Every year I think to myself, “this is the year I will write The Piece about the Oscars,” and every year, I…don’t. Not usually. I think, years ago, it hit me that writing about the Oscars in long-form structure is a fool’s errand, and I’ve never not known that writing about Oscars the way Oscar prognosticators write about Oscars would make me want to eat my own head. So I generally stay out of Oscar talk and contribute nothing to the conversation, because inevitably, Oscar talk boils away any interest in movies that are not Oscar nominees*, and I gotta say, I really hate living each year for the purpose of constructing a top ten** and then wringing my hands over whether my picks are everyone else’s picks*** or not.
But because I do not like seeing non-Oscar movies ignored, I feel compelled to write about those movies, which in this case would be Us; Little Women is very much an Oscar movie (duh), but I wrote about that too, because it’s insane to me that voters couldn’t scrounge a nomination for Gerwig.
You can read my thoughts plus our full slate of predictions over at Paste Magazine.
*Being nominated for an Oscar does not make a movie good or worthy of discussion, and the inverse is also true.
**I like making top tens, but I tend to think a majority of professional writers spend their years writing about movies only in the context of whether they are “best” or not, which I think is not the point of being a movie critic.
***”I can’t believe that I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians wasn’t an awards season hit” is a thing I’ve actually said, though maybe not in those precise words, but I said it more out of frustration that nobody bothered to see the damn thing. Sue me.
A Constant Visual Feast 