Lucky #26

When I said that was it for Oscars talk, I meant it ... but then after going to bed I thought of a couple things that I hadn't fit into my hurried reactions post. (Plus, it's not like I've been talking your ear off about the Oscars. In fact, they barely got a mention on this blog after I initially reacted to the nominations.)

Whichever film finishes 2025 as my 26th favorite movie of the year, they should feel happy, because it means they've got a good shot at winning best picture.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that Anora was my #26 of 2024 ... but so too was Oppenheimer my #26 of 2023.

It's a recent phenomenon for sure. If I glance over the other best picture winners since I started ranking my movies in 1996, they fall into three categories: much higher than #26 (I've had three #1s win best picture, which are Titanic, Birdman and Parasite), much lower than #26 (Nomadland was #82, Green Book was #69), or not seen at all by the time of the awards (12 Years a Slave and CODA, both of which I could not see in time to rank them). 

Number 26 is an interesting middle ground. It acknowledges that I think the film is good, maybe even very good, but there are usually at least a handful of best picture nominees I like better. This year, there were seven, as I had a whopping six in my top ten. Only A Complete Unknown did I dislike more, if you want to put it in the negative rather than the positive sense. (I still haven't seen I'm Still Here.)

But there's also a kind of message to it, whether intentional or not, and I appear to have been sending that message to both Oppenheimer and Anora. The top 25 makes an interesting cutoff, or at least, I think of it that way because my friend who does the ranking exercise with me used to highlight his top 25 before sending his whole list. He's scaled that back to his top 20 now, but the line of demarcation between #25 and #26 still feels like it means something. And to the extent that I apply intentionality to anything I do with my bigger list, making a movie #26 says to me "I get this movie is respected, and I liked it quite a lot too, but I have problems with it."

Apparently, that is the type of movie that wins best picture.

Since we own Anora, my wife is going to watch it this weekend when I'm out of town. So we'll see what she thinks.

A Complete shutout

Only two best picture nominees did not pick up a single Oscar: Nickel Boys, my #10, which wasn't nominated in enough categories to have a real chance, and A Complete Unknown, which received eight nominations ... and won not a one of them.

Sweet, sweet justice.

You may remember that I did not care for A Complete Unknown. It was my 128th ranked movie of the year, out of 177. Granted, it was also the last movie I ranked. But I don't know if my opinion would have improved significantly if I'd been given more time to think about it. Maybe 119th. 

So like what happened a couple years ago when The Fabelmans, which I also did not like, didn't win anything, I'm feeling like a necessary correction occurred here. I was bracing for Timothee Chalamet to win the best actor statue, and although I tend to prefer when the wealth is shared for Oscars, meaning I would have supported that win, I'd much rather have the (better) work by Adrien Brody recognized, even if means his second turn in that spotlight.

Then there were three nominations for ACU, other than best picture, that I thought were completely unwarranted: best supporting actress for Monica Barbaro, best supporting actor for Edward Norton, and best director for James Mangold. All of those were long shots and none of them happened.

Anyway, as I said, justice prevailed against a very overrated movie.

My personal scorecard

Although, as usual, I didn't pay much attention to the pre-Oscars discourse on likely winners (though I did pay some), and, as usual, I made my selections just before the show (actually after it had already ended, but I had seen no results), I did quite well on my picks this year, picking 15 of the 23 categories correctly. And that's even without guessing any of the random ones (the shorts) correctly to help boost my score. So it was 15 out of 20 on any categories I had a reasonable chance of getting correct, which is better than I've done in a long, long time.

My only really big miss: best actress. And this one stings a bit. I felt like I really had a dog in that race this year, and Demi Moore losing to someone like Mikey Madison, who is like 23 years old, just seems a bit of a travesty of the normal rules of Oscar fairness. Moore will never get another shot. I feel a bit how I felt when Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke, who were both nominated as best actor for my #1 movie that year, both lost Oscars to Sean Penn ... speaking of two-time winners. 

The Oscar nominations moved, but I'm staying put

When you are driving toward your final movie watched of a given ranking year, mapping out what days you'll watch what movies for as long as ten days out from that deadline, you develop a certain mentality of finality, of how it's all ramping up to a finish. 

So when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences needs to move its announcement of this year's Oscar nominations six days forward due to the ongoing fires in Los Angeles -- a more justified decision there never was -- it's hard, nay impossible, to shift forward with them.

Some people might say "Another six days of watching movies? Great! My 2024 list will now just be that much more complete."

Me? I'm saying "It's time to move on to something else."

