State of Play / Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

The more movies you watch, the more you realize the Academy Awards are merely a drop in the bucket of film. Even so, I have always loved the Oscars. Because films are movies too and movies need a little glitz, glamour, some searchlights, and giant self-regard. Yet, as the 97th Academy Awards approach, I struggle to remember in the 30-plus years that I have been watching them when they have felt so small, so unglamorous, so inessential. It is not just the wrenching fallout of the Los Angeles wildfires, nor the pall cast by America’s Useful-Idiot-in-chief casting our lot, apparently, with the new Axis of Evil in addition to all the other acts of virulent stupidity. No, it’s the movie themselves. It was a year so uninspiring that for the third time in the last four, I was not even compelled to compile a Top 10 list, underlined in the underwhelming collection of Oscar nominees that not only failed to enter the zeitgeist but seem to suggest, as Matthew Gasda did for his Substack, the Academy Awards have been gamed.

Now that is not entirely a new phenomenon. Before optimization became the trendy buzzword of the tech bros who would change your life (while stealing its pertinent details), studios were always seeking to game the awards system. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution is partly about how “Dr. Doolittle” luncheoned its way to a Best Picture nod in 1967 while Miramax optimized its own kind of Oscar movie in the 90s and the aughts and then relentlessly, viciously promoted them. Many of those Miramax pictures were, in fact, just outgrowths of what critic Dwight McDonald once deemed Midcult. In his piece, Gasda quotes McDonald explaining Midcult: “the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity [covered] with a cultural fig leaf.” In other words, rather than focus on making a quality film that might ultimately appeal to the Academy, you reverse engineer it by working backwards from the Academy’s taste. The bigger problem, however, is that now this suboptimal approach to art is threatening to become the American movie industry’s prevailing method. 

In a comprehensive piece for N+1 Will Tavlin guides us through the streaming titan Netflix’s entire history from a mail rental company chewing up Blockbuster to a vertically integrated behemoth that is reshaping, if not ruining, the film industry by putting the cart before the horse, as they say, and working backwards to create movies by harnessing the data of viewers to then turn around and meet their expectations rather than seek to surprise of subvert them. Movies are no longer the end, as Tavlin writes, they are the means to the end, the end being subscribers. Netflix acquires and then keeps them by relentlessly churning out content, ensuring there is always something else on; you can log off, but you can never leave. They produce this content in-house, a la the old studio system but without a genuine commitment to craft, evoking a modern variation of “The Producers” in so much as a rushed, shoddy production can be more beneficial than a thoughtful, solidly made one. Their watered-down movies might as well be television, blurring the line once and for all between the two, an art form intended for the big screen reduced to what may as well be reruns of “Caroline in the City” on a Tuesday afternoon. 

In an interview on Defector’s flagship podcast The Distraction, Tavlin was asked by host Drew Magary if he saw any way out of this predicament. Tavlin cited federal intervention as potentially the best remedy, as it was in the 1940s when the Paramount decrees negated the big studios’ own vertical integration. He seemed fatalistic about this proposition, though, and it’s hard not to understand why, what with an American government currently being run by a plainly stupid philistine who seems determined in his way to recreate Hollywood in the image of the People’s Republic of North Korea. His maniac second-in-command, meanwhile, is upending government agencies in part by firing scores of people and deploying A.I. software instead and it’s easy to imagine a near future where Netflix does the same, cutting out the middleman between data collecting and artificial intelligence entirely. Distraction co-host David Roth took hope that the janky product this type of method is already eliciting might also elicit pushback, an outcry for a true human handprint. Me, I don’t know, my faith in people has wilted significantly the last few years. 

Still, I did not want to end on such a hopeless note. And so, even if I felt just as unmotivated to compile a traditional Random Awards list as I did a Top 10, I had, nevertheless, jotted down a few Random Awards throughout the year that are vintage in quality and did not deserve to sit in the drafts folder forever. There is quality out there, somewhere. Therefore, a truncated Random Awards. 

Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

Her eminence Nicole Kidman appearing live via satellite from her couch to present the truncated edition of Cinema Romantico’s Random Awards.

Line Reading of the Year: “Hoo boy, Lousy Carter, what the fuck?” - Olivia Thirlby, Lousy Carter. In her immaculate drawing-a-blank deadpan and real emphasis of that concluding question mark, Thirlby hysterically encapsulates just what her character is doing in this moment, delivering the eulogy for an eponymous character who never quite believed in the worth of his own existence. 

Best Use of Wikipedia: Rebel Ridge. If using a search engine is typically a lazy storytelling device, in this Netflix (irony!) action-drama, a bunch of small-town southern cops only realizing a few moments too late what they are up against upon consulting everybody’s favorite free online encyclopedia not only turns a reveal into a hysterical punchline but a hysterical evocation of their own laziness for failing to look into things. 

Best Product Placement: Green and Red M&Ms®, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point. A movie not so much about nostalgia as imbuing nostalgia through aesthetic, “Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point” creates a collage of emotions and feelings and sensory memories more than it unspools a narrative, like a slo-mo shot of so many holiday-themed chocolate confectionaries being poured into a bowl. As they were, I felt myself pulverized by flashes of holiday memory, of a gold-colored Anderson Erickson eggnog carton, of the blue Royal Dansk Danish butter cookie tin my grandmother would bring each December, of Holiday Greetings from Budweiser, in one breath laying bare how Christmas is inextricably intertwined with consumerism.

Best Laugh: Nicole Kidman, Babygirl. As I noted in my review, when another character humorously suggests she always assumed that Kidman’s character was raised by wolves or robots, Kidman’s laugh in response sounds robotic, a real live human being chortling in A.I. It’s a vocally fried chuckle on the level of Meredith Marks, which I understand might not mean anything to most of you but trust me, in the space of that laugh, Nicole touches the face of God.

The Ruffalo (most unsung performance in a movie this year): Hailey Gates, Challengers. As Helen, with whom lothario Patrick (Josh O’Connor) goes on a blind date solely in the hopes of getting a place to sleep for the night, Gates’s character is there to emphasize Patrick’s cruelty and provide a counterweight when the woman he really loves, Tashi (Zendaya), unexpectedly appears. But Gates makes all that count so much more by turning her character into a living, breathing human by effusing an insecurity that borders on tragic. It’s truly a supporting turn and the true supporting performance of the year. 

Best Metaphor: American Star, American Star. Granted, the 1940 ocean liner SS America that wrecked off the coast of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands in 1994 and was just lying there to be gaped at for three decades before finally disintegrating and collapsing into the sea last year, might be an obvious metaphor for a hitman (Ian McShane) aging out of that life and life altogether, an anvil dropped on the head more than merely on the nose. And yet, in the conveyance of this metaphor, and the grave resignation with which McShane receives it, that gargantuan nature is itself an apt metaphor for how it made me feel when at movie’s close, the ocean liner just...disappears. Is that the world, I wondered, passing me by? (Don’t answer that.)

