Tricia Cotham Represents a New Low in American Politics

State Rep. Tricia Cotham (R-NC)

Party switchers are usually not hard to spot.  Politicians are creatures that value self-preservation, and so if they are leaving the party, usually one of three things are happening: their districts are becoming more competitive/out-of-reach, they have started to publicly fight with their leaders, or the leader of their party has become suddenly unpopular.  None of these was true State Rep. Tricia Cotham, who in April switched parties from the Democratic to the Republican side in the North Carolina State House.  Cotham was in a district she won by 20-points, and it was safely blue headed into 2024.  Cotham has publicly expressed support for much of the Democratic platform.  She was a firm believer in LGBTQ rights, had campaigned on a minimum wage hike, and was decidedly pro-choice.

She was also not new to the party-this was not someone who came out-of-nowhere George Santos style, and was suddenly found to have lied to get an office.  She was in the legislature for a decade (from 2007-2017), had run for Congress as a Democrat (losing to Alma Adams), and had roots beyond just her own achievements.  She campaigned for Bill Clinton and worked for John Edwards as a student.  Her ex-husband Jerry Meek was the Chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party from 2005-09.  Her mother Pat Cotham is a member of the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners, was a superdelegate for Bernie Sanders in 2016, and was elected to the DNC in 2010.  The family had deep roots in the Democratic Party-this would be the equivalent of someone like Mark Udall switching parties in Colorado.

But Cotham did switch parties in April, and thanks to an explosive exposé in the New York Times this past weekend, it appears this may have been planned as far back as her election announcement in 2022.  Cotham was encouraged to run by Republican legislative leaders Tim Moore & John Bell.  The article goes through the motions of talking about how she felt "alienated" from the party, but she just ran on most of these issues last year...how alienated can one get in three months?  She has proven to be a crucial problem for the North Carolina Democratic Party (and Gov. Roy Cooper) by ensuring that the GOP could loosen gun restrictions, support private school vouchers, & ban gender-affirming care for minors.  Most damning of all, Tricia Cotham, who once said on the State House floor that the abortion she had was between "she and God" helped to pass the most restrictive abortion law in North Carolina in her lifetime.

The New York Times is careful not to say the quiet part out loud here, and for legal reasons I'm going to admit that the upcoming is just a theory, but it's hard for me not to see this as a planned ruse.  The Republicans had no chance of winning a seat this blue.  Though Moore & Bell claim they did not know that she would leave the party, they still actively encouraged her to run, and she was backed in the race by conservative organizations like North Carolina Dental Society PAC and the North Carolina Health Care Facilities PAC, both of whom almost exclusively support Republicans.  Cotham is not a neophyte legislator, and she chose to run from retirement in 2022 in a district where her name recognition would give her a leg-up in the primaries, but in a race that no Republican could hold...this was the only way they could do so.  And her party switch would mean that the Republicans would be able to override any laws from Gov. Roy Cooper.  From my vantage point, it's hard not to think that this was planned (though the article nor the three legislators involved have claimed it wasn't, largely because Cotham would then be susceptible to fraud charges).

If this is the case, this would be basically unprecedented.  While both parties try to encourage or even run advertisements to get the other side to vote for weak candidates (think Todd Akin 2012 or John Gibbs in 2022), neither side has run an actual candidate in the other party's primary that they knew would switch sides.  Republicans did come close to trying to trick liberal voters in 2020 while running pro-marijuana candidates with GOP links in third party primaries that ultimately cost the Minnesota DFL the State Senate, but again...something like what appears to have happened with Cotham has never happened before...but given how well it worked out for the party in charge, it's hard not to think that both sides will cross this boundary now that it's worked so well.

And the worst part is...so far, there's nothing they can really do about it.  Cotham is in office the remainder of her term, costing the Democrats any defense they could have in the next two years.  And she wasn't someone whom we should've seen coming-her Democratic roots and long public service career in connection with progressive politics means that this isn't a "you should've caught this" moment  for Democrats.  This is really dark, terrible stuff, with people now (allegedly) lying to voters to win an office they otherwise couldn't, and screwing over thousands of people (and in this case, millions of North Carolinians) who trusted them.  All politicians "lie" but they don't lie like this-in a world where nothing shocks me about politics, Tricia Cotham has.  I hope her soul was worth it.

OVP: The Shootist (1976)

Film: The Shootist (1976)

Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Sheree North

Director: Don Siegel

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the 1970's, John Wayne as a persona was not something the hip, New Hollywood cinema had an obvious fit for, but the actor was bankable & kept working.  True Grit had been a proper hit, and he actually ended up acting for much of the decade while other headliners of his generation like Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart had to sit back and take supporting parts.  Films like Big Jake, The Cowboys, McQ, and Rooster Cogburn (a sequel to True Grit) all made money, and it was pretty clear at this point that it wasn't going to be changing tastes that eventually stopped John Wayne, but instead Father Time.  That came to pass in 1976 with The Shootist.  Wayne once again donned his cowboy hat and spurs, but this would be the last time that he would.  Fittingly, in many ways it recalls a film that he once turned down (The Gunfighter), and stars a host of major names of the past to watch him in his final ride.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Shootist takes place over the course of a single week, and starts with gunfighter JB Brooks (Wayne) finding out from his physician, Doc Hostetler (Stewart) that he is dying of cancer, and will soon die of that if he doesn't go out in a blaze of glory.  The film then becomes a series of vignettes, with Brooks meeting with a number of people from his past, many of whom are trying to profit off of their connections with a famous gunslinger since he will no longer be able to gain from it himself.  During this time, he lives in a boarding house run by Bond Rogers (Bacall), a widowed mother of a young man named Gillom (Howard) who is fascinated by Brooks' history of violence and death.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Brooks will not go down to cancer, but instead (in a very rare moment for a John Wayne film, as the actor only died a handful of times onscreen during his fifty-year career) he is killed in a gunfight, one that hopefully turns off Gillom (who flees rather than engages, despite his obsession with this type of violence) and protects the next generation from the mistakes of the past.

