Hugo 2023: Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form

You’ve got to start somewhere and as an avowedly lazy person, BDP:Long is a handy place to start. I’ve (sort of) watched them all and also none of the finalists really care very much, so I’m not ruining anybody’s happy time basking in the glow of Hugo recognition. Even so, this isn’t a strict ranking and I may shift preferences over time.

I’ll start with two movies that I don’t think should be on the ballot.

Avatar: The Way of Water is visually great and I couldn’t finish it. I started watching it weeks ago and repeatedly lost interest. It singularly failed to hook me into the plot or even care. I’m really struggling to sum up what it was about the film that fell so flat for me. Perhaps it was the weak dialogue or the feeling that we were just recycling the same character conflict. I might try it again on a bigger screen where its obvious strengths will have more impact but while I love really visual films they need more than that to work.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is another aquatic movie. I did see this in a movie theatre and even then it was cursed with murky parts. This was a more interesting movie than Avatar and did have many touching moments. The death of Chadwick Boseman is woven into the story as the death of his character T’Challa and the genuine loss felt by his fellow actors is felt throughout. The inclusion of Namor as a kind of aquatic Mayan-like civilisation is an interesting idea which expands the concept of indigenous super-civilisations in the Marvel world. Unfortunately, this film really doesn’t hold together very well and the central conflict between Namor and Wakanda feels forced. The film is many things but “exceptional science fiction movie of 2022” isn’t one of them in my opinion.

The next two are both worthy contenders that I’d be happy to see win but not my top picks.

Severance from Apple’s streaming service is a bleak satire on work and identity that has a PKD feel to it by way of 1990’s critiques of officer culture. The premise is that selected workers for the company Lumen have their memories “severed” so that their home lives and work lives are completely independent. Severed workers cannot recall basic facts about their home selves and once they leave work they can’t recall what they did at work. Functionally, this means their working selves experience nothing but work. This is a what-the-heck-is-going-on mystery with nightmarish scenario held in check by workplace monotony. Good stuff.

Turning Red is an unusual Pixar movie that suffered from under-promotion by Disney. Set in 2002 in Toronto, I think this is the first film I’ve seen that looks at the early 2000’s through the lens of nostalgia. I’m way to old to feel nostalgia for the 2000’s which are still just yesterday in my head but given how big 1950’s nostalgia was in the 1970’s it is surprising there isn’t more of it. Either way this is a movie with far more depth than its sometimes fluffy red-panda protagonist implies. Teenage girl experiences the trials of growing up amidst the pressure of generational trauma and tradition. Genuinely enjoyable.

My top two favourites from the finalists.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has rightly received a huge amount of praise. Like a lot of 2021/22 shows/films it also engaged on the topic of mothers, daughters, generational trauma and tradition using the medium of science fiction and fantasy. If that topic got a lot of outings recently (see Turning Red above but also Encanto but also in shows like Russian Doll) Everything Everywhere All at Once took that central idea and turned it into something phantasmagorical by combining it with the other movie-trope of recent times, multiverses. I shan’t try to sum up this film as others have done it better but you’d be hard-pressed to find a film that combines so much together and yet somehow remains a coherent whole.

Nope is a film that remains stuck in my head and it is also one that I have a regular urge to rewatch. Jordan Peele merges Jaws and Close Encounters into a single movie that explores the gap in understanding between humans and wild animals. This has ended up being one of my all-time favourite films, to the extent that I don’t think I can objectively rank it. I just really, really like it.