2023 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico's annual awards of cinematic randomness.

Line of the Year: “I don’t play him as an alien, actually. I play him as a metaphor. That’s my interpretation.” - Jeff Goldblum, “Asteroid City”

Best Terminology of the Year: Mojo Dojo Casa House, “Barbie” 

Best Monologue of the Year: Ayo Edebiri, Bottoms. As a high school senior unlucky in love, Edebiri brings the house down in a wild, wandering, sixty-second monologue comically embodying that singular sense of teenage defeatism in which she envisions her whole life as being over before it has even truly begun. 

Best Dog: Fallen Leaves. A canine that is not a plot device, nor one to engender cheap sentimentality, but a manifestation of the idea that dogs are balms for our broken spirits. (Honorable Mention: the dog in “Showing Up” demonstrating how dogs always manage to lie down in exactly the wrong spot, and how we don’t really mind.)

Best Shot: Priscilla. I can’t seem to source the full image, which is unfortunate, but even half the image will do, with Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) himself leaning over the teenage Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) with one arm pressed up against the wall, like the wall is her high school locker, and transforming a kind of model image of youthful romantic reverie into a brewing nightmare. 

The Annual Ruffalo Award (presented to the best unnoticed performance in a movie): Summer Joy Campbell, Bottoms. Ayo Edebiri is hilarious, so is Rachel Sennott, and Ruby Cruz steals the movie, really, but it is Joy Campbell who best harnesses director Emma Seligman’s penchant for eye-level shots by rendering them a window into her scorned soul. (Honorable Mention: Indira Varma & Charles Parnell turning information drops in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning” into gleeful art.)

The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Margot Robbie, Asteroid City. The most gasp-inducing moment in a movie that is a play as a television documentary is when all three of these layers suddenly give way to a fourth layer, a scene on a balcony, or two balconies, that is, one of which Robbie’s character steps out onto as she becomes nothing less than the living, breathing embodiment of the old writerly adage to Kill Your Darlings. 

The Annual Yosemite Sam Award (presented to the best Looney Tune in a movie): Margot Robbie, Barbie. Emma Stone is garnering considerable acclaim for the physical expressiveness of her turn in “Poor Things,” and it’s well deserved, but Robbie’s physical expressiveness as the living fashion doll was equally exemplary, never more than the scene when her character is fleeing the Mattel Execs. Even now I feel as if I can’t hope to express what Robbie does except to say that without the aid of effects, she seems to animate herself, her arms and legs moving with an exaggerated fluidity that improbably comes across independent of her own body. 

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expressions in a movie): Michelle Williams, Showing Up. It’s not just one facial expression, even if a few of the withering glares she affixes Maryann Plunkett, playing her character’s mother slash boss, because who wants to work with their parental figure, are side-splitting, but all the facial expressions. Because this performance - this movie - is made from Williams’s facial expressions, a working, or maybe just struggling, artist appraising life all around her. 

The Annual When Strangers Do Meet in Far Off Lands Award (presented to the best Meet Cute in a movie): Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Reminding us why writer/director Christopher McQuarrie is the master of working around Tom Cruise’s inherent sexlessness, he turns the airport hunt for a MacGuffin into a frisky, unofficial first date between his leading man’s IMF agent and Haley Atwell’s pickpocket.  

The Annual “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): The Adults. True, the dance in “Poor Things” is also great, but that dance feels like a lateral move, in a manner of speaking, from the 2018 “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in The Rain)” award winning dance in “The Favourite.” What’s more, the “Poor Things” dance just sort of exists unto itself whereas the dance of three siblings in “The Adults” not only quotes my favorite movie dance, but it also joyfully encapsulates and puts a button on a movie exploring the nature of performance.  

The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): Minifridge, Barbie. One quick image in the movie’s remarkable “Parallax View”-like montage of the patriarchy (Montage of the Year) in which a minifridge door is thrust open, functions like a wormhole, the Tannhauser Gate from a dude’s tailgate cosmically tunneling back to his college dorm. 

The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Adam Driver, Ferrari. It’s more than a little ironic that the Annual Penélope Cruz Award goes to someone in a Penélope Cruz-starring movie that is not Penélope Cruz. But then, “Ferrari” is a Michael Mann movie, and if there is one thing we know about a Michael Mann protagonist, even if his life is falling down all around him, his hair will still look good. 

The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best costume in a movie): Josh Hamilton, Reality. Sometimes the grim reaper comes dressed not in a black cloak but an unflattering short-sleeved shirt straight off the clearance rack at Kohl’s.

The Annual Cinema Paradiso Award (presented to the best cinema scene in a movie): Fallen Leaves. The deadpan Scandinavian version of the “Platoon” scene in “The Naked Gun.” 

The “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): The Iron Claw. Three brothers shoved into the front seat of pickup truck, tooling down the road, blasting Tom Petty, shoving fast food into their mouths, it’s the happiest moment, really, in a sad, sad movie. Youth has rarely seemed so ravishingly wasted on the young. 

The Annual “Then He Kissed Me” Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): Crimson and Clover by Tommy James & The Shondells in Priscilla. That eternal tremolo guitar has never sounded so foreboding.

The Annual “Best of My Love” Award (presented to the second-best use of pop music in a movie): Don’t Do Me Like That by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in The Iron Claw. See Also: Best Meal.

The Annual Tour Eiffel Award (presented to the best image of The Eiffel Tower in a movie): Full Time. When a single mother forced to spend the night in a seedy motel in Paris because she can’t get back to her home in the faraway suburbs due to a transit strike wakes up to see motel art of the famous open-lattice iron structure perched along the Seine and then goes to the window to see the city waking up in the alley below, it’s a pertinent reminder of how the City of Light looks to everybody else. 

Best Movie Tweet: See Below. For the “Michael Clayton” hive. If you know, you know. RIP Tom Wilkinson. 

2022 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico’s annual awards of cinematic randomness.

Best Line/Line Reading of the Year: “There’s always an air mass moving down from Canada.” - Adam Driver, “White Noise”

Best Line/Line Reading of the Year runner-up: “You didn’t tell me this was a polka party.” - David Bloom, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”

Best Monologue of the Year: Nicole Kidman, “The Northman.” If the Viking warrior and one-time Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) spends a good chunk of “The Northman” seeking to rescue his mother, Queen Gudrún (Kidman), from the uncle that killed his father, upon tracking her down, she disabuses him of his notions with extreme theatrical prejudice in the form of a monologue that begins with the camera backing up, like it’s frightened of her. And why wouldn’t it be given Kidman’s ferocious wracking, her concluding evil laughter epitomizing how the moment is at once horrifying and deliciously entertaining, a reminder that many of cinema’s finest moments are ones that make you laugh in spite of yourself. 

