Getting Set For The Oscars

With just a few weeks to go for the big awards show, we take a look at some of the best films that are in contention

- Maithili Rao

Oscar time makes me nostalgic for prepandemic Mumbai.

Though I left the city nearly four years ago, I remember how there were Oscar weeks with back to back screenings of the main nominated films. Documentaries and foreign films that made the coveted list had to wait. This was before we all began to watch content on streaming platforms instead of the camaraderie of seeing films in theatres. A communally shared experience gradually receded into the penumbra of memory and films became a solitary pleasure, especially now that we can’t even host or attend watch parties.

This mini binge watching — with major misses because many are unavailable even to rent — brought back the pleasure of watching films, instead of getting used to series, the prolonged, finely detailed narratives that have the luxury of time to flesh out subplots and back stories. We relearnt an old lesson: film demands more from the maker, to fulfil our narrative expectations within a limited time and yet, give a complete viewing experience, whether the classic three act structure with a catharsis that left us emotionally cleansed, or the newer narrative forms that could be episodic and yet linear, or intriguingly cyclic. Like Mank, my favourite film of the year.

Mank comes with a huge back story and decades of expectations caused by the critical conundrums bequeathed by Citizen Kane. This classic to beat all classics, a landmark that rewrote narrative grammar, has divided film historians and critics, even though all agree that it is a masterpiece forever. The question is who deserves credit. Pauline Kael, the formidable doyenne who shaped writing on cinema for decades, took up cudgels on behalf of Herman Mankieweicz in her influential