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.

Green Book (4/5 Stars)

There alot of interracial buddy movies out there. The genre was essentially born with In the Heat of the Night in 1968, the first interracial buddy cop movie, which seemed to spawn a different iteration every couple of years (a few examples 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour). Green Book belongs with the best of them and in a way is more than that. Other interracial buddy movies focus only on the race aspect of the buddy relationship. Green Book does more than that. The characters here are also separated by class and just as importantly, if not more so, their ideas about individualism.

The plot is disarmingly simple. It is based on a true story that took place within the space of a few months in the early 1960s. The Dr. Don Shirley, the celebrated concern pianist, is embarking on a cross-country tour, including the deep south, and has hired Tony "Lip" Vallalonga as his driver/bodyguard. Dr. Don Shirley is black and Tony "Lip" is white. But as I said, there's more. Dr. Don Shirley is upper class. Tony "Lip" is working class. And most importantly Dr. Shirley is an individual. He has eclectic tastes, has no family or close friends, and is not simply a good piano player but one of the best. Tony "Lip" on the other hand, is Italian. He's from the Bronx.

They mostly get along. Tony "Lip" may harbor basic 1960s prejudice against black people, but does not seem to apply them to Dr. Shirley, who has obvious class and money and will pay him a good wage for his work. Dr. Shirley appreciates the usefulness of Tony's skills and personality attributes even though he clearly does not want them for himself. They travel through the segregated south, but the hardships that prevail upon them there are never more interesting than how these two interact with each other. Most of it pretty funny in an odd couple kind of way, Tony "Lip" being the sloppy easy-going guy and Dr. Shirley being the neat uptight man. Tony "Lip" introduces Dr. Shirley to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Dr. Shirley helps Tony "Lip" with the letters he writes to his wife. By the time the movie was ending and Tony "Lip" was hurrying back to make Christmas dinner with his family, I was happily being reminded of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. This is an enjoyable movie. Is it one of the best of the year? (It has been nominated for Best Picture). I don't think so. I think it lacks the sort of ambition a Best Picture nominee should have. But I'm not unhappy with its presence.

What is a racial stereotype? It is a belief about the typical attributes of a type of people. If you would agree that there is such a thing as a type of people, than it follows that there exist racial stereotypes about them that are true. At one point in this movie, Tony "Lip" offers some fried chicken to Dr. Shirley. Dr. Shirley refuses it. What's the problem, says Tony, you people are suppposed to like fried chicken. Dr. Shirely takes offense. What's the problem, says Tony, if someone told me all guineas like spaghetti and meatballs, I wouldn't get offended. Now, we all know why Dr. Shirley would get offended. Perhaps a better question then is why Tony "Lip" wouldn't get offended. The answer is not a question of race, it is a question of individualism. Let's put it this way: The racial stereotype that black people like fried chicken is not offensive to Dr. Shirley because he believes a liking of fried chicken is inherently bad. It isn't. Nobody thinks that. Dr. Shirley is offended because he is being automatically placed into a group based on his race, when he, as an individual, does not share those characteristics. Tony "Lipp" on the other hand does not identify as an individual, or not nearly as much. He is an Italian. He grew up and lived his entire life in one neighborhood in the Bronx. He is not offended by the idea of a person telling him Italians like spaghetti and meatballs because he does not have a problem with being grouped with Italians and having others assume Italian characterisitics about him. When told a group of stuck rich guys won't like his last name, he says, if they don't like it, they can shove it, I'll wait outside. It's only a problem to Dr. Shirley to not be accepted or allowed to be something different from Black. Tony "Lip" is content with being Italian and does not want to be anything else.

America has a long history of promoting individuals and individualism like that of Dr. Shirley. Our culture say far less about the merits of being part of a group. The pitfalls of being part of a group are well known: less room for vanity, less chance of fame, and you have to suppress certain aspects of yourself that the majority believe are not beneficial or simply don't like. But what about the benefits? Everyone in Tony "Lip" neighborhood knows and respects him. His Christmas dinners are attended by a large amount of family and friends. Whether or not he needs it, his relatives show up to provide support. Contrast this with the situation of Dr. Shirley. He receives lots of applause for being an outstanding pianist, but he has no close family, he lives alone, his best friend might be his butler. This is not a result of his race. He has chosen to put himself on a pedestal apart from other people. His concerns about racial stereotypes are not always a blow against racial prejudice, sometimes they are an exercise in vanity. He wants other people to believe he is exceptional. To the extent that he is exceptional, he deserves that consideration. But this is unrelated to whether it is okay to assume a black person likes fried chicken. If most black people like fried chicken, and liking fried chicken is not a bad thing, it isn't offensive to say or assume so. It is at least not racially offensive. Individuals may be offended for being lumped in with a group and a lot of what seems to pass as racism nowadays can fit squarely within the latter category. Not being able to vote or sit in a restaurant. That's racism. Microagressions, I'm afraid not.