Best Shot of the Year: “Nope.” You gotta hand it to Jordan Peele, making a movie that’s all about the very essence of the movie image, what’s in the frame and what’s out, and then rendering his most striking pair of frames as a simple shot-reverse shot. The pair of images comes after O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) have sussed out that an alien craft is hiding in a cloud above their California ranch, which is much less of a spoiler than it sounds. In the first one, O.J. just stands there in a medium shot, looking up, and though it’s kind of counterintuitive to say, a still does not do Kaluuya’s stillness in the moment justice, a living, breathing embodiment of the idea that on camera, less is more, electrifying in his lack of movement. And if his dumbfounded sort of smile speaks to the nature of discovering the alien craft, the reverse shot over O.J. and Emerald’s shoulders underlines that sense of discovery and how the movie camera is a vehicle for it. 

The Annual Angels Live in My Town Award (presented to the best movie within a movie): Gunsmog in “The Fabelmans.” Reinforced my belief that the Kangaroo Court of Hollywood should draft a law that all filmmakers under the age of 25 are only allowed to make silent movies to really get a grasp of how to tell a story through images. 

The Annual “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): Jon Hamm, “Confess, Fletch.” Hamm’s turn is the most insouciant of the year, epitomized in the sequence when he tries to disguise his gumshoe character’s sneaking into some affluent-only soiree by cutting a rug on the dance floor with a drink in one hand except his cutting a rug is barely that, half-committed, nay, one-fourth committed, the fake moustache and glasses of blending in by dancing. 

The Annual “Paddington 2” Award (presented to the best end credits in a movie): “White Noise.” I’m paraphrasing myself, but if you can’t dance about architecture, as the idiom goes, maybe this sequence proves you can at least dance about death. 

The Annual Tony Manero Award (presented to the best walk in a movie): Aaron Taylor-Johnson, “Bullet Train.” For all the lethal choreography in tight spaces, the single most thrilling moment of this action thriller is a dressed to the nines Taylor-Johnson just bopping down the aisle. 

The Annual Madonna Award (presented to the best Madonna in a movie): Evan Rachel Wood, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” Like Derek Zoolander at the climactic moment of the Walk-Off, Wood is going for it. 

The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best costume in a movie): “Kimi,” Zoë Kravitz’s Hoodie. Give the Oscar for Best Costume Design to another period piece if you must, but our award for Best Costume Design goes to Ellen Mirojnick for honoring the Pandemic era’s preferred accessory in a movie willing to acknowledge the Pandemic exists. 

The Annual “Nowhere Fast” Award (presented to the best musical performance within a movie): Louisiana Hayride Show, “Elvis.” Baz Luhrmann, his editors, his shrieking extras, and Austin Butler as that boy from Tupelo all achieve the impossible and bring Elvis freaking Presley back to life. 

The Annual “Then He Kissed Me” Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): “I Ain’t Worried” by OneRepublic in “Top Gun: Maverick.” As an aficionado of the original “Top Gun,” I was dubious the sequel’s soundtrack could compare. But not only did Gaga put the throttle down, OneRepublic impeccably embodied a day at the beach. It’s the whistling, I think, that really feels like some busker at Breakers Beach making up some bouncy tune on the fly, though I also like how the lyrics speak not only to the characters but cosmically to Tom Cruise himself; he may get old someday, he has to, but for right now, Tom ain’t worried. (Listen here.)

The Annual Merv-Griffin-Is-the-Elevator-Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Rita Wilson, “Kimi.” Employing one of Hollywood’s Nicest as a phony corporate ally is just marvelously devious. 

The Annual Ruffalo Award (presented to the best unnoticed performance in a movie): Scott Subiono, “To Leslie.” The most skin-crawling scene in a movie full of them is made that way with immense help from Subiono playing a character trying to politely extricate himself from a moment opposite Andrea Riseborough’s wild-eyed drunk that is always a half-second away from going off the rails. The way he says “Be well” and means it...it’s shattering. (Honorable Mention: Ayden Mayeri, “Confess, Fletch.”)

The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Colin Farrell’s Eyebrows in “The Banshees of Inisherin.” The movie’s weathervanes. 

The Oscar the Grouch Award (presented to the year’s best trash): Monica Bellucci, “Memory.” In playing an ostensibly compassionate philanthropist revealed as cruel and coldblooded, Bellucci forgoes trying to play it real to play it ridiculous instead, deliciously cutting right to the lurid ridiculousness of the ultra-rich in a way that taking the role seriously could never hope to achieve.

The Annual Buffalo Wild Wings® Award (presented to the best sports movie scene in a movie): “Top Gun: Maverick, Test Run.” All art is political, so frame it through a geopolitical context if you must, but when Maverick goes rogue to prove to his young pilot charges that an impossible test run can be achieved, it is more like American Gladiators. And the way editor Eddie Hamilton sprinkles in reaction shots of those young pilot charges listening along in the briefing room makes them feel like a bunch of San Diego Los Angeles Chargers fans watching their team make a game-winning drive from inside a sports bar. 

The Annual Mission: Impossible – Fallout Award (presented to the best foot chase in a movie): “Decision to Leave.” Unlike the award’s namesake, in which Tom Cruise runs through the streets and across the rooftops of London not quite at Usain Bolt speed but at least at Armin Hary speed* (*sprinter deep cut), the foot chase between a pair of detectives and a perp in Park Chan-wook’s neo-noir is pointedly uphill, leaving the men noticeably exhausted, including one of the detectives who winds up hilariously sprawled on an outdoor staircase, groaning in agony, essentially giving up. Running fast is hard!

The Annual French Connection Award (presented to the best car chase in a movie): “White Noise.” Like last year’s winner, this year’s essentially involved only one vehicle, a family station wagon, the Family Circus as “The French Connection,” the fanatical Popeye Doyle recast as an out of his depth father just trying to keep his family safe. 

The Annual Clint Eastwood Squint Award (presented to the best gesture in a movie): TIE, Adam Driver, “White Noise” and Lee Hye-young in “In Front of Your Face.” In the above-mentioned car chase, there is a moment when Driver’s character is attempting to steer the family station wagon even as it floats down a river and Driver puts one hand in the air and shrugs in this impeccable wordless expression of “Fuck if I know.” The latter is probably my favorite movie of the year, built out of gestures as much as plot, like when Lee’s character, an actress having returned from America to her Seoul hometown for the first time in a long time, visits her childhood home, since turned into a boutique, and hugs the little girl of the owner, a sweet moment shading into melancholy and even low-key madness, trying to hold onto something that’s gone. 

