#LeMillRecommends: Gear Up for the Oscars

Have you started catching up on your Oscar-worthy films ahead of the ceremony? While Barbenheimer was a whole phenomenon last summer and Scorsese’s much anticipated movie grabbed a lot of eyeballs. We have rounded up some movies across genres that are up for the Best Picture award and honestly? Might have a good chance of winning, despite the lack of media attention compared to their counterparts.

Whether you’re looking for drama, romance or even fantasy. This year's nominations give you a bit of everything. So, sit back and watch the 2024 Academy Award nominations, they might just change your mind on who is more deserving.

Past Lives

A story of lost love and a childhood crush, the painful and dangerous access to the past given by digital media; the roads not taken, the lives not led, and the futile luxury of regret. Past Lives is a movie that speaks to the migrant experience and the way this creates lifelong alternative realities in the mind: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future. In a way it is similar to the frantic, Oscar-winning multiverse comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, though, might we say, better and truer.

Watch Past Lives on Amazon Prime Video.

Poor Things

Yorgos Lanthimos’ singular storytelling has established him as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand directors – with the acting elite clearing their schedules for a chance to work with him. Emma Stone is the beating heart of this macabre tale about a Frankenstein-esque professor and his creation, Bella. It unpacks themes of empowerment, love and loss, all with the darkly comic undertone that Lanthimos does so well. It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you are being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you – but that’s what Lanthimos does best, make you doubt your likeness of the movie.

Watch Poor Things on MUBI.

The Zone of Interest

What does a Nazi do on his day off? Things any of us might do, especially on a sunny afternoon: He takes the family out for a countryside picnic, watching them eat, play and splash in a river and then hiking with them back to the car. The Zone of Interest, the brilliantly disquieting movie from the English writer-director Jonathan Glazer, never brings us over that camp wall. It’s a horror film that keeps its horrors rigorously hidden from view. But while restrained in form and implications, Zone is not coy, and is surprisingly quick to disgorge its secrets. The camp is Auschwitz. The Nazi is Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), the camp’s longest-serving commandant. Glazer, drawing very loose inspiration from a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis, confines his narrative focus to the everyday rhythms and meticulously researched details of the Hösses’ family life.

Watch The Zone of Interest on MUBI.

Anatomy of a Fall

Anatomy of a Fall, a cerebral trial drama by the director Justine Triet, opens with a mysterious death in the French Alps. The deceased is an aspiring writer named Samuel (Samuel Theis). The suspect is his more successful wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a novelist who is a lot like her surroundings: stoic, remote and a tad frosty. Did Sandra kill her husband? As the film flows from investigation to tribunal to verdict, it’s only interested in the question — not the answer. The most important judge in the court room is the couple’s preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Partly blind because of an accident that figures into the case, Daniel is uncomfortable becoming a character in the lawyers’ competing narratives. His poor vision is a metaphor for the struggle to see the truth. Triet doesn’t satisfy you with the anticipated end but leaves it to the viewer to decide what actually might have happened at the scene of the crime.

Watch Anatomy of a Fall on AppleTV+.

American Fiction

Considered one of the cinematic triumphs of 2023, American Fiction is a relentlessly funny, uncomfortable and surprisingly touching satire. Jeffrey Wright plays a highbrow author railing against the publishing industry’s insatiable, reductive appetite for Black trauma, while Issa Rae (a smart, successful rival novelist defending her right to pen those same stories) and Erika Alexander support with their own stellar, steely performances. Indeed, somehow, among the snappy takedowns, writer and director Cord Jefferson also creates a touching family drama and modern love story. A movie that has it all.  

Watch American Fiction on AppleTV+.