We have such a patchy record predicting the screenplay categories that we’re trigger-shy about making this call. This despite Everything Everywhere All at Once’s guild sweep straight until the WGA Awards, where Martin McDonagh’s writerly screenplay for The Banshees of Inisherin wasn’t nominated due to strict eligibility rules. Which, of course, brings up memories of the clusterfuck that was last year’s race, in which Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning Belfast script took a back seat to Licorice Pizza at the BAFTAs (and, like The Banshees of Inisherin, wasn’t eligible for the WGA Awards, where Don’t Look Up triumphed).
But more to the point, it reminds us of the last time McDonagh was at bat, for 2018’s even more writerly Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Back then, we figured that his penchant for thinly veiled pseudo-allegory, zeitgeist-assimilating anger, and crowd-titillating bursts of profanity couldn’t lose. We then watched as the award went to an actual work of artful allegory, one which tapped into a genuine sense of collective outrage that, in turn, became a legitimate zeitgeist touchstone: Jordan Peele’s Get Out. And we immediately thought to ourselves that we shouldn’t have talked ourselves out of predicting what was, in retrospect, a sure thing.
Unlike Branagh, McDonagh did pick up the BAFTA, both four years ago over Peele, and once again this year, over the Daniels. But, really, who are we kidding? Everything Everywhere All at Once may, at its least disciplined, come across as the net result of a ChatGPT bot being instructed to generate a mother-daughter drama nestled within as many meme-worthy set pieces as the structure would allow. But we’d sooner cut off our fingers than try to argue that The Banshees of Inisherin has anything resembling Everything Everywhere All at Once’s standing in what’s left of our monoculture. (Tár does, but we won’t go there.)
Will Win: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Could Win: The Banshees of Inisherin
Should Win: Tár
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“But more to the point, it reminds us of the last time McDonagh was at bat, for 2018’s even more writerly Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
That was 2017.
¿Tar should win? ¿All of you agree? Then Hollywood really is in problems. Why don’t we begin to not care about the Oscars?