2019 was a great movie year. Full stop. Recognition aside it’s never a good look for studios to release the majority of said movies from Thanksgiving through mid-January but alas that’s what’s become of our annual release schedule. Studios fret over award-worthy movies being forgotten early in the year so they release them all at once – ensuring that a bunch go unseen anyway. It’s very stupid.
But if you had the will to parse through the crowded cineplex reader board, 2019 happily rewarded you. And the “movie of the year” discourse is louder than ever given the Oscars moved up nearly a month earlier than usual – leaving us far less time to collectively realize Joker was bad and to watch Judy with our Grandmas. Regardless – there are a lot of good (and great!) movies at the Oscars this year – and plenty more that went woefully unrecognized (Oscars are REALLY REALLY white in 2020.)
As I vow to see and write about more movies this year, here’s my look back at the year that was with my annual Oscar predictions.
Best Supporting Actress:
Who Should Win: Laura Dern Marriage Story
Who Will Win: Laura Dern Marriage Story
I’ll admit I haven’t seen most of the movies in this category but watching Laura Dern basically play her character from Big Little Lies in an otherwise subdued Marriage Story was damn thrilling at times. This will be an awards season cap on 2019 – a year Dern absolutely owned.
Best Supporting Actor:
Who Should Win: Brad Pitt Once Upon a Time …In Hollywood
Who Will Win: Brad Pitt Once Upon a Time …In Hollywood
Thirst trap presented without comment.
Best Actress:
Who Should Win: Lupita Nyong’o Us
Who Will Win: Renee Zelwegger Judy
I know I’m cheating – Nyong’o wasn’t even nominated. Which is bullshit because she gave the best performance of the year in Us (a criminally ignored movie this award season.) Her dual performance was riveting culminating in an inventive, memorable tunnel cat and mouse game. I’m sure Zelwegger was good in Judy but that’s a classic biopic performance the Academy devours.
Best Actor:
Who Should Win: Leonardo DiCaprio or Adam Sandler Once Upon a Time …In Hollywood & Uncut Gems
Who Will Win: Joaquin Phoenix Joker
2019 gave us two of the best movie star performances with Leo and the Sandman (I realize I’m cheating again here.) I would be so happy to see Leo rewarded for fully realizing Rick Dalton – an aging TV star who’s narcissistic worldview makes for the best and funniest performance of his career. Sandler is the only star on earth who could’ve pulled off Howard Ratner’s manic energy as he swindles his way through the New York jewelry district. Uncut Gems is invigorated by Sandler who carries the movie’s substantial weight and energy while somehow making us care for such a wildly abhorrent scumbag.
Instead we’re gonna celebrate this…neat
Best Director:
Who Should Win: Bong Joon Ho Parasite
Who Will Win: Sam Mendes 1917
What Sam Mendes accomplished in 1917 is truly epic, a riveting display of directing prowess that I won’t hate to see carry home the statue. That said – Director Bong Joon Ho’s almost clinical grasp on his material in Parasite is a tightrope that perhaps only he could walk. One misstep in tone and the movie doesn’t work but Bong deftly hits every mark. It’s an astounding accomplishment.
Best Picture
What Should Win: Parasite
What Will Win: 1917
Joker received 11 nominations this year. That’s hilarious because Joker is the movie equivalent of a goth 8th grader drawing spiderwebs in his trapper keeper. It’s a movie that doesn’t just wear it’s influences in every frame but actively steals from them. It has little to say and no conviction (the ending is a world class cop out) no matter how hard Joaquin fake laughs (he also runs down a record number of hallways.) It’s a movie desperate to be taken seriously that it’s set pieces come off so calculated, so artificial that they start to illicit laughs not thrills (those wall street bros know a shitload of Sondheim though.) It doesn’t dare want (or invite) the audience to interrogate it so it just tells you everything you need to know (clown is sad, society ignores him, clown tells everyone that.) Just because a movie takes place at night doesn’t make it dark, but it made a lot of money – so the Academy made sure we remembered that.
Joker is the polar opposite of the best films up for the award this year – films of unique perspective and conviction (The Irishman, OUATIH, 1917, Little Women.) And the best of them all was Director Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece Parasite. It’s a movie that never traffics in subtlety precisely because its class distinctions aren’t. They are as clear as the blue sky above the Park mansion. Director Bong weaves a tail of economic desperation that’s thrilling, pitch black and devastatingly funny. The Park’s and Kim’s are not families of good people, they are people shaped by circumstance and ultimately guided into prejudice and darkness by it. It’s everything Joker wanted you to think it was, and everything it’s not.
