Jeremy's 2019 Best Picture Rankings

Hi Y'all. It is the day of the Oscars and after seeing a movie on Friday and one yesterday and watching one on Netflix this morning, I have officially seen all of the Best Pic nominees. Last year, I did a whole preview where I picked winners for each of the eight big categories, but.......I don't have enough time for that this year, so I'm just going to rank the Best Pic noms, and then maybe just sprinkle in my preferences in some of the other categories throughout. So without further ado, here is my Oscars preview!

Category D: How the fuck did these get nominated for Best Picture?!?

8) Bohemian Rhapsody

Coming in with a distant, DISTANT last place finish is Bohemian Rhapsody. The space between 8th and 7th on this list is about as far apart as the things that were presented in this movie and any semblance of the truth. Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury as some sort of innocent puppy dog who is easily led astray by the people around him and has no agency to direct his life's path in any way. The other band members are portrayed as featureless ghosts, with no opinions, no faults, no defining characteristics beyond John Deacon being bland. And while there's never any overtly negative comments about Mercury's homosexuality, the movie pretty much thematically ties the most tortured portion of his life with the portion of his life when he was most openly homosexual. I mean, at one point he's throwing a big party, and the other dudes from the band are there with their wives, and Roger Taylor turns to his wife and is like "let's get out of here" and then the whole band leaves disapprovingly, like they are making the cool calm decision in this situation. Leaving the party. Because it's too much of a party. Ridiculous. The most pivotal scene of the movie involves Freddie Mercury standing in the rain breaking up with his (admittedly shady) partner who is dressed in full on leather biker gear. Straight up Looney Toons. Cool concert scenes though, I did enjoy those parts, but for real, this movie is not even good, let alone one of the best movies of the year. Let's move on.

7) Green Book

Now, I know that last section was harsh, and I am lumping Green Book in the same category as Bohemian Rhapsody, but I cannot be more clear on how big of a jump between these two spots is. While I do not think that Green Book deserves to nominated for Best Picture, I did overall think the film was pretty cute and overall enjoyable. Do I have issues with the naivety of the nature of racial tensions in this film? Certainly. Do I think it's a bit far fetched to have a character who is so racist in the first scenes of the movie that he throws away two drinking glasses that were used by black repairmen then in the next scene take a job working for a black man, then halfway through the movie, find out the black man is gay, have no problem with that, and then invite the black man up to his home for Christmas dinner? Yeah, I'd say that was a bit of a stretch. But y'know.....Viggo Mortensen was good, and Mahershala Ali deserves the Best Supporting Actor he's probably going to get. I have no real favorites in that category, honestly. Overall, thumbs up. But just not deserving of this nomination. I would like to note at this point that if I had my way, I would pull these two movies from the Best Picture category and replace them with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse and Annihilation.

Category C: Movies that definitely deserved to be nominated for Best Picture, but not quite Top of the stack

6) Black Panther

While this was not even my favorite Marvel movie of 2018, I am not here to be shit talking the first Marvel movie with an almost all black cast getting the first Marvel Best Picture nod. Not here for that. Now I haven't seen Black Panther since I saw it in the theaters, so I don't have a ton of recent thoughts about the filmmaking, but the one thing I do have to say is this: I did not think Michael B. Jordan was very good as the bad guy in this movie, and I didn't think Chadwick Boseman was even as good in this movie as he was in the last Captain America movie. On the other side of that though, all the ladies in this movie were amazing and definitely made up for my opinions of their male counterparts. Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, and Letitia Wright are what make Black Panther work, and if we could get a Black Panther sequel that follows the format of the most successful sequel of all time, Super Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, and has Black Panther get kidnapped, Donkey Kong style, and then we could just have Nakia, Okoye, and Shuri team up to save him, Diddy and Dixie Kong style, I'd be a very happy movie goer.

5) Vice

So, I didn't see this movie when it first came out because I figured I already knew enough about Cheney and that the movie would probably just make me angry. But I was pleasantly surprised when I eventually did see it that 1) I learned lots of new stuff and 2) that Adam McKay directed this movie like an early 90's Oliver Stone movie. I love JFK, and I thoroughly enjoyed Vice. Christian Bale is my preferred winner of an admittedly weak Best Actor category this year. He is Dick Cheney in this movie, it's not like last year when you could see the plastic chins hanging off of Gary Oldman's face, Bale is just Cheney. He disappears. And Amy Adams is a saint, and deserves an Oscar, but not this year. I'd actually put her at last in that category this time around. I liked this movie much more than I anticipated I would. Wouldn't be surprised to see it take home the Film Editing win though, the filmmaking in this movie was top notch.

