Why Women Talking Will Win Best Picture
'Tis t-minus 9 days until the Oscars, and for the second consecutive year-- but just the third time ever! -- 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 buzzy Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, not only would the multiverse comedy with a big heart and primarily Asian cast be a wildly abnormal winner, few if any other top contenders are traditional 'Oscar bait,' and none are without its detractor.
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 last year all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 12th.
Women Talking is a slow-burning, devastating adaptation of Miriam Toews' 2018 novel of the same name. The characters themselves are fiction, but the story in both the book and the film borrows heavily from the real-life events of the Manitoba community, a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia, between 2005 and 2010. The story picks up right as the women and girls discover the men in their community have attacked and raped them in their sleep, by using cow tranquilizer, and are meeting to determine their future. The movie unfolds almost like a stage play, with the action essentially confined to, well, women talking, and the vast majority of the plot taking place in the stables that serve as their meeting place. It's an intimate, fascinating look at the effects of abuse, as well as decision-making and leadership exclusively amongst women.
If none of the above necessarily screams "Best Picture winner" to you, you're not alone: it's fair to say that Women Talking is probably the longest shot of all nominees to win. The fact it's even a nominee is fairly surprising; unless you're a movie nut, you very well might have missed this limited release with not much fanfare. That doesn't mean it doesn't bring some real heft, though. In Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Ben Whishaw, the core of its cast epitomizes the type of actor that may not elicit much of a reaction in name alone, but once you see them on screen, you realize just how good they are. Those that have seen the movie have come away with overwhelmingly positive reviews; A.O. Scott of The New York Times gave it a perfect rating, as did critics from Variety, The Los Angeles Times, and The Independent. And while its presence on the award circuit hasn't been noticed nearly as much as other Best Picture nominees, it's been far from nonexistent: Women Talking landed on both the American Film Institute's and National Board Of Review's Top 10 Movies of the Year ranking, and prior to the Oscars, also landed Best Picture nods at the SAG Awards, Critics Choice Awards, Satellite Awards, and Hollywood Critics Association Awards. That sort of award circuit credibility can only help its chances, as can its frontrunner status for Best Adapted Screenplay, one of the most-predictive (in tandem with "Original Screenplay") awards for the top honor.
Skeptical about the Oscar chances of an understated movie predominantly about women, by a female director? That's very fair. But, I would remind you to look at Nomadland, and its double win for Best Picture and Best Director (for Chloe Zhao) just two years ago. This is actually produced by the same company, Plan B, that produced Nomadland, as well as 2017 winner Moonlight, so the more restrained, critically-lauded underdog is a position they are quite comfortable in. There's another 'woman' angle to consider here, too. The Oscars aren't nearly as politically aware nor as left-leaning as the everyday person might assume, but if the Academy, which is only growing more diverse, does opt to go a socio-political route with their major winners, this would be a truly groundbreaking win as a woman-centric story, touching graphically and unapologetically on both rape/assault and patriarchal structures in society. In a year that has seen more news cycles dominated by abusive men-- the guilty verdicts for and sentencing of Harvey Weinstein and R Kelly, the return of Donald Trump to the public political arena -- Oscar voters might find it worthwhile amplifying the voices of assault and rape survivors . And really, who could blame them?
Comments