A total of nine movies are in the running for the Academy Award for Best Picture at the Oscars 2020, but Marriage Story should be the eventual winner. This year’s Oscars ceremony, which will once again be without a host, takes place on Sunday 9 February, 2020, at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, Los Angeles. The Oscar nominations revealed a strong list of Best Picture candidates, although as ever awards season has whittled those down to a few frontrunners.
Leading the way right now are 1917, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Parasite, which have separated themselves from the rest of the pack thanks to some big wins at other awards shows, as well as a lot of general buzz and hype. One of those three is most likely to take home Best Picture, but it’s Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story that deserves to, even though the film has been shut out this awards season.
Released on Netflix towards the end of 2019 (after an Oscars-qualifying run in cinemas, of course), Marriage Story was a hit with critics, and rightly so. The drama, which stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as a couple going through a divorce, is somewhat based on Baumbach’s own divorce experience, and what comes is an at-times brutal, emotional, and authentic piece of work that ranks not only as the best movie of 2019, but one of the very best movies of the 2010s decade too. It’s also one that should, on the face of it, tick many Best Picture boxes for Oscar voters.
To start, there are the performances. Joaquin Phoenix is a shoo-in for Best Actor, but the emotional range on display from Driver - who truly flips between comic and tragic, breaking down in tears one moment, performing Sondheim the next - is beyond any other work in the category this year. Much the same can be said for Johansson, who gets perhaps a trickier role (since Driver’s Charlie is more the film’s viewpoint), but nonetheless delivers a fully layered performance. These are complex parts, and their actors astonish in them. They’re complemented by a full roster of supporting actor greats, from Laura Dern (who is expected to win Best Supporting Actress) to Ray Liotta and Alan Alda. The performances in Marriage Story across the board are sublime, but that’s just the beginning.
Those performances elevate what’s already on the page of Marriage Story’s incredible screenplay, which manages to find so much humor, warmth, and beauty in what’s a serious, cold, and ugly moment for the couple at its center. Marriage Story is more than a mere divorce drama, not only because it’s so funny as well as sad, but because this isn’t really a story of divorce, but a story of love, both conditional and unconditional, and how that sometimes just isn’t enough. It isn’t a big political statement piece, there’s not an obvious ‘message’ to the film in that sense, but its themes are ones that are universal and wholly relatable. That’s less the kind of film that wins Best Picture, but certainly the kind of film that should.
A lot of Marriage Story is relatively unshowy, which is perhaps another reason it won’t win Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars. But where other directors may need flash, Baumbach knows that Marriage Story can soar on its stars and screenplay; the direction is in service of them, but it’s with a sense of restraint that is so often lacking. The same goes for the editing, which keeps Marriage Story going at a great pace, allowing the most poignant moments to linger, the comedy beats to land, and the movie never once sagging. It’s a beautifully crafted film - with a score by Randy Newman that heightens every ounce of emotion around it - and one that, across the board, has all the qualities of an Academy Award winner. Marriage Story won’t win Best Picture at the Oscars, but it really, really should.
Next: Oscars 2020 Best Picture Nominees, Ranked
