The 92nd Oscars Afterthoughts and the Complete Winners List

by Nathaniel R

You know how we do at The Film Experience. We'll have a few days of post-mortem on the 92nd Academy Awards, honoring the films of 2019. So it's not quite over yet but the rest is the after-party if you will. And we think you will feel like partying. We sure do. Parasite won 55% of your votes in our readers poll for who SHOULD win (with Hollywood and 1917 fighting for a distant second place on the Best Picture chart) and it also took the top prize at both the Team Experience Awards and my own prizes right here. And then it actually went and won Hollywood's top honor, too, defying all odds (again) to become the first Foreign Language picture ever to triumph at the Oscars. It will go down as history as one of the best choices the Academy ever made in the top category along with films like Moonlight, Silence of the Lambs, Amadeus, All About Eve, and other classics...

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How Do You Watch the Oscars?

by Eric Blume

It's about time for High Holy Night, and as most of you reading this are serious cinephiles, we all know that HOW you watch the Oscar show is crucial.  Everyone has their own individual idea of what makes the show the most fun to watch.

Personally, I can't watch the show with too many people in the room.  I like to hear the show and don't need twenty opinions at every moment.  I've found the magic number for the gathering is somewhere around six or so:  people who are passionate and committed filmgoers, but also really smart, funny people who know just when to say that special bon mot that makes the watching so much better... 

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Film Bitch Awards - Traditional Categories Complete!

By now you've seen the long delayed top ten list and now the "traditional" (aka Oscar parallel) part of the Film Bitch Awards is complete with the addition of all four acting categories. If you'd like to see my 'alternate ballot' so to speak, that's there though are more "fun" categories to come since we'll try to wrap up the whole film year by NEXT weekend.

But first, THE OSCARS. TONIGHT. Here are the predictions and the nomination index if you're following along. 

Cinema as the theatre of memory

by Cláudio Alves

Cinema is the ephemeral crystalized. The camera transforms the now into a remembrance like the petrified bodies of Pompeii, those monuments of frozen life that frightened Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's Journey to Italy. I still recall when I first watched that classic and felt as if I was witnessing a film reacting to its own limited existence. When Bergman cries we see a star realizing she's no more than a shadow of yester, like those burnt cadavers her image is an unwitting memento mori. Since then, cinema's relationship to time has fascinated me, especially when it comes to the portrayal of memory. Rossellini showed me cinema remembering itself and Resnais shattered the recollection of personal history, Chris Marker paralyzed the days long gone and Varda made them abstract.

While these are names of the European vanguards, cinema as theatre of memory isn't a phenomenon exclusive to the art house. We need only look at this year's Oscar contenders to find ways of picturing memory on the big screen…

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Nathaniel's Top 19 of 2019

by Nathaniel

Better late than never. And since we're of the calendar-denying opinion that each film year doesn't really end until Oscar night, we're not too late. (Rationalization is a useful skill, isn't it?). Still what is a calendar? What is a year? Distributors and filmmakers can't seem to stay on schedule either. Of this year's top nineteen, five are out-of-time, with four premiering at festivals way back in 2018 and one still waiting around to show its captivating face (though its here due to its qualifying release). However you define 2019 is up to you. These 19 pictures are how I define it.

If you see them, which I hope you will, they'll take you from ramshackle abodes in the mountains of Macedonia and cave-homes in Spain to an architectural wonder in Seoul and even past the rings of Jupiter. They'll trap you, tripping, in an empty school with house music throbbing or drop you in Dakar where the ocean is ever roaring with its promise and its ghosts. Socioeconomic anxiety permeated the cinema this past year, which is no surprise given the world we're living in. Though many of the top 19 spoke directly to the now, they weren't always "modern" in the literal sense. Our cinematic time travelling stretched from third century China through the Civil War era in New England to Hollywood in the summer of '69 and  the stubbornly vague "near future" of science fiction...

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