The Shootist on its merits is an oddly-structured film.  The vignettes take a bit to get used to, particularly given that you rarely can tell which characters are going to stick around and which you need to invest into, and honestly, because in many cases actors like John Carradine & Harry Morgan feel less like they are paying tribute to the film itself, and more are there marveling at Wayne, doing his final ride.  That morbid curiosity, quite frankly, is what makes The Shootist worth something.  If you take it just as a movie, it's okay, but forgettable.  But understanding that Wayne, one of the most important figures of the Old Hollywood era, was coming to an end (in many ways taking that era with him), something that Wayne himself likely understood given his age, it makes the film a lot more powerful.  It helps that Wayne is very solid in this movie, playing the part with a type of desperation, a type of bargaining, that feels unusual for the two-dimensional actor, giving a fine performance (a worthier performance to give him an Oscar for than True Grit if the Academy had been inclined).

Wayne never made a movie again.  Contrary to common belief, Wayne wasn't battling cancer when this film was made, though he did struggle with a serious case of influenza during the filming of the movie.  In 1979, though, he was afflicted with it when he was given the task of handing the Best Picture Oscar to The Deer Hunter (a movie, let's be honest, the conservative Wayne probably loathed), and if you look at the clip you can see a visibly shaken Wayne, getting a standing ovation (which in those days of the Academy were quite rare) while longtime colleagues like Gregory Peck & Laurence Olivier look on the verge of tears.  Wayne opened the presentation, a little winded and his voice breaking just slightly, with "(Oscar) and I are both a little weather-beaten, but we're both still here, and plan to be around for a whole lot longer."  The Hollywood icon would be dead just 9 weeks later.

With us finishing John Wayne month, the quintessential cowboy in our year devoted to the leading stars of westerns, next month we're going to move into a new chapter in our series.  For the final five months of 2023, we'll focus on actors who made their name in westerns during the New Hollywood era, when the western went through a transformation and would eventually fall out-of-fashion.  We'll start with an actor who who would become synonymous with the western, despite hailing from a place far from the American West.

Impeaching Biden Would Be a Mistake

House Speakers Kevin McCarthy & Newt Gingrich

The 1998 midterms are one of the stranger political elections of the past century, and one of the most under-discussed amongst modern political analysts.  They do, however, provide a lesson to 2024, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has been making a conversation about impeachment far more public, with the California Republican clearly having members of his caucus float trial balloons to see if there's an appetite to impeach President Biden over the recent plea deal involving his son Hunter, and McCarthy would do well to remember what those lessons taught Republicans a generation ago.

In 1998, this was the first time in over a century that we had an election following the impeachment of a sitting president.  While President Bill Clinton did not stand for reelection (he was already on his second term), many Republicans assumed that this would be a point where the public could weigh in on Clinton's trial before Congress, and on his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky.  The public did weigh in, but they didn't do so in the way that Republicans had expected.  The 1998 midterms saw the first time since 1934 that a non-presidential party failed to gain congressional seats in a midterm, with the Democrats netting five seats in the US House, and neither side netted seats in the Senate (both sides flipped three seats a piece).  This wasn't the expectation going into the night, and it caused a lot of finger-pointing within the Republican caucus.  Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, at the time considering a run for the White House in 2000, saw his political career go up in smoke, with his caucus rebelling, forcing him to resign from being Speaker, and he soon after gave up on his dream of running for the White House in 2000.

Most of the blame for the weak performance of the Republicans in 1998 was attributed to public thinking that congressional Republicans had overreached when it came to Clinton's impeachment.  Though Clinton's impeachment was officially about perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power, most of the public saw it as retribution for Clinton having an affair with Lewinsky, and Clinton (in the middle of presiding over one of the most successful sustained economies in American history) was too well-liked for people to think this was something that they should remove him from office over.  This was Hillary's problem, not theirs.

This showed up in key elections.  Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) spent much of the 1998 campaign trying to link his opponent, trial attorney (and eventual Vice Presidential nominee) John Edwards to Clinton, but Faircloth's focus on the impeachment trial and support of it ended up providing Edwards with an opening, and cost Faircloth his seat.  Reps. Mike Pappas (NJ) & Jon Fox (PA) also suffered in their House races.  Pappas had sung the song "Twinkle, Twinkle, Kenneth Starr" on the House floor, and Rush Holt was able to make Pappas look like he didn't take government seriously, while Fox didn't read the tea leaves in his increasingly blue district that didn't want Clinton out of office, and was bested by State Rep. Joe Hoeffel.

Many Democrats worried when they impeached Donald Trump in 2019 that this was playing the same game, where Democrats would suffer in the same way Republicans did in 1998.  This didn't happen, though, and that was because public support for impeaching Trump was considerably higher than Clinton's.  Trump didn't successfully sell to the public that this was specious (though he certainly claimed it was), Nancy Pelosi made a point of keeping it a very serious affair (which Gingrich did not), and as a result the Democrats actually gained House and Senate seats in the following election.  This sets up a limited case study-impeachment can be bad for your future election chances IF the public doesn't support it.

Hunter Biden

So where does this leave McCarthy?  Not in a good spot.  Public support for Biden's impeachment is hard to read given that the potential charges against him are not openly known, but limited public polling shows that support for it is not high, certainly not a majority like with Trump.  It helps that there's not really a reason to impeach Biden.  Though Republicans have claimed there's more charges & evidence to come in the Hunter Biden case, common sense dictates that if they had it...it'd be public.  The charges therefore boil down to a couple of relatively tangential connections between the president and his son's legal affairs.  One, allegations that the Biden Justice Department stonewalled an IRS review of Hunter Biden's personal finances (and the president's involvement in them) and two, allegations from Sen. Chuck Grassley that the FBI had documentation that the Biden family received $10 million during the president's time as Vice President, the document claiming that Biden had pressured Ukraine to remove a senior government official and as a result received payment from an energy company.

