Oscars in close-up: Professors review a selection of this year’s nominated films

By VCU News staff

From a colorful retelling of a classic novel to a new take on vampiric horror, the most recent Oscar-nominated movies have captured the attention of moviegoers around the world – including at Virginia Commonwealth University.

On March 15, the 98th Academy Awards will showcase the best – and most talked-about – films of the year.

Ahead of Hollywood’s biggest night, some VCU professors shared their thoughts on films that are aligned with their areas of study and will be in contention in a variety of categories. The following are excerpts from longer reviews available on the College of Humanities and Sciences website. To access the full reviews, click on the title of the film.

Frankenstein

Nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Director Guillermo Del Toro’s departures from the complicated novel Mary Shelley wrote at 19 are intriguing.

Plot: Del Toro expresses the horror of toxic father-son relations (father/Victor, Victor/Monster) within Victorian patriarchy.

Aesthetics: A crudely colored Gothic palette (black, white, red, contrasting Elizabeth-associated greenness) expresses Victor’s contaminated/limited thinking. Meanwhile, CGI animals are clumsy; form and content work together to amplify the unnaturalness of Victor’s own machinations; ditto uncannily overblown production values and ornate architectural details.

Characters: Gone are characters that have sometimes been described as queer-coded, and Del Toro flattens Victor (villain) and Monster (not-villain). Elizabeth, however, is fleshed-out, antidotal to her absent-presence in the novel, where Elizabeth’s insistence, “I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know,” betrays submerged complexity. Del Toro’s expanded Elizabeth abandons that subtle Elizabeth-Monster connection for superficial visual connection and mutual love-pining. Lastly, Del Toro’s Victor is appropriately anti-charismatic, considering that although VF is Shelley’s protagonist, “Frankenstein” is the name readers always ascribe to Monster’s #maincharacterenergy.

Structure: No letters or layers. But I liked how Del Toro hewed to Shelley’s arctic beginning, instead of just ending there, while countering that cyclicity with Monster’s forgiveness of father/creator/author — offering proof that toxic patriarchal inheritance is breakable.

– Rivka Swenson, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of English, College of Humanities and Sciences

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

People have told me that Mary Bronstein’s comedy-drama “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” stressed them out so much that they couldn’t finish watching it. This did not strike me as a criticism, but rather a recognition: That’s the point.

From the beginning of the film, we are tugged into the world of a mother on the brink of a breakdown as she struggles to care for her very ill school-aged daughter, and carry on her job as a psychotherapist. With the camera’s unrelenting focus on the mother, Linda, this world feels exceedingly claustrophobic. Until the very last scene, we never actually see the daughter; she exists solely as an irksome voice, demanding constant attention. Similarly, the father and husband, apparently away on business, only resonates in distant, patronizing drones on the other end of Linda’s cellphone. This film is unyieldingly from the perspective of the mother and her emotional turmoil. We cannot help but feel the weight of her exhaustion, anger – and even regret.

– Olivia Landry, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, College of Humanities and Sciences, and author of the book, “Cinema of Crushing Motherhood”

Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” follows a small-town Russian public school teacher who clandestinely records the rapid insertion of wartime nationalist ideology into classroom lessons and rituals following the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In unnervingly mundane detail, the film’s strongest passages show how students are taught to internalize a state-approved narrative built on distortion and outright lies. By exposing how an entire generation of Russian children is being raised within a carefully curated alternate reality, the documentary offers a sobering window into Russia’s future as well as its present.

The film is less effective when it focuses on its teacher-protagonist, who ultimately fled to Copenhagen for fear of government persecution. His attention to his own fears distracts from the film’s clear-eyed account of an authoritarian system legitimizing itself by shaping children early and systematically. More importantly, the fact that this film was even nominated for an Oscar raises crucial ethical questions. As Russia’s brutal war enters its fifth year, asking viewers to stay trained on Russia—even critically—competes with the imperative to instead center Ukraine and Ukrainian filmmakers living with the consequences of Russia’s state-manufactured worldview.

– Judyth Twigg, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Political Science, College of Humanities and Sciences

One Battle After Another

Nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

While focusing on both its characters and their choices, this is a movie steeped in political context, offering both a timeless story of the fight for freedom and liberation against repression and tyranny and also a remarkably timely depiction of an alternative, if nightmarish, America.

In such a world, contentious politics often become polarized – a world of “us vs them.” In this alternative America, there is much that looks familiar, and it offers a haunting vision of what America, where civil rights and democracy have been supplanted by unaccountable repression, could become if we let it. As [the character] Bob reminds us, "Freedom is a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it, and when you miss it, it's gone."

