This is the thread where we discuss matters pertaining to the detrius that accompanies the "End of the Year in Cinema" -- 2022

feeling suspiciously like that field will include Decision to Leave

I'd be surprised about that. It's picked up a few critics' prizes for best foreign-language film and in categories like editing and cinematography, but it doesn't have much momentum in major categories like picture or director. At this time last year, Drive My Car (to pick an obvious comparison) had won best film from New York, Boston, and Los Angeles critics groups.

FWIW, this is the current Gold Derby expert predictions for Oscar best picture nominations:

1. The Fabelmans
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once
3. The Banshees of Inisherin
4. Top Gun: Maverick
5. TAR
6. Women Talking
7. Avatar: The Way of Water
8. Elvis
9. Glass Onion
10. The Woman King

(#11 is Babylon, which I think could easily sneak in there.)

i always feel like the oscars best picture noms need to include one unambiguously great film and i suppose i think that's the park chan wook this year

that is a great film, but I don't think it's likely.

i need to watch tar to see if that's unambiguously great. Maybe Women Talking is unambiguously great? I don't think anything else on that list could be.

Tar is very good

most great films are not destined for oscars

for sure! but it feels like there's always one in the list. this theory bears exploration.

? if i'm going based on reputation alone:

2021: Drive My Car?
2020: Minari
2019: I mean, I guess Parasite?
2018: The Favourite
2017: Get Out/Lady Bird/Phantom Thread
2016: Moonlight
2015: Fury Road
2014: Boyhood
2013: Wolf of Wall Street, maybe Nebraska?
2012: Amour?
2011: Tree of Life?

2011 is ROUGH man: Woody's last generally accepted film, War Horse, The Help, Scorcese's kids film...

I'd tag The Fabelmans unambiguously great but it doesn't exactly fit the profile outlined in forks' list

I was not crazy about Eo. Eo's cuter than Balthazar, I'll grant.

I had my issues with EO and yes, it's not the Balthazar we want ... but it's the Balthazar we deserve.

Sight and Sound Top 50:

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/50-best-films-2022

At some point, Aftersun landing atop an aggregate list was inevitable

Still haven't seen that damn Hansen-Løve.

Oscar shortlists:

Documentary Feature

“All That Breathes”
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
“Bad Axe”
“Children of the Mist”
“Descendant”
“Fire of Love”
“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song”
“Hidden Letters”
“A House Made of Splinters”
“The Janes”
“Last Flight Home”
“Moonage Daydream”
“Navalny”
“Retrograde”
“The Territory”

Documentary Short Subject

“American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton”
“Anastasia”
“Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices from a Plantation Prison”
“As Far as They Can Run”
“The Elephant Whisperers”
“The Flagmakers”
“Happiness Is £4 Million”
“Haulout”
“Holding Moses”
“How Do You Measure a Year?”
“The Martha Mitchell Effect”
“Nuisance Bear”
“Shut Up and Paint”
“Stranger at the Gate”
“38 at the Garden”

International Feature Film

Argentina, “Argentina, 1985”
Austria, “Corsage”
Belgium, “Close”
Cambodia, “Return to Seoul”
Denmark, “Holy Spider”
France, “Saint Omer”
Germany, “All Quiet on the Western Front”
India, “Last Film Show”
Ireland, “The Quiet Girl”
Mexico, “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”
Morocco, “The Blue Caftan”
Pakistan, “Joyland”
Poland, “EO”
South Korea, “Decision to Leave”
Sweden, “Cairo Conspiracy”

Live-Action Short Film

“All in Favor”
“Almost Home”
“An Irish Goodbye”
“Ivalu”
“Le Pupille”
“The Lone Wolf”
“Nakam”
“Night Ride”
“Plastic Killer”
“The Red Suitcase”
“The Right Words”
“Sideral”
“The Treatment”
“Tula”
“Warsha”

Animated Short Film

“Black Slide”
“The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”
“The Debutante”
“The Flying Sailor”
“The Garbage Man”
“Ice Merchants”
“It’s Nice in Here”
“More than I Want to Remember”
“My Year of Dicks”
“New Moon”
“An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It”
“Passenger”
“Save Ralph”
“Sierra”
“Steakhouse”

Original Song

“Time” from “Amsterdam”
“Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)” from “Avatar: The Way of Water”
“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
“This Is A Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“Ciao Papa” from “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”
“Til You’re Home” from “A Man Called Otto”
“Naatu Naatu” from “RRR”
“My Mind & Me” from “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me”
“Good Afternoon” from “Spirited”
“Applause” from “Tell It like a Woman”
“Stand Up” from “Till”
“Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick”
“Dust & Ash” from “The Voice of Dust and Ash”
“Carolina” from “Where the Crawdads Sing”
“New Body Rhumba” from “White Noise”

Original Score

“All Quiet on the Western Front”
“Avatar: The Way of Water”
“Babylon”
“The Banshees of Inisherin”
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
“Devotion”
“Don’t Worry Darling”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“The Fabelmans”
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”
“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”
“Nope”
“She Said”
“The Woman King”
“Women Talking”

