Welcome to the Stupid Oscars

Well, the Oscars won’t come for a couple of months, so I decided to make a version for myself…that doesn’t make any real sense whatsoever. Full of random categories, dumb suggestions and bizarre pointouts, these are the Stupid Oscars.

This is my way of calling out notable movies that I wasn’t able to review or comment on beforehand, so there’s going to be some bizarre categories in here. I won’t do the worst or best of 2021 until after this one’s come out, so have fun!

Movie that will be dated the fastest

Winner: Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin

There's a chip in your shoulder, mate.

Paranormal Activity’s choice of genre, that of the found-footage horror style, is already a fairly old-hat design that had its peak in the mid-2000’s. It’s rare to see films like this anymore, only being homaged in modern cinema instead of being fully committed to, but that’s not the only reason why this movie’s going to be dated fast.

Aside from randomly referencing COVID a bunch of times and immediately losing the timeless feel that other found-footage movies strive for, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin feels utterly stuck in the last generation of horror. Its structure of scares, merely wandering around a house until some random loud shit occurs, is incredibly outdated, not to mention its protagonists who represent the worst of the Zoomer archetype you could imagine.

10 years from now, the original Paranormal Activity will still hold as a classic fine wine horror, while this one will somehow feel like rotten milk despite being 14 years younger.

Best memes of the year

Winner: Squid Game

Squid Game was awesome. So of course, there are already innumerable memes about it. Enjoy these examples!

Darn Ugliest Film of the Year

Winner: America: The Motion Picture

Oddly enough, the Golden Raspberry Awards have never given anything out for “Worst Cinematography” or “Worst Looking Movie” – they’ve had “Worst VFX” and “Worst Misuse of 3-D”, but never one directed to the overall look of a movie. So, I decided to make my own for this year, going to the very deserving America: The Motion Picture.

There are other movies this year like Cosmic Sin or Home Sweet Home Alone that look terrible, but they aren’t as aggressively ugly as America: The Motion Picture. Largely coloured in blurry greens and browns resembling a smudged painting of poo, America: The Motion Picture looks like a rejected 2005 TV pilot from Eli Roth. The animation constantly blurs and stretches, swapping between frame rates at random, that it loses all style and just becomes repulsive to look at.

So that’s the conclusion. If you ever want to watch this movie, shut your eyes and hear it instead (admittedly, that’s not much better).

Most expletives in a motion picture

Winner: Malcolm and Marie

Swearing in a movie is common. And sometimes it’s excessive, like in the recent reboot of Cowboy Bebop. And sometimes, in between the dull monologues and close-us of Zendaya’s ass, a director feels like setting a continental record for the number of f-bombs they can throw in a movie.

Sam Levinson’s Malcolm and Marie, starring two people in a night-long argument with each other, boasts a whopping 289 f-bombs at a rate of 2.73 drops a minute. That makes it the 24th most profane movie in history, higher than every single Tarantino movie (many of which are also on the “most profane” Wikipedia page).

Oh, and shoutout to the Russo Brother’s Cherry, also released this year, which has 276 f-bombs at a rate of 1.97 a minute, making it the 31st most profane film ever (the rate is lower given Cherry’s absurd length).

Best Block of wood…

Literal: Michael Rooker in Vivo

I mean, yeah, Michael Rooker played a very well-camouflaged snake in the forgettable Netflix animated film Vivo. He effectively fooled a singing kinkajou and the result of a manic pixie dream girl cliché being forced to command an entire movie.

Good job.

Metaphorical: Bruce Willis in Cosmic Sin

Bruce Willis’s role in Cosmic Sin seems to be attempting to find how little emotion is needed to effectively lead a motion picture. Monoexpressive and without a single change in intonation throughout the film, Willis’s soul has long left his body, leaving a very strong impression of a block of wood.

Funnily enough, Bruce Willis’s performance in Cosmic Sin is the least of the film’s problems. He may be doing a decade-worst performance, but everything in Cosmic Sin is at a century-worst level, so cut him some slack at least.

Worst failure of the Bechdel Test

Winner: Black Island

I don’t normally get political here, but I want to make this one shoutout at the request of a co-worker who I bugged for awards category ideas for this post. In terms of Bechdel test successes this year, we had Black Widow and Shang-Chi (not Eternals, surprisingly), A Quiet Place 2, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Squid Game, Raya and the Last Dragon…then we had shit like this.

In this catastrophically bad Netflix thriller, there are two lead female characters. One of them is in love with the movie’s main character, and only talks to her female friend about his lack of reciprocation (conversations must be about something other than men). Meanwhile, the other one is the villain of the movie and again only talks about the lead character (and then doing him).

Damn it, Germany. Work harder.

Most Unnecessarily Loud Movie

Winner: Muppets Haunted Mansion

Did you even know that there was another Muppets movie this year? I didn’t until I went on the Disney+ Wikipedia and found it under “original movies”. It’s a holiday special that no-one cares about (including those making it) and which gladly deserves the “Most Unnecessarily Loud Movie” award.

It’s not just the mike drops, crashing soundtrack and beleaguered soundboard that make this so damn noisy, but also the loud visual palette on display. Shot on a green screen, everything has a bizarre CGI sheen to it that makes it blurry and garish, resulting in an unpleasant viewing experience both audibly and visually.

It’s a shame how far this practical and earthen franchise has fallen under the reign of Disney (check #32).

