Category: Film – Awards

Screening Room: ‘Anora’ Wins Best Picture from OFCS

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A good bit of film-related news here: one of my writers’ associations, the Online Film Critics Society, just named Anora the best film of the year. They also paid good attention to Dune: Part Two in technical areas, at least Challengers a couple nods, largely ignored Emilia Perez, and recognized All We Imagine as Light for best film not in the English language (a strong choice and preferable to the more predictable but less impressive I’m Still Here).

Here’s the rest of the awards:

  • Best Picture: Anora
  • Best Animated Feature: Flow
  • Best Director: Coralie Fargeat – The Substance
  • Best Actor: Ralph Fiennes – Conclave
  • Best Actress: Mikey Madison – Anora
  • Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain
  • Best Supporting Actress: Margaret Qualley – The Substance
  • Best Original Screenplay: Anora
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: Conclave
  • Best Editing: Challengers
  • Best Cinematography: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Original Score: Challengers
  • Best Production Design: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Costume Design: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Visual Effects: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Debut Feature: Vera Drew – The People’s Joker
  • Best Film Not in the English Language: All We Imagine as Light
  • Best Documentary Feature: Dahomey

Screening Room: This Year’s Weird Oscar Nominations

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I wrote about the 2025 Oscar nominations and what happened as a result of their overloading the list with too many nods to a pair of highly mediocre films (Emilia Perez, Wicked).

The article is at Eyes Wide Open:

The Oscars can be weird. We all know this. Some of us, despite remembering that strange mid-2000s stretch when Million Dollar Baby and Crash were snagging best picture statues, can even think we understand why the awards are so weird. The concept of looking at hundreds of feature films released theatrically each year to determine this one or that one is the “best” is fundamentally absurd…

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2024

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My year-end movie review was published at Eyes Wide Open:

The weirdest aspect to moviegoing in 2024 was just how weird it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean COVID and streaming haven’t reshaped the industry, likely forever. But with a few standouts, things have settled into a familiar pattern. Audiences flocked to cinematic comfort fare that gave a safe return on investment. Everybody knows what they’re getting with Despicable Me 4 or Venom: The Last Dance. Nearly every movie that earned over $100 million this year was a sequel (incredibly, they’re still making Bad Boys and Planet of the Apes movies). The IP mining shows no signs of stopping. The commercial failure of the unusually subversive Joker: Folie à Deux, an acidic burn-the-bridges takedown of fan culture, suggests that derivative and repetitive will be the assumption going forward…

Screening Room: ‘Io Capitano’

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My review of the Oscar-nominated Io Capitano ran in Slant Magazine:

Given the challenges that many migrants face when traveling to a new land, it makes sense to assume that they’re fleeing harrowingly nightmarish realities. But the scenes that director Matteo Garrone uses to open his heartrending Io Capitano are far from nightmarish. Garrone’s big-dreaming migrant characters aren’t running away from something so much as they’re running toward it. The possibility that their goal is little more than a mirage makes this epic tale’s often horrendous journey even more wrenching…

Io Capitano opens later in February. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Saltburn’ Didn’t Deserve an Oscar — It’s Still Great

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I wrote about the Oscar nominations and the divisive movie Saltburn for Eyes Wide Open:

Many great movies are made every year. They just keep coming. Some are hilarious, others make you cry, and very occasionally they might spark a new thought. They do not all require prizes. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn did something nearly every other 2024 movie could not: Start an argument…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: 2023 Online Film Critics Society Awards

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The Online Film Critics Society, which very kindly counts myself as one of their members, just announced out annual film awards for 2023. In another possible precursor to the Academy Awards, it’s Oppenheimer by a wide margin, with Barbie and The Holdovers getting multiple (very deserved) awards as well.

It’s a strong list, no real slouches there:

  • Best Picture: Oppenheimer
  • Best Animated Feature: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  • Best Director: Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer
  • Best Actor: Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers
  • Best Actress: Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer
  • Best Supporting Actress: Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers
  • Best Original Screenplay: The Holdovers
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: Oppenheimer
  • Best Film Editing: Oppenheimer
  • Best Cinematography: Oppenheimer
  • Best Original Score: Oppenheimer
  • Best Production Design: Barbie
  • Best Costume Design: Barbie
  • Best Visual Effects: Oppenheimer
  • Best Debut Feature: Celine Song – Past Lives
  • Best Film Not in the English Language: Anatomy of a Fall
  • Best Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol

Screening Room: ‘American Fiction’

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American Fiction, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s scathing 2001 satire Erasure, has been playing the festival circuit and picking up some well-deserved Oscar buzz along the way.

