Academy Member Reveals “Brutally Honest” Oscar Ballot
They always do this every year with different unknown voters, and it always kind of pisses me off how they’re allowed to be anonymous. I guess they’re afraid of being blacklisted, but people in Hollywood are so starved for attention, they still like seeing their opinions in print, even if their name isn’t attached to the article. Here’s some of the first “brutally honest” ballot published in The Hollywood Reporter this week (voting for the Oscars concluded yesterday):
Anatomy of a Fall grew on me over time — that monologue where Sandra Hüller tears her husband apart is just incredible. But for me, choosing between Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest was so hard. Oppenheimer is a movie that advanced cinema — with the invention of a new film stock, the use of IMAX cameras in closeup and dialogue scenes and the marriage of image and sound. This is the sort of cinematic experience that you live for if you love movies; it makes me sad that one day I’m going to die, because I won’t get to see movies like this. But no movie made me feel like Zone of Interest. That is what filmmaking is supposed to do. It wasn’t trying to tell you that the Holocaust was bad; it was showing you how little it mattered to the people who were doing it, just like today, when people are going about their lives while horrible things are happening all over the world.
The three films mentioned there are the best of the 10 nominees, although I’d go with Oppenheimer over Zone Of Interest, mainly because I never want to see Zone Of Interest again, as great as it was. He rightly picks Sandra Hüller as Best Actress, and his full ballot is here.
If there’s going to be one upset on March 10th, I do hope Hüller pulls out a surprise win, sort of like how Marion Cotillard and Olivia Colman did in 2008 and 2019, respectively. Here was some of that epic argument scene in Anatomy Of A Fall that would’ve easily convinced voters to go with Hüller:
Sandra Hüller
Anatomy of a Fall. https://t.co/bGFg3e6pPp pic.twitter.com/Qye6mFoWFW
— Whoami🫧 (@ashh_bones) October 23, 2023