And now the opposite!

Most Unnecessarily Quiet Movie

Winner: The Marksman

The Marksman was a Liam Neeson movie clearly written for Clint Eastwood – the grumpy and cynical hero, the Mexican kid he has to save, some grumblings about modern America, the whole shebang. I forgot the movie immediately after I saw it, but the one thing that did stick with me was the sound design – or rather, the lack thereof.

For a movie named after a man of guns, this is a very quiet movie – compared to dialogue and ambient noise, gunfire is whisper-quiet and weapon sounds are stock-library forgettable. Combined with many scenes of sitting and talking in a van, The Marksman is a bizarrely silent film, both in audio and in screenplay. And this is from a filmmaker whose made movies that won Sound Academy Awards.

Darkest movie…

Thematically: Nitram

I mean, this follows the perpetrator of the Port Arthur shooting, a man who acts brutally around other people and is surrounded by a society of either ineffective or cruel people. If Joker depressed you, then Nitram will probably shake your soul. There were even many people calling for this film to be censored (which it shouldn't be - I don't really need to elaborate why, just read the Wikipedia page for Joker)

Hell, Nitram was so dark that I couldn’t quite complete it. The whole thing was made in Victoria, and as such, I couldn’t handle the accents, the trees, the sounds of my homeland all coalesced around the story of a true monster. It was quite distressing.

Literally: Without Remorse

What wasn’t distressing was Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, which if it weren’t for its modern cast and digital cinematography could have been ripped straight from the early 90’s. The movie itself was pretty dumb, but what made it even worse was the murky, incomprehensible cinematography throughout every action scene.

Despite coming from Oscar-winner Phillippe Rousselot (A River Runs Through It, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), most of the action is framed through blurry greens or underwater shots, lacking any clarity or reasonable editing. Hell, even standard conversation scenes are shot in complete darkness, meaning that it looks like Michael B. Jordan is talking to a black blob.

Don’t see this one – it’s just not possible to do so.

Worst Haircut

Winner: Timothy Olyphant in The Starling (TIE) C.J. Perry in Cosmic Sin

There are many famous cinematic haircut trainwrecks. Some more famous examples include that of Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code, Ewan McGregor in The Phantom Menace, Matt Hannon in Samurai Cop, or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men (Bardem actually made fun of his haircut in his Oscar acceptance speech for the film).

And this year was not an exception. On the one hand, we had Timothy Olyphant, whose salt-and-pepper middle-aged handsome hair got hideously dyed a decaying tan, which combined with his awful accent made him look like an SNL parody of a Republican senator.

And on the other hand, professional wrestler C.J. Perry gets long yellow streaks in her hair for Cosmic Sin, which look like glued-on pieces of police tape and induce howling laughter whenever they’re on screen.

Least Watched Movie of the Year according to Letterboxd

Winner: The J Team

Yes, somehow a widely-released streaming movie in 2021 was beaten out by the obscure foreign shit on Netflix, including A Perfect Fit (575 viewers), Black Island (1822 viewers), Dynasty Warriors (1417 viewers) and Fever Dream (2259 viewers).

Paramount+’s The J Team, starring pop singer Jojo Siwa who last year found herself on Time Magazine’s Most Influential People List, only has 244 views on the entirety of Letterboxd. This is likely due to the fast that a) like I’ve said repeatedly, Paramount+ is a garbage service which no-one intentionally bought and b) it was marketed under the Nickelodeon brand so that it only seemed like some Disney channel movie you’d watch while drunk.

Strangely enough, The J Team’s proportion of likes on Letterboxd compared to views, a 4:1 ratio, is higher than many truly recommendable films this year including Boss Level, The Guilty, Willy’s Wonderland and Oxygen…so that’s something, I guess?

Randomest Movie available on Letterboxd of the Year

Winner: The Cost of Concordia

Internet Historian is one of the best YouTubers out there, no doubt. But I note that he is a YouTuber, not a filmmaker. So it was strange to see his recent video The Cost of Concordia, covering the Concordia cruise line disaster, pop up when I typed in “Internet Historian” on Letterboxd for fun.

At only 45 minutes in length, it’s the shortest feature-length film I’ve seen this year, and also one of the most recommendable due to Internet Historian’s combination of humour, inventive visuals and velvet-smooth narration.

Definitely putting it on the “best-of” list this year. But still very random.

Most obviously just porn

Winner: The Voyeurs

“Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement.” – Oxford definition of “pornography” (NOT “PORN” – it won’t give you one if you type in “porn definition” in Chrome).

And that pretty much sums up Amazon’s The Voyeurs, a movie seemingly about the inherently disturbing nature of voyeurism as a metaphor for the leering audience, but more likely an excuse to get a bunch of naked women around a shirtless Ben Hardy. There’s plenty of softcore stuff, some oral, 2 anals, even the excessive facial hair on Justice Smith that looks like the evolution of the classic “pornstache”.

To its credit, it’s not a bad film – the softcore sex is reasonably alluring, and the director seems like a great guy (he actually went on Letterboxd to set up an account to ask for constructive criticism – I now follow him). But yeah – it’s pretty much porn.

And that was the stupid Oscars. Whether you learned something or not, I had fun making this, and you probably had fun reading it.

Stay tuned next week for the 15 Worst Movies of 2021 (that I saw) and the week after for the 15 Best! See you then!