Neither of these seem to link directly to the president, even if they're true (which is also up for debate).  The President and First Lady have released their tax records for 25+ years, so any influx of $10 million would be pretty easy to identify, and there's no evidence the Justice Department mishandled the Hunter Biden case, or that the president was at all involved in the case (he's made a point of being hand's off with the Justice Department in affairs like this).  As a result, this comes across as a lot of right-wing theories and would be really hard for Republicans to convince anyone other than the most devoted.  What it would do is make Democrats and independents who rallied around Biden in 2020 more inclined to support him next year, and that could have a profound effect on the 2024 elections, particularly House races.  Incumbents like Brian Fitzpatrick & Don Bacon have gotten reelected largely by avoiding votes like this; forcing them to cast a vote against Biden would open them up in the way that Fox/Pappas suffered in 1998.  Someone like Ted Cruz or Kari Lake could also fall into the trap of Lauch Faircloth in the Senate-not realizing that their state is moving further left than they undertood, and focusing on impeachment becoming a bad look compared to bread-and-butter issues.  McCarthy, a leader who focuses only on the next problem ahead rather than long-term as a rule, is potentially sacrificing not only a second term as Speaker, but also much of his party's advantages in 2024, by pursuing a course driven by his most conservative caucus members.

My 2022 OVP Ballot

As we close our 21st Oscar Viewing Project (links to all past contests at the bottom of this page), we're going to close with our My Oscar Ballot, where I pick all of the nominees that I would've included had I been running the show with Oscar.  As I always add as a proviso, while I've seen every single one of the Oscar nominees in these categories, I did not see every film made in 2022.  If one of your favorite films is missing, ask in the comments before you call me out, as I might just have let it slip by (I do make a point of seeing as many major films of the year as possible, though, so I feel confident with saying these are the best).  With that said, let's dive into my choices for 2022!

Picture

Aftersun

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Banshees of Inisherin

The Bob's Burgers Movie

Decision to Leave

The Fabelmans

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Nope

Tar

Women Talking

Gold: One of the best films in recent memory to not get any nominations from the Academy in any category, Decision to Leave is hopefully going to be one of those movies that cinephiles discuss in hushed terms even if it didn't survive the awards onslaught.  Grand lead performances, and a story that ebbs between reality and postulation, it's a neo-noir that's impossible to see through.

Silver: Banshees is what happens when everything goes right in a movie.  The acting, the writing, the plotting...everything here is exactly where it needs to be.  The film itself gives us insights into its characters through their actions (particularly their mistakes) without ever feeling like they're doing something out-of-character to aid the plot.  In a comedy, that's a hard trick to pull off, and Banshees nails it.

Bronze: James Cameron's return-to-the-movies was worth the 14 year wait, giving us one of the most visually-arresting motion pictures ever made.  The plot and acting are good (better, one could argue, than what he brought with the original Avatar), but as a reminder, film is a visual medium, and oh is this a movie that knows how to make every corner of each frame look like another world.

Director

James Cameron (Avatar: The Way of Water)

Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave)

Todd Field (Tar)

Jordan Peele (Nope)

Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans)

Gold: Sometimes, directors make films late in their careers that are confused for being a "career achievement" award run and instead it's just a truly brilliant picture made by a senior citizen.  That was the case with Steven Spielberg's personal ode to cinema in The Fabelmans, a testament to his creative mind that this feels fresh even if you've seen every one of his other movies.

Silver: I have never felt about Park Chan-wook the way I felt during Decision to Leave.  Leaving behind some of the excess that has plagued a few of his past endeavors (just my opinion), he gives us a twisted tale in Decision to Leave, one that satisfies and leaves you guessing even as the last credits roll.

Bronze: James Cameron is one of those great directors like David Lean or Cecil B. DeMille that know what audiences want most from a big-screen adventure is spectacle, and he gives us that.  I cannot imagine what it's like to work in a sea of green screens and largely have to assume you know what's happening as you go along, but he does it better than any director in the industry.

Actor

Colin Farrell (The Banshees of Inisherin)

Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin)

Park Hae-Il (Decision to Leave)

Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans)

Paul Mescal (Aftersun)

Gold: Colin Farrell has been one of the unsung heroes of the film industry for decades (at least as unsung as a movie star can be), so it's great that he finally got his Oscar nomination for Banshees, and even better that it's for a rich, deeply-felt (and hilarious) show of a man whose world is upended.

Silver: Very close behind is Paul Mescal (if I allowed myself ties, I'd consider it here).  His work as a young father who seems to regret on some level having a daughter so young becomes much more complicated as we go, and we add in the aspects of flashbacks to his performance, working both as a real person & a memory.  Tricky stuff, but he's up to the task.

Bronze: Park Hae-Il has to play his detective from the start as a man who doesn't want the world to see him, but as we watch the movie, we begin to realize what is real and what is hidden about him, and come to know he's been showing aspects of himself from the start.  In a similar way to Mescal, this is a tricky balancing act (it's a performance that needs to play differently through a second watch), but it works.

Actress

Cate Blanchett (Tar)

Olivia Colman (Empire of Light)

Tang Wei (Decision to Leave)

Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans)

Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Gold: Cate Blanchett gives the best performance of 2022 as Lydia Tar, a woman that is not just at a crossroads, but someone who doesn't understand why she could possibly be at a crossroads.  I've said this before, but the embodiment of someone encountering the Peter Principle has rarely been done in such a way on the big screen, and man is Blanchett ready.

Silver: Tang Wei wandered through the acting wilderness after basically being blacklisted for her work in Lust, Caution (which if you click 2007 at the bottom of this article, you'll find she also medaled for).  So I'm glad to see that those years did not dull her talent, fully on-display as this coquettish femme fatale.

Bronze: Michelle Yeoh is at her best in EEAAO when she's inhabiting the prickly side of her character.  This is a woman who knows she had dreams beyond what she's living, and finds that expressing them, even if it hurts those around her, is worth the damage...that her full-circle moment never abandons those characteristics is a prime reason the film became so cherished.

Supporting Actor

Paul Dano (The Fabelmans)

Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin)

Brad Pitt (Babylon)

Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Steven Yeun (Nope)

Gold: Heartbreak feels good in a place like Barry Keoghan.  Playing his Dominic at first as a randy buffoon, we as the audience dismiss him, and then when he shows that he is, in fact, a person, we realize alongside Kerry Condon how devastating this must be, to live your life as someone else's joke.  In a movie where we learn the value of friendship, no one embodies it quite as well as Keoghan.

