The 5th Annual Perfect World Awards

Before the Oscar nominations come out this week and the various arguments ensue, it's fun to come up with some alternative ones. Have I really been doing this for five years already? Wow.

Best Picture
Apollo 11
Funan
Hustlers
The Irishman
Joker
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Parasite
Tigers Are Not Afraid

Plausibility: Middling to low. Parasite is most likely to get a nomination, which is good because I thought it was the best movie I saw last year. The Irishman looks good and despite the controversy, Joker has a good shot too. Hustlers is a long shot but it could happen. It doesn't look promising for the rest. Documentaries never show up in Best Picture so Apollo 11 is out. Funan is so obscure it would be a surprise for the Animated Feature category, let alone Picture. The Last Black Man in San Francisco has a magisterial feel that I would associate with a Best Picture winner but everyone seems to have forgotten about it during awards season. Tigers Are Not Afraid is both a horror film (kind of) and not widely seen so nope. Even if only a couple of my favorites make it this year, it still looks to be a more interesting line-up than usual.

Best Director
Joon-ho Bong for Parasite
Jordan Peele for Us
Issa Lopez for Tigers Are Not Afraid
Lorene Scafaria for Hustlers
Joe Talbot for The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Plausibility: Only Bong is likely to get a nomination and if I'm not mistaken, he would be the first Korean filmmaker to ever show up in this category. While well-regarded, Us was not the crossover hit that Get Out was even though Peele's direction was even more impressive. Joe Talbot made a terrific debut film but as noted above, the movie's been shut out of awards season.

For the last few years, this category has gotten bad press for how rarely female directors show up. As with 2017, progressive Twitter has pinned its hopes on poor Greta Gerwig to sneak into the boys' club. It may happen but she's hardly the only option. Issa Lopez and Lorene Scafaria did fantastic work on their respective films but it's probably still Greta or nothing. There's more than sexism at play here - it's a lack of imagination from the voters. There's much more out there in any given year than the dozen or so films deemed worthy of competition each time.

Best Actor
Adam Driver in The Report
Jimmie Fails in The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Eddie Murphy in Dolemite Is My Name
Joaquin Phoenix in Joker
Kang-ho Song in Parasite

Plausibility: Joaquin Phoenix will get a nomination and possibly the win. Eddie Murphy may show up too but this is a pretty competitive category this year. Adam Driver is likely to get a nomination, but not for the righteous investigator in The Report, for a cheating husband in Marriage Story, which I've avoided thus far since I don't care for the relationship-snuff-film subgenre. If it cracks Best Picture though, I'm going to have to check it out so that's a drag. Jimmie Fails most certainly did not fail (sorry couldn't resist) as he and Jonathan Majors (who would have been my sixth pick) brought a ton of heart to their movie. Any acting nominations for Parasite would be a nice surprise and the studio is pushing Song...for Supporting Actor. Category fraud strikes again.

Best Actress
Rachel Alig in The Cleaning Lady
Katie Douglas in Level 16
Lupita Nyong'o in Us
Rosa Salazar in Alita: Battle Angel
Constance Wu in Hustlers

Plausibility: Could be looking at a wipe out here but Lupita Nyong'o is a dark horse. I hope she makes it in because her dual performance as a desperate mother and her deep-voiced doppelganger was really amazing. The awards attention for Hustlers has been totally focused on Jennifer Lopez (more on her in a bit) but there's no movie without Constance Wu's moving lead performance. The Cleaning Lady is a deeply disturbing movie so I doubt many Academy members will see Rachel Alig's work, which is a great example of emoting under heavy makeup. Katie Douglas pulled off a great character arc in Level 16, but it's just too tiny of a movie. And finally, there's Alita. Motion captured performances are not new at this point, but I've never seen one as engaging as Rosa Salazar's work as the title character. She gets extra points for doing it all with the burden of big anime eyes.

Best Supporting Actor
James Cosmo in The Hole in the Ground
Baykali Ganambarr in The Nightingale
Bill Hader in It: Chapter Two
Jack Kilmer in Lords of Chaos
Al Pacino in The Irishman

Plausibility: Supposedly the real Jimmy Hoffa was a larger than life kind of guy, so Al Pacino's yelling and arm waving was pretty appropriate. He's the only one here with any shot at a nomination. As the adult Richie Tozier, Bill Hader dug deep while still being hilarious. The veteran character actor James Cosmo brought huge gravitas to his scenes in an otherwise unremarkable movie. Baykali Ganambarr plays a salty Aborigine in The Nightingale, a refreshing change to how this sort of character is typically portrayed. As for Lords of Chaos...it's based on the infamous 1990s black metal scene in Norway, but it's really not a very good movie. Jack Kilmer, however, gave a haunting performance as the morbidly depressed musician Per Ohlin, better known as "Dead."

Best Supporting Actress
Annette Bening in The Report
Madeline Brewer in Braid
Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers
So-dam Park in Parasite
Margot Robbie in Bombshell

Plausibility: Honestly, this one might turn out to be pretty close. Annette Bening could have lionized Dianne Feinstein in The Report, but instead she shows the tension between wanting to do the right thing and that single-minded fixation on getting re-elected that stymies so much progress in American politics. Either way, Oscars love actors playing real people so she's got a good shot. Margot Robbie is great as a fictional character in Bombshell's true story of sexual harassment at Fox News. It probably doesn't reflect well on the network that the made up character is far more sympathetic than any of the real people. So-dam Park played the wily daughter in Parasite with a devilish little twinkle in her eyes, but it would take a bigger than expected showing by the movie for her to show up. Braid was a small and very weird movie, the kind that never gets nominated for this sort of award, but Madeline Brewer's work as a deranged and delusional rich girl was wild. As for Jennifer Lopez, here's a phrase nobody would have said about ten years ago: she is very likely to get nominated for an Oscar this week. She might even win! Her acting hasn't always been consistent but I think the bigger issue was that she picked a lot of crappy movies. Anaconda, Gigli, Monster in Law...it's a long list. Hustlers was different. It feels like you're watching a true movie star. It's hard not to root for her at this point.

That's all for now. The Best of the Decade list should be next and in a month or so, we can make some predictions for the real (and almost certainly less interesting) Oscar nominations.