Whether you pay much attention to movies or not, you probably know last night was the 91st Academy Awards. Or at least that they handed out the iconic trophies last night, I didn’t know it was year 91 off the top of my head either. It’s a time for Hollywood to pat itself on the back, dish out some Oscars, and supposedly celebrate the best films of the previous year. If you care about such things, find the list of winners below.
Now that we’re solidly entrenched in 2019, it’s time to put a bow on the 2018 film year. And with that in mind, the 2019 Academy Award nominations have arrived. Check them out below.
I have the privilege of being a voting member of two different groups of film critics. One, the Seattle Film Critics Society, already had our time to shine and I wrote about those awards HERE. The other, the Online Film Critics Society, just kicked off the new year by announcing our winners. Here they are.
Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is everything everyone says it is. Gorgeous and formally flawless, the director’s precision and meticulous craft is unmatched, and his deep, personal connection to the story readily shines through. Yalitza Aparicio delivers a wonderful performance. The milieu is layered, thematically dense, and someone much smarter than I am will have a field day unpacking relationships between the lower class maid Cleo and the wealthy family she works for. (THIS ARTICLE examining how poor people’s stories, especially those of domestic workers, are always told from the perspective of the rich, with a special eye on current Latin American cinema, is a good place to begin.)
If you read this site on any regular basis, you’ve likely encountered me ranting about ranking movies, grading movies, and basically comparing works of art to one another as if there’s even a grain of objective truth to be found. I dislike it, quite a bit. But that’s a conversation for another time and place, and because of the whims and wills of writing on the internet, it’s never stopped me from assigning scores to a movie, writing “best of” lists, and all the rest. Nor has it stopped me from voting for end-of-year awards for a number of critics groups I belong to. One of these, the Seattle Film Critics Society, solicited input from our members and just revealed the 2018 Seattle Film Critics Society Awards.