Silver: Brad Pitt will continue to act, but one wonders if he enters a new chapter in his career after Babylon, a movie that showed everything special about him as a movie star (there's that charismatic light...the camera is fickle, but it knows what it likes), while also embodying the ephemeral qualities of being a star.  The spotlight only lasts but a flicker, and Pitt gets to play with that concept in Babylon.

Bronze: Few comebacks are as satisfying as what Ke Huy Quan brings to EEAAO.  Decades after he charmed audiences in The Goonies & Temple of Doom, he brings a gentle steadiness to his Waymond, playing a man who knows that he was not his wife's dream...but she was his, and has spent much of his life trying to show her how much he appreciated that.

Supporting Actress

Jessie Buckley (Women Talking)

Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin)

Claire Foy (Women Talking)

Kate Hudson (Glass Onion)

Janelle Monae (Glass Onion)

Gold: In what I believe is a first, we're going to give a third acting gold medal to the same movie.  But when you have a performance as rich as Kerry Condon's, you kind of need to break the rules.  Condon is the rational one in this cast, but she's also the one character who knows that there is, in fact, value in taking a jump and doing what's best for you rather than protecting the rest.  In a film about sacrifice, she's the one who shows it.

Silver: Janelle Monae's part is tricky in Glass Onion (and if you're going to call me out on category fraud, I wouldn't totally argue with you that this might be a little bit of it even if it's borderline enough that I'm not going to change).  Without giving away too much about the film, she has to play it twice, but like some of the other actors here, she has to play it the same way from the beginning, even if the audience will only understand some of her decisions later.  Continually the best singer-actor in movies today.

Bronze: Claire Foy had been in one of those positions where you give such a dynamic performance in a TV show, that you struggle to know if your talent will ever be used so well again.  With Women Talking, we get an answer, and boy is it a clear one.  I love the way that her character has practiced these speeches, even if they come off as off-the-cuff or impetuous.  In an acting year that could best be described as "characters keeping secrets," she shows just how powerful that can be as the movie progresses, and she has to make her own difficult choices.

Adapted Screenplay

The Bob's Burgers Movie

Glass Onion

Living

The Menu

Women Talking

Gold: Sarah Polley's marvelous script for Women Talking won the Oscar in what some considered to be a surprise, but anyone who saw the film would struggle not to hand her every statue you can find.  Scripts like this shouldn't work in film-they read like a play, and usually lens like one, but the script is so rich & organic, you understand the growing stakes and the pain of these women, and you know it was destined for a big screen.

Silver: Rian Johnson's filmography isn't perfect (this isn't a Last Jedi slam-it's a Looper slam), but I can say wholeheartedly I've never loved his writing more than in Glass Onion.  The script is hilarious, starting out with a confident introduction of all of the characters, and then spending much of the film spoofing Elon Musk (who proves by the day how right they are in casting Edward Norton as a lucky idiot), while also giving us a game mystery.

Bronze: The single funniest television show from the past ten years, going to the big-screen felt like a risk for Bob's Burgers.  But by giving us heart (with Bob & Louise) alongside great musical numbers, a fun mystery, and a host of jokes, this stands alongside The Simpsons and South Park as iconic animated series that hit a home run on the big screen.

Original Screenplay

Aftersun

The Banshees of Inisherin

Decision to Leave

The Fabelmans

Tar

Gold: If you've been on this blog for longer than five minutes, you'll know that I love nothing more than a well-constructed film noir.  With a tense mystery, one that shows a woman who doesn't entirely know where she's going (and sometimes feels like she's making it up as she goes along) and a detective solving a complicated case while falling in love, you've got a neo-noir classic in Decision to Leave's script.

Silver: Conversation is core to what happens in Martin McDonagh's Banshees of Inisherin.  Most of the action, in fact, happens from conversations, some planned, some (within the story) blurted.  This is a risky endeavor since it means that expositional dialogue is going to become a problem, but this movie never commits that error.  The dialogue flows naturally, telling the story without feeling like it's narration.

Bronze: Todd Field's script in Tar is the encapsulation of someone with genuine talent, but someone whose greatest gift is assuredly overconfident bullshit.  Field knows that in an era of people misreading female protagonists as "girlboss" (look at the people who still insist that Shiv Roy is a hero), the audience will be suckered into rooting for Lydia, which makes the way that he treats her downfall in his script even smarter.

Animated Feature Film

The Bob's Burgers Movie

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Gold: It started with a decided advantage as one of my all-time favorite TV shows.  But Bob's Burgers also stands apart from its series, giving us more depth about the titular character (and his relationship with his until-now unseen mother), as well as giving us some great musical numbers & a silly mystery to accompany it.

Silver: It happens sometimes that a movie is so much better than the rest of its franchise you wonder how it came to exist.  That was the case with the lush, miraculous beauty of Puss in Boots, a richly-animated, smart story about death that featured strong vocal work from Antonio Banderas, Florence Pugh, & John Mulaney.

Bronze: I debated quite long between Marcel and Strange World (the best movie I didn't nominate in any category, and a film that deserved far better than the "box office disaster" label it ended up with).  But I think Marcel is breaking different ground, and threads a tricky needle between knowing & wondering in its title character that other films would've made too pretentious.

Sound Mixing

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Fabelmans

Nope

The Northman

Top Gun: Maverick

Gold: Wonderfully folding in the score (even with a new composer), the team of Avatar: The Way of Water give us a freeing dialogue.  There's no doubt throughout the movie that you are hearing this in real-time despite the actors themselves being part of motion-capture, and you have to mix an particularly complicated dialogue track in along with a unique approach to movies.

Silver: All of Jordan Peele's movies sound marvelous, but with Nope, you get something on a whole different level.  The score is sublime, but it's the attention to detail as the movie continues that really makes this solid.  Think of the way noise is used, even songs in the film, to underscore more tension or to divert from the omnipresent danger (or the silence employed in the monkey attack).

