Sorry that it’s taken me a few days to get this out – I’ve been busy. Time to give you my thoughts on each of the Oscar winners! This whole blog up to this point has led to this.

(I won’t be covering short films since I have nothing to say)

Best Documentary Feature: American Factory

This category sailed as expected. I was pretty surprised that they didn’t get the Obamas up on stage but I guess they’ve both got better things to do.

Best Original Song: ‘(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again’, Rocketman

As most people predicted, the Academy couldn’t resist giving Elton John and Bernie Taupin Oscars. I for one am just happy that Rocketman won anything after that embarrassing Best Actor snub for Egerton, even if I think Randy Newman’s Toy Story 4 song was better. Also, John’s performance was a lot of fun (surprised they didn’t get Taron on stage too), as was Newman’s. If we’re being honest, I skipped all the other musical performances apart from the mid-show recap rap and Billie Eilish’s In Memoriam rendition of ‘Yesterday’ – she (and her hair colour) was an interesting choice for the In Memoriam segment but she did a great job.

Best Original Score: Hildur Gudnadóttir, Joker

As predicted, Joker won Score. Deserved too; it’s a great score, very memorable and atmospheric. I personally would have chosen 1917 but Joker would be a close second.

Sound Mixing: 1917

Sound Editing: Ford v Ferrari

The only interesting thing about these two is that they split the sound awards between two movies for the first time in ages. I guess they managed to find a middle ground between the two most hotly-predicted movies in the sound category.

Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 4

I had been predicting TS4 for months, but my confidence began to wobble a bit as Netflix’s Klaus started outpacing it in the precursor awards. Luckily, I stuck to my guns and was correct in the end. It’s a good movie, too, better than 3.

Best Make-Up and Hairstyling: Bombshell

This was one of the biggest locks of the night – Bombshell was the Vice of last year, except for the fact that, unlike Vice, it wasn’t terrible.

Best Costume Design: Little Women

A good choice, well-deserved.

Production Design: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

MY OSCAR FRIEND: 1917‘s gonna win, they built trenches.

ME: Parasite built an allegorical house. And no, it’s going to be Hollywood.

OSCAR FRIEND: No.

ME: Yes.

OSCAR FRIEND: Why?

ME: Because all the Boomer Academy members will remember being in Hollywood in 1969.

He laughed, thinking I was joking.

Best Film Editing: Ford v Ferrari

I shouldn’t have predicted The Irishman for anything.

Best Visual Effects: 1917

I shouldn’t have predicted The Irishman for anything.

Best International Feature: Parasite

Wow, I never would have guessed that the only International Feature nominee also nominated for Best Picture won the International Feature award. What a surprise.

Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, 1917

My main man Roger wins his second Oscar in three years, good for him.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit

On one hand, it wouldn’t have been my choice (I personally would have gone for Irishman) and it would have been nice to see Greta Gerwig get the Oscar she deserved for Lady Bird, but on the other I’m just happy to see that it is now the Academy Award-winning Taika Waititi, and I’m also happy to see that it is a historic win, given that Waititi is the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar. Nobody predicted that when they watched Eagle vs Shark.

Best Original Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won, Parasite

It was at this moment that I realised that Parasite was winning Best Picture (I had predicted Hollywood to win Screenplay and also Picture – it’s very difficult to win Picture without Screenplay). Great script, so I’m not too upset that they blew my prediction’s head off.

Best Supporting Actor: Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Hopkins and Pesci didn’t even bother to show up because everyone knew Pitt had this award in the bag. It’s a good choice, too – he was easily the best of the nominees and it’s great to see Pitt – one of my favourite actors of all time – finally get his acting Oscar (he previously won one for producing 12 Years a Slave).

Best Supporting Actress: Laura Dern, Marriage Story

As with Pitt, if you weren’t predicting this you may have been living under a rock. While Dern’s performance was, in my opinion, not the best of the nominees, actresses like Margot Robbie and Florence Pugh have got a lifetime of great performances ahead of them – let the 53-year-old actress who has given some of the best female performances of the last thirty years have an Oscar.

Best Actress: Renée Zellweger, Judy

I haven’t addressed this before on this blog, so allow me to indulge myself for a second. Judy…was not good. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it was erring on the side of bad. It was a bland, boring, formulaic biopic that brought nothing new to the table and gave a pretty shallow account of the events detailed within it. But it was saved by Zellweger’s great performance, right? No. No it wasn’t. Much like the rest of the movie, I found Zellweger fairly lifeless in the titular role. Full disclosure: I know precious little about the way Garland acted in real life, so if everyone else is liking her performance for its accuracy, it’s totally lost on me. I should also add that I’ve never liked Zellweger and can’t think of a single role in which I didn’t find her vaguely irritating (maybe Bee Movie?). But still, I don’t get the hype, especially when she’s up against fantastic performances like Johansson from Marriage Story, Ronan from Little Women and Theron from Bombshell. I don’t understand why she won every award under the sun this season and I don’t feel any different about this one.

Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix, Joker

My feelings on this are similar to on Dern. Phoenix’s turn as the titular Arthur Fleck was perhaps not the best of the nominees (my heart lies with Adam Driver’s much more nuanced performance in Marriage Story) but still a fantastic role and he’s an actor long overdue for an Oscar, while Driver has got plenty of time to earn his golden statuette.

Best Director: Bong Joon-ho, Parasite

This really came out of nowhere. I, like most people, was predicting Sam Mendes and giving Quentin Tarantino the #2 spot (check out this post from January to see my deliberations on the matter). However, Joon-ho managed to swoop in and take the award from right under Mendes’ nose, becoming the first Korean to win Best Director (and, with his Screenplay win, the first Korean to win an Oscar, period) and only the second Asian to win Director overall, after Ang Lee’s two wins for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi in 2006 and 2013 respectively. I was enormously happy to see Joon-ho win as, although I would have liked to see Tarantino pick up a well-deserved and long-overdue award for directing (which, I wrote in January, “tends to be overshadowed by his screenwriting but deserves praise in it’s own right”), he was the best director of 2019.

Interlude: At this point, I was beginning to become confident that, despite my initial prediction, Parasite was going to win Best Picture. Although it had both it’s lack of English and acting nominations working against it, the combination of Screenplay and Director, AKA two of the Big Five awards plus International Feature, was a package the other nominees could only dream of. Could Parasite win Best Picture?

Best Picture: Parasite

Yes, yes it could. Parasite‘s BP win is glorious – not only did it break through the foreign language barrier that has long restricted the award to only English-language films, but it is also the first time since The Departed in 2006 that the Academy gave the award to my favourite film of that year, and only – I think – the sixth time overall (obviously I haven’t seen every BP winner ever but you get the idea). Because of the factors working against it (this is the first BP winner without an acting nomination since Slumdog Millionaire), victory feels even sweeter. God, what a time to be alive. The Best Picture-winning Parasite.

Me every time I’ve heard a classmate say Joker should have won Best Picture over Parasite this week: pic.twitter.com/f4qPYIISQf

— Huncrweo (@huncrweo) February 14, 2020

DISCLAIMER: this is not an anti-Academy post. I understand that these quotes only fully represent the views of a single voter, and when I inevitably become frustrated, it is directed towards the voter, not the organisation that they happen to be a part of. I doubt many of these opinions will hold much water when compared to the final winners. You can find the original article here.

Little Women was badly acted and confusing, and I have no idea why they cast four British actresses to play American girls.

A hot take right out of the gate. I’ve never understood the criticism that Little Women is confusing (in fact, I almost wrote a whole post about it) – anyone with half a brain can recognise the timeline shifts through the changes in location, colour grading, costuming, hair etc. Additionally, what the hell is she on about with ‘four British actresses’? Emma Watson and Florence Pugh are British, sure, but Saoirse Ronan is Irish-American and Eliza Scanlan is Australian.

And every time they said they were poor, I gagged — they’re living in a beautiful two-story house, and they have a cook. Jojo Rabbit was cute, but I found myself unable to laugh about Hitler — I don’t think that’s funny. Marriage Story was phony: You don’t have an off-Broadway director and an off-Broadway actress living in a nice house with no day job — if an off-Broadway actor makes $150 a week, that’s a lot.

I feel this has descended into the CinemaSins/YourMovieSucks brand of film criticism where you nitpick random details and inconsistencies rather than actually reviewing the movie.

If someone besides Martin Scorsese had directed The Irishman, it wouldn’t have all the accolades; it does because of his years in the business.

Anybody who’s ever studied art at a secondary or tertiary level knows that the context of the artist is pretty important to appreciating the artwork, so this criticism is pretty wonky. Also, critics would have loved Irishman with or without Scorsese, they just might not have seen it.

I don’t think foreign films should be nominated with the regular films

I have an idea for a drinking game with this article – take a shot every time this actress says something that sounds either vaguely racist or expresses the opinion that America is better than every other country.

I can’t vote for Marty — nobody wants to say it, but it’s just not that good.

And now we’re in the Hollywood Elsewhere brand of film criticism where if the majority opinion disagrees with you there must be some sort of hidden agenda or conspiracy at play.