I covered its screening at the Twin Cities Film Festival for PopMatters:

In Cord Jefferson’s jaggedly funny and cannily perceptive film American Fiction, literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) tries talking sense into his high-minded and low-selling novelist client Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who is frustrated at the public’s appetite for “black trauma porn”. Trying to bring Monk down to earth, Arthur argues that while white people say they want the truth, really “they just want to feel absolved”…

American Fiction opens in December.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2022

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Now that 2023 is almost upon us, it is time to start catching up on all the great movies of 2022. It’s always a good way to spend a cold January.

My year-end roundup is at Eyes Wide Open:

Assuming the future still contains books, when one is written about what moviegoing was like in 2022, it will have a hard time finding a theme. Think pieces on the state of Hollywood (including several penned by this critic) over the past few years often bemoaned the industry’s caution and overreliance on industrially producing sequels to safe IP. The concern grew that, post-pandemic, theaters and audiences would stick to the familiar. To a degree that did happen, with even supposed arthouse theaters showing Wakanda Forever. But as the year closes with the usual late-December crush of award contenders muscling into crowded release schedules, fears of a movie landscape dominated only by superhero flicks with quarter-billion-dollar budgets have not quite panned out…

I break down the ten best movies of the year (some of which are pictured above), and also list some honorable mentions and disappointments.

Screening Room: ‘Donbass’

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My review of the new Ukraine-set black comedy Donbass, which opens next week, is at The Playlist:

Winner of the 2018 Un Certain Regard award for Best Director at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival but only getting released in the United States now, “Donbass” makes for eerie viewing coming just weeks after the Russo-Ukrainian war entered a new phase following the Russian invasion of late February 2022. Set at some unspecified time after Russian-backed separatists carved off the Donbass region of southeast Ukraine in early 2014, the film provides a glimpse of what life is like in (as the on-screen titles term it) “Occupied Territory in Eastern Ukraine.” From what we see here, day-to-day life appears to be some combination of Cossack ”Mad Max” cosplay, throwback Soviet-era corruption, smashmouth nationalism, and gangster’s paradise…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: What’s Wrong with the Oscars?

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I wrote a piece in Eyes Wide Open about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is ensuring that it will continue to lose relevance, with a suggestion for how they can avoid the annual hand-wringing.

You can read the article here:

There has been an increasing divergence between what Academy voters consider the best movies of the year and what people are actually seeing. It is easy to view this as simply Hollywood snobbery. In fact, an entire subgenre of criticism, often but not always from right-wing sources, can reliably be counted on to make that argument every year when the Oscars come around. It was not always this way…

Awards Central: Online Film Critics’ Best Films of 2021

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The Online Film Critics Society, a group I have been a member of for some years now, has just announced their 25th annual film awards. You can see the full list here (The Power of the Dog was the big winner, and deservedly so, with West Side Story and Licorice Pizza racking up a lot of nominations but sadly no wins).

Here are some of the highlights:

  • Best Picture: The Power of the Dog
  • Best Director: Jane Campion – The Power of the Dog
  • Best Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch – The Power of the Dog
  • Best Actress: Olivia Colman – The Lost Daughter
  • Best Supporting Actor: Kodi Smit-McPhee – The Power of the Dog
  • Best Supporting Actress: Kirsten Dunst – The Power of the Dog
  • Best Screenplay: Pig
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: The Power of the Dog
  • Best Animated Feature: The Mitchells vs. the Machines
  • Best Film Not in the English Language: Drive My Car
  • Best Documentary: Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Screening Room: ‘The Power of the Dog’

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The newest film from Jane Campion is a somewhat tortured and brooding but still surprising drama set on the high plains where Benedict Cumberbatch makes a surprisingly believable rancher.

