Road to the Oscars Review: ‘Nickel Boys’ Remind Us that Black Lives Matter and They Always Have

Every year, in the time between when the Academy Award nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OFM movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for Best Picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot move of the movies are now available on streaming.

Last year was the first year since they expanded the number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10 that River managed to make it through all 10 nominated films, and as she did so, she wrote reviews of them for OFM. This year, she aims to do it again, watching all 10 nominated films and writing about them for this site. She already saw and reviewed Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here as part of her coverage of this year’s 47th Annual Denver Film Festival. That leaves her with eight films to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10 films again? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!

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I knew going into Nickel Boys that the film was about an all-Black reform school in the South in the 1960s. I should have anticipated this being a downer of a film. But something about the movie poster, which showed two boys looking hopefully at a mirror on the ceiling, made me feel like I could expect something bright and inspirational in a surprising way, like Shawshank Redemption. Boy, was this movie not that at all. But that aside, it is a stunningly beautiful and unflinchingly brave portrait of racism at a pivotal point in the American Civil Rights Movement. Nickel Boys, while a difficult film, is also a beautiful film in the unique way this story is told.

The film follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a particularly bright and talented young Black teenager in 1962 in Tallahassee, Florida. Elwood, an idealistic youth, is also involved in the civil rights protests going on in the South at that time, being a huge admirer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his movement. When Elwood is offered an opportunity to participate in an accelerated program at a historically Black college, he hitchhikes his way to his new school and accidentally catches a ride with a man driving a stolen car. Booked as an accomplice by the police, Elwood is transferred to a reform school called Nickel Academy (which is based on the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida which ran from 1900 through 2011).

Nickel Academy is racially segregated, with the white students getting the posh accommodations and more respect while the Black students are put in shoddier housing and treated poorly. Students are told they can graduate out if they behave, but the system is specifically designed to keep Black students from graduating out until they age out of the academy, partially because the school makes money renting out students illegally as cheap labor. Elwood befriends another boy at the school named Turner (Brandon Wilson) who reveals the true depths of Nickel’s atrocities, with students often being subjected to cruel punishments and some even disappearing, presumed to be murdered by the school staff. The idealistic Elwood continues to believe that there is justice in this world and puts his faith in his innocence, but Turner often fears that Elwood’s naive view of the world will get him killed.

The most fascinating thing about this film is the fact that it’s told in a series of first-person point of view shots. At almost all times in the film, you see the story literally through the eyes of one of the characters, although which character’s eyes you see through changes from shot to shot. The only real exceptions are these flash-forward scenes where we see an adult version of Elwood in the future, in which case the camera is positioned right behind his head instead, but still gives a sort of surreal perspective. It makes for a strangely impressionistic film.

At first, the device is hard to follow, but the film eases you into the device, as the beginning of the film is more of a series of almost unrelated scenes about life in the South in 1962. They’re more like vignettes, if you will. Some are from Elwood’s perspective and others aren’t, but they’re very impressionistic moments of film.

As the film goes on, it starts to trust the viewer more and begins to actually tell a story with this device, but still maintains some of those impressionistic moments and flash-backs and flash-forwards to create a surreal stream-of-consciousness to the style of storytelling. It’s a daring method of telling this particular story, and the end result is to put the viewer in the position of the characters to draw out their empathy more. Ultimately, it’s very effective.

While the film is based on the 2019 novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, the fact that it is, as stated before, based on an actual reform school in Florida makes parts of this film absolutely bonechilling. As of the beginning of this year, the current count of boys believed to have been murdered at Dozier School for Boys is nearly 100 between 1900 and 1973 and only now are the victims claiming restitution after the Florida legislature having formally apologized for the atrocities at Dozier in 2017. So, while the particular story told in this film is fiction, it’s representative of the hundreds of true horror stories that happened at Dozier for decades. The film is a stark reminder to us of the brutal and cruel treatment of Black people in the Jim Crow era, which was not as long ago as we would like to pretend it was.

Considering that the film had so many first-person POV shots, it becomes hard to think of the actors as being responsible for the movie because the actors were absent for about 50% of their own scenes. Instead, we saw through their eyes, which only requires the actor’s voice. But that just means that there were more challenges to make the characters relatable given the actors’ having only half of the screen time that actors normally get. Herisse and Wilson do an excellent job of selling us on their characters well enough that we can remember who they are when we step into their shoes. And voice acting for a POV shot has to be a pretty challenging feat for an actor as well.

Nickel Boys is a great argument for expanding the Best Director category beyond just five nominees, because, while there are many talented directors nominated for Best Director already, the fact that Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross wasn’t nominated is a travesty. The movie was so uniquely shot and perfectly structured, and that’s absolutely the result of Ross’ outstanding directing.

Ross did, however, receive a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay alongside his co-writer Joslyn Barnes. Right now, the Vegas odds* for Best Picture have Nickel Boys as extremely unlikely to win, but it fares a little better in the odds for Best Adapted Screenplay where it’s currently in second place to win behind Conclave. That being said, the gap between Nickel Boys and Conclave is pretty significant, with Conclave being -1000 and Nickel Boys being +750. That suggests that Conclave is a dead-set winner, but, as Covers.com points out, the Best Screenplay categories tend to skew towards more imaginative films than the Best Picture category. Thus, Nickel Boys might have a better chance at Adapted Screenplay than the odds suggest.

In the age of the Black Lives Matter movement, this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen that embodies the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” It’s a reminder of how racism has allowed deadly and unforgivable crimes to go unnoticed for so long. The boys who died at Dozier deserved better, and Nickel Boys reminds us of that. It’s a movie that says, without hesitation, that Black lives do, in fact, matter, and they always have.

Rating: 99/100

*I’m going to be referring to the Vegas odds on the Oscars because I think they’re a handy guide to gauge the likelihood of a film winning a particular award, but I do want to emphasize that betting on the Oscars is not legal in the state of Colorado, and this is just something I bring up for fun in my predictions. We are not endorsing anyone gambling on the Oscars in an area where it isn’t legal.

Nickel Boys is available from most video-on-demand services. Find the best one to buy it from here.