Nearly every year there’s at least one Oscar nominee in the short categories that we think is “too good to win,” or, as I sometimes prefer to put it, will lose harder than any other nominated film. And this year that dubious honor belongs to Maxim Arbugaev and Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Haulout, which not only sheds unforgettable new light on the climate crisis but also features the most jaw-dropping reveal that I’ve seen in a film in a very long time.
Presented with the same level of attentiveness a Sensory Ethnography Lab film, Haulout (one of five films by New Yorker Studios nominated for an Oscar this year alone) unflinchingly depicts the devastation that climate change wreaks on walruses, who, due to the melting of Arctic ice caps, are forced to migrate en masse onto a small patch of land in Cape Serdtse-Kamen, a headland on the northeastern coast of Chukotka, that can’t possibly sustain them. Few other Oscar-nominated films this year boast more powerful images (and sounds), but ultimately it’s tough to imagine many voters wanting to back something so unyieldingly existential.
Especially not when there’s such a literally cuddly alternative that still manages to check off many of the same boxes: Kartiki Gonsalves’s The Elephant Whisperers. A consistently genial portrait of Bomman and Bellie, an Indian couple who take care of rescued baby elephants, the film largely focuses on their bond with abandoned calf Raghu, and is told in a series of bite-sized, comforting vignettes generously ladled with precious pachyderm cutaways.
The Netflix-distributed film acknowledges that human interference is the direct cause for displacing these elephants, but it also gets to have its My Octopus Teacher cake and eat it too by centering human kindness as the only prospective solution. Unlike Haulout, which ends with a devastating toll, The Elephant Whisperers concludes with a content elephant spraying a group of bathing children with its trunk, and our married heroes lovingly giving their newest charge a set of pigtails. Which one do you think will garner more votes?
Crowd-pleasers come in many forms, though, and there are some who think that Man Who Used to Be a Bully Shares Home Videos of His Daughter As Though We Want to See Them (directed by Jay Rosenblatt, a nominee last year for When We Were Bullies) has a shot for packing nearly two decades’ worth of a young girl’s development into 30 intimate minutes. I’m not sure many will find much profundity here, even parents. After all, don’t we all know that everyone gets older and that most gain knowledge and awareness along the way? For every voter charmed by the parental love on display here, there’s likely to be another who, like me, thought that if I were Roseblatt’s daughter and he showed the world videos of my three-year-old self pounding my crotch and saying “my vagina,” I’d be seeking damages.
The remaining two entries link the political with the personal from very different angles. Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy’s The Martha Mitchell Effect, which is also distributed by Netflix, starts out a boilerplate history lesson on one of the most outspoken critics from within Nixon’s circle during Watergate but emerges as a knotty portrait of the interplay of U.S. politics, celebrity, and mental illness that seems, if anything, even more relevant in 2023 than in 1973. It’s certainly the nominee most likely to get remade as an Oscar-ready biopic.
But it’s Joshua Seftel’s risible Stranger at the Gate, another New Yorker Studios nominee, that feels like the potential spoiler, in every sense of the word. To say that on the surface it tells the story of how a white former Marine who served in Operation Enduring Freedom didn’t go through with his intention to kill as many Muslims as he could at his local mosque is to say precisely that it remains on the surface. It’s not so much that we doubt the veracity of the story (although the too-tidy film leaves plenty room for doubt), but rather the issue of representation.
As many have pointed out, Seftel seems blindly naïve to the optics of making an example of a would-be mass-casualty hate crime being short-circuited because a persecuted group chose to turn the other cheek, rather than because white supremacy has in any meaningful way been held in check. But these are Oscar voters, and frankly Oscars have been awarded to far more egregious sermons on the great theme of American racism. With every day seemingly bringing news of another mass shooting, Stranger at the Gate feels familiar enough to reach the podium.
Will Win: The Elephant Whisperers
Could Win: Stranger at the Gate
Should Win: Haulout
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