Early Awards Predictions

For the best Actress and Supporting Actress races, the movie Bombshell seems likely to nab nominations in both categories. You have Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, and Charlize Theron playing Megyn Kelly.



John Lithgow plays Roger Ailes. I always believed him to be one of the most underrated actors of our time and that he deserved an Oscar, so a Best Supporting Actor nod for him and win would be great.

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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa

Whoever's film/ performance is the wokest will win is my prediction

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101 Favorite Movies (2019)

Charlize is a lock, Margot might have trouble competing against herself for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.


Lithgow might have issues because it's a Goliath field in supporting with Hanks, Pitt, Pacino, and Pesci

This might make things quite unpredictable this year as Once Upon A Time In America and Joker are getting a good deal of praise but also quite a bit of "woke" criticism.

I can't stand this "woke" culture we live in today. I miss the days when movies were just "movies" and not platforms to push some political or social agenda (whether it be a conservative or a liberal agenda). Not to mention the days when it was okay to say or make fun of anything or anybody in movies and not have anybody getting offended by it. Which brings me to the 'cancel culture' which is flat-out ridiculous and absurd. The people behind the 'cancel culture' need to get their faces punched.

With regards to praise, I've said the same thing the last few years. Any movie that involves LGBTQ, woman power, or the plight of minority groups, especially jews, blacks, and Hispanics will be showered with the Academy's praise and awards. I'm hoping this year is different.

Sorry dude, but movies have been pushing agendas since at least Birth of a Nation (if not earlier), besides which maybe it's less a question of people suddenly "getting offended by everything" in recent years and more that they've always been offended and changes in social dynamics have led to there being more open criticism of the offensive that was either not voiced or ignored in previous decades.

Besides, if anything woke culture's approach to awards season tends to be much more critical of films that feature superficially acceptable subjects like POCs or the LGBTQ community. Green Book is nominally an anti-racism movie that won Best Picture but it was still criticised for resorting to cheap white-saviour clichés, to say nothing of how Bohemian Rhapsody took a bi icon and watered him down in some questionable ways in order to fit a generic musical biopic narrative.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

"Films have always had agendas" isn't really a rebuttal to any of this, because "I don't want my films to ever have agendas" is pretty clearly a straw man. The contention, right or wrong, is that it's ramping up, and/or that artistic and critical quality are taking a backseat to those concerns. That critics are passing off ideological or moral disapproval as if it were artistic critique.

You (and many others) have rightly noted that it's vapid and naive to expect films to be mindless entertainment with no relationship to politics or real-world controversies. But most fail to note that the opposite extreme--demanding that the art function first as moral instruction for a particular worldview--is just as ridiculous. Art should not be primarily valued for how useful it is as cultural rhetoric.

I'm not sure Green Book helps your argument, either. The fact that even ostensibly ideologically "correct" films are subject to criticism is kind of the point, since that criticism is invariably "they didn't go far enough." The purity demanded on this front does not contradict the concerns here, it underscores them.

And it fits what I'm saying about judging films primarily by their rhetorical usefulness: it's subject to criticism simply because it's not especially confrontational about racism, even though the message is obviously a good one. For that reason alone it can be criticized as if it were explicitly retrograde. That's pretty ridiculous, because it's based in the presumption that the first function of art is propaganda.

Fair points. I just figure it's always worth questioning why someone would claim to "miss the days when movies were just movies" and also how much you can ever truly separate a film's sociopolitical rhetoric from its overall quality as a film (assuming you can or even should). It's not like a film that says and does all the "right" things automatically earns a 5/5 rating from me anyway or that I haven't liked my fair share of films that drew criticism of a similar nature. The difference being that I don't act like this is some kind of personal affront - if anything, I could use something like that to help me give further consideration to films rather than just acting like No It Is The Children Who Are Wrong.

It is, of course, pretty significant that the No It Is the Children Meme is perpetuated and used by...the Children. Have you met children? They're wrong a lot.

But, I digress. I'll agree that movies were never "just movies." But like cultures almost always do (and more as time goes on, I think), there's been a pretty clear overreaction. I agree you can't and shouldn't entirely separate a film from its point of view or impact on the culture, but I do think its quality as film needs to always be the primary consideration, except perhaps in extreme circumstances. Green Book is a really, really good example of people losing sight of that and inadvertently revealing what they think art's function ought to be.