Bronze: Top Gun: Maverick is the movie of this bunch where it's almost impossible to tell what is mixing and what is editing (perhaps Oscar was onto something keeping them combined), but it all sounds terrific.  The way that we get real-time engine roars along with the actors in the film is thrilling & proof of how few things compare to a well-constructed action film.

Sound Editing

Avatar: The Way of Water

Nope

The Northman

RRR

Top Gun: Maverick

Gold: Top Gun: Maverick comes out on top for this one, because I just can't fathom how hard this was.  Every plane ride, many of which are being edited and added to, is so realistic that you'd believe that there were no special effects.  The use of actual jet packs to create the sound in the movie adds to the authenticity, and gives us one last ride with Maverick.

Silver: The world of Avatar is so unique, with every angle of the screen gleaning your focus, that you'd be forgiven for taking the sound for granted.  But the whales, the creatures of this film, and the way that we film so much outdoors without it feeling like we're suddenly inside (or there's an omnipresent racket) enhance, not decline, the illusion of the movie.

Bronze: Sometimes grotesque (the other realm scene where you can almost hear the blood rushing is intense), but always realistic & adding to the film's otherworldly nature, The Northman's sound team created a sound that felt centuries in the making.

Score

The Banshees of Inisherin

The Fabelmans

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Living

Nope

Gold: Nope gives us a total homage to the western as we're watching, with Michael Abels channeling vocals, whistling, and a strumming guitar in a way that you could easily put this music in the middle of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western without feeling out-of-place.  This keeps the juxtaposition between western & horror all the stronger.

Silver: Carter Burwell brings a light-hearted softness to Banshees of Inisherin, underlining how we don't entirely know whose story this is (or where it will end), while also playing into the comedy that is running throughout the picture itself.  I particularly loved the reliance of marimba on the film, like we're walking along on a journey.

Bronze: John Williams is so far into his career, every score feels like an event, because it might be the last film he makes (he's said he wants more, but has nothing on-deck after Dial of Destiny).  His work in Fabelmans is filled with a melancholic hopefulness, wistfully recalling something for the audience even as they experience the film for the first time.

Original Song

"La Despadida," Bullet Train

"Lift Me Up," Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

"Naatu Naatu," RRR

"Nothing is Lost," Avatar: The Way of Water

"Sunny Side Up Summer," The Bob's Burgers Movie

Gold: I have spent over a decade worshiping the magic that is Bob's Burgers, and you can bet that when the film opens with "Sunny Side Up Summer," giving us a gleeful jolt of magic to go along with this charming movie that I was already mentally memorizing every lyric.

Silver: It matches literally nothing else in the movie, but you will honestly not care as you watch "Naatu Naatu" get tapped out in RRR.  The ridiculous over-the-top nature of the number, along with Ram Charan giving us all a master class in sexiness, makes this the highlight of a play-to-the-rafters film.

Bronze: Rihanna was given the difficult job in Black Panther to try and capture the spirit of not just the film in front of her, but the missed opportunity that Marvel was clearly feeling in the wake of Chadwick Boseman's untimely demise.  She does that well, going subtler and softer over the end credits, giving us a lament that still has hope engrained within its melody.

Art Direction

Avatar: The Way of Water

Babylon

Glass Onion

The Northman

White Noise

Gold: I'm going with an unusual choice here, but I am someone who thinks animated works deserve their due.  The watery beach world brought to life in Avatar: The Way of Water deserves its place in the sun (literally and figuratively) and is beautiful in how it enhances the loveliness of the original film.

Silver: We'll go close behind with the gargantuan, opulent sets of Babylon.  I know there's a bit of a debate right now in Hollywood over spending too much money on movies, but I'd much rather get something like this, with meticulous recreations of sound stages from the classic era, than a CGI mess if we're spending $100 million on a picture.

Bronze: Finishing this off is The Northman.  Realism isn't always what I'm looking for in a movie, but when it's done this well it's hard to argue with the results.  The film's sets look like they are centuries old, with the rowboats and houses steeped in mud, dust, and ash to give a truthful glow.

Cinematography

Avatar: The Way of Water

Decision to Leave

Empire of Light

The Fabelmans

Nope

Gold: Hoyte von Hoytema is on another level with Nope.  At once lending homage to The Searchers, The Misfits, and Once Upon a Time in the West, he also has the tricky task of making the rare western horror, and does so by playing with wide expanses, epic action scenes, and never letting the effects feel cheesy, but instead terrifying.

Silver: There's been a long debate about whether or not effects-heavy films should be eligible for this category, but while I don't think it's the same art-form, I do think that in a world where most action films look like garbage, CGI done-well has to be acknowledged.  The lighting and beauty of Avatar makes every frame feel deliberate.

Bronze: There were a lot of "tributes to cinema" in 2022 (I, for one, can't get enough and will happily take more even if box office receipts don't bear them out).  In terms of capturing the look of movies, though, no film did that quite like The Fabelmans, where we get actual scenes of Gabriel LaBelle literally processing the trauma of his childhood through cinema.  Genius (and gorgeous).

Costume

Babylon

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Glass Onion

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

The Northman

Gold: The way that Jenny Beavan recreates Christian Dior in Mrs. Harris is so inventive.  Instead of trying to modernize it, she uses the elegant designs of one of the great masters of the 20th Century standout, giving us something timeless (and worth spending your pension check on).

Silver: Babylon, on the other hand, does well with going anachronistic, giving us looks that are inspired by the 1920's but with a 2020's flare (think of Margot Robbie's crimson, waist-cut gown).  The film's playfulness with time leans in heavily on the "movies last forever" front.

Bronze: Every costume in The Northman adds a level of authenticity you rarely find in modern pictures.  Look at the designs, which can be quite beautiful (the fur-lined robes of Nicole Kidman are a highlight), and then add in blood, sweat, and mud stains to much of the remaining battle wear.  You never have any doubt that these characters live in these costumes.

Film Editing

Avatar: The Way of Water

Decision to Leave

EO

Nope

The Northman

Gold: Avatar: The Way of Water accomplishes the impossible.  It makes a three-hour movie feel like it lasts for 70 minutes, giving us a raring adventure over the end of the film, but also has the decency to let us sit with the beautiful world that James Cameron has created in the middle third.  You're going to give us art direction that costs $300+ million...make sure the audience sees it.