This movie was directed Peter Farrelly without his brother Bobby Farrelly. There is probably a story there. The Farrelly brothers were responsible for some of the best comedies of the 1990s (Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, There's Something About Mary), but have not been doing that great since. This is a good change of pace. 

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (4/5 Stars)

Sometimes a comedian's persona parlays perfectly into a dramatic role adding depth and pathos into what was before a rather two dimensional act. A great example of this is Adam Sandler's turn in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love. It was ostensibly the same rage-prone Adam Sandler character that he got famous for in a bunch of pure comedic movies like Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy, but Punch-Drunk Love got inside it and turned it the Sandler-persona for one brief shining moment into the stuff of art.

This can be said of Melissa McCarthy's turn here in Can You Ever Forgive Me? I have always considered her shtick a bit overrated and too dependent on being a dependable jerk. In Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she inhabits a role, playing a real life jerk named Lee Israel, that takes this persona to the logical end of the line and then asks the audience to consider her nature for more time than a punchline. Their are moments of subliminity in this movie when you feel like you really understand her in a new way and, for a brief shining moment, what floats to the top is the stuff of art. Melissa McCarthy was nominated for an Oscar for her work here (her co-star Richard E. Grant was also nominated) and it is well-deserved.

Lee Israel was a real person, a writer who specialized in biographies in the bad old days of New York City. In the early 1990s, after had lost her last job because of alcoholism, and without friends or family because she was a jerk, she became desperate. She could not pay the rent and more dramatically, she couldn't pay the vet costs for her sole companion, her beloved cat. While doing research in the library for a book on Fanny Brice nobody wanted, she serendipitously found a few old letters from the comedian. She sold one, got some money, but not all that much because the letter wasn't exciting. She added some caustic wit onto the next one in a p.s. line. That letter sold for much more. So she started forging letters in the style of other authors like Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and such.

She actually did not make all that much money. Still the movie is fascinating in several procedural ways. It explains quite succinctly how Lee Isreal made these letters and how she fooled the anitque dealers. It also makes apparent Lee Israel's artistic worth. Nobody would buy her books, but everyone believes that the letters are real because Israel succeeds so well in capturing the voices of the authors she is impersonating.

But most of all, the movie is succeeds in its portrayal of a character at her lowest gaining some victories however small. Lee Israel is a miserable person. At the time she embarks on her criminal career she remeets an acquaintance named Jack Hock, played here by Richard E. Grant. Jack Hock is absurdly optimistic given his status as a lonely and penniless queer man. One of the biggest laughs in the movie is when Jack Hock is revealed to be homeless and speaking about this to Lee he relates his failures but adds, "I can't say I have any regrets." "That can't possibly be true," she deadpans. Jack Hock is so low on the societal totem-pole he seems to be unable to judge Lee's immoral behavior. This allows him to become her drinking buddy and every now and again, there is one particularly sublime moment in a jazz club, we see Lee Israel relax enough to the point where she experiences something along the lines of happiness.

This is what the movie does so well. It presents a person that is not particularly likable, but also does not require the audience to like them. The movie shows a frank discussion with Lee and her agent (played by Jane Curtain) in the beginning of the movie and allows the agent to win the argument as to whether or not she deserves an advance of money ("You're not famous enough to be an asshole," her agent explains). However, the movie succeeds in explaining the character and once a character is explained, it is possible to empathize with them and her small victories become something the audience shares in. Courtroom speeches from guilty defendants are the thing of drama and Can You Ever Forgive Me? does not disappoint in this regard. We believe Lee when she states that she does not regret her actions, that the period in which she was forging letters and being able to pay the rent and help her cat were some of the best times in her life and that she had never been more proud of her work's artistic merit. We also believe her when she admits that pretending to be someone else is a coward's act, that the true artist is someone who explores herself, which she has always failed to do. She is granted parole and we are glad she doesn't receive a prison term. She is directed to attend AA meetings, which she doesn't, and we forgive her that as well. She is too old to change and is not asking anything more from us anyway.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?, was directed by Marielle Heller, She previously had made the movie The Diary of a Teenage Girl, another movie that took great interest in the overlooked inner world of a not-so-obvious character. I hope to see more movies from her.

