Call Me By Your Name - 4 nominations

Best Picture - Peter Spears, Luca Guadagnino, Emilie Georges and Marco Morabito
Actor in a Leading Role, Timothée Chalamet
Music (Original Song), "Mystery Of Love" from Call Me by Your Name, Music and Lyric by Sufjan Stevens
Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Screenplay by James Ivory

Elio (Timothee Chalamet) is a 17 year old student who lives with his professor father and translator mother in Italy, living the normal life of a teenager (as normal as it can be when one is trilingual and an incredible musician). The family of intellectuals welcomes Oliver, a doctoral student and uber hottie (Armie Hammer), to live with them for the summer so that he can study with Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg).  Over the course of the summer, Elio experiences a sexual awakening having both his first experience with a girlfriend and heterosexual sex and his first experience with love, as he and Oliver find delight in each other.  

There are some confusing moments - Oliver claims to have been trying to woo Elio throughout the summer, but has an affair with a woman from the town.  He never says anything about why a 17 year old would find it hard to decipher that Oliver might be interested in a gay romance while he is pursuing a woman, and we the audience must decipher that both Oliver and Elio are having sex with women while apparently secretly pining for each other.  The sexual orientation of both characters is never entirely clear, but the romance is so pure that labels are clearly irrelevant and totally unimportant.

I'm not a big lover of slow, methodical films like this one, and if you peruse my past reviews of films, you'll find similar criticisms as I'm expressing here.  Call Me By Your Name is gorgeous to look at at, and it's true that Timothee Chalamet gives a remarkable performance for someone so young - the final shot of the film is probably what won him the nomination.  

But what I couldn't get over in the age of #metoo, where an entire movie is reshot because Kevin Spacey was sexually inappropriate with a 14 year old at age 30 (I'll talk more about this in my future review of All the Money in the World), people are strangely silent about a film in which a 17 year old boy is finding himself with a 24 year old man (and let's face it, Armie Hammer is actually a 29 year old man who looks like a 29 year old man which doesn't help).  I couldn't get past the "ew" factor of a teenager and a grown man who has finished college.  Certainly one could argue that Elio would be 18 in a year and that he was already old for his age and that I'm being too conventional.  But had this same film been shot with another high school student, I think this creep factor wouldn't have been an issue.

To me, the most powerful part of the film comes at the end in a monologue by Michael Stuhlbarg who plays Elio's father.  (Spoiler alert)  To see a father express unconditional love, to provide support when his child's heart is breaking, and to reassure him that everything he is experiencing is normal AND important was truly pivotal and must honored.  Though this one monologue isn't really enough to garner an Oscar nomination this year, it certainly is enough to give Stuhlbarg the great adoration that he deserves for his performance.

Again, I'm not always engaged by long, slow films, so I'm not sure that the creep factor was my only issue with the film.  There are plenty of people who love this style and I've heard many who have said they thought this the finest film of the year.  Bottom line, it wasn't for me and if you are like me, you can skip it.

To watch the movie trailer: