with no simple solutions. In Anatomy of a Fall, the problems of eyewitness testimony are explored on a more personal level. This film also looks at how bias and experience impact on our judgement of events we did not participate in. When a woman is accused of murdering her husband, she insists that his death was accidental. With the woman the only one present at the scene, we see the machinations of a flawed legal and social landscape. It’s impossible to have one agreed correct interpretation of history. But it should still be studied, not brushed under the carpet.

Identity Breakthrough and Living the Authentic Life

One key idea explored in all of the nominated films is that of personality. In all of these films we must reckon with the complexities of being human in the present day. They ask who we are and how we see ourselves. Humans thrive on categorisation based on demographics and beliefs, see Social identity Theory, popularised by Tajfel and Turner in the 1970s, and these films ask how we can be an individual while living in a group society. 

In American Fiction, a black writer sees how work which leans into racial stereotypes is more successful with white readers than his own. The author decides to write in this category, against his better judgement. At the same time, his relations evaluate their own roles within the family dynamic.

Poor Things plays more literally with the notion of self. Can a person be reduced to their body, mind or beliefs? And to what extent are these facets interdependent? In the basest terms, the awakening of a young female mind is seen as a pure test of nature versus nurture. Characters are forced to confront societal stereotypes and ask whether how you presents yourself is the same as your inner self.

As mentioned above, Oppenheimer looks at one man’s changing moral compass over his lifetime, whereas Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest suggest that it’s also simply human nature for people to be greedy and bad if they can get away with it. However, being a human is not all bad. These films imply that true authenticity is shaped by our interaction with others.

We need each other.

In Past Lives, two people are drawn to each other over many years, but circumstances mean that they are unable to interact in the way their hearts sometimes yearn for. The constancy of their feelings never abates and they find a way to retain their bond. Whereas, Maestro, a biopic of composer Leonard Bernstein seeks to illustrate the complex notion of cognitive dissonance. As a gay man, Bernstein also loved and married a woman. Bernstein struggles to deal with the competing facets of his self means he can ever live authentically. Both of these films involve their leads making difficult personal decisions about their private lives.

In a completely different realm, Barbie is also a film about true authenticity. A doll lives in a golden prison, a world where everyone follows strict rules about their place and their beliefs. Barbie breaks out of these strict social structures in order to become a happier, more fully realised person, knowing that being a person means accepting flaws, making mistakes and sometimes being unhappy. 

The Holdovers is a fictional story similarly full of recognisable archetypes. Three people stuck against their wishes at an American college over the festive season, yearn for their lives to be different. Their trauma leads to negative behaviours and upsetting feelings. When they learn to listen and understand one another they turn these difficult circumstances into a positive experience.

And finally, Anatomy of a Fall has a complex heroine at the centre of its story. It shows how people simply cannot be categorised in one simple box, and that they don’t have to be only good or only bad. These films ask for the viewer’s understanding and celebration of the multifaceted nature of our species.

There are so many other lessons to be taken from this year’s Best Picture nominees, and that is the power of cinema, it means something different to all of us, and that’s a wonderful thing.