Anyway, it's too easy for this to turn into people shooting down dueling extremes ("movies shouldn't challenge us"/"movies must always be challenging us") that maybe nobody in this actual thread actually believes in. Clearly these ideas are out there, but I think there's a good chance the Internet dramatically exaggerates how widely held they are, in both directions. Seems like it's more of a general posture thing, IE: whether you're more forgiving of someone being clearly overzealous or even ridiculous because you like the general thrust of their worldview. That's trickier to parse out.

In fairness, it is a line from a 25-year-old episode. Can't exactly fault it for resonating across the years (especially since it references an older authority figure who refuses to consider that he may be wrong about something, which has never really stopped being a thing).

But I digress. I think another part of the negative reaction to Green Book was that it wasn't considered a particularly high-quality film to begin with - you had a couple of solid lead performances, sure, but that's about it - and the undercooked approach to its supposedly Important subject matter was part and parcel of the negative reaction. If anything, it comes across as a prime example of the kind of film that the anti-woke types are liable to complain about.

Yeah, obviously it's an actual thing that happens in reality. But like every self-exculpatory meme it gets used increasingly thoughtlessly; you're now liable to see it in any tweet thread where anyone suggests any new idea is a bad one.

I think we can all agree, at minimum, that human understanding is a constant push-pull between keeping the hard-earned wisdom of past generations while being open to letting it evolve and grow, both in general and at the margins to account for differing circumstances.

The reason I'm agitating more for the former is because it makes up more time (and thus, more minds) and deserves more relative deference, and because it seems to need the help. Because while it's a well-known and well-understood trope/meme that haha old people fear change, slightly less appreciated is the very obvious and equally undeniable counterpart of young people are way too open to new and dramatic ideas. Probably because, duh, the kids are the ones using tropes and memes the most in the first place. So of course there's memes about how right they are, and of course your great aunt in the MAGA hat doesn't have a pixelated GIF to respond to you with.

Re: Green Book. Yeah, it being a relatively ho-hum movie (in all but the acting, of course) probably didn't help. Rationally, there's no reason that should matter to those types of criticisms, but in practice that's the kind of thing that tends to lead people (critics, editorialists masquerading as critics, whatever) to feel a lot safer levying those kinds of criticisms, relative to what they might be willing to say if the film were truly exceptional.

I don't think Green Book was ever really the kind of thing people would complain about the way people complain about wokeness now, though. I think that (in this case, the idea that racists in the 60s would've reacted to Green Book the same way people do to some overtly woke artistic work now) is revisionism, though. A big part of the problem is the (often explicitly stated!) belief that every one of these struggles is just like all the others, all cultural vanguard ideas are the Right Side of History, and in time they'll all look equally as valid and obvious as the Civil Rights movement (hence the Skinner meme). I think that's borne out of survivorship bias (a constant and unavoidable issue with progressive notions of history, by its very nature) and half a dozen other things.

Whoops started a firestorm. I use to love the Oscars, now I can barely stomach watching them. I feel like if you are a white straight male you almost have to get up there and apologize for winning an Oscar now. Every person that gets up there has a righteous cause to support like they are on some morally superior mountain top the rest of us can only see through binoculars. It nauseating. Meanwhile they are sucking at the teat of China where most of these issues, Gay rights, Women's rights, racism, christian/Muslim re-education camps, concentration camps, freedom of speech, climate concerns etc....are all much more severe there then here by miles. Hell I even heard Once Upon A Time In Hollywood reshot the Bruce Lee scenes to appease China. It's all just too much hypocriticism to stomach anymore.

As far as the movies themselves, it's fine to have an agenda but most of these movies slap you upside the head with a rock with their message. Subtlety is all but gone, but these movies get rewarded now. You guys are much more articulate then me on this, but it's just taken a turn for the worse and I think the quality of movies have suffered.

I think 2 years ago was my breaking point when the best picture of the year Blade Runner 2049 didn't even get a nom for obvious reasons and Nolan didn't stand a chance to win Best Director. Both films trying to push the median forward to me.

