98th Annual Academy Awards Winners

We had tornado warnings yesterday and that's my excuse for not posting.  

I didn't love this telecast.  I've never found Conan O'Brien all that funny so he was a middling host for me.  It felt like ABC went out of its way to make sure no one could possibly be offended and it made for a weak show.  There were sound problems, camera problems, and they kept cutting people off for their speeches in a way that felt needlessly aggressive.  I understand you have time constraints on your broadcast but people wait their entire lives for this kind of award.  That being said, the Academy did manage to get a few things right, even if they ultimately fumbled the biggest one.

Best Supporting Actress went to Amy Madigan for Weapons.  This is the first time since 1992 that it has gone to a horror movie.

Best Live Action Short had a tie for The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva.  It's not completely unheard of but it is pretty rare.

Best Casting went to Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle After Another, beginning a depressing trend.

Best Supporting Actor went to Sean Penn for One Battle After Another.  He didn't show so Kieran Culkin accepted on his behalf.  Just going to pretend somehow Kieran won and be happy about that.

Best Adapted Screenplay went to Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another, breaking his 14-loss streak.

Best Original Screenplay went to Ryan Coogler for Sinners.

Best Animated Feature went to K-Pop Demon Hunters, as expected.

Best Animated Short went to The Girl Who Cried Pearls, which I unfortunately didn't get to see.

Best Costume Design went to Frankenstein.

Best Hair and Makeup went to Frankenstein.

Best Production Design went to Frankenstein.

Best Sound went to F1: the Movie.

Best Original Score went to Sinners.

Best Original Song went to K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Best Film Editing went to One Battle After Another.

Best Visual Effects went to Avatar: Fire and Ash.

Best Documentary Short went to All the Empty Rooms.

Best Documentary Feature went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

Best International Feature went to Sentimental Value.

Best Cinematography went to Autumn Durald Arkapow for Sinners, the first woman to ever win this category.

Best Actress went to Jessie Buckley for Hamnet.

Best Actor went to Michael B. Jordan for Sinners.

Best Director went to Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another.

And finally, Best Picture went to One Battle After Another.  This is Green Book levels of safety picks.  I think there's going to be a major revisit of this movie in about 5 years and it's not going to survive well.  Somebody on social media called it "liberal fantasy porn" and they're not wrong.  But hey, could have been worse.  Could have been Marty Supreme.

Jane Austen's Period Drama (2025)/The Singers (2025)/Two People Exchanging Saliva (2025)/A Friend of Dorothy (2025)

Nominated for Best Live Action Short    For expediency's sake, I'm lumping all the shorts together.

Jane Austen's Period Drama - Kanopy - a very funny short that people online have likened to a better class of SNL skit.  I think that's setting the bar too low but I don't like SNL.  

Miss Estrognia Talbot (Julia Aks) is in the middle of being proposed to by handsome bachelor Mr. Dickley (Ta'imua) when she unexpectedly gets her period.  Confused and alarmed, Dickley rushes her home where she argues with her sisters over how much she should educate him on women's biology.

Honestly, it's 2026.  If we cannot as a society be over the "ew, girls have cooties" factor about periods, what are we even doing?

The Singers - Netflix-  almost the polar opposite of Jane Austen, this doesn't have a single woman on screen and is four times as emotional.

A bar full of men is energized by a late-night bet:  whoever is the best singer wins a free beer and $100.

Absolutely magical performances.

Two People Exchanging Saliva - YouTube - what if Carol had been directed by Yorgos Lanthimos?

A shopgirl (Luàna Bajrami) and a wealthy housewife (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) try to suppress their desire in a world that criminalizes kissing as disgusting.

Only the French would think that the fastest way to show a dystopia is to make kissing illegal.  The garlic gum is going to give me nightmares, though.

A Friend of Dorothy - Kanopy - And we're back to being wholesome and cute.

A teen (Alistair Nwachukwu) trying to retrieve an errant soccer ball from a garden befriends an elderly lady named Dorothy (Miriam Margolyes) who encourages him to pursue his dreams.  All of them.

So sweet.  

Little Amelie or the Character of Rain (2025)

Nominated for Best Animated Feature   Content warning: child endangerment (drowning)

Amélie (Loïse Charpentier) is a Belgian toddler living in Japan with her diplomat family.  She spends the first two years of her life in a vegetative state, believing that she is a god.  An earthquake "awakens" her and allows her to finally begin interacting, but being limited to a squishy human form is very frustrating, so her family hires a nanny, Nishio (Victoria Grosbois), based on the recommendation of their austere landlady (Yumi Fujimori).  Amélie and Nishio bond, which angers the landlady, who still blames all foreigners for the war that killed her husband and son.  Geopolitical resentments are tough to navigate when you are only three-years-old.  

