Oprah Winfrey's Favorite Movie Is An Underrated Fantasy Drama That Made Oscar History

Benh Zeitlin's 2012 film "Beasts of the Southern Wild" was a gigantic indie success. Made for only $1.8 million and shot on 16mm film, the film made an impressive $23.3 million at the box office and attracted a lot of attention from the Academy. It was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress for Quvenzhané Wallis. Wallis was only nine years old when she was nominated, making her the youngest ever Best Actress nominee. It also won four awards at Cannes, including the Caméra d'Or. 

An adaptation of the play "Juicy and Delicious" by Lucy Alibar, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" was a commentary on the destruction that 2005's Hurricane Katrina wrought on the southern part of the United States. Almost 1,400 people died, and $125 billion in damage was done. Set in a remote and extremely impoverished island of the Louisiana bayou nicknamed the Bathtub, the film is seen from the perspective of a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (Wallis) who lives in a small home with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry). The Bathtub's isolated location among the levees is a clear piece of foreshadowing that Mother Nature will rip the area apart before the film's end. Hushpuppy, however, sees the world through the lens of childhood fantasy. She learns about ancient aurochs in school, and begins picturing the beasts breaking free from arctic ice and treading their hooves to the Bathtub. She pictures them as giant boars, even though aurochs are a bovine species. The monsters can be seen in a cool behind-the-scenes featurette. 

Oprah Winfrey loved "Beasts of the Southern Wild," which she talked about on her website. She found the film to be suffused with magic. She watched it after it was recommended to her by President Barack Obama.

Although Winfrey used words like "magical" and "spiritual" to describe "Beasts of the Southern Wild," it's also a tragic and painful film. For a great deal of the film, Hushpuppy sadly finds herself alone. Wink suffers an unspecified medical crisis and returns home in a hospital gown, clearly too disturbed to stay in a hospital and receive treatment. He stages his refusal to accept help as pride, but it's really just a form of neglect. Wink is dizzy and out of it a lot, and in one scene, yells at Hushpuppy. When she punches him in the chest in one scene, he crumbles to the ground. 

For Hushpuppy, the world is falling apart. Time is out of joint. It's at the point where the sky cracks open. Everything is crumbling. The unfrozen aurochs, a symbol for environmental entropy, will come and destroy her home. Oprah was very brief in her description of the movie, saying: 

"[It's] unlike anything we've seen. [...] When you see it, you're just going to want to talk to somebody about it. You're going to want to know, 'How did they do this?'"

Indeed, most critics loved "Beasts of the Southern Wild," earning it an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 205 reviews. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it one of the best films of the year. He admired the film's mythic tone and its eerie sense that it takes place out of time. When he finally figured out when and where the film took place, he saw the commentary on modern poverty. "Sometimes miraculous films come into being," he wrote, "made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius."

Not everyone was high on "Beasts of the Southern Wild." Ann Hornaday, writing for the Washington Post, said that the film felt like an outsider's perspective, turning it into a piece of crass "cultural tourism." Dana Stevens, writing for Slate, noted something similar, saying that "Beasts" skewed into unfortunate cultural cliches. It was "anthropological voyeurism." She wrote against Wink as well: "After the terrible things Wink lets happen to his daughter during the opening scenes, it would take a really well-written second half to make us believe in his moral transformation — and this movie's second half is barely written at all." Harsh.

This is only anecdotal, but I once personally spoke to a critic who felt that "Beasts" was a movie about a neglectful, abusive father, but that it treated him as merely stubborn and proud, a depiction that didn't sit well with him. The general consensus among the detractors seemed to be that "Beasts," while visually lush and loaded with a hazy, wet atmosphere, eventually falls back into a pat, melodramatic story about finding family. Although praised as one of the best films of the year, there is still a lot of critical controversy about "Beasts of the Southern Wild." 

Benh Zeitlin has only made one feature film since "Beasts," an earthy reboot of the "Peter Pan" story called "Wendy," which was barely seen by audiences when it was released in 2020. It was a victim of COVID-19. Quvenzhané Wallis, meanwhile, went on to score the leading role in a 2014 reboot of "Annie," and continues to act to this day. She was a recurring character on "Black-ish" and appeared in the obscure sci-fi thriller "Breathe" in 2024.