The Annual This Gun For Fire Award (presented to the best movie poster of the year): Given that she’s both our spiritual presenter and a recipient of two awards she spiritually presented to herself, discerning readers might suspect Cinema Romantico’s awards of being rigged. And while we cannot rightly say we would not not stoop to rigging our awards for Nicole Kidman, we can also say with 100% forthrightness that even if we wanted to, in both cases, Ms. Kidman was the truth. And you can’t close your eyes to the truth. And if you look into her eyes on that poster, boy howdy, you’ll see the truth too.

2021 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico's annual awards of cinematic randomness. 

Line / Line Reading of the Year: “Let’s get this over with so we can go home and eat banana cake.” – Nicolas Bro, “Riders of Justice”

Line of the Year runner-up: “It was another time, it was another Ennui. Must be nearly six months ago, I guess.” – Timothée Chalamet, “The French Dispatch.”

Line Reading of the Year runner-up: “Fuck off, teenagers!” – Alana Haim, “Licorice Pizza”

Monologue of the Year: “Precisely! He’s a Renaissance master of the highest order! He mines the same vein as Piperno Pierluigi when he illuminated the Christ before God’s heavenly altar in 1565! ‘Maw’! Nobody has an eye for things nobody has ever seen like ‘Maw’ Clampette of Liberty, Kansas! We should be ashamed to even gather in her presence! Why the fuck did she say fresco?” – Adrien Brody, “The French Dispatch.” Part of this mini-monologue’s success is the baroque verbiage, certainly, and how it hilariously emphasizes the concluding ‘fuck’ that much more. But it’s also Brody’s delivery. If his art dealer character is realizing the masterwork in question is, unfortunately, painted into a prison wall, negating its commercial potential, the way he does not even give “Why the fuck did she say fresco?” a split-second to breathe after everything he has already said makes it seems like he is recognizing in his mind midway through his mini-monologue that she said fresco but he still needs to get everything else out for his own sake before he acknowledges that recognition. 

Best Shot: tie between, respectively, “Passing” and “The Card Counter.” In the first shot, director Rebecca Hall and her cinematographer Eduard Grau transform the shop from which Tessa Thompson’s Irene has just been passing for a white person into The Sunken Place (coinage: Jordan Peele) while the second shot, the final image in “The Card Counter”, is Paul Schrader returning once again to the end of his beloved “Pickpocket” (1959) but elevating it into the mystic. 

Best Craft Services: Toast, “Get Back.” How much toast and marmalade did those four lads from Liverpool go through during recording anyway? 

Best Accent: Riley Keough, “Zola.” I want to be clear: Keough’s so-called blaccent in Janicza Bravo’s sensational film is good in terms of quality, not in terms of moral righteousness. When it comes to the latter, Keough’s accent is pure evil, which is what it’s intended to be, embodying appropriation rather than merely appropriating. It is so revealingly terrifying, in fact, that it seems to have frightened virtually every film awards voting body from acknowledging that Keough’s bravura turn even exists. 

The Annual I Like My Brandy In A Glass Award (presented to the best drink in a movie): Suicide, “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.” God tier throwaway joke. 

The Annual “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): tie between the pan-roasted squab, chanterelle mushrooms, pommes Anna, and huckleberry jus that Nicolas Cage’s character serves in “Pig” as both a peace offering and conscious rejection of violence and the Shabbat dinner in “Licorice Pizza” that comically reminds us sometimes meals are not about food at all but expressing bewilderment at your daughter’s choice of boyfriend. 

The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Willem Dafoe, “The Card Counter.” One look at that hair and you know everything you need to know about Major John Gordo.

The Annual French Connection Award (presented to the best car chase in a movie): “Licorice Pizza.” Like the award’s namesake, Paul Thomas Anderson impressively only needed a single vehicle (and no gas!) to mount a spectacular car chase. 

The Annual Muslin Sock Award (presented to the best special effects in a movie): “The Green Knight.”In this, the CGI age, so often special effects that are supposed to be of our world never feel that way, too artificial, too far away. When The Green Knight enters King Arthur’s hall, however, he is in the room, gloomy realism mingling with ancient magic in a way that is as fabulous as it is foreboding. 

The Annual “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): Ed Harris, “The Lost Daughter.” There’s this thing guys do, guys that specifically can’t dance, where they try to dance, sort of, for awhile, and then give up and just start enthusiastically jumping up and down. And in the most unlikely “Livin’ on a Prayer” scene in movie history, Ed Harris nails this faux-dance. 

The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best piece of clothing in a movie): George Harrison’s Psychedelic Boots, “Get Back.” See Above. Also, honorable mention to the entire wardrobe of Glyn Johns in the same film.  

The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): Angelina Jolie’s Ray-Bans®, “Those Who Wish Me Dead.” Those sunglasses will forever mark my glorious 2021 return to the movies (before Delta & Omicron). 

The Annual “Then He Kissed Me” Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone in “Summer of Soul.” Bit of a cheat, perhaps, because this is a performance in a concert documentary rather than soundtracking a moment or scene in a fictional film. But in this case, the judges (me, me & me) have ruled an exception is in order. Because man, the organ at the start is asking the congregation to rise and the congregation, baby, is America. This, I realized in the moment, should be our National Anthem. “They simply seem,” wrote Wesley Morris of the sequence, “sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.” Listen Here

The Annual “Best of My Love” Award (presented to the second best use of pop music in a movie): “Stumblin’ In” by Chris Norman & Suzie Quatro in “Licorice Pizza.” Paul Thomas Anderson honors the 1970s as the height of movie theme songs by incorporating an actual 1970s song as what essentially functions as his main characters’ unofficial theme. Listen Here

The Annual “Nowhere Fast” Award (presented to the best original song in a movie): “My Heart Will Go On” by The Math Club in “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.” I am no doubt certain that a remix of a preexisting song, one that has already won an Oscar no less, would not qualify for Best Original Song under the arduous, asinine Academy Award criteria. But this is Cinema Romantico. And in Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo commissioning their very own “My Heart Will Go On” remix for an unlikely party hearty sequence between two middle aged ladies from Soft Rock, Nebraska and a mixed-up assassin who just wants to be in a committed relationship, “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” demonstrates that a quarter-century later the legend of Rose DeWitt Bukater endures. Listen Here 

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expression in a movie): Kirsten Dunst, “The Power of the Dog.” See Above. Friends, let me get personal for just a moment. There’s this thing that happens when you’re an introvert, when you’re at parties where you don’t really know anyone or don’t really know anyone well and the person you’re with goes off with someone else and all of a sudden you’re just left standing there alone and this hot flash of fear surges through your body. In this shot, as the socially overmatched Rose Gordon, in her pained expression and her subtle yet undeniably desperate little move toward her husband who has just departed, like she’s spiritually trying to reach out and grab him and bring him back, Kirsten Dunst captured this sensation implicitly and perfectly. I crumbled. 

