Shot in brilliant black and white by Phedon Papamichael, for which it has been Oscar nominated, NEBRASKA may well be the first black and white film to win Best Picture Oscar since The Artist.

Certainly, like The Artist, NEBRASKA’s lead character, Woody Grant, played by Oscar nominated Bruce Dern is a man of few words. A cantankerous old codger who communes with the bottom of a bottle more often than with his wife and two sons.

NEBRASKA is the deceptively simple story of the Grant family of Hawthorne, Nebraska. Now transplanted to Billings, Montana, stubborn, taciturn Woody (Bruce Dern in a role that won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival) is well past his prime — such as it ever was — and possibly his usefulness, but he believes he’s got one last shot at mattering: a notice that he’s the lucky winner of a million-dollar sweepstakes.

To claim his fortune, Woody insists he must quickly get to the sweepstakes company’s office in Lincoln, Nebraska – a 750-mile journey that seems unlikely given that he can barely shuffle down the road a few blocks, at least not without stopping for a drink. Worried for his father’s state of mind, it falls to Woody’s reluctant, baffled son David (Will Forte) to accompany him on a trip that seems hilariously futile on the surface.

Yet, their odd journey becomes a kind of modern family odyssey. By the time Woody and David make a pit-stop in their hometown of Hawthorne, they have been joined by Kate, Woody’s tart-tongued wife (June Squibb) and their other son,news anchor-man (Bob Odenkirk) and word of Woody’s fortune makes him, momentarily, a returning hero. Then it brings out the vultures. But it also opens a view into the unseen lives of David’s parents and a past more alive than he ever imagined.

Vulture veritas is on view within the family but also with an old business partner, Ed Pegram, played with veneered malevolence by Stacey Keach.

June Squibb’s pitch perfect portrayal of Kate, the acerbic mid Western shrew matriarch, has garnered the actress a well deserved Oscar nomination and the picture’s overall swag of nominations is brought to six with nods to writer Bob Nelson and director Alexander Payne.

Payne has been down the Oscar road before, nominated for directing The Descendants and Sideways, He walked the aisle for both those films, but as a writer rather than a helmer.

In Payne’s pantheon of work, NEBRASKA is most akin to About Schmidt, which, incidentally, featured June Squibb as the main character’s wife.

See NEBRASKA for the story, the performances, and the black and white Cinemascope that mirrors the dusky beauty of small-town USA and the film’s high contrasts of humour and heartbreak. Just make sure you see it.