Why Licorice Pizza 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.

Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Gary Valentine (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son, Cooper Hoffman) is a high-schooler and aspiring actor with endless ambitions around launching his own business. Alana Kane (musician and first-time actor Alana Haim) is a photographer’s assistant who can’t seem to get her life started. When Gary makes overtures to Alana on school picture day, the two begin a flirtatious relationship, wheeling and dealing their way across southern California in the 1970s.

Paul Thomas Anderson is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s modern masters, a man who makes surprising and sometimes inaccessibly idiosyncratic films while remaining refreshingly candid and unpretentious in person. (Anderson loved Venom: Let There Be Carnage.) His films are almost universally praised, even if they don’t attract universal awards attention: He’s been up for Best Director and Best Picture twice — for 2007’s There Will Be Blood and 2017’s Phantom Thread, both meticulously executed period dramas that could easily qualify as one of the best of their respective decades — but he’s never won an Oscar. Licorice Pizza winning an award would be something of a departure, as it’s Anderson operating in a looser, more sentimental mode, outside of the Academy’s usual tastes.

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