The Annual Runaway Jury Award (presented to the best middling thriller of the year): “The Courier.” Not sure a Top 10 Films is in the cards this year. Mentally, I just don’t feel up for it, though you can kind of discern from these awards what movies might have made it. What I will say is that Dominic Cooke’s thriller “The Courier” would have likely been slotted in at #10. It is imperfect, certainly, and not really the 10th best film of the year, of course, whatever the hell best means. But it’s got some pace, and it’s trying some things visually, and its actors are mostly playing something, and the scene where two of the main characters attend the Bolshoi is like a last supper at the ballet, and I really wish we could get ten more movies in its vein every year. 

The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): [redacted], “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.” No, not the cameo at the end; the cameo midway through. This cameo was so good I simply refuse to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Reader, my jaw literally dropped. It was my single happiest moment in the COVID hotel. 

2020 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico’s annual awards of cinematic randomness.

Line of the Year: “Could you box that for me?” - John David Washington, “Tenet.” Like Anthony LaPaglia’s detective feeling such joy at finally being chewed out by his Captain (Alan Arkin) in “So I Married An Axe Murderer”, my heart swelled when Christopher Nolan (!) finally created an honest-to-goodness funny in sending up British stuffiness that made me laugh out loud.

Line of the Year runner-up: “Woah, look out. That was good. That’s how you got to be when we’re recording. That was queen of Cayuga. You’re Five Hundred Watt Fay.” - Jake Horowitz, “The Vast of Night.” It’s the way Horowitz says it, yes, in that Beatnik dialect, but it’s also the words themselves, as written by Andrew Patterson and Craig W. Sanger, the rhythm of them, how I swear they named the fictional New Mexico town Cayuga and the co-main character Fay just for the mellifluousness of this line. This line is just so much fun to say!

Line Reading of the Year: “No, I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless.” - Frances McDormand, “Nomadland.” The whole movie is in that line reading.

Monologue of the Year: Ethan Hawke, “Cut Throat City.” Set in New Orleans, “Cut Throat City” is haunted by the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina and in this scene Hawke, as a good ol’ boy councilman sort of seeing the error of his ways, is literally talking to ghosts. It’s more Hawke’s Hamlet moment than his actual Hamlet moment.

Best Shot in a Movie: tie between, respectively,  “The August Virgin” and “Dick Johnson Is Dead”, though you really need to see the first one onscreen, the motion of the light being key, making it seem as if she is floating underwater.

The Annual Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain) Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): “Palm Springs.” Here I quote myself from my own review: It’s like if rather than Schwarzenegger’s Model 101 Terminator from “Terminator 2” getting into a rumble in the biker bar to get some duds he suddenly found himself in an 80s New Wave MTV video instead.   

The Annual Tenzing Norgay Award (presented to the best reference in a movie): Edwin Moses, “Da 5 Bloods.” “Fly like Moses.” Long live The Streak.

The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): No Doubt show poster, “The Little Things.” How do you know “The Little Things” is set in 1990? Because Gwen Stefani is a brunette! 

The Annual Scarlett O’Hara Curtain Dress Award (presented to the best piece of clothing in a movie): Katy Perry Tour T-Shirt in “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets.” As if the closing night of the bar at the center of this pseudo-documentary is akin to some big blow out Katy Perry show at The Hollywood Bowl.

The Annual Ruffalo Award (presented to the best unnoticed performance in a movie): Merrin Dungey, “Greenland.” More than the leads, frankly, Dungey’s one scene walk-off embodies the surprising wit of Ric Roman Waugh’s disaster flick. As an Army Major coordinating evacuation for select a few in advance of a planet killing comet, Dungey’s curt exhaustion reminds us that even the apocalypse has overworked middle managers.

The Annual “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): Noodles, “The Wild Goose Lake.” The way Hu Ge shoves and slurps up those noodles in the moments before his character’s house of cards finally collapses refashions the last meal not as some sacred rite but the desperate sustenance of the damned. 

The Annual “Then He Kissed Me” Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): Kunta Kinte by The Revolutionaries in “Lovers Rock.” Like the second of Steve McQueen’s five-film anthology contrasts joy and release with more sinister forces lurking, when the D.J. cues this up for the movie’s virtually endless dance party, it feels like catharsis tipped at the edge of something utterly unbound. 

The Annual “Nowhere Fast” Award (presented to the best original song in a movie): Volcano Man in “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.” The ballad Husavik is the song from the same movie that got nominated for an Oscar, but it was the opening “Volcano Man” that stole my heart, like if Petra Marklund and Erik Hassle did a duet. Listen here.

The Annual Norma Desmond Award (presented to the best close-up in a movie): Delroy Lindo, “Da 5 Bloods.” In his climactic monologue (Monologue of the Year runner-up), he breaks the fourth wall, looking right at us, before the camera gradually drifts in, closer and closer, demanding us to look him right in the eyes as he decrees that he will live and die on his terms, that this Black veteran will not be forgotten. 

The Annual Bacall Award (presented to the best female performance in a movie): Kate Winslet, “Ammonite.” There was no Best Facial Expression Award this year because all the winning expressions were rendered by Winslet as real-life paleontologist Mary Anning. Expressions of frustration, fear, curiosity, everything in a glance, over and over. I mean, could anyone other than Winslet so effortlessly harmonize with the climate and terrain of the stark beach where her character hunts for fossils? I liked much of Winslet’s work in the Twenty-Tens more than many critics, but still. After a decade of semi-wandering in the wilderness, Kate the Great is back. It’s a pity more people didn’t seem to notice. 

The Annual Bogey Award (presented to the best male performance in a movie): Chadwick Boseman, “Da 5 Bloods.” He’ll win the Oscar for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, surely, and respect; I don’t want to rain on the parade. But. Boseman’s supporting work in Da 5 Bloods was a true blue, full-blooded movie performance, a complete, incredible understanding how to subtly harness the camera to truly render a character larger than life. God, the things the man who gave this performance could have done...

Random Awards 2019

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico's annual awards of cinematic randomness.

Best Line Reading of the Year: “It’s a bunch of goddamn fucking hippies.” – Leonardo DiCaprio, “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.” Director Quentin Tarantino’s sometimes condescending portrayal of hippies caused much consternation in the ranks, yet this hysterical line reading near the film’s climax lays bare this aggression toward the counter-culture as nothing but the ravings of an angry old man watching the world pass him by.

