Oscar Ceremony in Review: 10 Moments To Cheer or Jeer At...

by Nathaniel R

"L Ron Hubba Hubba"

Like, Eric, who felt joyfully optimistic about the Oscars after the 95th Academy Awards, wrapped, I also had a good night. Did you? Overall it was a well produced, well paced, quite entertaining, and often moving night with good speeches and the requisite history being made. Now, in point of fact, history is always made at the Oscars. Each year of an institutional annual event that is super consistent in its approach (far more so than say the Grammys, BAFTAs, and Emmys which all change rules and category names so often that records and stats end up feeling blurry and mostly meaningless), will necessarily alter at least a few nooks and crannies of statistics and records. But we got a few true biggies last night: First Asian Best Actress winner, first film in half a century to take 75% of the acting prizes, first sci-fi action comedy to win the big prize.

But "it was a good time!" isn't much of a rundown of a three and a half hour glamorous event so herewith 8 things that stuck out for me, for better and worse, in no particular order...

Click to read more ...

Oscars: When Your Favorites Lose, But Still...

by Eric Blume

How can you sit through the Oscars, see each of your favorites lose in essentially every category, but still come away thinking it’s one of the best Oscars in history?  That was the miracle of last night’s show.

Last year, the 94th Academy Awards, was Oscar’s nadir...

Click to read more ...

Complete List of Oscar Winners (and records broken!)

by Nathaniel R

Everything Everywhere All At Once swept the Oscars last night, winning 7 of its 10 categories (and 11 nominations). While it wasn't a "clean" sweep, it's the only sweep and the biggest haul for a Best Picture winner since the expansion of the Best Picture field changed the Oscar stats story in so many ways back in 2009. (The only other film to win that many Oscars in the current era was 2013's Gravity, which lost Best Picture). The most shocking element of EEAAO's big win in terms of the history books (if not the temperature of awards season) was the fact that it won 3 of the 4 acting Oscars. This has only happened twice before in Oscar's 95 years via A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and Network (1976). 

We'll talk about the ceremony later today but first the prizes and some stats / observations...

Click to read more ...

Year in Review: Nathaniel's 'Multiversal' Top Ten List & Personal Prizes

by Nathaniel R

Multiverses were the hot trend in mainstream cinema this year with the MCU banking its whole future on the appeal of mirror dimensions and alternate timelines. If you take the trend less franchise-literal, it was even more omnipresent. Multiple films asked us to consider alternate realities, ahistorical timelines, and the multiplicity of identity through the power of both storytelling and our own imagination. It's through this broad prism that I present my take on the year's best films.

I hope you enjoy though it always bears repeating that "Best" is necessarily subjective; We each occupy our own universes when it comes to these matters. Before the top ten, a bakers dozen of honorable mentions...

Click to read more ...

Best Picture in Black-and-White: 2022 Edition

by Cláudio Alves

Remember when Bong Joon-ho and NEON did a special re-release of Parasite in black-and-white? Since then, it's been an awards season tradition to imagine what the Academy's Best Picture nominees would look like devoid of color. This exercise is based chiefly on silly fun since there's more to black-and-white cinema than just turning the saturation dials down. However, it sometimes reveals exciting things about the films at hand. Whose cinematography relies the most on chromatic contrast? What picture would survive the best in monochrome, mayhap even excel? Last year, The Power of the Dog proved a silvery revelation, calling to mind midcentury revisionist westerns. Let's see if this batch of nominees includes a similar success…

Click to read more ...