In 2019—when “climate emergency” became Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, millions of people took to the streets for global climate strikes, and a 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl was chosen as Time’s person of the year for her dogged climate activism—Hollywood did not lean in. In fact, you could say that the moviemakers honored by the Academy leaned way back, celebrating a retrograde era marked by white men free to be as unhinged and destructive as they please. Suffice it to say, environmental themes in this year’s Oscar picks weren’t exactly leaping out at us. Luckily, a movie-viewing experience is truly a modern Rorschach test. Here are Sierra’s enviro takes on seven nominated films, selected from a range of categories:

Parasite (Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Foreign Language Film, Original Screenplay, Production Design, and Film Editing)

Much like it is in the actual world, in Parasite true wealth and security means looking through a plate-glass window at rigorously managed nature, where no blade of grass gets to rise a micron above the others and poverty means living in a neighborhood that gets flooded with sewer water.

In the film, director Bong Joon Ho not so subtly uses nature as a tool to demonstrate wealth inequality, and not for the first time in his career. From Snowpiercer (the rich are shielded from eternal winter by a train; the poor are sacrificed to keep the train running) to Okja (the whole freaking system exists to help money-hungry factory farmers kidnap the animal buddies of rural children), this is a frequent trope of Joon Ho’s. Arguably, it should be more frequent in cinema, period. Climate change has made inequality and the tortured relationships between humans and nature into the central metaphors of the Anthropocene, so thank goodness someone is making films like this to counter all the vroom-vroom nostalgia of movies like Ford v Ferrari.

Parasite is light-years ahead of its Best Picture competition in inventiveness and sheer weirdness. But it lacks the empathy that would make it truly great. In the film, the landscape is actually more plausible than the human characters, who—despite the obvious talent of the actors portraying them—seem more like a fantasy of the guilty and well-to-do of what the private lives of the poor must be like. If an Oscar should go to anyone, it’s to that sewer water, which delivers a vibrant and utterly convincing performance. —Heather Smith

Keon-kyo (Yeo-jeong Jo) in the Oscar-nominated film Parasite | Courtesy of NEON + CJ

Frozen 2 (Nominated for Best Song)

I suspect that neither I nor the theater full of small children in Elsa dresses who I saw Frozen 2 with went in expecting to see a film about colonialism, Indigenous rights, and dam removal. But we live in interesting times. The first Frozen demonstrated the devastatingly lucrative power of merging the poofy-dress-princess archetype with the tortured-feelings-superhero archetype (Elsa is the first Disney princess with superpowers that extend beyond getting woodland creatures to do housework). I expected more of the same: ice, prisms, castles, sister drama.

But, similar to what happened with Coco before it, the writers behind Frozen 2 first ran afoul of, and then began to work with the cultures that they were incorporating into their storytelling. In the first Frozen, the character of Kristoff wore clothing that didn’t look particularly Norweigen but did closely resemble traditional clothing worn by the Sámi, an Indigenous culture that has fished, hunted, and herded reindeer for thousands of years in the far north of Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Russia, despite attempts by various iterations of those countries to sterilize, occupy, and legislate them out of existence. That, plus the fact that the opening music to Frozen incorporated the traditional Sámi jiok singing style, made it seem like Sámi culture was being used as a decorative flourish for some Norweigen princess drama, rather than something deserving of its own movie.

Rather than retroactively Sámi-ize Kristoff for Frozen 2, Disney worked with the Sámi council and other community representatives as cultural consultants and developed a plotline involving an imaginary territory to the north called Northuldra. In the film, Elsa and Anna have grown up on stories about a dam that their grandfather, the kindly king of Arendelle, gave Northuldra in a gesture of friendship. As the plot develops, Elsa and Anna realize that Grandpa was not what he seemed, and there is no such thing as a gift dam. (That dam, by the way, may or may not be based on the Alta dam, which was built in Sámi territory beginning in the 1970s.)

The result is good but not great—not because of the Sámi plotline but because Frozen 2 isn’t quite sure how to build suspense when it can’t tap directly into the primal fear of being frozen to death/otherwise murdered by an older sibling. Also, nature is still a backdrop to all the people-and-snowman plotlines. On a scale of one to Hayao Miyazaki, Frozen 2 is maybe a 4. But thanks to the Sámi, Frozen 2 is a much better and more interesting film than it would have been. —HS

Marriage Story (Nominated for Best Picture, Actress, Actor, Actress in a Supporting Role, Original Screenplay, and Original Score) 

As a child of divorce and an adult who last year ended a nearly decade-long relationship, I wasn’t expecting my primary emotion throughout Noah Baumbach’s depiction of marital unraveling to be flygskam. I’m referring, of course, to that word the Swedes unleashed on us all last year to describe the environmental guilt wrought by air travel.