Best Line Reading of the Year runner-up: “Six.” – Emma Thompson, “Late Night.” Out of context, I know, but Thompson’s droll delivery makes the culmination to an obvious comic set-up soar.

Best Line: “Yes, I Can-ada!” – Keanu Reeves, “Toy Story 4.” Both Keanu’s Canuck roots and his celebrated real-life rectitude were indelibly honored in his animated Duke Caboom’s catchphrase of positivity.

The Annual 5135 Kensington Avenue Award (presented to the best set design in a movie): Welcome to the Moon framed photo in “Ad Astra.” It’s perfect. It suggests a lunar visitors center, like you’ve just crossed the Iowa/Illinois border.

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expression in a movie): Elisabeth Moss & Keith Poulson – “Her Smell.” These are not separate facial expressions, mind you, but simultaneous ones. As a, shall we say, difficult-to-work-with rock star, Elisabeth Moss’s Who Do You Think You ARE? expression is caught in the reflection of the window of a sound booth where Keith Poulson’s sound engineer is doing everything possible to avoid her expression.

Forget the foreground, notice the background.

The Annual Rita Hayworth Award (presented to the best walk in a movie): Keanu Reeves, “Always Be My Maybe.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Not his entrance to the restaurant, the one making all the GIFs. I don’t say this to be contrarian, honest I don’t, because seriously, did you SEE this other walk? It happens when he gets up from the table after their highfalutin meal, says to Ali Wong’s character that he’ll go fetch their “chariot” and then departs with this unparalleled strut that is somehow like a mall walker crossed with a cock of the walk.

The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Natasha Lyonne, “Ad Astra.” When you need an actor who in the space of, what, ten seconds can embody the entirety of irritating bureaucracy made doubly worse because it’s irritating bureaucracy on Mars and everything is red all the time, who you gonna call? Natasha Lyonne.

The Annual Rolex Submariner Award (presented to the best use of a gadget in a movie): Ophelia, “Us.” Representing Amazon Alexa, I remain, even now, several months later, hesitant to give it away except to say that at a moment of extreme stress technology proves a comically false god.

The Annual “I Like My Brandy In A Glass” Award (presented to the best drink in a movie): Whiskey Sour(s), “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.” Shout-out to cinematographer Robert Richardson and the team of art directors for making every damn Whiskey Sour in “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood” look as good as the last one on earth.

The Annual “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): Saoirse Ronan & Timothée Chalamet, “Little Women.” 2019’s Best Dance reminds me a bit of 2018’s dance, culled from “The Favourite”, which was, at once, period appropriate and not period appropriate at all. Indeed, in “Little Women”, when legendary Jo March and Laurie Laurence escape a party to dance alone on the front porch instead to boogie, it is scored to Dvořák even if the choreography is based off a Gilda Radner/Steve Martin sketch, effortlessly, improbably embodying the adaptation’s classical yet contemporary vibe.

The Annual Rolling Boulder Award (presented to the best action sequence in a movie): Divorce Court, “Marriage Story.” “Avengers assemble”, and all that, and more power to you if that’s your thing, but my thing is more Laura Dern and Ray Liotta exchanging verbal haymakers amidst scorching Jennifer Lame edits.

The Annual “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): Meat Pie in “The Farewell” & Random Flan, “Pain and Glory.” Food looms large throughout “The Farewell” and when a Chinese grandmother feeds her Chinese-American daughter her lovingly made meat pies it becomes an edible invitation to return to her roots. The flan in “Pain and Glory”, meanwhile, well, I have no idea why it’s even there. Nobody eats it. But Pedro Almodóvar doesn’t do anything that’s not on purpose, and so perhaps, like his bright color schemes are often meant to signify one feeling or another, his flan, that savory looking flan, is simply meant, as the scene between Salvador and his ex-lover commences, to savor this scene, this wonderful scene, to the last.

The Annual “Save the Clock Tower!” Award (presented to the best plant & payoff in a movie): Flamethrower, “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.” The conclusion’s grisly violence was too much for some, and I’m sympathetic to that argument, though the quality of this particular payoff overruled, for me, any complaints of excess.

The Annual Norma Desmond Award (presented to the best close-up in a movie): Tom Hanks, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” It’s not any one close-up director Marielle Heller frames but all of them. Because if a Mr. Rogers movie doesn’t suggest Freaky, well, big, looming close-ups of Mr. Rogers, it turns out, do.

The Annual Gregg Toland Award (presented to the best lighting in a movie): Miami, “The Irishman.” I want to go to there.

The Annual Then He Kissed Me Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): “Out of Time” by The Rolling Stones in “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.” The greatest Quentin Tarantino needle drop, which is really saying something, I know, and which is why I don’t say it lightly, believe me. He repurposes The Stones’ stay-away-girl slice of baroque pop, improbably, to craft his own version of The Busy Sunday sequence in “Goodfellas”, elegiac rather than out of control, a dirge for the Sixties, and all that term entails, and for Hollywood too, one that might never have existed, which, epitomized in all those neon signs that spring to life as the song winds up, shines bright one last time.

The Annual Best of My Love Award (presented to the second best use of pop music in a movie): “Control” by Janet Jackson in “Hustlers.” It doesn’t just use the song; it lives the song out.

The Annual Scarlett O’Hara Curtain Dress Award (presented to the best article of clothing in a movie): Keira Knightley, Bootcut Jeans in “Official Secrets.” If the fashionistas are right and bootcut jeans are on their way back in, then you’ve got Keira to thank.

Random Awards 2018

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico's annual awards of cinematic randomness.

Best Line of the Year: “Do you want to die having never been to Europe? Or do you want to go to Europe and die having been to Europe?” - Kate McKinnon, “The Spy Who Dumped Me”

Best Line Reading of the Year: “First thing tomorrow we need to go to every landmark in that book, see if we can sniff out anything suspicious.” - Sally Hawkins, “Paddington 2”

Best Laugh of the Year: Ethan Hawke, “First Reformed.” Ethan Hawke forcing laughter at Cedric the Entertainer’s A Mighty Fortress is our God joke well after the punchline, like Hawke is trying to will himself to laugh in the face of the absolutely not funny, is pretty much my prevailing mood.

Best Monologue of the Year: Chelcie Ross, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” Chelcie Ross has long been a splendid character actor and yet that very character actor nature is what has long prevented him from truly getting a chance to step to the forefront of a movie screen and belt one out to the back row. I reckon many movie-goers know him as the guy sitting there silently while every Notre Dame football player deposits a jersey on his desk to convince him to let that pugnacious Rudy play. But The Coen Brothers, bless their souls, designed an ingenious, lengthy monologue for Mr. Ross, playing a fur trapper, in their western “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” The monologue is a virtual run-on sentence with Ross allowed to go and go and go, constantly seeming to be about to stop to only keep chugging. It is comical, certainly, as much from the When-Will-This-End? momentum as the actual words, though it improbably builds to a stopping point that illuminates the film’s overriding theme of all at once denouement.