Silver: Nope is about as perfectly-structured as horror gets.  The film feels surgical in the way that it pops in hints, clues, and eventually the horrible reveal of our monster...and then gives us a raring, Shane-inspired final act.

Bronze: The Northman gets much of its power from the way that it unfolds, a horrible family tale, amidst the bloody, unearthly world of Vikings that it wields on the audience.  Think of the way that it handles some extended cuts, especially on the longboat.  True devotion to the craft.

Makeup & Hairstyling

All Quiet on the Western Front

Babylon

Elvis

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Northman

Gold: The incredible realism on-display in The Northman is astounding.  The detailing here is what sets it apart.  It's not just the dirt & blood & guts that happen, but also the period work, with the hair being without conditioner and the ways they exemplify beauty for a gorgeous 21st Century cast from a millennium ago.

Silver: Babylon is just on another level when it comes to its makeup & hairstyling.  I love the gaudiness of this, the way that Margot Robbie's windswept mane changes based on her career health (but always feeling authentic) and the search-for-youth hipness of what Jean Smart is sporting in terms of dark eyeliner & a trendy hairdo.

Bronze: You'd be forgiven for starting with the hot dog fingers.  After all Jamie Lee Curtis & Michelle Yeoh having the most ridiculous hot dog fingers in Everything Everywhere All at Once surely is a defining look of the film, but for me, it's the way that the characters (Michelle Yeoh & Stephanie Hsu) seem to have similar beats in their makeup & hair in every multiverse, while still playing with an increasingly mirrored image.  Also, the donut hair bun rocks.

Visual Effects

Avatar: The Way of Water

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Nope

The Northman

Top Gun: Maverick

Gold: Honestly, if you did top special effects of the past decade, it'd still be Avatar: The Way of Water at the Gold.  Gorgeous, lifelike animation, as if we are actually on Pandora.  Look at the way he draws water pouring over rocks or the whale blinking its eye...every detail is captivating (and putting all other CGI movies to shame).

Silver: In a different year I'd have been very happy to give this statue to Top Gun: Maverick.  The return of practical effects (though aided by CGI, let's be clear) we get a spellbinding return of the glory days of action movies, when you saw stunt-work and aerial acrobatics zooming across the blank movie theater canvas.

Bronze: The work in Nope is, like Top Gun and Avatar, story-building.  The effects here are less intense, and in some cases feel like something pulled out of the 1950's (the use of the digesting alien is terrifying but also insanely well-crafted).  Best of all is the way that it merges onscreen with our night sky cinematography.

Also in 2022: Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, International Feature Film, Animated Feature, Sound, Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2022

Other My Oscar Ballots: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Why Did Elon Musk Destroy Twitter?

Wealth is something that, no matter who you are, inspires a reaction.  There are a variety of responses that people can have to it, of course, and not all of them good.  The phrase "eat the rich" is bandied around as a jocular (probably) phrase for a reason.  In a world where income inequality has hit a breaking point, the gaps between CEO's and their lowest-paid employees increasing ten-fold and union threats from actors to teachers to (quite possibly a week from now) UPS workers showing just how angry people are with their compensation, the wealthy are bandied around like a swear word by many parts of the world right now.

Wealth, however, has also ignited fantasies.  For centuries we've been obsessed with those who possess the most cash, with everything from society pages in the newspapers to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous-type programming to the Republican Party picking as its leader a man who has made his name synonymous with a specific type of gauche money-parading, people are obsessed with talking about wealthy people, and projecting a certain type of fantasy onto people with a great deal of money.

It stands to reason, therefore, that the richest man in the world would mean different things to different people, and presently, that person is Elon Musk.  The list of companies on Musk's resume is impressive on its surface.  He is currently the CTO of Twitter, one of the world's most vital social media companies, he has also played a role in the leadership of SpaceX, Tesla, & PayPal.  Musk has gained a reputation of being a genius, someone who is one of the leading minds of his era, and someone whom a large amount of (young white men) on Twitter hero-worship.  But Musk's leadership of Twitter, the only social media site I use regularly, has been shockingly bad, and I think it begs the question-is Musk's reputation earned or purchased?

Musk has a history of buying his way into promising companies like PayPal and Tesla, and in both of these cases, he appears to have let the powers-that-be in those companies do what they needed to do to succeed.  That hasn't been the case with Twitter, and it's worth wondering why.  Musk bought Twitter, a publicly-traded company, and turned it private in the process.  He immediately started by uprooting the company culture that had been in place by previous CEO Jack Dorsey, and started to have mass layoffs, in many places where it felt like this was foolish, including in areas like content moderation & system functionality that are vital to a social media company's success.

But it was the policy decisions that were the most baffling.  It's not surprising that Musk made an elevated subscription service for the site.  Other social media sites (like YouTube) have done this, after all.  But the subscription service quickly became a joke, and altered the site's culture.  The subscription service came with a blue checkmark, which until that point was something that you needed to verify yourself.  One of, if not the most useful things about Twitter for most of its users was understanding that a blue checkmark meant that the person was actually the person who was tweeting.  Anyone could impersonate Katy Perry, but only one account was going to be Katy Perry-the one with the blue checkmark.  Quickly after this, this meant that a blue checkmark was essentially worthless, because it was just a status symbol.  While Musk reversed to a certain degree with other colors of checkmarks (for government officials and for companies who advertised on the platform), combined with the system outages, this made the site increasingly unusable.

Most of Musk's decisions, in fact, seem to have been focused entirely on making Twitter harder for its devoted user base to actually use.  He removed Dorsey's policy about the spread of Covid-19 misinformation, and unblocked previously banned accounts like those of Donald Trump & Jordan Peterson.  It drove legitimate news organizations like NPR & the CBC off of the site.  He implemented a "tweet limit" for his site, which seemed less to be a policy decision and more to cover up for an increasingly shoddy website, which at one meant that Twitter Circle tweets were made public despite them not supposed to be private.