Let me back up—Marriage Story centers around the divorce between Nicole (played by Scarlett Johansson) and her husband, Charlie (played by Adam Driver), and if Baumbach were to have slapped on a subtitle, “A Tale of Two Cities” would’ve been apt. The split itself roots back to Nicole’s desire (unacknowledged by Charlie) to live in her hometown of Los Angeles and pursue the onscreen career she backburnered when she settled in New York City for Charlie’s theater-directing life. As their ensuing legal clash heats up, the crux of the dispute becomes custody of their son, Henry. Post-split, Henry resides with Nicole in L.A.; meanwhile, Charlie, who continues to nurse delusions that Nicole and Henry will return to New York, regularly jets across the country and tries to convince Henry to frequently fly east to fulfill Rockwellian fantasies of weekends and holidays marked by father-son camaraderie. The glacial pit in my stomach melted a little more every time Netflix flashed another aerial view from a plane—"That’s 1.59 carbon tonnes a pop!" I’d think, silently thanking my parents for confining their post-nuptial territories to the north and south sides of Chicago.

And here’s the ironic part: The film opens with a pair of voice-over monologues in which Nicole and Charlie, at the behest of their separation mediator, detail what each loves about the other. “He’s energy-conscious,” Nicole declares over footage of Charlie passive-aggressively turning off lights in rooms his family is occupying.

Of course, we’re all hopeless hypocrites, and this film about a broken bicoastal family does a beautifully nuanced job of portraying as much. It also depicts divorce as not only a terrible rupture but as a source of positive change and lessons to be carried forward—which, for me, is a kind of hopeful metaphor for the trauma of our current climate crisis. —Katie O’Reilly

Joker (Best Picture, Actor, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Cinematography, Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Original Music Score, and Costume Design)

The year’s most divisive film appears to be the Academy’s most celebrated (if you’re counting up noms, that is). Even prior to the release of Todd Phillips’s take on Batman’s mortal enemy, critics worried Joker would glorify violence and incite even more chaos—hardly necessary ingredients in the age of mass shootings and political unrest. Yet, by lifting up the hood to examine the comic world’s arguably most iconic villain, this film communicates a powerful message: Origin stories matter. How do young men with untreated mental illness grow up to menace society? It made me wonder how climate deniers arrive at their staunch outlooks and destructive actions.

It’s worth noting that this is a story set during the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were busy forwarding neoliberal capitalist agendas, championing the free market, and forcing its byproducts—austerity measures and slashes to social safety nets and notions of shared human obligation—on all areas of public life. If Hollywood can’t get audiences to care about the effects of such a political atmosphere on minorities and women, then at least Joker is here to illustrate what it can do to a socially alienated and mentally unhinged white man.

By offering a somewhat empathetic portrayal of the Joker back when he was just a hobbyist psychotic clown named Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix) existing in his own dangerously subjective reality, Phillips and Phoenix don’t glorify right-wing domestic terrorism. Rather they offer up a cautionary tale about late gangster capitalism, and the culture of cruelty it can engender—the harm it can unleash around the world.

In the film, Fleck is denied mental health care by public hospitals and other programs being “downsized” or terminated. He’s economically insecure, with no health insurance or other benefits. He still lives with his mother (Frances Conroy), who’s in dire need of medical assistance. The incidents that turn Fleck into the Joker take place on dilapidated public transit and in under-resourced public hospitals—after being bullied by comparatively privileged strangers on the subway, Fleck becomes something of a vigilante in this world so indifferent to human needs, a role model for other dispossessed residents of Gotham.

At a time when the climate crisis is wreaking the most havoc on those who did the least to cause it—deepening social, health, and wealth inequality—Fleck’s uprising against his “social betters” (namely, Thomas Wayne, father of Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman) who demean his working-class ilk as “clowns” probably should leave audiences unsettled. Because at its essence, this film is an indictment of the failings of the very system that ushered in the Anthropocene. —KO

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Cinematography, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Costume Design)

Don’t you just love a good counterfactual righteous historical revenge fantasy? Screenwriter-director Quentin Tarantino sure does. Take Inglorious Basterds, which depicted a Jewish woman luring Hitler and other Nazi leaders into a theater before torching it (and thus circumventing the entire Holocaust); Django Unchained’s slaves, who wipe out a slave plantation; and The Hateful Eight, which centered around a former black Union soldier notorious for burning a group of Confederate soldiers alive. Likewise, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sees Sharon Tate and other murdered stars triumph over the Manson family cult members who in fact brutally slayed them one fateful night in 1969. Not only do Tate and Co. get to live free and grow ever more world-famous for glamorous moviemaking, but also has-been western star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) uses a flamethrower once used to light up Nazis in a WWII movie to burn the murderous Manson-ite hippies to a crisp. Did you expect Tarantino to use anything less dramatic to set history right than a massive torch?

