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 […]

Not-Oscars 2021

It’s been another unusually long awards season, though not quite as long as last year’s. The window for Academy Awards eligibility extended out of 2020 into the first couple months of 2021, meaning that some notable 2021 releases, like the Best Picture-nominated Judas And The Black Messiah, have already had their day in the sun, […]

Not-Oscars 2020

This year’s Not Oscars are really not the Oscars, because the Oscars aren’t happening for another three months and there’s still six weeks left in the eligibility window for new contenders to pop up. I’ve seen all the likely nominees from 2020 and several more yet to be officially released, but some buzzed about performances […]

Not-Oscars 2019

Hello, and welcome to the awards announcement you have not been waiting for, The Not-Oscars! My annual list of accolades is not the talk of the town during awards season. The nominees are not thrilled to be nominated… because they will never even hear about it! The winners would not like to thank the Academy […]

Not-Oscars 2018

The Academy is always a little bit wrong, which is why I write this post every year. Inevitably, there are writers, directors, actors, composers, and others who don’t get their just desserts from the Academy when nominees are announced — and those whose work is too niche, or too gene, to ever have a chance […]

Not-Oscars 2017

Welcome to another Not-Oscars, where I call out the year’s best craft and performances, including plenty of good work that was not nominated by the Academy. In many years, this list feels pressing to correct some of the Academy’s egregious blunders. This year, I’m pretty happy with the crop of nominees in every category.

The Not-Oscars 2016

It’s just about Oscar time again — though for once, the Best Picture race isn’t exactly the most disappointing contest I’ll witness over the past year. At times like these, the Academy Awards feel somewhat frivolous. It’s possible that some likely winners — The Salesman, Mahershala Ali, The White Helmets, OJ: Made In America, and even […]

The Not-Oscars 2015

Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences releases a roster of the pictures and performances they think are most deserving of accolades. And every year, I put together this list to tell them what they got wrong.

The Not-Oscars 2014

Once again, it’s Oscar time. This year’s race is gearing up to be one of the least predictable in recent memory. For every race that has an all-but-guaranteed winner (Julianne Moore, Best Actress; J.K. Simmons, Best Supporting Actor), there are as many that are truly up in the air — some with not only two […]

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 […]

Not-Oscars 2012: The Year’s Best Performances

(Originally published at JustinPlusSeven on January 10, 2013.) You, dear reader, have the honor of reading this in the future, after the Oscar nominations have been announced. But I am writing from this from the near past, before we know which five contenders are fighting it out in each category. Of course, some are shoo-ins; […]

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 […]