Netflix viewers are rediscovering The Menu, the 2022 dark comedy starring Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult, having made it one of the top movies available on the platform ever since it was added at the beginning of February. The movie is a lot of fun and is “Certified Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes (read WTW’s The Menu review for our thoughts), but thinking back to the movie I’ve come to the conclusion that Fiennes’ would have been an awesome, and well-deserved, Oscar nominee for his performance.
In case you need a refresher, The Menu takes place at a lavish, world-class restaurant on a remote island, with Fiennes playing a famous chef and Taylor-Joy and Hoult among the guests partaking in a special dinner. I won’t go into detail into the plot if you haven’t seen it and want to catch up with it on Netflix, but Fiennes is serving up much more than just flavorful dishes in what is ultimately a satire of the upper class.
Fiennes is among this year’s crop of Best Actor Oscar nominees for his performance in Conclave, his first Oscar nom since 1996’s The English Patient, but his deliciously devious and fun performance could have and in hindsight should have ended that drought sooner.
As Chef Slowik, Fiennes commands his kitchen like a military platoon. As his guests soon learn, he is actually controlling everything about this night. While this makes Fiennes an imposing figure and by the strictest definition the villain of the movie, we are absolutely hooked by him and very much see his viewpoint as things progress. That all beautifully culminates in the climax of the movie, where if just for a moment, something changes in Slowik, adding another dimension to the character.
Multiple awards bodies recognized the quality of the work and chose to nominate Fiennes, including the Golden Globes (though they of course have additional nomination spots by splitting most categories into drama and comedy), the London Critics Circle and other regional critics groups. Yet Fiennes remained a long shot and eventually was not included in the list of 2023 Oscar nominees.
Reviewing who got in ahead of him, Fiennes absolutely has a case to be included. No disrespect to any of the actual Best Actor nominees (Austin Butler in Elvis, Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin, Paul Mescal in Aftersun, Bill NIghy in Living and winner Brendan Fraser in The Whale), but Fiennes’ performance is just as memorable, if not more so, than most of them. The only I would pick ahead of Fiennes is Farrell.
And if you want to make the case that Fiennes’ performance belonged more in the Supporting Actor category (as some awards bodies did), the case is just as strong against, especially against the likes of Judd Hirsch for The Fabelmans and Brian Tyree Henry for Causeway (personally I wouldn’t swap Fiennes in for Brendan Gleeson or Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin or winner Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once).
Ultimately, The Menu isn’t the kind of movie that gets nominated for Oscars, even as trends are starting to change within the Academy (The Substance’s strong haul this year being evidence of that). All the more reason in hindsight that had Fiennes getting an Oscar nomination for The Menu would have been a fun, deserved change of pace.
The Menu is now streaming on Netflix in the US; it is streaming on Disney Plus in the UK.
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