This week, he implemented two more changes, implementing a limit to the number of DM's a person can send on the website (which I just hit...I use Twitter as my email for certain friends so it adds up quickly), and then changing the entire name of the site from "Twitter" to "X."  Every single one of these things have been met with ridicule by any unbiased observer and certainly by the bulk of the people who actively use the site...and it begs the question, what exactly is Musk doing here?

Twitter was a valuable tool, though it's hard to tell if you could still call it that now, the equivalent of Elon Musk taking a sledgehammer to a classic Cadillac rather than restoring a couple of parts to get it running again.  I loathe the term "content," but in this case I'm going to make an exception because it's kind of what this is-Musk owned a platform where the most important people in the world gave him "content" for free.  Taylor Swift, Stephen King, Michelle Obama, Roger Federer...they all regularly used Twitter.  Do you know how much it would cost an advertising company or a movie studio or a publishing house to get these people to give you their thoughts of the day...and Musk got it for free?!?  Twitter was always a struggle to monetize, because unlike Instagram or YouTube it's harder to make advertisements organic to the experience, but it's there.  Someone with enough innovation could see a site that had hundreds of millions of people sharing their wishes, dreams, crushes, and interests and could turn that into something that turns a profit (hell, that's what Facebook did).

So it's either two things here, in my opinion, that have to be true-there's not really an in-between.  The first is more nefarious, and what I initially thought.  Twitter was home to not just mega-celebrities, but more importantly it was a place to get of-the-second information about a news item or for journalists to share information.  If you are hearing about a school shooting, you go to Twitter.  If you are watching on election night, Twitter has the answer well before any major network is telling you anything.  During the early stages of Covid-19 vaccination, Twitter was the best place to find out where to get your Pfizer shot.  Twitter is the single biggest new asset for journalists and researchers since the invention of Google, and a great asset to help democratic nations ensure freedom of the press, petition, and assembly.  Musk, who has celebrated far-right issues like attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, and has been sympathetic to the views of Donald Trump & Tucker Carlson, could spend $44 billion on a company without changing his lifestyle at all (he's that rich) and run it into the ground simply for the joy of making democracy harder.

For most people, that would be the worst case scenario, but I suspect for Musk, there's something even scarier, and with the renaming of Twitter, I kind of wonder if it's true: Elon Musk is a terrible businessman.  History is littered with wealthy men who came in and stood on the backs of smarter, savvier figures, and came out looking like the genius because they had the biggest pile of gold coins because of the company's success.  Musk, however, gives off the vibes of someone who bought something he didn't understand, and tried to treat it like he thought he understood it.  He didn't listen to most of his users, he made changes that made the company more valuable to his core group of sycophants (who loved the idea of annoying the people who used to try to moderate & ban them, and who had blue checkmarks for actual achievements and not because they paid the price of a cup of coffee to get them).  But the problem with trying to turn "own the libs" into a business model is that that only works to take something down.  You can't denigrate the majority of the population with a company as big as Twitter without losing money in the process, and as a result Musk feels like he fell for his own hype.  Twitter (or now X...I still call it Camp Snoopy & the Sears Tower, so I ain't budging there) will probably exist forever in some facet of the internet.  But Musk has made it impossible for it to ever be something of proper value again.  It's not clear if BlueSky or Threads will be the replacement, or if something totally new comes along, but eventually Musk will have a true representation of what uninspired, lazy thinking gets you, and for the first time in his career, he'll have an example of what happens when you actually put him in charge and not just let his money talk.

OVP: Picture (2022)

 OVP: Best Picture (2022)

The Nominees Were...

Malte Grunert, All Quiet on the Western Front

James Cameron & Jon Landau, Avatar: The Way of Water

Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, & Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin

Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, & Schuyler Weiss, Elvis

Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, & Jonathan Wang, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg, & Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans

Todd Field, Alexandra Milchan, & Scott Lambert, Tar

Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison, & Jerry Bruckheimer, Top Gun: Maverick

Erik Hemmendorff & Philippe Bober, Triangle of Sadness

Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, & Frances McDormand, Women Talking

My Thoughts: We are at the end of yet another season of the Oscar Viewing Project!  This is the quickest turnaround we've ever done from the initial ceremony to the OVP ballot (the Oscars were just a few months ago), so I'm excited we were able to do this within a calendar year.  I'm going to make you wait a little more than week for our next season; we'll kick it off in August, but as a hint we'll be doing one of the two remaining years left this century (for links to past contests, click the bottom of this page).  We'll also be doing one of my favorite series to write on the blog-whom I would've picked if I had picked all of the nominees tomorrow.  But for now, grab the popcorn & get ready for one last ride with Oscar's ten best pictures.  Hopefully the ride goes better than our first film...

Triangle of Sadness is another commentary from Ruben Ostlund about the ways that capitalism & power destroy our combined humanity, and how no one is really exempt from it.  Combining Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away with recent Best Picture winner Parasite, the movie is a fascinating look at a lot of ideas that definitely needs a better editor.  The second third of the movie lasts too long, with Ostlund less trying to aid his tale and more attempting to gross out his audience, but much of the rest of the movie is worth sticking around if you can stomach it, specifically grand performances from Dolly de Leon and Harris Dickinson.  The ending needed to chop the last thirty seconds off of it, though.

Top Gun: Maverick is the antithesis in pretty much every way of Triangle of Sadness, here finding ways to glorify the industrial complex & capitalism.  The movie itself works in key aspects.  Some of the supporting cast (Glen Powell & Jennifer Connelly, specifically) play well, and this is a last great lap of one of the quintessential action heroes, Tom Cruise.  Plus, in a world dominated by CGI, it's thrilling to see actual sets, actual stunts, and not just a wall of computer-generated banality.  But the movie's script lands like a lead balloon, is filled with cliche & the dialogue is cheesy as hell (plus, Jon Hamm continues his weird trend of not knowing how to act in movies after giving one of TV's most iconic characterizations).

Women Talking is that rare film where you say "a film feels like a play" but you mean it is a compliment.  Everything about this is about finding direction through conversation, with us learning more about the complicated world these women live in, but also about the freedom they feel outside of the gaze of men.  I loved the way that your initial assumptions of how these women will progress alters, in the way that new ideas change your mind, and I've never felt claustrophobia used as a framing device (rather than something to overcome) so well.  Sarah Polley's movie is fresh, alive, & full of uncomfortable truths.

