Hey, Oscar Movies: We Get It, Rich People Are Bad

thewrap.com:

Nearly three years ago, “Parasite” swept awards season. Bong Joon-ho’s sardonic masterpiece followed the Kim family, a tribe of basement-dwelling con artists who wormed their way into a wealthy household and wound up with blood on their hands.

Perhaps as a direct result, we now find ourselves in an awards season glutted with eat-the-rich narratives. That might be fun — even revolutionary — if these films had more to offer than shallow drollery.Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” Mark Mylod’s “The Menu” and Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion” are all stacked with prime talent and featured among this year’s For Your Consideration fodder, and all three films lampoon the garishly wealthy.

But where “Parasite” used fleshed-out commonfolk as foils to the heinous elite, today’s films are more interested in making a spectacle of wealth than they are in actually developing their working class heroes. “Glass Onion” is perhaps the worst offender, if only because it pales so drastically in comparison to its predecessor, Johnson’s 2019 whodunit hit “Knives Out.” Where “Knives Out” followed an immigrant nurse named Marta (Ana de Armas) as she was sucked into a cartoonishly rich family’s homicidal antics, “Glass Onion” centers on the flamboyant detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig).

Blanc, who helped Marta out of a pickle in the first film, is unquestionably delightful. This is not your average gumshoe — Blanc is an occasionally bumbling clotheshorse who sounds like Foghorn Leghorn.But he’s hardly an everyman: “Glass Onion” introduces him relaxing in his beautiful terrace apartment, at the tail end of a Zoom session with Natasha Lyonne, Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury and Kareem Abdul-Jabar.