Comment: Wicked is a fun movie musical, sure, but it shouldn't win the Best Picture Oscar

The Oscars nominations are here, and every snooty cinephile and Letterboxd clout chaser has opinions. So here’s mine: Wicked was a very fun move, but it shouldn’t win Best Picture.

Before you grab your buckets of water to melt me like a wicked witch, let me caveat that I thoroughly enjoyed my cinema-going experience at Wicked.

Watching the opening scenes did give me that tummy-flip of fun that I haven’t had since I watched the first Harry Potter movies, and I can’t enjoy those now because *gestures at JK Rowling’s entire online presence*. One friend told me they couldn’t wait for Wicked to come out on streaming, because they knew it would be their new comfort movie.

But is a fuzzy feeling enough to make it truly worthy of the Academy Awards’ highest prize? Movie musicals have, historically taken the top gong. West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Oliver! (1968), and Chicago (2002) all got Best Picture. There hasn’t been one in over two decades, mind, if you don’t count the La La Land snafu.

Now Wicked may well win where its origin story, The Wizard of Oz, did not — it lost to Gone With the Wind in 1939.

Wicked’s film’s clever and intricate costumes, it’s frankly death-defying choreography, and the stellar performances of Cynthia Erivo (nominated for Best Actress) and Ariana Grande (in the running for Best Supporting Actress) are all worthy contenders in their own right. Nine nominations would have been enough. But as a coherent whole it is, narratively and spiritually, a flop.

The film’s hefty two hour forty minute run-time is longer than the entire Broadway show, sans interval. That means a lot of padding, rather than the kind of snappy editing you ideally want for a gold-trophy-winning slice of the silver screen.

It re-commits Wicked’s original sin of ending the first act on Defying Gravity, the show’s one true banger. But rather than wait through an interval for the anti-climactic showtunes to come, audiences will have to wait years – and pay for another ticket.

Splitting an adaptation of a beloved work has, to my chagrin, become a popular cash-grab move from movie studios. Wicked has been particularly sly about this. Nowhere on the promotional materials would you guess that it is simply the opening act.

Because of this decision to cleave it in two, it is a stunted story. The emotional through-lines of the character’s development, its radical stance that reviled outsiders work for good while the real baddies occupy the halls of fame and power, all lost in the shiny sauce. Now we have months of Grande queerbaiting over Glinda’s sexuality when, to be clear, she and the Wicked Witch of the East were banging on the way to the Emerald City in the book that inspired the musical that inspired this film.

Musicals have a powerful remit, as Hollywood knows better than most. The Sound of Music was very clear that Nazi’s are the bad guys. Wicked could have taken similar aim at the dangers of creeping fascism, but it didn’t stick the landing.

It leaves the audience still thinking Grande’s Glinda is just too concerned with self image to join Erivo’s Elphaba on that broomstick, rather than a woman who is about to become the figurehead of a fascist state. The world’s richest man is currently throwing out Sieg Heils on TV; we need films unafraid to show audiences where an obsession with popularity can lead to populism.

There are other, better films in the running for Best Picture that managed to tell a whole story in a single piece of cinema and tackle thorny issues.

Conclave is a glorious, multi-faceted gem of a story about faith, gender and the corrupting lure of power. It managed to turn a pulpy airport thriller into a breathtaking work of art. I won’t spoil the twist, but it’s an absolute wonder and highly controversial given the current state of attacks gender difference from the highest halls of power.