A while back I posted about my cinemaphilic nephew Steven’s nominees for the “Golden Steves,” which he humbly presents as a better alternative to the Oscars. As he says,
Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, immune to ballyhoo, unswayed by sentiment, and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might be termed in all accuracy “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 200 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, some caveats:
1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category comprises six nominees, not five.
2) A film can be nominated in only one of the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Non-Fiction Film, Best Foreign Language Film. Placement is determined by the Board of Governors. Said film remains eligible in all other fields.
3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar analysis.’
Click to read and see all the winners.
The nominees for the “big” categories are below, and I’ve put in bold the winners. Remember that there are eight categories below but 12 on the original list, so I’ll put the four extra winners at the bottom.
Best Picture
Afire
All of Us Strangers
Anatomy of a Fall
Killers of the Flower Moon
May December
Trenque Lauquen
Best Director
Laura Citarella, Trenque Lauquen
Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers
Todd Haynes, May December
Christian Petzold, Afire
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall
Best Actor
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Benoit Magimel, Pacifiction
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Franz Rogowski, Passages
Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
Michael Thomas, Rimini
Best Actress
Jodie Comer, The End We Start From
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall
Natalie Portman, May December
Emma Stone, Poor Things
Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One
Best Supporting Actor
Jamie Bell, All of Us Strangers
Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
Charles Melton, May December
Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things
Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
Merve Dizdar, About Dry Grasses
Claire Foy, All of Us Strangers
Anne Hathaway, Eileen
Rachel McAdams, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Best Non-Fiction Film
Apolonia, Apolonia (Lea Glob)
Beyond Utopia (Madeleine Gavin)
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman)
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado)
Our Body (Claire Simon)
To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja)
Best Foreign Language Film
About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismaki)
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
And the other winners:
Best Screenplay–Adapted: All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)
Best Screenplay–Original: Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
Best Animated Feature: Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger)
Best Original Song: “Live That Way Forever,” The Iron Claw (Richard Reed Parry, Laurel Sprengelmeyer)
Here’s that best original song:
I guess I’ll have to see “May December” as it took home three Golden Steves. My moviegoing has been thin in the past year, and I know nothing about this movie save that it got a 91% Critics Rating (but only a 65% Viewers Rating) on Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s the trailer, showing the costars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.
FWIW, I found May December well worth watching. It’s loosely based on real life events that are uncomfortably intriguing. The cast is, IMO, superb. Julianne Moore is particularly unsettling as a woman who went to jail for statutory rape and subsequently married her victim.
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Many are very interesting to me. I am especially interesting in documentaries these days.
It wasn’t so long ago nominations were rare for any woman in any screen awards in the ‘director’ category. If ‘director’ is gender neutral, why not establish the same for the ‘actor’ category? It would be more interesting and dare I say, ‘rewarding’, to split the actor category into 3 levels — eg under age 25, over age 55, and in between. This would have the virtue of avoiding social media spats for trans actors in terms of ‘where they belong’.
Golden Steve here! Yes, May December is about a woman closely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, and her husband of 20+ years — her former seventh-grade lover/victim. Now their own kids are leaving home, and they’re facing life as empty nesters, even though he’s barely 35. But more than that, the film is about a Hollywood actress preparing to play Mary Kay in a movie, who embeds herself in their daily lives as part of her “process,” ostensibly to learn what makes them tick.
Probably the reason the Viewers Rating is lower than the Tomatometer score is that audiences not familiar with director Todd Haynes (who first made his mark with a devastating portrait of Karen Carpenter, told entirely with Barbie and Ken dolls) may have been expecting a straightforward account of Letourneau that clarifies her motives or facilitates easy judgment. Here she remains opaque, as the true subject is the narcissistic actress, and the way she disrupts all the lives in her wake in her own reductivist quest to “understand” her subject. The movie changes tones often — dramatic one minute, tongue-in-cheek the next — so it’s easy to see why it doesn’t appeal to everyone. But I think as satire of the public’s appetite for scandal and the media’s eagerness to strip-mine vulnerable people’s lives in the the guise of producing enlightening entertainment (but really just to cash in on the feeding frenzy), May December is trenchant, darkly funny, and brilliantly acted.
May-December left me cold. However, the fact you give it such high marks makes me want to watch it again and maybe see what I missed the first time around.
My personal favorite this year was Poor Things – not just for the great actors (loved Ruffalo! – I could watch him throw tantrums all day), but for the surrealist story and the fabulous sets, sound track, and costumes.
(You probably couldn’t get two more different movies than M-D and Poor things!)
How do people watch movies these days? Is there one particular streaming service you would recommend for at home?
I go to the theater whenever possible. True, it’s expensive and people are rude, but you can mitigate the former by skipping the concessions stand and the latter by sitting in the third or fourth row, so the phone users are behind you. (Talking is much less prevalent than scrolling these days.) There’s simply no substitute for the immersive experience of watching a movie on a 50-foot screen in a dark auditorium with no incoming texts or emails to distract you.
As for streaming platforms, if I had to pick only one it would be the Criterion Channel. It’s less helpful with new releases (especially mainstream Hollywood ones), but can’t be beat when it comes to classics, international, independent, etc, and with the supplemental behind-the-scenes features we used to enjoy on DVDs. The new stuff can generally be rented a la carte from Amazon, Google Play, or Apple TV/iTunes.
I appreciate your reply. I’ve been living in a no entertainment zone for 3 years (long story) and have decided it’s time to buy a sofa, some sort of tube and try to enjoy the life I’ve got. Thanks for the recommendations (I like independent, less popular stuff more anyways).
Glad to see the original song – I’d like to hear Steve’s pick for original score/soundtrack.
Though I don’t pick a winner for soundtrack, two of my favorites were Joe Hisaishi’s gorgeous score for Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and the late, great Robbie Robertson’s compositions for Killers of the Flower Moon. Both are innovative and haunting. I also liked May December’s repurposing of Michel Legrand’s music from the 1971 classic The Go-Between. On the other hand, I found the Oppenheimer score bombastic and off-putting.
Oh wow, thanks! Ha – I didn’t expect a reply – I’ll check it out!
BTW I’m intrigued by Hans Zimmer’s Dune 2 ideas – but not sure if that’s for this year or next.
Cheers
I too have a life-long discomfort around prime numbers.
OT: How do you feel about the number one? (By a popular definition, a prime is a positive integer divisible only by itself and 1.)
Oops: Meant as a reply to Diana.