I bet no one thought of All Quiet for more than a few seconds as a likely Oscar winner until two weeks before the winning streak Bafta’s – seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director – even had his own director shake his head in disbelief. Repeating the trick seems unlikely, but strange things have happened: remember when Green Book stood between Roma, The Favourite, and BlacKkKlansman to win Best Picture of 2019? And non-English-language films take the form: All Quiet is the 15th film to receive a Best Picture nomination, although admittedly Parasite is, in 2020, the only film to go on and win the award.) .
All Quiet’s record at Baftas may have been lost a little in the post-show rave of diversity, Bernard Cribbins and Angela Bassett have done it, but while Everything Everywhere All at Once is clear Oscar’s favorite movie All Quiet is on his shoulders, having picked up many names like The Banshees of Inisherin. Can he go all the way?Well, this is definitely a brilliantly made movie that achieves an astonishing level of realism about the battlefields of World War I. What’s more, the alien perspective – of the naive, careless German soldiers we Brits are used to seeing as effective killers killing our boys – gives the film a ‘s strange shell and kicked it out of the territory. often. (This even applies to the bizarre scenes of the Final Armistice, which attempt to present the top French leadership as callous belligerents, as opposed to the Germans being begs for humanity.)
On the other hand, All Quiet’s chances will likely be undermined by a WWI interest in the (mostly) American voting pool. Unlike World War II and other major conflicts in which the United States was involved, the first conflict does not appear to have left such a deep scar on the national psyche — not as much as that of the United States. European countries participated.When the Michael Morpurgo War Horse adaptation was released in 2012, Steven Spielberg pointed out that conflict is not taught in American schools, despite the deaths of more than 50,000 American soldiers in the conflict.
It was also inevitable that the Germans’ reception of the film was too contradictory. One reviewer described it as “148 minutes of blockbuster-compatible war kits”. Oh.
All Quiet’s main strength is, I guess, the same weakness that could be considered a weakness in another context: it doesn’t delve into the controversial and/or challenging areas of contemporary discourse. that other movies use. promote their campaigns, whether it’s toxic masculinity (Banshees), racial violence (Till), cultural abolition (Tár), or heinous wealth (Sad Triangle).All Quiet does not take the position or exaggerate its meaning. It’s just an incredibly powerful film about a period historical event whose consequences we’re still living with to this day. This, however, may not be enough.
