News from the San Diego Becks

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category (or Globe, in the Globes section).  Films in blue were nominated.  Films (or directors) in olive are links to earlier posts that I don’t want to have show up in blue and be mistaken for a nominee.  Films with an asterisk (*) were Consensus nominees (a scale I put together based on the various awards) while those with a double asterisk (**) were the Consensus winners (except Picture).

I’m listing the top 20 in the categories (except Picture where I list all ***.5 films) but only the top 5 earn Nighthawk nominations.

Nighthawk Awards

• Best Picture

1. The Personal History of David Copperfield
2. The Trial of the Chicago 7  **
3. One Night in Miami…
4. Promising Young Woman  **
5. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
6. Judas and the Black Messiah
7. The Father  *
8. Soul
9. Minari  **
10. Sound of Metal  *
11. Tenet
12. News of the World
13. Emma.
    ***.5
14. Dear Comrades!
15. A Whisker Away
16. The Painted Bird
17. Supernova
18. Saint Maud
19. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
20. Onward
21. Wolfwalkers
22. The Boys in the Band
23. Blizzard of Souls
24. Another Round
25. A Sun
26. Nomadland  ***
27. Palm Springs
28. The Dig
29. Those Who Remained
30. The Endless Trench
31. The Wolf House
32. First Cow  *
33. What We Wanted
34. System Crasher
35. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
36. Bacurau
37. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon

Analysis:  A reminder that *** is the Consensus winner, ** is 2-5 and * is 6-10.  The three Black themed films that are in my Top 6 miss the Consensus because First Cow won a critics award and Judas wasn’t nominated by the CC and the other two weren’t nominated at the Oscars.
This is a disaster of a year in many categories but especially here.  David Copperfield (which was a 2019 film that Searchlight didn’t release in the States until 2020) is the weakest winner since 1978, the last time Ma Rainey would have made my Top 5 was 1995 and the Top 5 is the weakest since 1978.  The second 5 are a good group so it’s the only weakest Top 10 since 1998.  The Top 20 is the weakest since 2008.
Nomadland is the first Oscar winner since Million Dollar Baby in 2004 to make my list (so eliminating Crash and Green Book) but not be in my Top 10.  This will actually happen again in 2021.  They are just the 5th and 6th films to do this since 1941.  Nomadland is also 7th among the nominees; tied with Green Book and Coda for the weakest in the Expanded Best Picture Era.

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