OSCARS 2019

Noone Hosted. No picture of host then. My picks below. 2018 was a great year for movies.

Best Supporting Actress

1. Cynthia Erivo, Bad Times at the Old Royale
2. Olivia Colman, The Favourite
3. Amy Adams, Vice
4. Emily Blunt - A Quiet Place
5. Zoe Kazan - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Best Supporting Actor

1. Jeff Bridges, Bad Times at the Old Royale
2. Timothy Hoult, The Favourite
3. Steve Carell, Vice
4. Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
5. Josh Hamilton, Eighth Grade

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

1. Black Panther
2. The Favourite
3. Vice

Best Costume Design

1. Black Panther
2. Bohemian Rhapsody
3. Crazy Rich Asians
4. The Favourite
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Best Production Design

1. Black Panther
2. Isle of Dogs
3. Sorry to Bother You
4. Annihilation
5. Crazy Rich Asians

Best Use of A Song in a Movie

1. Acoustic Take on Me, Deadpool 2
2. Shallow, A Star is Born
3. He’s a Rebel, Bad Times at the Old Royale
4. Jazz Singer Scene, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
5. Wedding Scene “I Can’t Help Falling in Love”, Crazy Rich Asians

Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing

1. Black Panther
2. Avengers: Infinity War
3. A Quiet Place
4. Bohemian Rhapsody
5. Roma

Best Visual Effects

1. Black Panther
2. Ready Player One
3. Avengers: Infinity War
4. Annihilation
5. Mission: Impossible - Fallout

Best Film Editing

1. Avengers: Infinity War
2. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
3. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
4. Roma
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Best Cinematography

1. The Favourite (Robbie Ryan)
2. Lean on Pete (Magnus Nordenhof Jonck)
3. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (Rob Hardy)
4. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
5. The Battle of Buster Scruggs (Bruno Delbonnel)

Foreign Language Film

1. Roma

Best Animated Feature:

1. The Incredibles 2
2. Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse
3. Ralph Wrecks the Internet
4. Isle of Dogs

Best Actress

1. Lady Gaga, A Star is Born
2. Catherine Weisz, The Favourite
3. Emma Stone, The Favourite
4. Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
5. Yalitza Aparacito, Roma

Best Actor

1. Steve Buscemi, The Death of Stalin
2. Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
3. Lakeith Stanfield, Sorry to Bother You
4. Christian Bale, Vice
5. Steve Coogan, Ideal Home

Best Adapted Screenplay

1. Armando Iannucci, The Death of Stalin
2. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, Avengers: Infinity War
3. Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
4. Andrew Haigh, Lean on Pete
5. Alex Garland, Annihilation

Best Original Screenplay

1. Wes Anderson, Isle of Dogs
2. Paul Schrader, First Reformed
3. Brad Bird, The Incredibles 2
4. Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You
5. Drew Goddard, Bad Times at the Old Royale

Best Director

1. Wes Anderson, Isle of Dogs
2. Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You
3. Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite
4. Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
5. Roma, Alfonso Cuaron

Best Picture

1. Isle of Dogs
2. The Death of Stalin
3. Avengers: Infinity War
4. First Reformed
5. Incredibles 2
6. Sorry to Bother You
7. The Favourite
8. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
9. Eighth Grade
10. Roma

Best Use of Cultural Appropriation

1. Black Panther - African/Science Fiction Makeup, Costumes, and Production Design
2. Isle of Dogs - Wes Anderson/Japanese Language, Style, and Mythos
3. Bohemian Rhapsody - Farokh Bulsura’s (aka Freddie Mercury) Persona and Music
4. Crazy Rich Asians - Chinese covers of American pop songs
5. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse - The many cultural iterations of Spider-Man

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (4/5 Stars)

Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse war written in part by Phil Lord. This man has been instrumental in bringing to prominence a very 2010s subgenre of movies. Previous examples of his work are 21 Jump Street and the Lego Movie. What these movies have in common is a consciousness of previous source material that goes beyond being meta and continues into a weird quirking of the "suspension of disbelief". These movies are insisting that a fake universe is real to its characters and that the fake reality rules should apply instead of real reality rules. A good example is Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, whereby the characters are sucked into a video game and realize the world they inhabit is not governed by physics or biology but video game rules.