Best Extra of the Year: “You Were Never Really Here.” We see this woman only because the movie is lingering on the stream from a water fountain where our main character just was, and her physical languor improbably becomes not only the perfect juxtaposition to the sequence’s tension but to the overwhelming noise inside the main character’s head.

Best Title Card: “A Star Is Born.” Gloria in excelsis Gaga, the title card stretches all the way across the screen, allowing just enough space in the middle to let Gaga’s character twirl, making you long for a world where we could have glimpsed Stefani Germanotta in Technicolor.

Best Impersonation of the Year: Rachel McAdams, “Game Night.” In performing the Amanda Plummer stick-up bit from “Pulp Fiction” because she thinks the situation in which her character is in is all just pretend, what you think will merely be a funny gag erupts into spur of the moment spirit possession, leaving Jason Bateman’s expression to speak for all of us.

The Annual Cary Grant Award (presented to the best double take in a movie): Andy Garcia, “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.” It’s hard, it’s real hard, to stop the show a second time after Cher’s already stopped the show, but that is precisely what Andy Garcia does upon doing a double take when he spies Cher.

The Annual Clint Eastwood Squint Award (presented to the best gesture in a movie): Sam Elliott, “A Star Is Born.” Though boxers might be fond of cocking their heads to one side as a means of from-across-the-ring intimidation aimed toward their opponents, neither Michael B. Jordan nor Florian Munteanu from “Creed II”, nor any other actor as boxer in the history of film come to think of it, can menacingly cock their head to one side like Sam Elliott does every time he strides on screen in “A Star Is Born.”

The Annual Norma Desmond Award (presented to the best close-up in a movie): Richard E. Grant, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” When Grant and Melissa McCarthy’s crime-committing drinking buddies find themselves in the money, they naturally go out for drinks. And as Grant’s Jack Hock sidles up to the bar, while the film’s official theme song, Lou Reed’s “Goodnight Ladies” is crooned in the background, director Marielle Heller basks in a close-up of Grant’s beaming face that is one of those grand Hollywood moments where character and actor intrinsically converge so that even as you feel Jack Hock’s reverie in the fleeting moment you also feel Richard E. Grant’s reverie at living out this wonderful role.

The Annual “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): Rachel Weisz & Joe Alwyn, “The Favourite.” Yorgos Lanthimos’s film both is concerned with period specificity and not concerned with it at all, as the dance between Weisz’s Lady Sarah and Alwyn’s Baron Masham astonishingly, hysterically evinces in a routine that is baroque crossed with Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in “The Naked Gun 2½.”

The Annual “Anybody Got a Match?” Award (presented to the best entrance in a movie): HALO Jump, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout.” So much pre-release discourse was spilled over Tom Cruise performing his own high altitude low parachute open jump for his latest M:I movie. But whatever you thought of his decision, and whatever of you thought of the moment’s rendering, he was HALO jumping directly into a Grand Palais gala meaning he was – and I still can’t get over this – HALO jumping into the club. As Lauren Bacall is my witness, more movies need that sort of joie de vivre.

The Annual Toto Award (presented to the best dog in a movie): Charlie, “A Star Is Born.” Comb through the Google and you will find a lot of headlines like The Real Star of A Star is Born is Charlie the Dog. But that’s not right and not just because anyone trying to claim Lady Gaga isn’t the star of “A Star Is Born” needs to check themselves before they wreck themselves, but because Charlie is a supporting actor, enhancing the proceedings, not commandeering them. He is not the point of the movie’s worst blow, for instance, his presence just softens the blow, even as his presence makes the worst blow just a little bit worse.

The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): Cravat, “Paddington 2.” Hugh Grant’s character spying his reflection in a window as he sashays down the pavement and discovering he is, inadvertently, sans cravat (Runner-Up for Line Reading of the Year), effortlessly converts the moment from a plot device to get his antagonist home to catch the heroes sneaking into it to a true-to-character moment of sartorially imperious comic glee.

The Annual Then He Kissed Me Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): “Too Late to Turn Back Now” by Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose in “BlackKkKlansman.” What music does, whether it’s on your headphones, in person, or at a club, is let you slide into an in-between place for a few minutes at a time. That’s the sensation Spike Lee’s implentation of the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose’s 1972 hit captures. And in “BlackKkKlansman”, after the thrill of the Kwame Ture rally and then the pain of the activists at the rally getting stopped by the police, when “Too Late to Turn Back Now” appears, that’s where the characters briefly, blessedly go...into the in-between of both those places.

The Annual “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): “Set It Up” & “The Sisters Brothers.” If the former is intended as a conduit to the inevitable Will They/Won’t They? moment of sexual tension for the characters played by Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell, the simple yet breathtaking gastronomical bliss of drunken late night pizza entirely sans sexual tension actually resonates more. In the latter, John C. Reilly’s night out by himself gives us brief glimpse at something like a hipster food hall by way of old west chuckwagon.

The Annual I Like My Brandy In A Glass Award (presented to the best drink in a movie): St-Germain & Mello Yello, “Gemini.” No commentary required.

The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Carol Kane, “The Sisters Brothers.” Here’s the situation: You need an actress who can, simply in her very being on screen, convey, in an instant, where The Sisters Brothers come from and why they are the way they are. Hence, Carol Kane.

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expression in a movie): Vanessa Kirby, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout.” When Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, posing as the ultra dastardly John Lark, coolly mentions he has killed women and children as a means to evince how the person he’s impersonating has no line to cross, Kirby, playing an evil arms broker, seems to virtually, woozily breathe in the vapor trails of those vile words and then, as if overcome when she does, lets her bottom lip tremble almost imperceptibly. I tried to grab a screenshot but it was not worthy of whatever it is she does. I ask again, why on earth wasn’t she the principal villain?

Best Closing Credits Sequence: “Paddington 2.” Folks, this award gets no pithily referential moniker because the closing credits sequence to “Paddington 2” is the new gold standard. This is no self impressed, spell breaking bout of outtake rubbish (I loathe outtakes) but a witty furthering of the movie’s theme of rehabilitation. Whatta movie.

The Annual Scarlett O’Hara Curtain Dress Award (presented to the best article of clothing in a movie): Cate Blanchett, blue suit, “Ocean’s 8.” The movie, sadly, was trash; that suit, however, was the shit.

