Not-Oscars 2023

It’s been fashionable to say that the Oscars are irrelevant for quite some time now. Movies are less central to the cultural conversation than they used to be. Recent Best Picture winners like Nomadland and CODA weren’t exactly entertainment milestones the way Forrest Gump, Titanic, and The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The […]

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Top Ten Films: 2004

(A “Then & Now” perspective.) Like my 2005 list, this Top Ten comes at you twenty strong, because that’s how I wrote it back in the day on my LiveJournal. And like last time, I’ll be adding my commentary about how the movies have held up 11 years later, because tastes change. Some of these […]

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The Not-Oscars 2013

It’s the morning of the Oscar nominations, and I’m not upset. This is weird. All the films I wanted to see nominated for Best Picture are. All the actors I hoped to see receive nominations for this year’s performances were. Compare and contrast to last year’s fatal omission of Kathryn Bigelow as Best Director, or […]

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The Not-Oscars 2011

It’s that time of year again, folks! What I like to call “movie Christmas.” And like an actual holiday, the Academy Awards often end up as more of a disappointment than anything else — any Oscars handed out to not-so-great nominated films like Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and The Iron Lady can be chalked […]

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Top Ten Films: 2011

Is it me, or were 2011’s movies more united by theme this year than is usual? Nostalgia was the big one, with several titles capitalizing not just on our nostalgia of a past era, but of movies from a past era — from silent films to Spielberg blockbusters and everything in between. Films like The […]

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