And so after learning yesterday that the announcement of nominations was moved from the expected date of January 17th at 5:30 a.m. PST to the new date of January 23rd at 5:30 a.m. PST, I decided this did not change my own timeline, and I would still finish up tonight with my final movie of 2024, as first conceived when I learned of this year's nomination date several months ago. Tomorrow, I will post my list. 

Look, I'm tired. And (spoiler alert) I will already be setting a record number of movies ranked this year, even without bonus time.

This was not the only 11th hour change related to my movie rankings.

I had expected to see A Complete Unknown tonight as my final film. In fact, I already had a post written called "My final screening is an advanced screening," which will now sit forever in my drafts folder, since I never delete my unpublished drafts, leaving them as sort of a record of unfinished thoughts. 

See, A Complete Unknown does not come out in Australia until next Thursday, a fact I did not realize when I ignored the opportunity to see it in Los Angeles. I assumed it was one of the many high-profile Boxing Day releases in Australia, and that I'd have ample time to squeeze it in when my family returned from our trip to America. Then again, even if I had known about Unknown, there was very little chance I would have prioritized seeing a musician biopic over the movies I did see while I was there, The Brutalist and Nickel Boys.

So I expected the Bob Dylan biopic to go unseen by me prior to closing off my rankings, until I got invited to an advanced screening that was scheduled, lo and behold, for the 12-hour window before the Oscar nominations went live in a time zone 19 hours different from my own. I RSVP'd straight away.

Fortuitously, it would mean I finished my 2024 rankings in the same place I finished my 2015 rankings, at the glorious venue The Astor in St. Kilda, an old-fashioned movie house if ever there was one, complete with balcony. In 2016 (for the movies of 2015), that was where I saw the first of three movies that had only just been released on my final day of ranking, which was The Hateful Eight, intermission and all. I finished the epic day with Carol and The Big Short at venues increasingly closer to my house. Only Carol did not make my top 20 and The Hateful Eight made my top ten. I actually have not been back to The Astor since later that same year, when I saw a special screening of the beloved Australian film Malcolm, my wife having worked with its writer and director. 

I loved the idea of finishing at The Astor, but there was something nagging and incomplete with this plan. Despite RSVPing within a day of the invitation being sent, I had not heard back from the publicist confirming my spot. I followed up with her about five days later to be sure I was on the list, and again did not hear back. Yesterday at work I went so far as to print out the emailed invitation as well as my response to it, should my legitimacy as an invitee be questioned.

Only after getting home from work yesterday did I notice I finally had a response from her, which was to tell me that alas, the screening was at capacity, but she would add me to the waitlist.

That's lame. When you respond within 24 hours, you should be on the list, especially at a venue as large as The Astor. I was surprised it could be at capacity regardless, and I wonder if she intentionally didn't respond because she had other higher priority attendees she wanted to accommodate. After all, my site is still not one of the big players in Australian film coverage. Nonetheless, it would be hard for me to imagine that there are, oh, 500 ahead of me, though obviously a lot of those seats would be reserved for other VIPs/ticket winners etc. 

I don't expect my waitlist spot to materialize -- possibly especially after I responded stating (politely) my disappointment in the outcome -- so now I am pivoting, and it's actually to see a movie I am a lot more interested in than A Complete Unknown.

I had written off Sing Sing as a movie I had any chance of seeing before my deadline. In discussing it briefly with my friend who also ranks his movies, he told me he wouldn't be able to rank it because it had disappeared after a very brief Oscar-qualifying run. If it isn't generally available in the U.S., I figured it was one of those movies that wouldn't come out in Australia until March.

Lo and behold, it actually opened yesterday.

So I guess there is a net positive here. My wife still thinks I'm going to see A Complete Unknown tonight -- or at least to an advanced screening, since that's all I told her and she didn't ask for any clarifying details. So I'm going to use the preapproval for the time slot to go to Cinema Nova instead of The Astor, and if she asks what movie I saw, I'll just tell her the truth. After all, she didn't know this wasn't the movie I was seeing, and she does not keep track of release dates. 

And by finishing with Sing Sing at Cinema Nova, I'm finishing at the real place I concluded my viewings nine years ago, as this was the venue where I saw my final film of 2015, The Big Short. I believe only a single final film of a year has been in the theater since then, which would be Darkest Hour in 2017. 

I suppose there is still a chance the publicist comes back to me with apologies and an open-arms invitation to A Complete Unknown, and if that happens I would go, having been bent out of shape about it to her. Even though Sing Sing is now the center of my thoughts.

You'll know either way tomorrow, when I finally post my rankings of the films of 2024, all the way from best to worst.