David Walsh, His Colleagues, and the Nominees Honored by the 96th Academy Awards

As I have remarked many a time in the past I have consistently found David Walsh and his colleagues the most worthwhile team of film critics publishing in English today. Still, it has seemed to me that for a long time the amount of film reviewing they do has been falling off--especially where major U.S. theatrical releases are concerned. Where maybe a decade ago you would find one new review of such a film every week or so, now one can go for months without seeing a really widely released American film presented here. (Almost three months passed between the reviews of Wes Anderson Asteroid City and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.) Reviews of the kinds of movies that can be expected to sell very many tickets, the typical blockbusters (admittedly, not often the occasion of their best work, even if they do now and then present something interesting, as with Walsh's review of Suicide Squad) are especially rare here these days (Avatar: The Way of Water the last such film I noticed getting that attention--over a year ago in January 2023).

All but crowded off the site, with this likely encouraged this year by the attention they have given to both increasing censorship in a time of ascendant "extremism" and increasing conflict, and the historic double-strike by actors and writers in Hollywood this past year, Walsh and his colleagues remain attentive to the "critics' darling" sorts of productions, and continue to do plenty of what they do best in regard to it--exposing the artistic, intellectual and political limitations that leave so much of it just so much Midcult junk, always pretentious and very often truly noxious, churned out by, of and for a very privileged "social layer." This past year they have reviewed all ten of the nominees for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, which not incidentally account for 29 of the 35 nominations in those more prestigious categories recognizing direction, writing and acting--Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Celine Song's Past Lives, Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (getting several of them in very recently, I suppose, to have the whole list covered before the Big Night). While all up to par qualitatively, with the reviews of Triet's Anatomy of a Fall and Glazer's The Zone of Interest especially telling of the state of what passes for intellectual and cultural life these days, the reviews of Nolan's Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things strike me as especially meriting note because in each case a director of whose work they had been very critical in the past managed to win a positive review from them--the only really positive reviews to be found in this lot. (That's right--just two of the ten movies up for Best Picture really deserving of any honors in their books, and a good many of the other eight better discussed as cultural artifacts testifying to the profound derangement of politics, social thought, culture and art in our time than as cinema.)

Will the Academy judge as these critics judged? The Academy's sensibility is very different from this group's--as Walsh never fails to remind his readers in his incisive coverage of the ceremony every year. Still, at last check Oppenheimer had the momentum behind it--and if most of the media seems to find virtues in that film other than those which impressed Walsh (interestingly they seem to think that this movie literally about nuclear war, which the director himself says is about nuclear war, has nothing to do with nuclear war in our time, but rather artificial intelligence) it could at least look like a case of the broken clock striking the right time twice a day--and Walsh's remarks about that should be interesting.

NOTE: This post has been revised and significantly updated twice since its initial February 27, 2024 posting.