Random Cinematic Awards 2017

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico’s annual awards of cinematic randomness. 

Line Reading of the Year: “I fear you must prepare yourself for a polka.” — Cynthia Nixon, “A Quiet Passion”

Line Reading of the Year runner-up: “Thank you, Arthur, for your frankness.” — Meryl Streep, “The Post”

Line Reading of the Year special jury prize: “Well then, I gotta go.” — Lykke Li, “Song to Song”

Exchange of the Year: “Money isn’t life’s report card. Being successful doesn’t mean that you’re happy.” — “But he’s not happy.” The first line is mother, Marion McPherson (Laurie Metcalf), selling daughter, Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), that sort of banal parental wisdom that drives kids absolutely bonkers. And the second line is daughter’s rebuttal, which Ronan strains of any dawning melancholy for piercing clarity instead, the kind of clarity that become comical because it is so innocently up front and free of adult rationalization.

Exchange of the Year runner-up: “By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could. Best president in my lifetime. Hands down.” — “I agree.” The first line is Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) in “Get Out” not so much sucking up to his daughter’s black boyfriend, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), as trying to play that white liberalist get out of jail free card, which Whitford gives a comic self-congratulatory ring, and the second line is a seemingly simple response that Kaluuya twists into, like, three different things once — actual agreement as well as a verbal equivalent of both head down eyes up incredulousness and a kind of “easy, Tiger.”

Monologue of the Year: Buddy Duress, “Good Time.” The entrance of Duress into the movie as a sudden unwilling and perplexed accomplice of Robert Pattinson’s narcissistic lowlife is something I will not spoil, but not long after this happens, Duress’s character is afforded an explanation of how he came to be where he is now. And while I remain not entirely certain that this speech officially belongs in the movie, that concern is cancelled out by the sheer force of Duress’s hysterical, profane, uninterrupted soliloquy — which can only be heard, not written — rendered in the untrained actor’s brawny Queens accent. The capping line is in and of itself funny, yes, but the pissed off period Duress puts on it is even funnier and made me laugh harder than I did at anything else in a movie all year.

The Annual Goblin King Award (presented to the best pop star in a movie): Lykke Li, “Song to Song.” The music of the Swedish chanteuse exists at the intersection of sorrow and bliss, which in her fleeting turn as the aptly named Lykke in a doomed love affair with Ryan Gosling’s BV is searingly apropos, fatalistically seeing his refusal to commit through to end but extracting this playful mirth in the midst of its failure to launch anyway.

The Annual Scarlett O’Hara Curtain Dress Award (presented to the best piece of clothing in a movie): Allison Williams, turtleneck in “Get Out”. I am hesitant to reveal the precise context of the Pima Cotton Cashmere Turtleneck Sweater that Williams briefly sports for anyone yet to see “Get Out”, but suffice to say that it becomes something akin to the sartorial embodiment of the dubious way Denzel Washington as “Malcolm X” reads the definition of “White” (“White: The color of pure snow. The opposite of black.”)

The Annual Rolling Boulder Award (presented to the best action scene in a movie): Meryl Streep & Tom Hanks having breakfast in “The Post.” What, you think action scenes have to have guns and explosions and fisticuffs? Think again, junior. Sometimes all an action scene requires is two acting titans sitting down in front of the camera and verbally going Hagler v Hearns for a few minutes. I could watch this scene a hundred million times.

The Annual Tom-Hanks-Standing-At-The-Crossroads-In-Castaway Award (presented to the worst symbolism in a movie): Kitchen Sink, “Mother.” Everything, and the kitchen sink.

The Annual Merv-Griffin-Is-The-Elevator-Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Tom Skerritt, “Lucky.” When Harry Dean Stanton’s old-timer notices a Marines ballcap get tossed on the counter of the diner he frequents, I never expected to see Skerritt’s face when the camera tilted up, but there it was, and it gave me a rush. He nails his walk-off speech, sure, but there was something even more, I confess, in Skerritt, of my admittedly beloved “Top Gun”, in which he so ably inhabited that film’s atmosphere of testosterone, appearing so frail and politely ruminative. If so much of “Lucky” is about impressing upon us the weight of time, emotionally and physically, in Skerritt’s cameo, Lord help me, I felt it all pressing down on me.

The Annual Penelope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Robin Wright, “Blade Runner 2049”

The Annual Nurse Alex Award (presented to the best nurse in a movie): Pam, “The Meyerowitz Stories”. The only thing worse than a loved one being hospitalized is the preferred nurse caring for your loved one being reassigned, which is brought home in the Meyerowitz clan’s crack-up after discovering Gayle Rankin’s Nurse Pam is no longer looking after their father, the funniest bit in a movie overrun with them.

The Annual “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): Ice Cream, “Wonder Woman.” Diana Prince’s Hero’s Journey is at least partly a Fish Out of Water comedy, though all the possibility of it becoming hackneyed is negated by Gal Gadot’s indelible guilelessness, never more so than when her character tries ice cream for the first time. If it makes you chuckle, it is not because Gadot is wringing comedy from the moment so much as her mouth-agape earnestness is so true that you can hardly believe your eyes.

The Annual I-Like-My-Brandy-In-A-Glass Award (presented to the best drink in a movie): “John Wick Chapter 2” & “Logan Lucky.” In the immediate aftermath of a brutal brawl, perhaps the film’s actioneering high-point, Keanu Reeves and Common sit down for a cocktail, an action movie evocation of the digestif. The beer that Daniel Craig’s Bang orders while briefly on the lam to help pull the heist at the NASCAR track functioning as the centerpiece of “Logan Lucky”, on the other hand, becomes an evocation of momentary liquified freedom.

The Annual Best of My Love in Boogie Nights Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): “Fortunate Son” in “Logan Lucky.” There is a case to be made that “Take Me Home Country Roads” is the sonic linchpin of not-retired Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant heist movie, the moment when the movie once and for all transcends any charges of condescension. But if Soderbergh manages to breathe new life into that familiar soundtrack tuneage, he employs CCR’s scorching anti-war anthem to breathe new life into the end of thriller cliché in which a quick montage casts many little moments we have already seen in an entirely new light by not simply locking all the plot elements completely into place but utilizing the song to bring the movie’s social ethos to the surface.

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expression in a movie): Kristen Stewart, “Personal Shopper.” See above. And while I know that image appears a bit, shall we say, NC-17, context is everything, and the context, as the film title implies, is that Kristen Stewart is playing a personal shopper to a highfalutin celebrity. That she cannot help but try a few of items she is personally picking out for someone else that she could never afford, goes without saying, and when Stewart tries on some retina-sizzling kicks, Stewart opts for that expression, improbably embodying Sade’s “Smooth Operator” in shoe shopping. Props, KStew.