Vice (3/5 Stars)

Not that it is wise to suppose that Dick Cheney cares, but I bet he never suspected at the time when he was at the height of his power, that the little known writer currently working at Saturday Night Live producing Bear City skits would go on to make the definitive biopic of him. That is the problem with being an under-the-radar bearaucrat with little to no personality. Nobody talks about you, until one person does and that person becomes the only storyteller around.

The writer and director of Vice is Adam McKay, better known for his work directing Will Ferrel comedies such as Anchorman, Talldega Nights, and Step-Brothers. Will Ferrell is still doing that type of shtick. For the time being, Adam McKay seems to have moved on to more serious entertainment. His first venture into this genre, The Big Short, was one of the best movies of the year. Vice is in the same vein. It takes a complicated subject, the life and politics of hugely influential if not particularly known man, Richard Cheney, and tries its best to explain the significance of his policies and politics. The Big Short had an easier time at it. That movie's subject matter was complicated to, but the movie (and the book as well) adroitly got all the major points across by inserting them into the stories of several sympathetic well-rounded characters. Vice lacks a sympathetic well-rounded character. We learn alot about Dick Cheney but not so much about what makes him click. We learn much about what he did but not much about why he thought it was the right thing to do. Perhaps it would be hard for a writer-director such as Adam McKay to really understand someone so politically opposite. I have seen it done before though. I thought Oliver Stone did a particularly good job with Richard Nixon in Nixon. I mean, the movie makes a big deal about Dick Cheney's pursuit of power, but what is power without purpose. Did he actually want anything besides it? I'm not sure this movie found the answer to that question.

The most chilling thing about Cheney is that there might be less to him than you would think. I watched Errol Morris' documentary interview of Donald Rumsfeld and was absolutely taken aback by the utter lack of seriousness and self-introspection in Donald Rumsfeld. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney go back a long way, Cheney basically learning the ropes of Washington from Rumsfeld. Was Dick Cheney like Donald Rumsfeld? Can he really be explained by a scene in the beginning of Vice in which a hungover and bruised Cheney is read the riot act by his wife and told that if he does not make something of himself she will leave him. To gain power to keep his wife, is that the sum total of this man's ambitions. What a scary thought.

Adam McKay does not seem to agree. I think McKay's politics are provoking him to seek some more nefarious answer to that question. So the movie makes much more sense in its first half when Cheney is an underdog more defined by a simple pursuit of power than in the second half when Cheney gains power and pursues many of his controversial policies like war and torture. McKay hasn't achieved insight into Cheney motivations, but he is assuming that something more is there. Maybe, maybe not.

The performance in Vice are damn near perfect. Christian Bale may seem a not obvious choice to play Dick Cheney until you see him onscreen for five seconds and you realize its the perfect casting choice. As a matter of course, he seems to have gained like fifty pounds to do this role. All in a days work for this man. This is a much better version of Dick Cheney than we briefly saw Richard Dreyfuss give in W.The most perfect choice of casting though belongs to Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. That is some uncanny shit. I remember being unnerved while watching the real Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known. I felt the same thing here and think it a stroke of genius to use Steve Carell, an actor who has played famously empty characters before like Brick the Weatherman, to portray Rummy.

Like any half-way decent movie that portrays well-known people, the viewer gets a kick out of who got cast to play whom. Tyler Perry plays Colin Powell. Sam Rockwell plays George W. Bush. Amy Adams plays Lynne Cheney. George W. Bush, bless his big dumb heart, doesn't seem to know what he is doing half the time and is under the unfortunate impression that Rumsfeld and Cheney do.

I like political movies with a point of view. Not only does Adam McKay have a point of view, he is brilliantly angry about it. This movie and The Big Short reminded me of the best movies of Oliver Stone. They take chances, they are vibrant, and they are passionate about the subject matter. Sometimes this really works like when Dick and Lynne Cheney speak Shakespeare. Other times not so. Vice has a narrator who is not really introduced and might not be a portrait of the actual person he is supposed to be. (Noticeably, he narrates this story in a wearied manner, not unlike the narrator in last years War Machine. Is this how Afghanistan and Iraq are to be remembered? As sad slogs.) We do not know who this man is until he gets run over by a car and Dick Cheney as organ donee, receives his heart. The movie argues that Dick Cheney slighted the dead man by referring to his donor heart as "his new heart." I get what the movie is getting at, but heart problems don't seem to be a fair thing for which to criticize someone.

I found Vice to be frequently funny. That does not mean the movie has jokes. This relates more to the skill of the writer/director who consistently finds ways to present information in a clever and efficient manner. I am a big fan of Adam McKay. I look forward to whatever he does next.