Blitz is one of those movies in the Oscar race that is elevated before it is seen. That’s always a tricky prospect. Ideally, movies should be seen with lowered expectations. High expectations are tough to meet, especially if the measure is Oscar nominations. Things were better, and more healthy, when movies had to please audiences long before they were considered for the Oscars. But that isn’t what happens now. The power has given over, almost completely, to the tastemakers.
Blitz is an Apple movie so even if it was a crowdpleaser like, say, CODA, it doesn’t have any way to really build that momentum since it will not open wide. It is designed to live on Apple-TV, which is where most people will see it and the whole point of Apple being involved in the Oscar race at all (like Netflix and Mubi).
Blitz will open in select theaters on November 1.
As to whether it will be the Oscar player the pundits anticipated is a different question now that we’ve seen the reactions and the early reviews.
Rotten Tomatoes has given the film a perfect score of 100% at the moment, with just 15 reviews.
It’s likely to get good reviews as it doesn’t sound like there is anything about it that anyone would find offensive. The reviews seem to suggest thatting a more Steve McQueen-like movie (12 Years a Slave, Shame, etc.), and this film has a Barry Levinson feel as a classic period film about WW2. There isn’t any they were expecthing wrong with that. But the question is whether it can find a place in the lineup.
The film’s best review comes from the Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey who gives it five stars:
Earlier this year, the British filmmaker Steve McQueen released Occupied City, a four-hour documentary companion to his partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. Building by building, street by street, it mapped out its stories of fascistic brutality and brave resistance, presenting those same places as they appear to us today. Its point was simple, but deeply effective: we are surrounded and consumed by history, and blind to it only by our own folly. Time and time again, it circles back to look us in the eye.
Blitz, McQueen’s fifth feature after Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave and Widows, builds on those ideas until they swell into a symphony. It’s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it’s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others.
Owen Gleiberman of Variety says:
Does “Blitz” transport you? In a literal way, yes. McQueen recreates London during the Blitz with such you-are-there detail and, at moments, such devastating smoky hellscape grandeur that we feel we know the place, and its citizens too. Yet there’s something a tad generic about the movie’s journey. Wartime has a way of bringing out the best and the worst in people and everything in between. But there’s a stiff-upper-lip nobility to “Blitz,” as there was to Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast.” It’s hard not to be touched by it, but the movie, for all its craft, feels muffled by good intentions.
So the question then becomes will the tastemakers keep it in their predictions, where it’s been for so long? If I had to guess, give the average review is around 3/5, they will drop it to either #10 or out completely. You need at least 100 people who say it’s the best film of the year to get in for Best Picture.
If Apple spends on ads then it’s possible that might influence how the pundits predict. But probably you’re looking at crafts nominations – Production Design, Cinematography, Sound, etc., more so than Picture, Director, etc.
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