You wouldn't think that should work in a dramatic sense because when anything is possible, there should be no stakes or suspense. But the rules have kind of changed in the last twenty years, in part by gamer culture (which I will speak of later) and in part by a TV show named Community. (Obviously there are a million different threads that produce culture, but I do feel this show must have been instrumental). Community introduced a character named Abed who was so ingrained in the workings of genre storytelling that he could seemingly predict what would happen in the very TV episode he was in. Other characters would chide Abed that reality wasn't like a TV show, but they would generally be proven wrong becuase they were characters in a TV show. Over-time, Community became less a TV show about what characters did in certain situations, and more about how already established characters would react if they found themselves in a completely different TV genre. That is the situations didn't change in Community. The TV show's genre, and thus the cliche genre rules, changed.

This type of storytelling probably wouldn't be possible without something like gamer culture. By that I mean, the ability for an entire audience of people to have spent more time studying the rules of a fake universes to the point where it might make sense for a story to be using different rules of realty. I guess you could trace this back to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, the enormity and details of which were so developed that the place became real in the imagination. Nowadays, vast landscapes of fantasy come out every couple of months. Much of this can be crowd-sourced, with different people contributing their own stories. Think of the expansiveness of the Star-Wars Universe. These are not simply movies. There are dozens of novels and several 30-50 hour video games. Wookieepedia, the StarWars encyclopedia has granular descriptions of various races, planets, languages, specifications of different weapons and vehicles. There are historians of these fake universes who curate online encyclopedias and obsess over what is canon, a mind-boggling absurd notion that tries to differentiate the fake-actual events from the fake-fake events of a completely fictional storyline.

But amazingly, if the universe becomes detailed enough, its reality can become something approaching real and drama/pathos/humor can be derived from it. Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is such an example. Now you know this story as this movie will explain to you at least six separate times. Peter Parker was an unassuming teenager from Queens, New York. He was bitten by a radioactive spider and became Spider-Man, a friendly neighborhood crime-fighter who works as a photographer for the Daily Bugle and falls in love with his highschool sweethear Mary Jane. He has a particularly good origin story that involves a beloved uncle that counsels him the "with great power comes great responsibility" and whose death occurs because of Peter's inaction. The original Spider-Man story has been told three times already in the last twenty years, first with Tobey Maguire, than with Andrew Garfield, and currently with Tom Holland in the main role. (As a NY Times critic pointed out, Spider-Man's defining characteristic is his youth, thus he must remain forever young, and thus the many reboots). Over the last sixty years, there have apparently been many spinoffs and satires of this story. In this movie, all of those universes merge.

The science is hazy but goes something like this: Every version of Spider-Man that has been created in any comic book or movie lives concurrently but in different universes. A bad guy named KingPin is creating a big machine underneath Brooklyn that will meld this multiverse. Spider-Man (the original Peter Parker) tries to stop him but gets sucked into the machine. This sucks the other versions of him into the original universe. Now instead of one Spider-Man, there are at least six.

I had no idea how out-of-hand this universe had become. Apparently, none of these characters are original to this movie. But we've got Miles Morales, teenager from Brooklyn. Gwen Stacey, best friend of Spider-Man who becomes Spider-Girl after Spider-Man's death, Peter B. Parker the middle-aged version of Spider-Man recently divorced and out of shape (voiced by Jake Johnson), Spider-Man Noir a black-and-white private detective Spider-Man from the 1930s (voiced by Nicholas Cage), Penni Parker, an anime japanese school-girl from the year 3100 who utilizes a Spider-Man robot, and finally, the one and only Peter Porker, Spider-Ham, a cartoon spider who was bitten by a radioactive pig, works for the Daily Beagle, and can float through the air while smelling a delicious pie (voiced by John Mulaney).

Visually, the movie is very impressive as it utlizes all of the different animation styles from the various Spidermen in the same movie. Animation, especially computer animation, makes for great action sequences, and this movie is very impressive in that capacity too. The heart of the story belongs to Miles Morales who we see gaining his powers, going through the tribulations of high school, and losing his beloved uncle. Certain stories are special to us. "If it was never new, and it never gets old, it's a folk song" says Llewyn Davis in Inside Llewyn Davis. This too applies to Spider-Man.