The Oscar Race Review: "Nickel Boys"
A new series where I try my best to see every Best Picture nominee ahead of the Academy Awards and try to figure out which film will take the top prize
In an effort to branch out and meet people IRL with similar interests, I started 2025 by doing something that sounds more prestigious than it is and joined the DC Film Society. As a literal card-carrying member of the group, I get access to monthly discussions, free screenings, and more. It was as a result of this that I got an alert a few days ago that if I wanted to catch MGM/Amazon’s newest prestige picture Nickel Boys for free, all I had to do was show up to the Georgetown AMC at 2 PM on a Thursday and hope that I got a seat.
It’s as a result of this program that I was able to watch this incredible movie, so thank you to the DC Film Society and MGM for the opportunity.
An adaptation of the 2019 novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys follows Elwood and Turner, two teenage boys stuck in Nickel Academy reform school in mid-60s Florida. The conditions are harsh, the adults are cruel, and the bullying is brutal, but the friendship between our two protagonists is tender and hopeful as we get dual perspectives on what life at Nickel reveals about American injustice in the middle of the 20th century and beyond.
The first thing that anyone will likely want to talk about with Nickel Boys is the cinematography. Director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray opt to shoot the film entirely from the first person perspectives of Elwood and Turner. It’s tempting to call this a gimmick; movies like Hardcore Henry have attempted this style before in an attempt to emulate the visceral action of games like Call of Duty to mixed results.
Nickel Boys isn’t trying to drop us right into chaotic action though. In truth, it doesn’t even feel like we’re being dropped into reality. Much of the film feels less like the actual events of the story and more the subjective memory of those events. Characters will repeat lines a second or third time, almost like we need to remember it again for our own sake. There’s no clear distinction between dream and reality, the two often seeping into one another and confusing our sense of what really happened.
The effect on storytelling is powerful. We as the audience see the world in all its beauty and misery, with no ability to look away or hope for a cut to a gentler perspective. Elwood and Turner look at the world differently, the former casts his eyes down during many stressful moments but refuses to believe the world cannot be changed while the latter looks openly at a world he knows is built on hate and injustice.
In a particularly powerful moment of visual metaphor, the pair come across an old hanging tree, the living wood grown fully around the metal loop hammered into the trunk to more easily lynch generations of African-Americans. The hate is so ingrained, it’s simply part of the tree’s makeup now.
Not a single performance here is anything less than outstanding. The two leads, Ethan Herisse as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner, are simply brilliant. These roles must have been so hard to perform, considering much of the physical acting of each character is replaced by the camera’s perspective. But the young stars pull it off. They have extraordinary chemistry as a pair, and just shine on camera. Herisse and Wilson absolutely nail the subtle facial cues that are possible when the camera is so tight on their faces, telling entire stories with a flick of the eyes or a flare of the nostrils.
The supporting cast also totally kills it. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is perfectly brilliant as Elwood’s grandmother. You buy her as this force of human good despite a life of violent hatred that has tried to bring her down. Hamish Linklater is subtly terrifying as Spencer, the white administrator whose simmering hatred breeds panic in the audience whenever he’s on-screen. Nickel Academy is a school where the worst things possible can and do happen, and Linklater works beautifully as a manifestation of unfair authority that can make those frightening possibilities reality.
Frankly, I’m not surprised there were no acting nominations for Nickel Boys at the Oscars since this is more of an ensemble piece and those are hard to figure out individual acting awards for. But if there were an Academy Award for Best Ensemble (which there should be!), I’d put Nickel Boys up there with Dune Part Two as the frontrunner to win.
Nickel Boys is a long 2 hours and 20 minutes, and though the non-linear timeline does break up the tension every once in a while to give you space to breathe, it is tough to sit in the anxiety of what could happen next at Nickel Academy for that long. Nothing horrifically violent is ever shown, but the perspective of the camera means the audience has to sit with the worry of what could happen even if we don’t explicitly see it.
The last ten minutes of this movie make it all worth it. When combined with the brilliant score by Alex Somers, it’s some of the most breathtaking filmmaking I’ve seen in ages. No spoilers though. You’re gonna want to go into it totally blind.
Given recent political developments, one has to assume that if Jeff Bezos has final say over his company’s film productions, he won’t be greenlighting anything like Nickel Boys again for the foreseeable future. The film contrasts the hope of the Civil Rights movement with the horrible truths of racial inequality in the Jim Crow South. Protesters like Elwood fight and claw to end places like Nickel Academy, but the truth is that its existence means the system is working as intended.
I don’t think Nickel Boys has much of a shot at winning Best Picture come March, but that’s not a knock against the movie. This is an ambitious, challenging, at times abstract piece of filmmaking. The Academy isn’t wont to reward films like these with statues and two minutes for its producers to make a speech.
A loss in this category wouldn’t be the most egregious snub in the world; for that, you simply have to look at the nominations list. Nickel Boys received a paltry two nominations, one for Best Picture, the other for Best Adapted Screenplay. Both are deserved, but the lack of any recognition for the mind blowing visuals and audio design of this film is frankly insulting. No other film has ever placed me so firmly into the mind of a fictional character, and there’s not even a chance of rewarding the director, cinematographer, or sound team for that incredible achievement.
Nickel Boys isn’t for everyone, but I just know this film’s going to have an audience of diehard adorers for decades to come. There’s going to be an unmissable Criterion Collection release of this movie, which I’ll be first in line to get.
More than anything else, I find Nickel Boys supremely important right now. In an era where so many at the top of the pile want to pretend that things were always fine all along for everyone, a historical piece like this that refuses to let you look away from the truth serves as a necessary counter-argument. When this inevitably gets added to Prime, watch it quick, before Bezos finds out and has it delisted to appease his new Presidential pal.