Okay. Wow. After six months… six months, what even is time… on a deep dive through Best Pictures Past, it’s time for a massive gear shift to look at Best Pictures Present, the nominees from 2020.
Which… okay.
Honestly I’m mad at the Oscars this year.
Seeing as the entertainment industry was shut down by COVID for most of the year, the Academy delayed the eligibility period, they were more open to streaming, they did whatever they could to ensure that the Oscars would not have to pick and choose from what few movies made it into theatres before the lockdown, or inadvisably during it, thanks for that Christopher Nolan, Tenet’s sound mixing was bad and you should feel bad.
Personally, I felt that after the trash fire of 2020, what we as a society (such as it is) deserved was the Trash Oscars. The Best Pictures selected only from what came out between January and early March, or snuck into theatres when America just… somehow got bored of fighting COVID. But no, what they felt we needed was a ceremony celebrating festival darlings, some streaming movies… eight mostly joyless films.
As someone on Twitter (don’t recall who) said, the only Awards Discourse worth having is when we decided suffering was more artistic than joy, because maybe this level of morosity isn’t what we needed right now. Maybe what we really needed was the unconditional love of Going My Way’s Father Chuck O’Malley.
Anyway I watched them all and now I’m gonna rank them and say which one I think least deserves to lose to Nomadland, unless that is my favourite, who knows, let’s find out!
And perhaps I’ll say what my Trash Oscar replacement movie would be. Won’t be easy, I only saw like two movies before theatres shut down… might need some legit good ones in there too. Also, since I just finished a rank order of every Best Picture in Oscar history (Art Vs Commerce, still available on finer internets everywhere), I’m sure you’re curious where these would be on the list if they won. Well, get curious, because you’re gonna find out where they fall between #1 and #94, they won’t be #94, I hit rock bottom in 1933 and there was nowhere to go but up for 87 years.
I’m sorry, Cavalcade, I know you didn’t ask to be dragged on the internet for six months, I mean how could you have known that was an option, but I seriously can’t remember a single moment when you didn’t bore me, unlike any of the following.
Next Page: The bottom half