Why Drive My Car deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar

polygon.com:

The 2022 Oscars ceremony is coming up on March 27, and 10 new movies are up for the Best Picture title: Belfast, CODA, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, and West Side Story. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and any of them might end up winning big. In the lead-up to the Oscars, we’re making a case for why each of them might deserve to take the big prize.

Drive My Car, directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi from a short story by celebrated Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Renowned stage director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is quietly dealing with an overwhelming guilt and confusion about a series of events involving his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima). While processing these emotions alone, he leaves the Toyko area for a residency in Hiroshima, where he’s set to stage a version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with a multi-national cast of actors speaking different languages. When a quiet, scarred woman named Misaki (Tôko Miura) is assigned as his driver for the project, he initially resists, but he eventually forms a bond with her, and with young actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada). As his play comes closer and closer to its premiere, all three characters start to reveal devastating secrets.

Drive My Car was a major critics’ darling in 2021, winning Best Picture awards from the critics’ associations in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Boston, as well as the National Society of Film Critics. Hamaguchi’s previous film, 2021’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, was highly celebrated as well, with its three powerful emotional stories earning praise for their impeccable cinematic and narrative craft. Murakami is also a major name here — the author of The Wind-Up