RNZ critics rate the 2024 Oscar winners

The Oscars is over for another year. Oppenheimer swept the board with seven awards, Poor Things won four, and Zone of Interest won two. Buzzy 2023 cultural juggernaut Barbie went home with one Oscar for best original song.

Here’s what RNZ’s resident film buffs had to say about this year's winners.

Oppenheimer (2023), directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Cillian Murphy. Photo: Universal Pictures - Atlas Enter / Collection ChristopheL via AFP

Emma Stone has bagged Best Actress for her Performance in Poor Things. Here’s Dan Slevin’s take on the film for Widescreen.

The Zone of Interest, which won Best International Feature, is a harrowing film about the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp and his family. The pictures are almost like home movies, the sound is pure horror, writes Simon Morris.

Like so many of Alexander Payne’s films, The Holdovers, for which Da'Vine Joy Randolph won Best Supporting Actress, is about people slowly realising that the stories they tell themselves about themselves are no longer serving them. Not a vintage Payne effort, writes Dan Slevin, but there are plenty of pleasures to be had.

Best Visual Effects went to Godzilla Minus One, in which the famous Japanese radioactive lizard is reimagined for post-war Japan.

Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig, starring Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures - Heyday F / Collection ChristopheL via AFP

Barbie scored just one Oscar for Best Original Song - surprisingly it wasn't for Ryan Gosling's 'I'm Just Ken', but rather for Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell's 'What Was I Made For?'. 

When the Oscar nominations were announced, much was made of the fact that its star, Margot Robbie, and director, Greta Gerwig, were ignored. In this review, Dan Slevin points out that the film asks whether the 'real world' even thinks of women as human at all?