Welcome to the 12th annual Danny Awards! Which I promise you’ll be able to read in less time than it takes to watch Killers of the Flower Moon. I’ll also steal shamelessly from the Cannes Film Festival. And I will not drone on too long about Oppenheimer’s brilliance.
But I will start with Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the father of the atomic bomb as it is my Best Picture. Being one half of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon helped with its box office and buzz, but this three-hour epic about the genius who changed the course of a war and the world more than stands on its own. A lesser film would have limited itself to just the Manhattan Project, ending in triumph as the bomb ends the war. Expanding the scope to include Oppenheimer’s evolution after he understood what he had wrought makes the experience all the richer. A well-deserved Best Director and Best Screenplay to Mr. Nolan, too.
The most surprising feat of Oppenheimer is making us care about the outcome of a 1959 Senate hearing to confirm the Secretary of Commerce. Robert Downey Jr. earns my Best Supporting Actor award and gives a career-best performance as Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s post-war rival. Driven by jealousy to take down a better man, Strauss eventually reaps the consequences of his actions and learns a lesson we all need from time to time: The world does not revolve around us.
The winner of the Cannes Film Festival receives the Palm d’Or, but the second-place film wins the Grand Prix. This winner of the Danny’s Grand Prix is The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama with an early 1970s vibe. Set at a New England Boarding School, Paul Giamatti plays a teacher stuck babysitting students who can’t go home over Christmas break. Giamatti’s character is miserable and only too willing to take his disappointments out on those around him. In a movie like this, the lead character will inevitably become a better version of themselves. But what could have been sappy becomes more subtle in Giamatti’s care, earning him my Best Actor award.
Best Supporting Actress also comes from The Holdovers, with Da’Vine Joy Randolph winning for her turn as the school’s cafeteria manager, whose son was recently killed in Vietnam. She finds a companion for her misery in Giamatti’s broken teacher, but both eventually find ways to help the other. Randolph brings a quiet dignity to her role, never milking the screen for easy sympathy. And Best Newcomer to Dominic Sessa, who made his feature film debut as a troubled student and more than holds his own with two excellent actors. I can’t recommend The Holdovers enough. Check it out!
They have a third-place prize at the Cannes Film Festival, too. It’s called the Jury Award, and the Danny’s version goes to a movie nominated for zero Oscars. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a beloved book by the great Judy Blume. Kelly Fremon Craig wrote and directed a worthy film adaptation. It’s a rare movie that can dig deep into themes like adolescence, family, faith, and friendship and still be as charming as this one. It’s the kind of thing Hollywood should be trying to do more of instead of regurgitating the same superhero, space opera, and secret agent plots again and again.
They don’t have a fourth-place award at the Cannes Film Festival, but I do. I’ll call it the Fourth-Place Award because I’m bad at naming things. I wasn’t excited to see Past Lives, maybe because of this plot synopsis from the film’s website: “Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they are reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance.” It sounds like something perfect for the Hallmark Channel. But I was wrong. Celine Song’s beautiful film captures what might have been with elegance and compassion.
Best Actress is a tough one this year, with two worthy performances. But I resolved not to be a coward and have ties. I feel like Emma Stone has won enough awards already, but I can’t deny that her work in Poor Things is a powerhouse. So, she wins another one. This feminine take on Frankenstein is not for the prudish. Stone’s brave performance takes her character from infancy through adolescence to a woman living on her terms. Yorgos Lanthimos’ film is also a visual marvel, winning my combined Best Costume & Art Direction award.
Lily Gladstone was also great in Killers of the Flower Moon, which is based on the excellent non-fiction book by David Grann. Gladstone plays an Osage woman whose friends and family are being murdered for their oil money. Her character is an enigma, falling for, marrying, and staying with a charming but obviously no-good man. You can feel the conflicting emotions down to the core of her soul in Gladstone’s performance. The film is 206 minutes long and could have been a half-hour shorter. But it’s still another strong showing from 81-year-old Martin Scorsese.
The actual winner of the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival was the French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. German actress Sandra Hüller is fantastic as an author who may have pushed her husband out of a window to his death. It’s well done, and my Best Boy award for the most outstanding canine performance goes to Messi, a border collie who plays Snoop, the family dog who has more to do with the outcome than you might think.
The Grand Prix winner at the Cannes Film Festival was The Zone of Interest, a disturbing and detached film about the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. Their beautiful home is right by the camp’s entrance. The horrors of the holocaust are never shown but expressed mainly through the gunshots and screams heard in the background, earning a well-deserved Best Sound Design award for what is certainly not a fun Friday Night flick.
The award that I stress out the most over every year is Best Scene. I’m always looking for that scene that leaps off the screen at me. This year, it was easy. Here’s the opening two lines of the screenplay for Barbie:
EXT. A DESERT-LIKE LANDSCAPE. DAY
Like Kubrick’s 2001, but with little girls, not apes. And with baby dolls, not sticks and stuff.
I did not expect the first 60 seconds of Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster to be an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have no clue how she and her co-writer and partner Noah Baumbach came up with something so out there as a giant Barbie being a stand-in for Stanley Kubrick’s mysterious black monolith. But I am glad they did. I enjoyed the rest of the movie more than I thought I would, but that opening is brilliant.
I don’t often give a Best Short Film award, but The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar from Wes Anderson is a 40-minute delight starring Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s worth catching on Netflix.
A few quick takes on the rest of the movie year:
Jeffrey Wright is a worthy Best Actor nominee for his work American Fiction, a satirical take on the publishing industry and the many phonies who work in it. At its core, though, the story is about family, and Wright’s performance balances the outlandish and the heartfelt.
There were good performances in Maestro, and it was interesting to learn about Leonard Bernstein’s life, but my main takeaway was, “Wow, they sure smoked a lot back in the day.”
Lola is an extremely low-budget British sci-fi film set during World War II about sisters who invent a machine that can tune into the future. At 78 minutes, it’s a quick watch, and I would have liked it to be a little longer, but it’s the kind of original story we don’t get from the big studios much anymore. Someone please give director Andrew Legge more money!
Annette Benning and Jodie Foster are enjoyable in Nyad, an engaging look at distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s attempt to swim from Cuba to Key West in her 60s.
May December is an unsettling movie with Julianne Moore as the matriarch of a rather unusual family and Natalie Portman as a famous actress studying to play her on the screen.
I probably liked Dumb Money more than I should have, but it’s an entertaining take on the Game Stop revolution that rocked Wall Street during the pandemic.
I missed my chance to see Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron in theaters. And the many streaming services I subscribe to have let me down. So, sorry to those two films that I wanted to see before making my picks.
As always, the winners can stop by my house to pick up their awards. I’m still waiting for someone to take me up on that offer.
Thanks for reading!