The film ends with a hopeful note as the generations reconcile and the struggle to build a better America is passed on to another generation. But it also offers us a warning about the need to protect the democracy we have, for it is that democracy that protects our freedoms but which, like all valuable things, is lost when taken for granted.

– John L. Froitzheim, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, College of Humanities and Sciences

Sentimental Value

Nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Two sisters, Nora and Agnes, confront potential reconciliation with their estranged father, Gustav, an aging movie director wondering whether he’s too old to produce another excellent movie. Both sisters were deeply wounded when, after making an award-winning picture 15 years earlier, Gustav ran away to Sweden, his marriage in tatters.

The movie asks us to confront three main questions: Is it ever too late in life to reconcile? Must reconciliation be direct, or can it somehow happen without verbal processing? And does a person need a reconciled family and safe home to be fulfilled? I posed these questions to invite you to make a general conclusion, like the psychological scientist I am – but I’m also a licensed couple therapist and psychotherapist, and therapy seeks individual, human-centered answers to specific dilemmas. If you see this film, you’ll want to wrestle with both the specific and general answers.

– Everett Worthington, Jr., Ph.D., Commonwealth Professor Emeritus affiliated with the Department of Psychology, College of Humanities and Sciences

Sinners

Nominated for 16 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

“Sinners” – grounded in the supernatural and in the real terror of racial violence and economic exploitation – confronts the lingering past while offering an invitation to a soothing remedy coated in the blues, beauty and unapologetic Blackness, masterfully capturing Black love, religion, spirituality and community as acts of survival and resistance, while also exploring how beauty – dark-skinned, full-figured and unapologetically human – defies the narrow frames imposed by the world.

In a time when Black culture and history are continually under threat of erasure, “Sinners” provokes, heals and reimagines, offering a cinematic altar to what has always been beautiful, powerful and profoundly alive. This is especially true in one poignant “time-leaping” musical sequence in the juke joint which connects ancestral African rhythms with modern hip-hop to illustrate a culture that emotes joy, while refusing to be silenced.

Viewers get a Mississippi gumbo mix of musical history, lessons in Hoodoo and Conjure, along with a commentary on the pursuit of freedom. As noted by the older version of the character Sammie, played by Blues pioneer Buddy Guy, “Before the sun went down, I think that was the best day of my life.” My sentiments exactly after one of my many memorable viewings.

– Grace D. Gipson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies, College of Humanities and Sciences

The Alabama Solution

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Filmed over years in coordination with activists, attorneys, artists and the family of the incarcerated, the makers of this movie – people in prison filming on contraband phones – expose several deaths at the hands of guards. After experiencing deprivation, dehumanization and bureaucratic denial of the truth, the imprisoned men go on strike to demand justice, eventually inspiring prisoners across the country to join in.

This film is tragically beautiful, mixing grainy cell phone shots and high-end cinematography. Toward the end of the film, one of the imprisoned men points his cell phone from his cell into the open tier, where light is spilling through the barred window of the common room. He comments, “This is the light of truth coming through.” But when the film ends – the prison has been sued for wrongful death, with the state giving money to expensive law firms to fight the suit in court – the last word is given to Alabama’s governor. Asked if she would still support expanding prisons by taking money away from education, she responds quickly: “Yes.” That is no solution.

– David Coogan, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of English, College of Humanities and Sciences, and editor of “American Prison Writing and Mass Incarceration”

The Secret Agent

Nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

For the second straight year, a Brazilian film about the country’s 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship has been nominated for Best Picture. “O Agente Secreto” is sweeping, colorful and occasionally absurdist. Multiple storylines are never resolved; the loose ends illustrate the frustration of living under a state of repression and censorship, and never getting a complete picture.

This is a story particular to the northeastern city of Recife, notable for having the most shark attacks of any beach city in the world. Throughout the regime, the entire northeast was neglected and pillaged for the benefit of the richer states of São Paulo and Rio, the result of which is reflected today in Brazil’s geographical political divides. The movie depicts these alongside more regional trivia, including a running gag about a disembodied human leg that attacks people in parks – a real news story in Recife at the time.

While surreal, it masks a more sinister reality: that the dictatorship spread urban legends about killer sharks or legs to hide murders by state security forces. People simply “disappeared,” a unique cruelty that the state visited on its citizens, with families unable to grieve loved ones who they never learned were dead.

– Michael Paarlberg, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Political Science, College of Humanities and Sciences