Why Past Lives Will Win Best Picture

'Tis the week before the Oscars, and no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. The biggest award has the potential to be either one of the most anticlimactic or most surprising result in recent years. The former is true, because one film has won the vast majority of the top prizes on the awards circuit thus far, the gargantuan Oppenheimer. However, not only would the 3+ hour, half black-and-white, half color biopic be a wildly abnormal winner, few if any other top contenders are traditional 'Oscar bait,' and none also are without its detractors.

Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge in 2022 all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 10th.

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In the course of any Oscars race, there has never been a hard and fast rubric for what films deserve to win Best Picture each year. In fact, when we look back at some years, it becomes clear that oftentimes the best film isn’t always the one to actually win Best Picture. How Green is My Valley won in 1941 over classics like Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon. I’m sure very few people alive today have seen that film or know anything about it. Green Book and Crash won over literally any other film in their respective years, which is itself stunning.

Out of all the nominees from 2023, Oppenheimer has been the clear frontrunner since its release. And with good reason- it is a star-studded affair full of great performances up and down the cast, and a spectacle to boot. It is people talking in rooms disguised as an epic, in a similar vein to Game of Thrones. We remember the set pieces from Thrones, but the majority of the show was people talking in rooms too.

When Christoper Nolan goes up to accept the Best Picture for Oppenheimer, it will be well-deserved. I also believe that Oppenheimer’s win will be looked back on as historically deserving. But Celine Song’s Past Lives is a masterpiece of storytelling that is every bit as deserving of the coveted award.

Song’s film has been described as being “both fictional and autobiographical”, pulling from very real and personal elements of her own life, and weaving them into a sensational and moving story about the sliding doors of relationships and love.

Past Lives follows the characters of Na Young and Hae Sung from childhood through adulthood. While friends as children, they lose contact when Na Young’s family immigrates to Canada, where she chooses to go by the name Nora. Nora and Hae Sung reconnect years later while both are in college, via Facebook and Skype, carrying on a deep long-distance friendship, bordering on romantic relationship, until Nora calls it off when she realizes it will be years before they can see each other in person.

Now an aspiring writer, Nora participates in an artist’s residency where she meets Arthur, who she later marries. After another time jump of 12 years, Nora and Arthur married and living in New York City. Hae Sung finally makes the trek from South Korea, allegedly for business. He finally meets Nora for the first time since they were children, and what follows is a third act underscored by “will they won’t they” tension that traditional storytelling has conditioned us to prepare for. The film plays with our preconceived notions of how this should go in a masterful way that needs to be experienced to truly understand.

The revelation of intimate emotional moments between the characters, through the lens of another culture is an incredibly powerful piece of Past Lives that feels like it can only come through properly in a film versus any other medium. 

Scenes like the triangular conversation in the bar which takes place in the third act (and is foreshadowed at the beginning of the film,) or even the emotionally-charged final scene, will go down as some of the most memorable and moving of the entire film. But the growing intimacy through the Skype calls and distanced exchanges come across as some of the most powerful exchanges in the film, despite their understated nature. Even the lingering moments after the calls are finished are impactful and relatable. These scenes are especially unique in the way they speak to how much connections have changed in the past 15-20 years in our ever-evolving digital world. 

Biographical films like Oppenheimer attempt to reveal the internality of a character, but from an outsider’s perspective. We can never truly know what the subject of biography may have been thinking or struggling with, and filmmakers can do their best to interpret and translate those conflicts to the screen, but there is still a level of remove that clouds us from true revelation.

But with Past Lives, it is clear that Song has put herself into the film and the character of Nora, letting the whole world see a piece of her, unflinchingly holding out her heart and soul for the world to see. Even if some of that real-world truth is obfuscated by the necessary structures of dramatic storytelling, the inner truth that shines through makes Past Lives something truly special and deserving of Best Picture.