If it were up to me, this morning’s Best Picture lineup would have included 2023 gems like Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” Michel Franco’s “Memory,” and Sean Durkin’s “The Iron Claw.”
Of course, one can dream — I’m sure you all have your own personal best picks. I was also well aware that these films didn’t stand a chance in the Oscar industrial complex.
You see, the way for a film to get nominated these days is for it to get captured by a hive-mind hybrid composed of pundits, critics, and social media users. The game is fixed. It’s been like this for many years now. There just isn’t as much free thinking when it comes to Oscar voting — it’s now, more than ever, all about the hive-mind hybrid and which studio can campaign these titles most efficiently.
Speaking of “The Iron Claw,” it’s being released in France tomorrow and the reviews it’s been getting have been excellent. It currently has an amazing 4.1 score on critical aggregate AlloCine — critically, it’s doing better than “Poor Things” (3.7), “Oppenheimer” (3.8), “Barbie” (3.5), “The Holdovers” (3.8), “Maestro” (3.9).
I will again mention that it’s a real shame that “The Iron Claw” got lost in the shuffle of late-December releases. It deserved better than this. The film was not rolled out in any kind of efficient way for it to contend for awards. A24 should have absolutely premiered this one at a fall festival, like Telluride or Venice. Instead, they opted to skip festivals altogether and release it in the final weeks of the year. Why?
The result is that Zac Efron, who is fantastic, in a career-best performance, as Kevin Von Eric, was not nominated. Ditto the film itself, which felt so lived-in, with intense sadness in every beautifully constructed frame. There’s an emotional core to this film; it’s as much about death as it is about family and love. Themes that deeply resonate.
The most frustrating part is that audiences seem to love “The Iron Claw”: it has an 8.1 user score on IMDB, 94% audience approval on RT and garnered an A grade on CinemaScore. I can also attest that it’s very well-liked by readers of this site. Really, anybody who actually sees this film comes out of it impressed.
It’s now been 13 years since "The Grandmaster,” and it doesn’t sound like Wong Kar-wai will be making another film in the near future. His future seems to be on the small screen.