I am so, so tired. It’s been a loooong six weeks.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’24 has dominated my head space and made me neglect numerous other overdue blogging projects. I’m pleased to report I’m at long last finished: I’ve seen all 38 nominated features and all 15 shorts, marking my first-ever 100% achievement of completing my OQ24 scorecard before the big ABC ceremony. I don’t watch sports, so the Oscars are my Super Bowl, which makes me look weird to most folks in my circles. Nevertheless, once again my traditional hobby-journey was spellbinding, enlightening, maddening, exhausting fun.

Longtime MCC readers have already been privy to our reports on 46 nominees. Of those, I saw the following 18 films in theaters throughout the past year and devoted an entry to each:

• American Fiction
• Barbie
• The Boy and the Heron
• The Color Purple
• The Creator
• Godzilla Minus One
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
• Io Capitano
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1
• Oppenheimer
• Perfect Days
• Poor Things
• Robot Dreams
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
• The Teachers’ Lounge
• To Kill a Tiger
• The Zone of Interest

…which added up to quite a few AMC and Landmark frequent-theatergoer points earned. The other 28 were capsulized in grouped entries:

• Elemental
• The Holdovers
• Maestro
• May December
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar




• Anatomy of a Fall
• The Eternal Memory
• Killers of the Flower Moon
• Nimona
• Past Lives
• Society of the Snow




• The ABCs of Book Banning
• The After
• The Barber of Little Rock
• Invincible
• Island In Between
• Knight of Fortune
• The Last Repair Shop
• Letter to a Pig
• Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó
• Ninety-Five Senses
• Our Uniform
• Pachyderme
• Red, White and Blue
• War Is Over! A Tribute to the Music of John and Yoko




• Bobi Wine: The People’s President
• Four Daughters
• 20 Days in Mariupol

We wrap up the Quest with the final seven capsules — the remaining nominees I streamed between the January 23rd nominations announcement and the final home-video release I was waiting for on March 1st. Let’s get this over with, with feeling:

* American Symphony (Netflix) This year’s only nominated documentary feature not nominated for Best Documentary Feature skated onto the docket through Best Original Song, always the most hodgepodge category, often giving refuge to the most mediocre honorees this side of Best Visual Effects. That is emphatically not the case with this sometimes lively, sometimes worrying piece about Jon Batiste, winner of five Grammy Awards as well as a shared Oscar for the score to Pixar’s Soul, not to mention longtime bandleader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. (Our family saw him live back in 2016!) Director Matthew Heineman (previously nominated for 2015’s Cartel Land) catches Batiste at an extremely up-and-down moment in time — he’s working hard at composing his first full symphony and he’s sticking by the side of his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, whose leukemia has taken a turn for the worse. He can only smile so wide while life volleys him back and forth, causing his own anxiety issues to flare up. Public success fights for his head-space with more vulnerable moments, such as a particularly intense concert that he begins by dedicating a song to her at the piano, then pauses for a tension-fraught eternity before his passion is overwhelmingly unleashed on the ivories. Then he’s gifted in that moment to let the music speak.

* El Conde (Netflix). Pablo Larrain (Spencer, Jackie) willingly deviates even more from history than normal with a horror-tragedy about five spoiled-rotten adult siblings who’ve disappointed their father — the tyrant who’s racked up more negative karma than all of them combined. Yes, that’s the plot of Mike Flanagan’s far superior Fall of the House of Usher, but this time Dad is an alt-timeline Augusto Pinochet who’s a centuries-old vampire. Instead of a smart but clueless homicide detective, the ostensible foil is an accountant-exorcist-nun sent by The Church to cook his books and his proverbial goose, in that order. Chileans in the know might “get it” more than us outsiders if they don’t mind the first 90 minutes of stylized tedium, but even the most insular viewer will perk up when the undead finally come alive in the last half-hour with a Sally Field homage and an out-of-their-gourds, eye-rolling, brilliant twist involving another political icon with about as many fans as Pinochet.

* Flamin’ Hot (Hulu). “Eh, close enough,” is the lazy motto of many a biopic maker, but they usually try up to a certain point, or at least confess to hiding behind an unreliable narrator. The amazing false story of a snack flavor’s alleged secret origin would’ve been more amusing if this had been a made-up farce about Pipin’ Hot Schmeetos, but they refused to peel the labels off and insist a debunked inspirational tale is still inspirational, because Cheetos dust works pretty much like fairy dust if everyone claps hard enough. Are we expected to believe the L.A. Times and NPR, who exposed all this months before filming even began, were in bed with Frito-Lay? How exactly would that work, and why bother? All told, mixed in with the cliched rags-to-riches trail mix are a few choice kernels (The Unit‘s Dennis Haysbert as Our Hero’s de facto factory-floor coach, Jimmy McGill’s nemesis Bill Oakley, a moppet who can tell “good-hot” from “bad-hot”) and the second half gets a little more comfort-schmaltzy if you shut your windows so you can’t hear the faraway sound of Dutton Peabody weeping into his printing press.

