Oscars 2018: The Odds and Ends

Jeremy BeckOscars
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"

Welcome to Oscars Week! If you’re less than excited about Sunday’s annual cinematic gala, you might well be a producer for the show! Suffice it to say that it’s been a rough month for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, as they introduced one dubious revision to the telecast after another—no live song performances; no prior year’s winners as presenters; shunting the announcements for four categories to commercial breaks—only to walk back each change in the face of virulent criticism from the moviegoing public. (And let’s not forget the risible “Best Popular Film” category that was introduced in August before being mercifully scrapped a month later.) Enthusiasm for the ceremony may vary, but this parade of failures has left the sour impression that the people who care least about the Oscars happen to be in charge of running this year’s Oscars.

For my part, I no longer view the Oscars as hugely important. But I still think they have value, both as a historical record—literally, what were they thinking?—and as an opportunity to honor a bunch of movies that are, by and large, pretty good. Sure, I disagree with the Academy’s chosen winners more often than not, but that disagreement doesn’t automatically render their selections terrible. Besides, the arguments are part of the fun.

And so, over the next week, we’ll be running through our predictions and preferences in all 21 features categories (sorry, I don’t weigh in on the shorts because I know absolutely nothing about them). Today, we’re ripping through eight below-the-line fields that I dismissively dub “the odds and ends”, which is just a way to distinguish them from the five other crafts categories that I’m more passionate about. If you happen to care deeply about sound mixing or costume design, I apologize if I’ve insulted you. Also, get over it. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2018 (all 135 of them)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Matlida Lutz in "Revenge".

Yesterday, the Manifesto unveiled its list of the 10 best movies of 2018. Today, per annual tradition, we’re expanding that list and ranking every single movie of the year, or at least every single one that we saw. This is a deeply silly exercise, but it’s also a fun one, designed to inspire frivolous debates and indignant arguments, which are of course what the internet does best.

It’s also meant to be something of a service. For each title, in addition to embedding a hyperlink to my full review (where applicable), I’ll include a parenthetical identifying the movie’s director, its Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores (to see whether I conform with or diverge from the critical consensus), and—most usefully—a notification if it’s currently available on a particular streaming service. The idea is that you can continually refer back to this list over the coming years when you’re craving something to watch and you’re too lazy to Google the latest Indiewire poll. You’re welcome. Read More

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The 10 Best Movies of 2018

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible—Fallout"

There may not have been a ton of great movies released in 2018, but 2018 was still a great year for movies. It was one of the most fertile cinematic years that I can remember, full of challenging, fascinating films that were far from perfect but were resolutely good and—more important—interesting. Even as the industry continues to undergo seismic change, the movies themselves remain a vibrant cultural center, a thriving bazaar where viewers can converse, promote, argue, and discover.

It was also a year full of exciting and diverse voices, varied not only in terms of race and gender, but also with respect to age, style, and even mode of distribution. Black directors made themselves heard, and loudly, from the stirring adventure of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther to the fiery agitprop of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman to the scalding satire of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You to the youthful anger of George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give to the piercing melancholy of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Women, too, continued to assert themselves as equals in a marketplace that has treated them as inferiors for far too long; Kay Cannon’s Blockers made us laugh, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider made us cry, and Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? made us do both, while Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here made us tremble in fear and awe. Read More

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On the Basis of Sex: Fighting for Equality, Through the Law and Gritted Teeth

Jeremy BeckReviews
Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in "On the Basis of Sex".

Last year, the documentary RBG attempted to honor the extraordinary life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, charting her path from able young mind to Harvard Law student to U.S. Supreme Court Justice to feminist icon to internet meme. It was a well-intentioned effort that suffered from the usual pitfalls of cinematic hagiography, struggling to compress 85 years of the life of one of the most important legal figures in modern American history into a tidy 98 minutes. On the Basis of Sex, the new Ginsburg biopic from Mimi Leder, takes a narrower approach, homing in on two key periods in its subject’s life: her challenges as one of the few female students at Harvard, and her early labors as a litigator striving for women’s equality. Where RBG’s impact was glancing—to borrow from Supreme Court terminology, it felt more like a syllabus than a full opinion—Leder’s film lands a blow with something resembling force.

If the boxing metaphor seems peculiar, bear in mind that, despite trafficking in bookish disciplines and legal arcana, On the Basis of Sex is essentially a sports movie. Its heroine, played with poise and pluck by Felicity Jones, is the proverbial underdog, fighting to rise through the ranks and topple an entrenched dynasty. Its villains, most notably personified by Sam Waterston as Harvard’s dean of students, are pillars of the establishment, wielding their superior resources—money, power, connections—to extend their unbroken streak of competitive dominance. There are triumphs and setbacks, eager rookies and cagey veterans, strategic coaching maneuvers and breezy montages. There is even a Big Game, with a climactic moment designed to be as suspenseful as the final jump shot in Hoosiers. Read More

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