Why Licorice Pizza deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar

On March 27, the 2022 Oscars will be held. Ten new films are being considered for Best Picture. Belfast, CODA, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, Dog PowerPlease see the following: West Side Story. Each person has strengths and flaws, but any one could be the winner. In the lead-up to the Oscars, we’re making a case for why each of them might deserve to take the big prize.

WHAT’S THE MOVIE?

Licorice PizzaThe film was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

WHAT’S THE STORY?

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. Gary approaches Alana at school to make overtures, and the pair begin an affair, wheeling, dealing, their way through southern California in 1970s.

WHAT’S THE CRED?

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: 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.

WHY SHOULD IT WIN?

Like Hangout movies Licorice PizzaSometimes it can seem so simple. These films are works of exquisite craft that feel more like effortless strollabouts. This is contrary to what people mean when they describe a film as “awards bait,” which denotes a palpable sense of effort. This is the bias that makes comedies — and Licorice Pizza arguably is one — into difficult awards fodder. But Licorice Pizza is a complex portrait of two young people playing at things that they’re not, a romance that isn’t really about two people in love as much as it is two people using each other to prove something to themselves in the early moments of a tumultuous decade. Gary and Alana feel too scared to discover what the future holds for them.

WHAT’S THE CATCH?

There are two things that can hinder all of this craft. The first is a repeated gag involving a character played by John Michael Higgins, a business tycoon who opens the neighborhood’s first Japanese restaurant and speaks in ways that come off as open racist caricature. It’s a poorly constructed gag that invites the audience to laugh at the racism and not the racist, a glaring lack of care in a film otherwise full of it. The other concern is just an occupational hazard of this genre of film: It’s a movie about people who might not really learn anything by the end. While “characters learning” isn’t the mark of a good movie, it’s a good recipe for a satisfying one. The success of a movie depends on its impact on viewers.

One great thing that no one should miss

Photo: MGM Studios

At the end Licorice Pizza’s second act, Gary and Alana are hired to install a waterbed in the home of unhinged big-shot Jon Peters (the real-life then-boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, played by Bradley Cooper). The job takes a turn when Gary vandalizes Jon’s car, and Gary and Alana have to get away in a truck that’s out of gas, rolling downhill in reverse to safety and a gas station.

In a film that isn’t terribly dense on plot, Alana’s reverse downhill drive is the film’s most thrilling moment, and the character’s personal nadir. It’s a magnetic sequence, pulled off with tremendous skill. And it gives the impression that the character is so good at navigating this crisis because she’s been rolling downhill for a long time now.

HOW DO I VIEW IT?

Licorice Pizza Currently playing in theatres. Check out the streaming guide for every nominee in 2022 Oscars.

Previously:

Why? Don’t Look Up Worths to be the Best Picture
What is the point? Dog Power deserves to be the Best Picture
Why? West Side StoryIdeal Picture
Why? Belfastdeserves the Best Picture
Let’s find out why Nightmare Alleydeserves the Best Picture
Why? King Richarddeserves the Best Picture
It is important to understand why Dunedeserves the Best Picture

Next stop:

Why? CODAdeserves the Best Picture