All Quiet on the Western Front joins the very short list of movies where both the original and the remake got cited for Best Picture (I believe this is just All Quiet and West Side Story...not a great look for Hollywood originality that both are in the past two years).  The story in this movie is too hard to break entirely-it's one of the most damning anti-war tales ever told-but this one feels paint-by-numbers, and includes a needless addition of Daniel Bruhl reminding us of the ticking clock that we already understand is hanging over these soldiers' heads.  With a remake, I need more than just "it's more realistic" to justify its existence, and this movie never provides that.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is bizarre because my initial review of it on Letterboxd (follow me) is way shorter than I normally would've gone with a Best Picture nominee, which is kind of an indication of how I feel about it (and how out-of-nowhere it felt at the time for the Best Picture race).  I liked it, I didn't love it.  I think that the central performances are all good, but the final third is too convoluted, frequently borrowing from things we've already seen and rarely in a way that feels like it's adding more texture to the story.  It's a miracle that an original movie with no established IP or real-life figure managed to take over the pop culture/box office in such a way, so I give it credit for that...but it's not as original as it needs to be, nor as well as well-edited as it has to be, if we're going to throw around phrases like "masterpiece."

If you want to give out that title for a wholly original movie, you gotta look at a movie like Tar.  The movie is an epic, staggering character study of human nature, and the reasons why we keep things secret.  Cate Blanchett gives the performance of a lifetime (and it's Cate Blanchett we're talking about here, so the lifetime was already on a pedestal) as Lydia Tar, owning every scene of her movie and giving us a domineering, complicated, over-her-head woman that defies expectations.  One of those movies you only truly understand once you've seen every second of it.

I'm always a sucker for an "ode to cinema" and the past couple of years have given us high-profile takes from major directors.  2022's best was The Fabelmans, which gives Steven Spielberg the vulnerability to share not just where he came from, but where some of his best movies came from.  Within The Fabelmans, we get a sense of the prickliness that we see in so many of his movies (for all of the "happy ending" criticism that Spielberg gets, so often the children in his films are from "broken" or divorced homes, just like Sammy here).  Solid performances from Williams, LaBelle, & Dano help to underline the central dynamic of a father-and-mother's love being so crucial to a young man finding himself.

I have been so sick of musical biopics (by far the most tired & overdone genre in movies today) that I kind of forgot that they could have some thrills.  Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to get me there with Elvis.  This movie doesn't always work in its approach-the length (oddly enough) is fine, but it glosses over side characters too much (particularly Presley's wife Priscilla), to the point where it makes the editing feel choppy.  And I don't entirely get what Tom Hanks was doing here, even if there are times it kind of works (bad acting can have its place in a movie, though that is what this is).  But casting Austin Butler as this unknowable sex god is so appropriate and so inline with Elvis, you might believe at some points that that electric magnetism has been brought back from the dead.

An even more successful spin on a tried-and-true genre (the buddy comedy) is The Banshees of Inisherin.  The best parts of Martin McDonagh's films are when he gives us sharp edges on his characters, which we get as the film goes-the central four characters are all imperfect, and sometimes that imperfection has consequences they can't take back.  Buoyed by the best acting ensemble of 2022, the writing & acting are so heightened and extraordinary it's hard not to feel you're in the presence of some great, untold tale.  I loved it.

With Hollywood telling more and more stories that we've already heard, an increase in sequels in this category is inevitable.  If that's the case, please make them all as good as Avatar: The Way of Water.  I had honestly forgotten a blockbuster movie could look this good, with James Cameron genuinely caring about light & design in his film rather than piecing together action set pieces with no care in-between.  The story itself is strong, particularly the way that he folds it into a thrilling action sequence over the film's last 40 minutes (you will not look at your watch once in this very long movie), but it's the glorious visual effects that make this something truly special.

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes separate their categories into Drama and Musical/Comedy so we have ten films to discuss, but in a different style than Oscar's ten.  Best Musical/Comedy went to The Banshees of Inisherin against Babylon, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Glass Onion, and Triangle of Sadness while The Fabelmans bested Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, Tar, and Top Gun: Maverick in Best Drama.  The PGA Awards gave their statue to Everything Everywhere All at Once beating most of the Oscar lineup with Women Talking, All Quiet on the Western Front, & Triangle of Sadness replaced by Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Glass Onion, & The Whale.  BAFTA only does five nominees, and picked All Quiet on the Western Front against Banshees, EEAAO, Elvis, & Tar.  In eleventh place...I think it was probably The Whale given it won two major awards and got the PGA nod.  I maintain that had Glass Onion (a populist hit if you've ever seen one) gotten a real run in theaters and not just a "quick, get it onto Netflix" it would've gotten a nomination here the second it hit $100 million at the box office.  Streaming, I cannot stress this enough, is ruining the entertainment industry.

Films I Would Have Nominated: You'll find out tomorrow!

Oscar’s Choice: An easy call for EEAAO-BAFTA & the HFPA were doing their own things (which I love) but by Oscar night, it was evident that EEAAO was taking this over All Quiet and The Fabelmans.

My Choice: Comparing films is insane, and that's very much proven by my top two films, Avatar: The Way of Water and The Banshees of Inisherin, two superb movies that have nothing in common.  I started this article ranking Banshees first because the acting & story is a bit better, and I'll stay there, but this is one of those decisions I'll waffle about forever.  Behind them (in order) I'd go: The Fabelmans, Tar, Women Talking, Triangle of Sadness, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Elvis, Top Gun: Maverick, and All Quiet on the Western Front.

And there you have it-another OVP in the books.  Are you staying with Oscar's bandwagon love of EEAAO or do you want to hang with Jenny the Donkey & I over with Banshees?  Do you think The Whale, Glass Onion, or something else was just out of this contest?  And overall-what is your favorite movie of 2022?  Share your comments below!

Also in 2022: Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, International Feature Film, Animated Feature, Sound, Score, Original Song, Production Design, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Previously in 2022

Past Best Picture Contests: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021