Makeup and Hairstyling

“All Quiet on the Western Front”
“Amsterdam”
“Babylon”
“The Batman”
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
“Blonde”
“Crimes of the Future”
“Elvis”
“Emancipation”
“The Whale”

Visual Effects

“All Quiet on the Western Front”
“Avatar: The Way of Water”
“The Batman”
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”
“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”
“Jurassic World Dominion”
“Nope”
“Thirteen Lives”
“Top Gun: Maverick”

Sound

“All Quiet on the Western Front”
“Avatar: The Way of Water”
“Babylon”
“The Batman”
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
“Elvis”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”
“Moonage Daydream”
“Top Gun: Maverick”

It's too short for that gesture.

it would be so rad if naatu naatu won best song

“Applause” from “Tell It like a Woman”

This is the Diane Warren presumptive nominee this year, for those keeping score

We could be looking at Oscar nominee James Murphy

was gonna happen sooner or later

“My Year of Dicks” is gonna be one hell of an animated short

the only thing that will get me to watch the oscars is the promise of a "naatu naatu" performance

I'm positive that one will get nominated

My best bets for the dumbest Oscar category:

“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
“Ciao Papa” from “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”
“Naatu Naatu” from “RRR”
“Stand Up” from “Till”
“Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick”

New Christmas-themed Alice Rohrwacher short film on Disney Plus is supposed to be good.

It is! Do check it out ASAP.

I love when Keith unleashes the big guns, and am surprised this isn't a zero-star review:

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/babylon-review-damien-chazelle-margot-robbie-brad-pitt/

― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Friday, December 16, 2022 10:09 AM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Apparently Babylon includes a bit alluding to the Arbuckle scandal. Chazelle is not only dead to me; it is my moral obligation to kick the corpse in the crotch.

and uh we have our winners:

BEST PICTURE: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Runner up: Decision to Leave
BEST ACTOR: Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Runner(s) up: Brendan Fraser, The Whale and Park Hae-il, Decision to Leave
BEST ACTRESS: Cate Blanchett, Tár
Runner up: Tang Wei, Decision to Leave
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Runner up: Paul Dano, The Fabelmans
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: (tie) Jessie Buckley, Women Talking and Nina Hoss, Tár
BEST ENSEMBLE: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Runner up: Babylon
BEST DIRECTOR: Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave
Runner up: Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Park Chan-wook and Jeong Seo-kyeong, Decision to Leave
Runner up: (tie) Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin and Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Sarah Polley, Women Talking
Runner up: George Miller & Augusta Gore, Three Thousand Years of Longing and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, She Said
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kim Ji-yong, Decision to Leave
Runner up: Claudio Miranda, Top Gun: Maverick
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Avatar: The Way of Water
Runner up: Nope
BEST ART DIRECTION/PRODUCTION: Babylon
Runner up: Crimes of the Future
BEST SCORE: Justin Hurwitz, Babylon
Runner up: (tie) Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Empire of Light and Michael Abels, Nope
BEST DOCUMENTARY: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
No clear runner up
BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM: Decision to Leave
No clear runner up
BEST ANIMATED FILM: Turning Red
No clear runner up
BEST FIRST FILM: Charlotte Wells, Aftersun
Runner up: John Patton Ford, Emily the Criminal
BREAKOUT AWARD: Austin Butler, Elvis
Runner up: Frankie Corio, Aftersun

I was Team Decision to Leave.

That Rohrwacher short is fun.

Here’s your zero-star Babylon review: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2022/12/babylon.html

lol good stuff

I saw some great movies this year – here are some of my favorites. What did I miss? pic.twitter.com/vsgEmc8cn8

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 23, 2022

Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant has a good list:

1. The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier)
2. Hytti nro 6 (Juho Kuosmanen)
3. Vortex (Gaspar Noé)
4. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund)
5. Close (Lukas Dhont)
6. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
7. Cow (Andrea Arnold)
8. L’événement (Audrey Diwan)
9. Rimini (Ulrich Seidl)
10. Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)
11. R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu)
12. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
13. Narcosis (Martijn de Jong)
14. Plus que jamais (Emily Atef)
15. Nope (Jordan Peele)
16. Las bestias (Rodrigo Sorogoyen)
17. Knor (Mascha Halberstad)
18. Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron)
19. Blonde (Andrew Dominik)
20. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Gu Xiaogang)
21. Housewitz (Oeke Hoogendijk)
22. Alcarràs (Carla Simón)
23. Silence of the Tides (Pieter-Rim de Kroon)
24. Les passagers de la nuit (Mikhaël Hers)
25. Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski)

Read a Deadline piece about the death of "Babylon" and came across this honestly kind of shocking editorial fuck-up:

Examples of Hollywood insider movies that didn’t translate to mass audiences: The three-time Oscar-nominated Chaplin, starring Robert Downey Jr., which did only $9.5M stateside back in 1992 (though it did make Hollywood take the SNL alum seriously as an actor) and the Coen brothers’ two-time Cannes-winning title The Player only grossed $21.7M that year as well.

is babylon really this terrible?

xp among other things, I managed to forget that Not the Coen Brothers' The Player won 2 at Cannes

I'm amazed no one's talked about Armageddon Time. A way smaller scale The Fabelmans if you wanna sell it and be reductionist. Anthony Hopkins concludes a helluva octogenarian renaissance.

