While I usually avoid making lists of awards-worthy films, rules are meant to be broken and this year it was something definitely worth doing.
It has been strange going through the titles of nominated or shortlisted films this year, particularly in the Best International Feature or Best Non-English Language category — depending on which voting body you follow. Having watched all the entries featured now, I can safely say I disagree wholeheartedly with where the final nominations (for the Oscars) or award will go, straight from the get-go. And I don’t know who will win the Oscar or the other award that looks like a solid gold world and is 100 percent, 24 carat plated bulls**t. I am allowed to say that, because I used to be a voting member.
Here are my categories and also including Best Ensemble, which I guess is equal to the Oscar’s Best Casting award, a new category which will kick off this year.
Best Score
A score to me isn’t just about great music, but also the way it is used in the film to make you feel. Two films used music in the best way for me, this year, and they are Wicked For Good and Sentimental Value. Neither really uses original music — Wicked was a show before it was a film and the songs for Joachim Trier are not made especially for the film. But there is something about hearing Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande sing ‘For Good’, or the specific placement throughout the film of a song like Terry Callier’s ‘Dancing Girl’ in Sentimental Value that really did it for me. Kudos to Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the original stage musical's music and lyrics, and John Powell, who composed the film's orchestral score alongside Schwartz, adapting the musical themes for the big screen. But also to music supervisor Stephen Oremus and orchestrator Jeff Atmajian, for Wicked for Good. And Hania Rani for composing the score of Sentimental Value and music supervisor Martin Hossbach for finding the cool additional songs.
Best Song
‘For Good’, from Wicked For Good, because nothing else comes even close. Sorry. And it’s not original I know, but I’m giving the prizes here… So that’s how I’m rolling. For credits, see above.
Best Casting
Hands down that award goes to Spanish Oscar submission Sirāt. Although I didn’t find the film particularly interesting, and the explosions towards the end felt constructed by the guys at the Magic Castle in LA, plus I didn’t buy a dad having lost one child bringing the other along to search for child one. I also didn’t connect with the rave culture, because I’m a Studio54 girl and raves have never been my thing, but the casting was an absolute stroke of genius! I mean, who casts a pudgy middle-aged man with a child and not-particularly memorable dog, and sets them in the middle of the desert, surrounded by misfits and rail thin women who look like men and assorted men missing a limb, covered in tattoos and just plain weird. This is Mad Max, Furiosa without the budget and played in community theater, if your community is circa-1990 downtown Detroit. Kudos to María Rodrigo, Nadia Acimi and Luis Bértolo who all worked together to bring Oliver Laxe’s vision of a dystopian present to life. About the film itself, all I can say is that if Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch had been directed by a man, it would have been Oscar nominated. But it wasn’t, and it wasn’t, and Laxe’s less fascinating film will be.
Best Male Performance in a Lead
Well, I’ve seen him nominated as a supporting actor but I won’t take that sitting down. Stellan Skarsgård pulls Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value out of the foreign language, complicated family drama commonplace it could easily occupy without his presence. And the film may be about its female characters but the god, father almighty figure looming between and above them is definitely Skarsgård, in all his splendor. So give this man a Best Actor Oscar too please.
Best Female Performance in a Lead
Without a doubt, Tessa Thompson in Hedda. Wow! Talk about owning the big screen, Thompson fills it, plays with it, and us the audience, colors it in shades of rotting fruit, and drops it, commanding our attention throughout a film that needs her completely. I felt like I was in the presence of Hedda, the woman, throughout Nia DaCosta’s deliciously watchable film. No other performance this year dared as much as Thompson’s and that she’s a lovely woman in real life, with whom I’ve had more than one interesting conversations just adds that proverbial cherry on the cake.
Best Supporting Actor
Well, I saw it written on social media that someone should give Pedro Pascal an award for pulling us all through 2025 and helping most of us make it to finish line. I have to agree and my own personal Silver Star goes to Pascal for his wondrous performance, so against type, as Ted Garcia, Eddington's ball of contradictions, incumbent mayor, who is also running for re-election when he locks horns with Joaquin Phoenix’s sheriff Joe Cross during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ari Aster’s modern western Eddington has not gotten much love, come awards time and I hope people will reconsider the film as the great social commentary it proves to be — all wrapped in a totally entertaining film!
Best Supporting Actress
Laura Dern in Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? You are going to see the film getting some more love from me a bit further down in this awards list but I have to go totally against the current and nominate an actress who rises above her roles, always. Think of her in the underrated gem 99 Homes, as the mother figure, but also Jay Kelly and Marriage Story, in the latter as the slutty looking divorce lawyer. Dern has made a career out of being a character actress, like a serious one as in the olden, golden days of cinema. And I love her for that. So give this girl an award! Another one, I mean…
Best International, Foreign Language Film
Palestine 36, by Annemarie Jacir. I have to admit that I love a bit of education with my entertainment and Jacir’s opus, epic story within the history of the Arab Revolts of 1936/37 is beautiful but also oh-so needed. We may be where we are now, but do you really know how we got here? I didn’t, not completely, and thanks to her wondrous actors, the intelligent script, the well-placed archival footage, recolored to blend in with the story, and the perfectly aligned soul of this iconoclastic Palestinian filmmaker, I felt like I was watching the perfect film. And it turned out to be the one which made all others I watched afterward simply feel… mweh. I also love how Jacir made women’s roles also very prevalent in this “his-story”, making what has happened in the Holy Land affect “her-story” too.
Best Director
I’d easily give the award to Jafar Panahi for his latest film It Was Just an Accident, hands down. While I don’t find this latest film Panahi’s best, he needs some love for all he’s been going through for cinema. He’s a film martyr and has recently been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and no travel for two years. On January 4th, just two days from now, he will be tried at Branch 26 of Tehran's Revolutionary Court. It seems his filmmaking hits close to home in Iran and that’s what cinema is meant to do, even while it provides entertainment. And It Was Just an Accident rattles our consciousness, shakes our souls into understanding and for that, its unrelenting helmer deserves an award.
Best Screenplay
Ryan Coogler for Sinners. Yup, I did that. Setting the film in 1932 Mississippi and turning what could be a story about racism into a vampire horror film, with Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as criminal twins Elijah "Smoke" and Elias "Stack" Moore was a stroke of genius. And the film achieved so much box office success it really deserves a double award, but again, I’m not that other voting body which gives out a Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award. What is that anyway? And how do you measure it… I think the film got a bit lost in the Warner Bros. meltdown and never reached as many awards voters as it should have. But I think it will still manage to get some love at the Oscars.
Best Film of the Year
Ta-da-da-da-dah! And the award goes to… Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? It’s finally time Cooper got recognized as the great talent he is, a funny, good looking and not messed up so he turns super fat later in life Orson Welles for our times. The man acts, he writes and he directs like a master and he needs some love, from his peers that is. The way he shot this film, where he also held one of the cameras by the way, one feels like one is part of the audience and his casting of friend and fellow actor Will Arnett as a man who turns to stand-up comedy to overcome his funk, inspired by UK comedian John Bishop’s life, is magical. I personally thought Maestro was awards-worthy too and when I look at it now, I feel like it got lost down the WGA and SAG strikes rabbit hole and should be revisited today.
So there, this is what I think. What are your faves? Feel free to shoot me an email or write a comment below, telling me the errors of my ways, or how you agree with my list. Happy New Year!