Every year, The Wife and I watch the Oscars while enjoying a meal inspired by the Best Picture nominees. For example, we had sushi for Lost in Translation, cowboy campfire beans for Brokeback Mountain and Grandma Ethel’s Brisket for A Serious Man – you get the idea. Here’s the 2023 Oscar Dinner, complete with the everything bagel from Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Fruit Loops from Top Gun: Maverick and the Nutella from Triangle of Sadness.
The high point has been the Severed Hands Ice Sculpture in 2011 for 127 Hours and Winter’s Bone (photo above). The Wife built on that earlier work with another ice sculpture in 2023 – the severed fingers from The Banshees of Inisherin.
This year, we resisted the temptation to build the meal round the ham and fluffy potatoes anchoring the Christmas dinner in The Holdovers prepared by Mary (Da’vine Joy Randolph) for Paul (Paul Giamatti) and Angus (Dominic Sessa), possibly followed by the impromptu cherries jubilee in the parking lot. And there are lots of food scenes in American Fiction (omelets and brunch and barbecue). In Past Lives, we seeHae Sung (Teo Yoo) consumes gallons of soju with his buddies, army rations and breakfast noodles, and Nora (Greta Lee) has a craving for chicken wings.
But this year has been singular in that so many of the nominated movies had scenes featuring whiskey and pasta. It has just been a one-dish-from-each-movie kind of year. So we are putting the whiskey and the pasta front and center. I usually drink Bulleit Rye, but on Oscar night, I’ll be pouring Maker’s Mark, not for any movie-related reason, but because it was the favorite of in tribute to my former roommate, Kam Kuwata, who has passed.
Here is this year’s complete menu:
Whiskey
- Killers of the Flower Moon: Whiskey just keeps showing up, from King (Robert De Niro) greeting Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) with a glass to Mollie (Lily Gladstone) bringing out the good stuff to entertain Ernest.
- The Holdovers: In The Holdovers, Paul is a bourbonaholic, who usually drinks Jim Beam, and he buys a pint in the Boston liquor store. (I’m a fan of The Holdovers, but not Jim Beam).
- Past Lives: The film is bookended a scene in a New York City bar with the three main characters; Arthut (John Maguro) is drinking an Old Fashioned.
- Oppenheimer: The flask keeps showing up – and in the 1940s US, it’s gotta contain whiskey.
Pasta:
- Anatomy of a Fall: Defense attorney Vincent fixes spaghetti when first visiting Sandra (Sandra Huller) after her husband falls to his death. It’s a simple, light colored pasta like cacio a pepe or alla Gricia, and that’s what I’ll be preparing.
- Past Lives: Given the choice of any cuisine available in New York City, Hae Sung requests pasta, so Nora and Arthur take him to an Italian restaurant where there have pasta with a red sauce.
- American Fiction: Monk (Jeffrey Wright) and Coraline (Erika Alexander) are preparing a pasta dinner at her place, when their relationship takes a turn.
To go salad in a deli clamshell from American Fiction: Monk is at a hotel conference center to serve on a panel judging books for a literary prize. At the lunch break, he grabs a clamshell salad instead of a wrapped sandwich, which just perfectly fits the character.
Toast and milk from Barbie: Barbie (Margot Robbie) holds a piece of toast and a cup of milk (but doesn’t actually CONSUME them because she’s made of plastic, after all).
Chinese takeout from Maestro: Lenny (Bradley Cooper) and Felicia (Carey Mulligan) enjoy this Manhattan staple in their Upper West Side apartment with their artsy, intellectual friends.
Pasteis de nata from Poor Things: Belle (Emma Stone) gets addicted to these delectable Portuguese egg custards as she matures into having really good taste. The best pasteis de nata in the Western Hemisphere are from Adega in San Jose, but we had to make our own poor substitute.
German pastry from Zone of Interest: This is from the scene when Hedwig (Sandra Huller) is impressing her mother with the lifestyle perks of Hedwig’s marriage to the big boss.
I’ll post a photo tomorrow, on Oscar night.