I admit that my cohort Odie H. calling the movie out on its purported racism kind of ended my desire to check it out, as a moderate James Gray fan

I...don't see it?

Ppl keep citing Armageddon Time as an example of a movie for adults that failed to draw audiences, but I feel like I barely had an opportunity. I wanted to see it, but it only played for a couple of weeks here in Chicago. Meanwhile, Tar, another supposed box-office disappointment, has been in theaters for almost three months straight.

It got no play here.

A way smaller scale Fablemans that came out this year was Ricky D'Ambrose's 'The Cathedral'. Quite Bressonian take on the disintegration of an American family.

Thanks for the reminder; it's on MUBI.

Probably belongs on the Arm0nd thread, but it's decidedly detrius:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/editors-groom-awards-and-moviegoers/

Going beyond movie news, the Los Angeles Times editorial board decided to forget the raging proxy war in Ukraine, inflation, our open border, tarnished elections, and single-party government to weigh in on “gender-neutral” film awards. This is another example of cultural revolution in reverse, where media elites use their commanding heights to influence popular opinion.

A thousand-word December 21 editorial urged, “Award shows can smartly lay out” what it called “a plan to get rid of these categories” of gender. The drastic proposal to reclassify prizes aligns with the media’s transsexual agenda.

But this grooming of the populace — disguised as social progress — went uncontested until film reviewer Wade Major of the CineGods website took the bold step of writing a corrective letter to the editor of the Times.

Major’s dissent should be saluted for bucking the politically correct coercion by journalists who want the Academy Awards and other film organizations to radicalize. Major warned the Times, “You’ve set the stage for a cultural dumpster fire.” But destruction is exactly what the Times wants when it promotes tyrannical change to how we perceive gender and make movies about it.

Defending the distinction between male and female, Major argued that “sex-segregated acting categories celebrate not just performance but the diversity of those differences, without which audiences would enjoy no emotional connection to performance.” This is the crux of the crisis: Men are not women, and vice versa; their souls are equal, yet acting and characterization express specific experiences. The Times editorial means to abolish more than categories; it aims to shatter ideas of spirituality and facts of human difference.

While endorsing the gender-neutral-awards trend already initiated by several industry groups, the Times got caught up in confusion: “Dissolving gendered categories for Oscars or Emmys would not magically give women parity with men in accessing substantial acting roles.” The editorial bemoaned that “the entertainment industry is still weighted in favor of men” and conceded that “awards still play a part in the ecosystem of Hollywood.” The term “ecosystem” exposes nebulous non-reasoning.

But Major’s doubt is more precise: The Times is “painting new-age misogyny with ‘progressive’ lipstick, notably the idea that if we pretend men and women aren’t different, inequality will disappear.”

The Times editorial is dishonest. Board members ought to individually sign the diatribe rather than pretend objective wisdom through an institutional stance on questions of gender and equity. They should admit to aiding the destruction of heterosexual identity. Not saying what they’re really after — a social transformation, transsocialism — is why we must read the media with skepticism.

The Times praised the ridiculous example of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s decision to go gender-neutral (declaring male and female ties in both lead and supporting-acting categories), but the facts are laughable. Major, a longtime LAFCA member, revealed the group’s actual lunacy: “I can testify that the group remains deeply divided. The change passed by a single vote, with insufficient debate, procedural anomalies and no outright majority.”

Fact is: Film journalists desperately yearn to appear progressive; legacy media then serve that bias to the public by implying a consensus that doesn’t exist. It’s merely fiat, same as Democratic Party dictates that corrupt media misrepresent as “bipartisan.”

Some back history: The farce of gender-neutral awards began at the far-left Village Voice when gender activism (feminist and queer-preferential practice) dominated that publication’s movie poll from 1999 to 2005; it was disbanded thereafter. Loss of interest? Coming to reason? Reason has disappeared from Millennial discourse. Now, the point is to turn moviegoers into deferential nonbinary soldiers.

That’s why the Times wants the Oscars and Oscar-watchers to ditch the basic idea of sexuality that makes life — and movies — fascinating.

Other than James Sweeney’s Straight Up, there hasn’t been a good sex comedy this millennium; #MeToo has destroyed cinema sexuality. Remember how Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront and Sally Field in Norma Rae fought against and for unions (respectively), both using masculine and feminine approaches that made those issues fresh and interesting? Look at Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone for female and male versions of the American dream, and marvel at the individual physical, moral, and historical performance that makes those characters recognizable and unforgettable.

Denying such gender differences is another form of media tyranny and progressive fascism. Seeking to abolish gender identity, the L.A. Times pushes for gender equity the same way mainstream media push for socialism — a backwards revolution in thinking and behavior.

Michael Corleone, symbol of the American Dream.

That plus women's American Dream is to be raped and go insane