This was a little jarring at first because the animation is like MS Paint-style pixelation.  It wasn't what I was expecting but it was certainly eye-catching.  I don't think it will win but it's still absolutely worth supporting independent animation.  

Sirat (2025)

Nominated for Best International Film and Best Sound    Content warning: dog in distress, animal death (dog, off-screen), child death (off-screen), violence, mild gore

Luis (Sergi Lopez) has traveled to a rave in southern Morocco with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), in the hopes of finding his missing daughter, Mar.  He shows her photo around and manages to inspire some pity in a small group of ravers, who tell him there is a second rave planned even deeper in the desert, close to Mauritania.  Against their advice, Luis and Esteban follow the group into the desert, slowly becoming closer as a group until unimaginable tragedy strikes.

If I had to count all the ways this movie wasn't for me, we'd be here all day.  It's well-made.  That's about all the praise I can spare.  I hated the music.  I don't like house, techno, EDM, or trance.  I don't like concerts or live music, really, at all so the idea of going to the middle of nowhere to hear super-loud repetitive music gives me a full-body shudder.  I got the found family thing.  I got the "trial by faith" thing.  It wasn't enough to make me like the movie.

However, a lot of people really do like it and maybe you'll be one of them.  It's currently not available for streaming so fire up that VPN.

It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Nominated for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay    Content warning:  animal death (dog, off-screen but you hear it), descriptions of torture.    Biggest surprise of the season for me, so far.

Vahid (Vahid Mobassari) is having a normal day trying to get stuff ready for his sister's wedding when a customer comes into his repair shop.  Vahid recognizes the sound of the man's prosthetic leg squeaking as belonging to the interrogator Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), who tortured him in prison.  But Vahid was always blindfolded, so he can't be sure.  Impulsively, he kidnaps the customer and seeks out Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a former journalist who was also imprisoned and tortured by Eghbal, to see if she can positively identify him.  Shiva is now doing wedding photography for Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), another torture victim, and when Goli hears they might have Eghbal, she demands to be included in the decisions.  Shiva only knows one person who could make a positive ID, Hamid (Mohammed Ali Elyasmehr), but he is volatile and bitter, and Vahid doesn't necessarily trust that Hamid would tell the truth.

Okay, so all of that is an accurate synopsis of the movie that does not in any way tell you how funny it is.  Yes, very serious, kidnapping, moral quandary, wrestling demons, but also (!) goofy bureaucratic nonsense, cartoonish levels of graft, and five good people who are trying to do the right thing for justice that had been denied to them.

Don't sleep on this one because it looks too heavy.  I promise you, it is handled so well.  It's streaming on Hulu.

Arco (2025)

Nominated for Best Animated Feature    

Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi) lives in the far future where time travel is possible thanks to rainbow-colored capes and diamonds that break down light.  His parents and sister travel to the past to retrieve rare or extinct plants but all Arco wants is to see real dinosaurs.  One night, he steals his sister's flying suit and goes to the past, but shorts it and ends up in the near future of 2075 instead.  After a crash landing, he meets Iris (Romy Fay), a ten-year-old girl desperate for connection since her parents work all week and leave her and her baby brother in the care of Mikki, a robot.  Arco lost his traveling diamond in the woods where he landed and Iris agrees to help him look for it despite the pending threat of wildfires.

This is a very pretty movie.  That's about all I can say about it.  It's fine.  It feels like an anime but is French.  I tried to get the French language track on Amazon but it wouldn't take, for some reason, so I watched the English dub.  I found the three brothers super annoying but otherwise, it's not bad.  It's at least an original.  Currently only available for rent.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

Nominated for Best Visual Effects    All right, we are in the homestretch.  The ceremony is tonight so I'm going to push out as many posts as I managed to get drafted during the week.

Zora (Scarlett Johansson) is a mercenary hired by a pharmaceutical company to get blood samples from some of the largest dinosaurs produced during the ill-fated Jurassic World theme park expansions.  She is assisted by Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a paleontologist eager to see specimens up close.  But when they hear a mayday from a family whose sailboat was capsized by a mosasaur, the objectives change.

Talk about a series with diminishing returns.  This has an A-list cast spouting the most wooden, cliche-ridden dialogue, zero thrills, bland humor, and nowhere near enough gore to make up for all the above.  Unless you are seriously into the franchise, skip this one entirely.  It's basically Jurassic Park 3 but without the charm of Michael Jeter.

It does make a good point about how quickly we become inured to miracles but it's not worth sitting through just to hear that.  Also, it's part of the villain's monologue because of course it is.  When I watched it, it was streaming on Peacock but it has since moved to Netflix if you can't heed warnings and want to watch it anyway.