Netflix Best Picture nominee All Quiet on the Western Front is the Oscars’ horror contender
With so many movie industry awards happening before the Academy Awards ceremony, the Oscar winners tend to feel relatively predictable by the time the actual broadcast rolls around. So the biggest surprises tend to be reserved for the nominations. One of this year’s bigger surprises was the overall strength of Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which racked up nine Academy nominations, including Best Picture. It’s won a variety of industry and technical awards, and appeared prominently on best-of-2022 awards from film critics circles. At the BAFTAs (essentially the British Oscars), it notched an impressive 14 nominations and won in seven categories, including Best Film and Best Director. It’s now considered one of a handful of long-shot possibilities at upsetting presumed frontrunner Everything Everywhere All at Once for Best Picture in the United States. This is especially surprising, because it’s arguably the worst movie among the 10 nominees.
That may seem like a harsh judgment, especially for a movie with such impeccable technical credentials, coming from a story with such lasting cross-generational impact. The German-language film, a new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic 1929 anti-war novel, cuts between hardline negotiations to end World War I and the grisly fates of a group of young German soldiers. It’s a timeless message about the horrors of war. (So timeless, in fact, that it already inspired a Best Picture-winning 1930 adaptation.) But director Edward Berger uses a surprising amount of gore to deliver this message, to the point where the anti-war bona fides feel oddly regressive.
Filmmaker François Truffaut has been consistently cited (and even more frequently paraphrased) on the subject of
Read more on polygon.com