* Golda (Xfinity Rewards discount rental). Rated NC-17 for pervasive smoking, more than anyone’s lived through since Sterling Cooper dropped the Lucky Strikes account. The best parts of this mixed-bag biopic from Israeli director Guy Nattiv (an Oscar winner for the 2019 Live-Action Short Film Skin) are the justly nominated Makeup and Hairstyling crews who transformed Dame Helen Mirren — an Oscar winner for The Queen and costar of four Fast and the Furious sequels — into an ornery grandma from Shaker Heights who was this close to wiping Egypt off the map in 1973 in retaliation for the surrounding Arab nations’ coordinated attacks. At times she resembles Prime Minister Golda Meir until the interspersed archival footage makes the fatal mistake of letting us see the real Meir, who seems far more three-dimensional. The micro-documentary portions also mismatch against the incessantly One Perfect Shot-obsessed angle change-ups from one scene to the next, each individually suitable for framing yet existing in entirely different dimensions from each other. Most annoyingly, the singular focus on Meir sacrifices nearly any glimpses of the Yom Kippur War, performed offscreen as a radio drama called “EXPLOSIONS!!” It’s like the cast is eavesdropping on the louder, cooler flick screening in the theater next door.

* Napoleon (Apple+). Longtime MCC readers are aware of my weak grasp of world history, so I defer to the tsunami-sized backlash from historians and the entire population of France who gave themselves hernias guffawing at this old-fashioned epic’s depiction of events. (I’m pretty sure Ridley Scott could’ve found a better response to them than simply yelling back, “NEEEEERDS!”) The precious few wartime scenes justify its Best Visual Effects nomination (most impressively at Austerlitz, a raging tumult of ice and cannonballs and blood) and The Crown‘s Vanessa Kirby does what she can with Josephine’s allotted lifespan, but the buck stops with Joaquin Phoenix, the leader of this swingin’ Bring Your Own Accent party. As the notorious conqueror he kindasorta manages a straight face while barking lines like “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!” and “No dessert for you!” and the meme-immortalized instant-classic tantrum, “YOU THINK YOU’RE SO GREAT BECAUSE YOU HAVE BOATS!” but not so much in the scene where he furiously yanks down on both his hat-handles like a Mad lampoon. I died laughing at the line, “Good morning, General Bluecher!” said exactly as a horse whinnies, which cannot possibly be anything but a Mel Brooks homage. Some have theorized this is supposed to be funny and it’s totally a satire from Scott’s British-scold perspective, which would explain Phoenix’s Frank Drebin vibe. Whether they meant for me to chuckle or not, I think I know slightly more about Emperor Bonaparte now than I did when I learned about him in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but…wait, no, I see a horde of wild-eyed Wikipedia editors waving red flags at me, so never mind.

* Nyad (Netflix). Inspirational sports dramas aren’t a go-to for me, but Oscar season is all about tiptoeing outside my circles of interest. AMPAS voters love seeing actresses enduring arduous deglamorization to play real-life personalities, and few have gone as hard as Annette Bening does here. She plays famed swimmer Diana Nyad, who in her 60s stubbornly took multiple tries to achieve her dream of swimming the dangerous 110-mile stretch between Cuba and Florida. Our Heroine weathers savage jellyfish schools, a blonde whelp trying to steal her glory, and the grim horror of spending so many hours submerged that upon surfacing she looks like Mitch McConnell. Co-directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin won Oscar gold with the 2018 documentary Free Solo and keep falling back on their factual source-material methods, sometimes inserting contemporaneous footage and news coverage between the dramatizations, as well as dashes of Nyad’s other pop-culture tangents. (An actual challenge to her from Andy Kaufman! Kate McKinnon playing her on SNL!) The crutches add context but subtract a little power from its suspenseful sequences and the winning ensemble camaraderie, which includes the first time I’ve seen Jodie Foster convincingly play a lighthearted character since…I dunno, possibly Candleshoe at the drive-in when I was 5.

* Rustin (Netflix). In 2008 screenwriter Dustin Lance Black picked up a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Milk, the Best Picture-nominated Harvey Milk biopic that went fully warts-and-all yet deified him in the end out of reverence for the historical milestone he represented for the gay community. 15 years later Black and top-billed writer Julian Breece (When They See Us) take the same approach here with civil-rights organizer Bayard Rustin. The flamboyant firebrand ostensibly taught Martin Luther King everything he knew about protests, civil disobedience, public speaking, speechwriting, and how to tie a necktie. He was the glue that held the warring Black activism factions together (with leading luminaries played by The Wire‘s Glynn Turman and a scowling Chris Rock, among others). But his significance was deleted from history books and contemporaneous reporting due to his sexuality. (Speaking candidly whitely here, it worked: I’d never heard of him till Selma gave him a foot in the door.) Colman Domingo is a flamboyant, energizing steamroller who dominates every frame and practically wills the March on Washington into being from the shadows, which may be accurate for all I know, but director George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) can’t convince anyone else to match his larger-than-life performance and escalates the proceedings to nothing less than heavenly-choired sainthood for the man. Acknowledgment of his contributions is overdue, but in aping Milk‘s template so closely, it risks feeling like Part 2 in a series of Time-Life gay-history educational films rather than a singular tribute.

…

…and with that, we are done. All that’s left to do are the formalities, by which I mean ABC being ABC, Jimmy Kimmel hosting, and winners being named. I’m so exhausted that the ceremony nearly seems beside the point, rather than the point.

To be concluded!