I want an American director to win. The Oscars is an American thing; English things win BAFTAs and the French vote for the French

*knocks back a shot*

I wasn’t particularly impressed by Adam Driver. Leonardo DiCaprio has won already. I loved Jonathan Pryce, but I don’t know if I want to give it to the pope. So for me, it was between Antonio Banderas and Joaquin Phoenix, and I had to go with Joaquin because that is a performance that sticks in your mind. Antonio’s was much more subtle and poignant; Joaquin hit it out of the park.

The hot takes are hitting as if shot from a Gatling gun now. Not impressed by Adam Driver? Not voting for Leo because he’s already won (tell that to Hepburn, Nicholson, Streep and Day-Lewis)? I understand that the Catholic Church can be a bit dodgy at times but I didn’t realise it was problematic to vote for an actor pretending to be a Pope, and a fairly popular one at that (I think, I don’t know a whole lot about Popes outside of what I learned watching The Two Popes and skimming Francis’ Wikipedia page). I’m surprised that this woman even took into consideration a non-American actor in a non-American film, but she did go for Joaquin Phoenix in the end, citing Antonio Banderas’ subtlety as if it is a negative compared to Phoenix’s comparatively showy performance – quite strange.

Saoirse Ronan is wonderful, and I’ve liked her in so many things, but not Little Women. I can’t vote for Scarlett Johansson for a story I thought was not truthful. I won’t vote for Cynthia Erivo because I think that they should have gotten an American actress to play Harriet, not an English actress. Charlize Theron did a good imitation, but I find the real Megyn irritating, so I found her irritating, too. Renée was just wonderful in the movie — her singing and everything, she’s just great.

Here we go again with the Little Women actress hate – this time directed at the only semi-American lead in the film – not very consistent, is she? She’s not voting for Johansson because she somehow decoded that the (rumoured to be semi-autobiographical) story was not truthful because of the apartment one of the characters lived in or something. Knock back a shot for Cynthia Erivo. Also, imagine thinking Renée Zellweger was Oscar-worthy in Judy (admittedly, that’s more a hot take on my part than her’s).

Joe Pesci was good, but I don’t think that he did anything he hasn’t done before, just less of it.

Again with the criticising actors for being subtle!

I was irritated by Florence Pugh; she is so much older than her character is supposed to be that it was laughable. “You’re, like, 30 years old, why aren’t you a grown-up?”

Agree: it was a weird choice for Gerwig to cast the same actresses in the flashbacks as in the present. Disagree: Pugh wasn’t interesting. She’s the best performance out of the Supporting Actress nominees.

Laura Dern was annoyingly over-the-top. If I was her client in a divorce case, I would have walked out five minutes into her rant and hired Ray Liotta.

I’m starting to think that she’s sexist as well as racist.

I usually love Margot Robbie, but I didn’t really like her in Bombshell; it was just a caricature. 

That performance was in no way a caricature. Moreover, a caricature of who? Sexual assault survivors? She was playing a fictional composite character.

So I voted for Scarlett Johansson, even though I didn’t like Jojo Rabbit very much, because she did something kind of different than I’ve ever seen her do before.

Would you care to elaborate on that please, ma’am? No? Alright then.

Little Women was back and forth [chronologically], and you didn’t know what was going on.

*sigh*

I actually went for The Two Popes over Joker because I didn’t think a movie about two popes could be interesting, but it was — and funny.

I thought she didn’t want to vote for Popes? Also, I remove points for not voting for The Irishman in this category.

But Quentin did an amazing job with his fairy tale, and that’s really what it is — it begins “Once Upon a Time,” after all.

Insightful screenplay analysis, thank you for that.

I didn’t like American Factory — when the Chinese boss says “We’re better than them” and they show the American workers as big fat slobs, I thought to myself, “Why is Obama attaching himself to this?”

*knocks back a shot*

Honeyland got my vote, though, because it’s a beautiful story about saving the environment that is told so simply, without hammering us over the head like Greta whatever.

I’ll just leave that here.

There was nothing special about the visuals of The Irishman or Joker.

I beg your pardon?!?

The Irishman was too long; Thelma Schoonmaker has worked with him Scorsese for years and should have reined him in.

Newsflash to the Academy members: generally, the editor does not have control over the director. Also, the editing in The Irishman was exceptional.

I wasn’t blown away by Bombshell, even if all the women had Fox News hair.

What the hell does ‘Fox News’ hair look like?

Apparently The Hollywood Reporter has published another one of these with a different Academy member, so I might do another one of these reactions, though it may have to happen after the Oscars due to time constraints.