Don’t Look Up (2021)—The Most Unlikely Oscar Nomination

With the 94th Academy Awards taking place last Sunday, most of the nominations make sense. However, one nominee comes at a bit of a surprise. Why did this…thing get a nomination? Before you bring up that 2016’s Suicide Squad won an Academy Award, that was for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, not Best Picture. Why the flying FUCK was this film nominated for Best Picture?!!!! Were there really weren’t any other more qualified films out there?

Astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discover a large comet that’s about to collide with Earth. They attempt to disclose their findings to the president (played by Meryl Streep), but to no avail. However, when the midterm elections are nearing, a sex scandal involving the president has leaked, prompting her to take the comet finding and its imminent collision into Earth seriously.

Let me say this, I think that the film excels on a technical level. The performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep all shine through. Leo really sells the role of a nervous scientist who tries to do his best to spread true information about the comet to warn people of the imminent destruction of Earth. With that said, that is all the praise I will give this movie. Now, time for me to be utterly ruthless…

First off, this film is not for people who either have anxiety or a penchant for worrying about things. The message of the film is basically we’re all gonna die, so everyone panic! Yeah, what a great fucking message you got there, movie! Yes, I understand that the comet is an allegory for climate change and the ill effect it will have on our planet, but freaking out about how we’re all gonna die is not the way to get things done! You need to assess what you can do and then act accordingly. Throughout the film, both our main leads freak out about how we’re all gonna die and that nothing can stop it from happening.

Now onto Meryl Streep’s president. The best way I can describe her character is if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had a lovechild with Mao Zedong. Yeah, that bad! Her plan to deal with the comet colliding into earth is to nuke the comet to change the course of its direction. When scientists later find that gold deposits are on the comet, they abandon trying to destroy it to mine it so that they can all become filthy rich. What a great fucking president!! First off, nuking a comet is the worst possible thing to do. It feels like I’m watching an episode from Rick and Morty when planet Earth was forced to play a singing competition for the giant heads, and the U.S. general decides to fire nukes at the giant heads!! Except this is in a multi-million dollar budget film!!!! How do you come up with that kind of plan?!! Who the fuck would approve of that?!!! And when she’s criticized later on in the film, she goes on to lambast her opponents in a very Trump-like fashion. God, I hate her so much!!!!

On the track of characters I hate, I also hate that son of a bitch Peter Isherwell! Mark Rylance has been in some of my favorite films such as The Trial of the Chicago 7 and is a great all-around actor. But this isn’t about his performance, it’s about the character he plays. Peter is one of the top donors of the government funded project and his greed fuels the project to extract minerals from the comet. This motherfucker is a stand-in for every greedy businessman who doesn’t give a shit about anyone else but himself. And he also is likely a pedophile since, he has prepubescent girls present his products and even have one of them confess feelings of love towards him. If I had it my way, I would strap him to a chair and slice his testicles off with a rusty steak knife.

This is one of two times where I have never watched a film to its entirety, the other being Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland. At least with every bad film I hate, I watched to the very end! I only made it about 60-70% of the way through, and all I have to say is that Don’t Look Up is so torturous that I have no desire to finish it! Again, why was this film nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay? I really don’t know, you tell me! If anything, I could say it’s the Academy Awards virtue signaling, as much as I hate that term. Most people use it as a way to shit on good films that feature minority groups, but in the case of Don’t Look Up, I honestly think it’s their way of trying to care for climate change, because I genuinely don’t know why it’s nominated!

Overall, while I understand that the film was made to raise awareness of the dangers of climate change, this is not the way to present it. The film plays it as if there’s nothing we can do to solve the problem and that we should all just give up and panic. For people who already have anxiety and have a tendency to worry about everything, this is not a film for you to enjoy. The only feeling you will get out of this is more paranoia and suffering. I’d rather watch the live action Cat in the Hat and Dungeons and Dragons back-to-back over this piece of shit film any day of the week!