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There’s an expression in Formula One racing: “outperforming the car.” It refers to a scenario in which a driver delivers outstanding results despite the questionable pedigree of the vehicle itself. You might apply that maxim to F1, the sports drama that has been nominated for four Oscars including, somewhat bafflingly, best picture — despite receiving perfectly average notices across the board and no buzz for its top-line talent.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski and starring Brad Pitt, the film combines a “one last chance" narrative with the kind of high-speed car races that only a (reported) $200 million-plus budget can buy. Pitt, who also co-produces, plays Sonny Hayes, an ex-F1 driver whose career stalled after an on-track accident 30 years ago. He’s given a chance to prove he’s still got it when an old friend (Javier Bardem) invites him to race for his new team. It’s an inoffensive throwback to the kind of sports films that Hollywood used to make on the regular. The expected beats all play out in slick, unsurprising fashion (“visceral but corny,” said our own review) as Sonny gets back behind the wheel and pieces his life together, one lap at a time.
View Green Video on the source websiteHere’s the thing: the film’s trio of Oscar nominations for technical achievements does make sense. The film’s sound, editing and visual effects work in tandem to capture the concussive noise and speed of a Formula One Grand Prix. The movie’s race sequences, crafted with the cooperation of F1, are genuinely exciting (even if Sonny commits so many illegal moves that, realistically, he would have incurred championship-ending penalties from the notoriously stringent FIA).
So, the technical nods feel warranted — but best picture? That’s a stretch.
What exactly is it about F1 that earns it a place alongside the likes of Sentimental Value, Sinners and Marty Supreme? Those are films with genuine artistry under the hood. They feel urgent and ground-breaking, their drama and action threaded with prescient questions about, respectively, forgiveness, the power of music and single-minded egotism. On a purely narrative level, F1 can’t hope to touch them. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger, in essentially rewriting his own Oscar-nominated script for Top Gun: Maverick, struggles to come up with anything even half as compelling as a real Grand Prix, instead relying on stock drama (love issues with Kerry Condon; team rivalry with Damson Idris) to fill the yawning spaces between races.
And of all the Oscars for which the film has been nominated, it’s a shame that Hans Zimmer wasn’t acknowledged for his surging score. (Though he did make the 20-strong pre-nomination shortlist, whittled down by members of the Academy’s music branch.) More than anything, it imbues F1 with an undercurrent of tension and excitement that is otherwise lacking from the, well, formulaic story.
Still, the question remains: does F1 really have a shot at best picture? History says no. In 2020, Academy voters garlanded another racing drama, Ford v Ferrari (aka Le Mans ’66), with a similar array of technical nominations plus best picture. On the night, it won two — best sound editing and best film editing — and lost out on the big prize, which went to a history-making Parasite. Kosinski and Kruger’s last collaboration, also with Oscar-nominated producer Jerry Bruckheimer, was 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick — that received six nominations including best picture, with only one win, for its sound.
Not that the future is ever set when it comes to the Academy. Who knows, maybe the “Drive to Survive effect” has reached as far as Hollywood. Formula One ratings have skyrocketed in the wake of that Netflix show, which takes viewers inside the cockpits and allows us to get to know the racers more intimately than ever before. Could voters, conscious of the Oscar ceremony’s own flagging popularity, be looking to prove they still have their fingers on the pulse by picking F1 as the best film of the year? Will the technical mastery of this rubber-burning Rocky thrust it to gold?
“I’ve always believed that you should never, ever give up,” Michael Schumacher once said. In a world where Crash, Green Book and CODA can win the top prize, maybe underdog F1 has a shot at the podium after all…
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