Category B: Almost at the top of the mountain, if any of these won Best Picture, I would not agree but I would not be offended either.

4) A Star is Born

Here's another one that I like more than I expected. Lady Gaga is great, super great even, and is definitely in the mix for Best Actress, by far the most stacked acting category this year. I think I would probably put her in second place on my personal list. Bradley Cooper was a convincing drunk person, and then when he's not drunk he basically just sounds like Bradley Cooper. Or actually like Bradley Cooper doing a Jeff Bridges impersonation. No hate though, rock stars are like that, realistic acting choices. I understand. Also, Sam Elliott! Damn. What a performance. If he gets the Best Supporting nod, I think even Mahershala would understand. Also, pretty decent music for a movie, usually fake rock band songs are god awful, but I imagine having Gaga on hand to work on stuff probably helped all of that out. Also, I'm just going to note that Alec Baldwin has an appearance in this film as himself on SNL with Ally, and he gives the racist intro to BlacKkKlansman, and he was in the Mission Impossible movie from this year. Good year for Baldwin.

3) BlacKkKlansman

This movie kind of blew me away. All the performances were great, especially, and this is going to sound weird, but all the guys that they had playing klansmen were especially good. I will never complain of Adam Driver getting any kind of recognition, but I'm a little surprised that Jasper Pääkkönen didn't get nominated instead for Supporting Actor for playing Felix, the super crazy klansman with a lie detector test and a super racist, fat wife. And man, if what happened in this movie is what happened in real life, the balls this whole operation took to pull off blows my mind. With his upcoming appearance as a pastor in the next God movie looming, it was nice to have this performance from Topher Grace as David Duke to remind us that Topher Grace isn't a total joke and can still be a real actor when people give him an opportunity. I don't think Spike Lee deserves the Best Director win, but I do think he fully deserves, and will win, the Adapted Screenplay statue. Let Adam Driver be in all movies!

2) The Favourite

It kind of shocked me to type out that last line because for the entirety of this Oscars season, The Favourite has been my, well, favorite. So why at number two? I'll leave that for the next entry. I love, love, love this movie. It's goofy and dramatic, it's full of insane costumes and powdery makeup. I don't know how Nicholas Hoult didn't get nominated for Supporting Actor because that dude made me laugh. But let's talk about the ladies. I don't really get why Olivia Colman is nominated for Best Actress and not Emma Stone, since Abby's story is definitely the defining line of the movie but whatever. OIivia Colman portrays Queen Anne's solitude and frustration of being dismissed perfectly. Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz are both nominated for Supporting Actress and if Emma Stone won, I'd be down. Also, shoutout to Regina King who is nominated alongside these two for her performance in If Beale Street Could Talk, she's also deserving of the win. I loved how dramatic everything in this movie is, from the dancey wrestle fest that Abigail has in the forest with the dude that she is basically conning into marrying her, to the blood splattering all over Sarah's face when Abigail shoots that bird, to the duck races, obvi. This movie reminded me of all the things I love about movies.

Category A: The best, and by far the best, this movie should win Best Picture

1) Roma

I was originally going to start this whole post talking about how hard it was for me to choose between The Favourite and BlacKkKlansman, and that this wasn't a top heavy Oscar season. And then I watched Roma this morning, as it was my last one to see and it wasn't ever in the theaters (thanks a lot for that Netflix, you d-bags). And wow. It took about twenty minutes before I realized that Roma is not only the best Oscar nomination but it passes Spider-Verse as the best overall movie of the year. And I saw Spider-Verse in the theaters three times, so this is high praise coming from me. This is a beautiful film, Alfonso Cuarón deserves the win in both the Directing and Cinematography categories (although I didn't see Cold War, which by all accounts is breath-taking). Yalitza Aparicio should win Best Actress against a murderer's row of performances. Her portrayal of Cleo, a maid to an affluent family in 1970's Mexico, is beautiful and subtle, she has so much warmth and is strong in the face of the constant, and sometimes literal, shit that she has to deal with. And Marina de Tavira is my favorite in the Supporting category as her boss, who is in the process of being abandoned by her husband and is having a meltdown while trying to keep things together for her four kids. Roma is my Best Picture, and it's not even close. Roma is the Golden State Warriors, and everything else is just the Rockets and the Cavs (this metaphor applies to NBA years past). Bohemian Rhapsody is the Knicks. I hope this movie wins every award it's nominated for, and I honestly want to watch it again as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading, friends. I hope that you took the time to watch at least a couple of these films, and enjoy the Oscars!!!

#Oscars #Movies #2019