The Power of the Dog is playing on the festival circuit right now in what looks like a pretty certain play for the Oscars before being released on Netflix in December. My review is at Slant:

Nobody is where they should be in The Power of the Dog, and everybody seems to be searching for something, somebody, or somewhere else. Set in 1925 Montana, Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 book tracks the obsessions, miseries, and passions of a group of people who inhabit a cavernous house in the middle of a vast ranchland and make each other miserable until blood is finally shed. The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility…

The trailer is here:

Screening Room: ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

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One of the most gripping films to premiere at Sundance so far this year is Judas and the Black Messiah, which details the extreme lengths the FBI and Chicago police went to in order to take down Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

Judas will be in limited theatrical release and on HBO Max starting February 12. My review is at Slant:

Fierce but mournful, Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah serves as testament to a brief and revolutionary flare that was snuffed out before it could take hold. Unfolding during the late 1960s, when the Black Panther Party’s Chicago chapter was besieged by law enforcement, the film is filled with the high drama one expects from tales of heroes cut down before their prime. But because the drama is split between the story of that hero and that of his betrayer, King’s film complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nomadland’ Best Picture

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After much deliberation, the Online Film Critics Society released our list of the best movies of 2020. Nomadland quite deservedly took the most awards with six wins, including best picture. Here are the rest of what we thought were the most worthwhile cinematic endeavors of that very strange year just passed:

BEST PICTURE
· Da 5 Bloods
· First Cow
· I’m Thinking of Ending Things
· Minari
· Never Rarely Sometimes Always
· Nomadland — WINNER
· Promising Young Woman
· Soul
· Sound of Metal
· The Trial of the Chicago 7

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
· Onward
· Over the Moon
· Soul — WINNER
· The Wolf House
· Wolfwalkers

BEST DIRECTOR
· Emerald Fennell — Promising Young Woman
· Eliza Hittman — Never Rarely Sometimes Always
· Spike Lee — Da 5 Bloods
· Kelly Reichardt — First Cow
· Chloé Zhao – Nomadland WINNER

BEST ACTOR
· Riz Ahmed — Sound of Metal
· Chadwick Boseman — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
· Anthony Hopkins — The Father
· Delroy Lindo — Da 5 Bloods WINNER
· Steven Yeun — Minari

BEST ACTRESS
· Jessie Buckley — I’m Thinking of Ending Things
· Viola Davis — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
· Sidney Flanigan — Never Rarely Sometimes Always
· Frances McDormand – Nomadland WINNER
· Carey Mulligan — Promising Young Woman

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
· Sacha Baron Cohen — The Trial of the Chicago 7
· Chadwick Boseman — Da 5 Bloods
· Bill Murray — On the Rocks
· Leslie Odom Jr. — One Night in Miami WINNER
· Paul Raci — Sound of Metal

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
· Maria Bakalova — Borat Subsequent Moviefilm WINNER
· Olivia Colman — The Father
· Talia Ryder — Never Rarely Sometimes Always
· Amanda Seyfried — Mank
· Youn Yuh-jung — Minari

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
· Da 5 Bloods
· Minari
· Never Rarely Sometimes Always
· Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell WINNER
· The Trial of the Chicago 7

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
· First Cow
· I’m Thinking of Ending Things
· Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
· Nomadland, Chloe Zhao WINNER
· One Night in Miami

BEST EDITING
· Da 5 Bloods
· Mank
· Nomadland, Chloe Zhao WINNER
· Tenet
· The Trial of the Chicago 7

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
· Da 5 Bloods
· First Cow
· Mank
· Nomadland, Joshua James Richards WINNER
· Tenet

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
· Da 5 Bloods
· Mank
· Minari
· Soul, Trent Reznor Atticus Ross WINNER
· Tenet

BEST DEBUT FEATURE
· Radha Blank — The Forty-Year-Old Version
· Emerald Fennell — Promising Young Woman WINNER
· Regina King — One Night in Miami
· Darius Marder — Sound of Metal
· Andrew Patterson –The Vast of Night

BEST FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
· Another Round
· Bacurau
· Collective
· La Llorona
· Minari (United States) WINNER

BEST DOCUMENTARY
· Boys State
· Collective
· Dick Johnson Is Dead WINNER
· The Painter and the Thief
· Time

Screening Room: The Movies of 2020

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My essay on the cinematic year that was, “2020 Didn’t Kill Cinema But it Didn’t Help”, was published at Eyes Wide Open:

This year will be remembered for many things. Sweat pants. Zoom humor. The post-Election Day realization that a solid minority of Americans were in a cult. Warner Bros. selling out its filmmakers (sorry, “content creators”) for some short-term streaming buzz. What people may not remember — and for good reason — is that the top box office performer of 2020 was released just seventeen days into the new year. And it was Bad Boys for Life…