Best Picture Nominees and Winners

Corrie and I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once. About six minutes in I said, "Well, I can see why this won best picture." As it played on we both enjoyed it, and we started to feel like while we liked the movie, it may not have been the best movie this year. It was as if Hollywood was enjoying their own farts and trying to correct 90 years of wrongs with a single vote.

I've been a fan of Michelle Yeoh since Magnificent Warriors and Police Story 3 from Hong Kong in the late '80s and early '90s. Then she was the best part of one of the Pierce Brosnan Bond films, and then came 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. For some of us, this was her true arrival, her coronation. She was badass as a tertiary character and you never had a sense that she could lose any conflict she got into, other than as Chow Yun Fat's unrequited love interest. (Also, Hard Boiled at the Tower Theater in 1996!)

What a rad poster!

It was in the role of unrequited/missed opportunity love interest with Chow Yun Fat that you could see how talented Michelle Yeoh is as an actor, and now she has the hardware to match. When I first heard of this movie, of its premise and cast and mid-level budget, I was all-in. It took longer than I wanted, but eventually we saw it. It's original and weird and fun. It's funny and heartfelt, features butt-plugs and hotdog fingers and fanny packs and sentient rocks and an event horizon everything bagel. Because that string of words makes sense.

But I started thinking: how many Oscar winners have I seen? Like in the recent past? I remember the year that Slumdog Millionaire won best picture that it was the only nominee we saw. And it won.

So I pulled up a list of the past winners and nominees. It turns out that Corrie and I have only averaged a single movie in the last five to ten years.

Since this year's Oscars are considered the 2022 edition, the only movie nominated from the 2021 edition was:

And from 2020:

*****

When I checked on 2019, I got bored with the concept, and lost the thread of what I was trying to say. The realities of caring about movies has changed for me, and the fleeting ideas or things to say come and go. This post sat as a draft for a few months before I got back to it. 

I quite wanted to say some stuff about Judas and the Black Messiah, and maybe that was the first thread to get focused on and then dropped. Don't Look Up was pretty neat, but the connection to climate change was probably too much for some audience members.

The three movies here, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Don't Look Up, and Judas and the Black Messiah, all have different things to say about life in America, the treatment of minorities, immigrants, er, the scientific community...

I was going to say that maybe we could get back to a time when movies may have things to say about the human condition, but then I noticed that, hey, maybe I had some of those right here...