I could wax reproachful about the halcyon heyday of car culture, consumption, and hubris this shiny film glorifies, but really, I just want to rally Tarantino to pen a climate revenge fantasy—and it’s gotta be juicy enough to make us feel better, for two hours in a dark theater at least, about the increasingly Mad Max–like dystopia we live in. Picture it: Greta Thunberg’s clairvoyant grandmother takes a cargo ship from Sweden to Houston, circa 1977, and cons Exxon executives into admitting that they knew carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were contributing to global climate change. She hijacks the memo they circulated among company executives acknowledging that “the greenhouse effect would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion” to avoid “potentially catastrophic events,” and sends it straight to the UN. World leaders immediately hold oil and gas titans accountable and chart a better course.

The B-plot possibilities are endless: Rachel Carson blows up a DEET factory. Jane Goodall marshalls chimps to burn down industrial palm oil plantations. Organic farmers collect the world’s supply of Roundup and force-feed it to Monsanto executives. Polar bears tango across massive, sturdy glacial sheets. Colombian coffee farmers and West African cacao farmers get rich enough to bolster their regions’ economies. It all creates a world in which the likes of Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump could never ascend into power.

Trust us, Tarantino. We’re all ready for this. And I guarantee you, Leonardo DiCaprio would agree to star. Every rock star who’s ever played Farm Aid, not to mention hip-hop climate activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, would join forces to create the most glorious soundtrack. Jane Fonda would hype the film. Consider it!

On that note, here’s to holding out for an Oscars truly so green, hopefully in the very near future. —KO

The Rise of Skywalker (Nominated for Best Sound Editing and Visual Effects)

Star Wars makes it onto this year’s list of Oscar nominations via the technical categories, unsurprisingly. The Rise of Skywalker, the final episode in the nine-part saga, has most of the usual flourishes: a cornucopia of alien life forms, wild rides in spaceships, encounters with storm troopers who have poor marksmanship. The landscapes that play host to various escapades aren’t exactly new either—the lush, vibrant forests where the Resistance is always hiding, the arid stretches of desert pocked with some form of rusting metal. This time an angry, stormy ocean is tossed into the mix, taking on the role of a foaming third combatant in the epic battle between darkside-heir-apparent Kylo Ren (played by Adam Driver) and Jedi-in-training Rey (played by Daisy Ridley).

Rey’s inner conflict revolves around the fact that she doesn’t know who she is. Having suffered a traumatic separation from her parents in early childhood, she has no real memories of them, and her family history is a mystery. As a nascent Jedi, she possesses tremendous power, but where does it come from? Does she control it, or does it control her, and to which side of the Force will it lead her? Her confusion leaves her feeling lonely and alienated, even as she pals around the galaxy with a crew of droids and humans who constantly get into sibling-esque arguments.

“Be with me,” she whispers fervently during one of her solo Jedi training sessions. She’s talking to all the Jedis that have ever existed—her spiritual lineage, if not her genetic one—and in her moment of greatest need, they answer, making it clear that they have been with her all along. We are all interconnected—like the scenery and the plot twists, this theme is hardly new, but it’s one we seem to need to hear again and again in order to understand the true source of our power. —Wendy Becktold

Harriet ( Nominated for Best Actress)

About halfway through the biopic Harriet, organizers of the Underground Railroad gather together at the home of a sympathetic politician somewhere in the northeast. It’s 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act has just been passed. The route to freedom has gotten longer and more perilous now that escaped slaves must travel all the way to the Canadian border or risk being captured and returned to their owners down south. Those at the meeting wonder if they can really continue the operation. The difficulties seem impossible to overcome. Then Harriet Tubman (played by Cynthia Erivo) steps up to speak. Having just escaped from slavery a year before, she’s already returned to the south more than once to rescue other slaves. At the meeting, Tubman chastises her colleagues—both the whites and the other blacks, most of whom have never known slavery—for their timidity. Comfort, she tells them, has made them complacent. “I will do whatever needs to be done,” she says, her voice low and forceful with intensity. Seared into her mind, into her skin, are the memories of slavery and the horrors it inflicts, and this grants her absolute moral authority.

Erivo’s performance throughout the film charts a remarkable course from a slave with no worldly experience to an indomitable leader, feared and revered and unstoppable. All the while, Tubman navigates unfamiliar natural landscapes. Sometimes nature is nurturing—like when she crosses the border into Pennsylvania and into freedom for the first time and the sun shines warmly all around her. Sometimes it’s menacing—like when she must ford a murky river at night with a group of frightened slaves.

But it’s the moment when Tubman is indoors at the meeting of Underground Railroad conductors that stays with me most. This arena of privilege should also be an unfamiliar landscape for Tubman, but she is undaunted. In this current time, when climate change presents us with such formidable odds, it’s useful to remember that our complacency—our unwillingness to let go of our own comfort—often determines what we think is and is not possible. Tubman reminds us that whether to act or not isn’t a practical question; it’s a moral one.  —WB