Having said all that, I still enjoy hearing all the winners and I've said my peace on it, don't want to distract from the topic anymore.

I think probably Phoenix and the Joker probably deserve some kind of Oscar (haven't seen it yet) but I don't think he or it will stand a chance with the politics around the movie. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood probably doesn't have a chance either. If Bombshell is anywhere near good expect for that to win acting noms for obvious reasons. I usually known better the closer December comes and I can watch most of the Oscar bait movies.

you don't really believe that

I do, with the caveat that "films" is plural because it refers to film in total, as a medium, and not just any individual film. Obviously individual films can be mindless entertainment, and that's fine, but it would in fact be vapid and naive to expect that all films, the medium itself, to eschew any connections to real issues.

Fair. But I think all really good works of art have a dominant entertainment motive (that goes back to Shakespeare, Cervantes, The Iliad). And films aren't a form that can have a message as the subject, they're one that may grip you or take you into a world or involve you emotionally. The cinema deserves to be rescued from the classroom curse which has lain heavily on it, and become entertainment once more.

And really, it's that sort of practice that has raised the ghost of long-dead philistines who thought the poet a liar and history the only truth.

Hmmm. I honestly can't tell if I agree or not. My instinct is that many great works have an instructional motive, but that very few have what we'd call a "political" motive, which is a slightly subtle distinction I can go into if anyone cares (though I might have to spin this off into its own thread soon).

Anyway, it's an interesting question. I certainly agree with the idea that when a film starts with A Point rather than a story, it's chances of being good seem to plummet.

I don't think there's any mutual exclusivity between having a message and involving you emotionally. In fact, I think that's sort of why it works. Frankly, it's kind of insidious: emotionally-involved stories are very effective ways to smuggle viewpoints in without being subjected to debate or critical analysis.

I agree that, in general, the medium is in danger of becoming too instructional. And I think it's for the reason mentioned above: it's really really good at being instructional, when done well. I'd say it's the most effective medium for propaganda, specifically because it can bypass our critical faculties, to the point where we can receive a message without it registering that we're being taught anything at all.

I'm not including in 'really good works of art' those works of almost superhuman eloquence, made for fame not profit, and seldom read/watched except as a solemn intellectual task. Certain 'masterpieces' may still arouse historic interest, but they have lost contemporary relevance (and made them more or less a dead bore to all but specialists). An English poet said they're Apollonian. Apollo being a patron of the intellect, not of intuitive truth: of metre, not of rhythm; of novelty, not of timelessness.

Orson Welles said about Godard's later films 'his message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.' (He's also the one who said it's not a form in which ideas are very fecund). All talk of motives & models tends to trivialise and de-universalise what the filmmaker has created. The integrity of fiction must be defended. The artists motive should be creative, not critical.

& my best actor prediction is eddie murphy, watch this space

Can you give me some examples of both/either, to clarify what you mean a bit?

I wonder if I'm misunderstanding, because this seems untenably extreme. All talk of motive trivializes the artistic expression? Many great works have some kind of viewpoint, and I don't think anyone can draw a clear line between expressing a feeling an an idea. It's easy enough to come up with extreme examples that pretty clearly fall onto one side or the other, but there are lots that don't neatly fall exclusively on either. It feels (heh) like any specific example of invoking a feeling is going to inevitably involve some kind of message, even if just implicitly. To invoke pathos is to value empathy. To invoke disgust is to express a moral standard that's been transgressed against. And so on.

I agree that the "motive should be creative," but I don't agree with the suggestion (assuming I'm understanding you correctly, of course) that to make something "creative" is some purely empty aesthetic act. It almost never is. Novels, films, they're chock-full of ideas, and you can't really express and frame ideas without expressing some kind of viewpoint. That's not at odds with creativity, that is creativity, to my mind.

Shakespeare, Don Quixote, The Iliad vis a vis Paradise Lost, Dante, Virgil

All talk tends to. Yes an artist has something to say, but he's not sermon-writing. The idea that the first importance of him is his 'message' is what's untenable. E.g. the poets only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they occur to him and presenting them in the msot effective way possible, without reference to their education value. R Graves said 'the more definitely propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist.'