Some folks love the Oscars, and obsessively follow them every year, nomination announcements to award campaigning to treating the grand ceremony like their Super Bowl. On the other hand, some folks hate the Oscars, and think it’s simply Hollywood patting themselves on the back, while largely ignoring both quality big-budget populism and great arthouse cinema in favor of vanilla, middle-of-the-road “crowd-pleasing” formula (AKA Oscarbait). And then there are folks who […]
Tomorrow, 8 February 2022, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces its nominees for the Oscars for the recent shortened year – 1 March through 31 December 2021. Because of the specific ways in which my mind is broken, I’m compelled once again to offer my predictions for the nominees in all 23 categories. And a very big thanks to our new contributors, Mandy Albert and Chris Trengove, […]
It can be to keep it in mind, especially with the memories of the grisly 2020 Oscar-baiting Trial of the Chicago 7 so fresh in memory, but there is in fact something Aaron Sorkin does very well. He’s great at writing a very particular kind of procedural narrative, in which egocentric, talented people involved in some form of communications media are confronted with a series of ultimately fairly petty setbacks […]
UPDATE, MORNING OF THE OSCARS: I’ve tweaked a couple of these, because even if I don’t care, I still care, y’know? Adapted Screenplay and Makeup & Hairstyling, if you want to just CTRL+F your way over there. You’ll have to forgive me: the movie year now breathing its last has been such a deeply, horribly empty wasteland, and even given that, the Academy seemed to go out of its way […]
The project that has finally emerged as The Trial of the Chicago 7, a direct-to-Netflix that was supposed to be Paramount’s big awards push and the inaugural film of Oscar movie season back in the Before Times, has been percolating since 2006. That was when Steven Spielberg commissioned Aaron Sorkin to write a film based on, well, the trial of the Chicago 7, the group of disparate and unrelated activists […]
This episode, in a burst of mid-pandemic positivity, we decide to take a look at our Top 5 Netflix Original Movies. And yes, we know that they’re mostly terrible. And yes, we struggled to find a good list, but gosh darnit we persevered and each came up with 5! Coming to Netflix in October October is shaping up to be a big month for Netflix original movies, between Radha Blank’s […]
This episode, in a burst of mid-pandemic positivity, we decide to take a look at our Top 5 Netflix Original movies. And yes, we know that they’re mostly terrible. And yes, we struggled to find a good list, but gosh darnit we persevered and each came up with 5! Coming to Netflix in October October is shaping up to be a big month for Netflix original movies, between Radha Blank’s Sundance […]
Hey! Don’t forget to check out our 2017 year-in-review podcast! You know, sometimes you’re just way the hell off-consensus, and that’s all there is to say about that. And that’s all I particularly want to say as a preamble to this summary of the 2017 movie year: it’s not much fun when everybody around you is oohing and ahhing over movies that you found deeply adequate and not much more, […]
Here’s the complete list of the Oscar nominees for 2018, along with my record for predicting right (and wrong) in every category. For a look on what I thought would happen, check out my original predictions. As for commentary – you’ll have to wait for that till our next podcast airing on Monday, 1/29! Picture Call Me by Your Name Darkest Hour Dunkirk Get Out Lady Bird Phantom Thread The Post […]
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces its nominees for its annual awards this coming Tuesday, and so it’s time for the annual game of trying to play telepath and tea-leaf reader. Pretty much everybody agrees that this has been an unusually baffling year for awards prognosticating, which comes from a couple places, I think: one is that there were no capital-G Great films to come out of […]
People talking a mile-a-minute about tightly-focused points of procedure, piling clauses upon clause until you realize that you’ve been listening to one nested sentence for the last 30 seconds; yes indeed, Molly’s Game was written by Aaron Sorkin, alright. Regrettably, there are very few (if any!) scenes where people have elaborate conversations while walking abreast down a hallway, but that’s pretty much the only point missing. And to top it […]
Almost time to put another year to bed. But not just any year: Alternate Ending will be celebrating its first birthday just a couple weeks into January, so we might as well call this our first full year. Thanks to all of you who followed over from Antagony & Ecstasy that was, or who were listening to Rob and Carrie before they brought on this Tim fella, and thanks as […]
