2014 Alternate Oscars

On its surface, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a shaggy dog story about how a hotel lobby boy (Tony Revolori) became the richest man in Europe. But ultimately, it's a contemplation of grace under pressure, kindness in the face of cruelty, beauty in an ugly world.

Set in the years between the two world wars, Ralph Fiennes plays the lobby boy's mentor, Monsieur Gustave H, the concierge of the Grand Budapest, eastern Europe's finest hotel. Gustave meets his guests' every need, especially the needs of rich, lonely women — not, mind you, from any motivation as mundane as reflexive servitude or the Puritan work ethic but because he is a civilized man who finds pleasure and meaning in creating a bubble of civilization for those fleeing an uncivilized world.

"You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant ... oh, fuck it."

Like the inchworm measuring the marigolds, Gustave labors unceasingly despite knowing that in the long run it won't make the slightest bit of difference. But what's the alternative? Surrender to chaos and cruelty and death? Hell, no.

If sooner or later we're all going to die anyway, can't we at least do it with a bit of grace and good humor? And in Gustave's case, poetry and perfume and pastry, as well?

There's something generous and moving and maybe even heroic in Gustave's devotion to the better angels of our nature.

"Rudeness is merely an expression of fear. People fear they won't get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower."

Well, some of them anyway.

As it turns out, Ralph Fiennes is the perfect actor to lead a Wes Anderson film. He can deliver helium-filled balloons of dialogue without puncturing the illusion that he actually believes what he's saying. And in a film like this, that's absolutely vital. One prick of cynicism, and the balloon bursts.

This is Fiennes best work since Schindler's List.

Cameos by everyone — Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, F. Murray Abraham, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and many others.

Excellent supporting work from Adrien Brody, Willem Defoe, Jeff Goldblum and Saoirse Ronan.

Tony Revolori as the lobby boy, Zero Moustafa, was terrific. Ralph Fiennes deserved an Oscar nomination at the very least.

The Grand Budapest Hotel was 2014's best movie, Wes Anderson its best director.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2013 Alternate Oscars

If you haven't seen it, Gravity is the story of an astronaut (Sandra Bullock) who is marooned in space after a catastrophe destroys her ship and kills her crewmates. Armed with nothing but her wits, a spacesuit and the oxygen on her back, she makes one harrowing leap after another into the unknown, searching for a way home before she runs out of air or burns up in the atmosphere.

That's the plot.

What it's about, though, is a woman who's been marking time since the death of her daughter, drowning in a pool of grief she can't escape. Sure, she's still active — she's an astronaut, fer Chrissake! — but she's going through the motions. Now, however, thanks to circumstances beyond her control, she has to make a choice whether she's going to get on with her life or join her daughter in the great beyond.

If you did this same story starring a woman sitting in a silent room with a ticking clock, the critics would lap it up with a spoon, but nobody would watch it. Put her in a spacesuit and play out her therapy while she's gasping for oxygen? Now you've got something.

It's like that show from a while back about a middle-aged man with mother issues who pours out his soul to his psychiatrist every week. Pretty dull stuff, right? But make him a gangster, call him Tony Soprano? The rest is television history.

All the great ones — Chaplin, Ford, Hawks, Wilder, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Tarantino, Gerwig — knew how to wrap a tasty doggie treat around the bitter pill of truth they were feeding you.

The late great Stanley Kubrick — who was absolutely never accused by anyone of being a corporate shill — once had this to say about the practical need to put the "popular" in "popular entertainment":

"However serious your intentions may be, and however important you think are the ideas of the story, the enormous cost of a movie makes it necessary to reach the largest potential audience for that story, in order to give your backers their best chance to get their money back and hopefully make a profit. No one will disagree that a good story is an essential starting point for accomplishing this. But another thing, too, the stronger the story, the more chances you can take with everything else."

Remember that the next time you're tempted to dismiss something as "merely" entertaining. Entertaining is what puts butts in the seats and make everything else possible.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2012 Alternate Oscars

2012 was a great year for movies about America's 16th president — Abraham Lincoln, in case you can't count that high ...

You may have heard of one of them, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the true story (warts and all) of how Honest Abe twisted enough arms to secure passage of the 13th Amendment banning slavery. Lincoln may have been an idealist but he was also a ruthless pragmatist who knew how to get the job done. It's a rare combination.

Daniel Day-Lewis went radically realistic in his portrayal of Lincoln and nailed it without ever giving off the sort of "actor-y" vibe Meryl Streep has a patent on, an absolutely balls-to-the-wall performance, maybe the best of his illustrious career.

And Spielberg immerses you in the legislative sausage-making behind the 13th Amendment without ever letting the proceedings turn dry — it's riveting stuff.

But did you also know The Great Emancipator killed vampires in his spare time? I didn't either until I saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The man was busy!

This one isn't quite as successful — with a title like that, I was expecting an over-the-top romp like Army of Darkness — Bruce Campbell with a beard if you know what I mean.

Instead it's more horror than hoot and more history than horror, with vampires as a metaphor for the "peculiar institution." The plantation owners not only feast on the forced labor of the enslaved but on their blood as well.

Still, the Ol' Rail-Splitter swings a mighty mean axe, lopping off the heads of dozens of bloodsucking monsters. Pop some corn, put your feet up and get into a Svengoolie frame of mind. It's not half bad!

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2011 Alternate Oscars

Of all the people I've covered in this blog over the last fifteen years, no one has fallen farther in my esteem than Woody Allen. Not, mind you, because of the accusations against him (which may very well be true, I couldn't tell you), nor because the undisputed facts that have emerged lead one to conclude that he's, at best, creepy. Here at the Monkey — where I will happily praise the art while beating the artist with a hammer — the fact that Woody Allen might perhaps deserve to spend the rest of his life in jail doesn't mean he didn't make great movies.

No, the problem for me are the movies themselves.

The older I get, the more the "Woody Allen" character — not the screwball nincompoop of the early comedies, but the neurotic, cultured, "wise" Woody of the middle years, Manhattan especially — seems more like the kvetching of an immature, half-smart misanthrope than the epitome of New York sophistication the adolescent me (who knew nothing about nothing) seemed to think he was.

In that sense, the perfect actor to play the "Woody" character isn't Woody Allen but a young Timothée Chalamet in 2019's A Rainy Day in New York because if there's anything more annoying than listening to a teenage kid explaining the meaning of life to you ... well, it's probably reading an old man's blog complaining about teenage kids explaining the meaning of life to you.

And that's what "Woody Allen" sounds like to my ears now — snotty, self-absorbed, brimming with unearned self-confidence yet insecure as only a kid can be, and name-checking the classics without any real sense of what they're about, which can be amusing, even endearing, out of the mouth of a nineteen year old kid, but is ridiculous and sadly pathetic from a man in his forties, fifties and beyond.

Maybe that's why I've come to prefer the Woody Allen movies Woody Allen isn't in. Midnight in Paris, for example.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is an American writer traveling in Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her rich, pompous parents (Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy). Gil has romanticized notions about Paris, specifically Paris of the 1920s when Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein drank absinthe in the bars and argued about art and literature. His ever practical bride-to-be has romanticized notions only about the handsome know-it-all (Michael Sheen) lecturing at Versailles.

After an argument, Gil finds himself wandering the cobblestone streets of the Latin Quarter when, at the stroke of midnight, a time-traveling Peugeot pulls to the curb and the half-drunk couple inside invite Gil to join them at a fun little party their friends are hosting.

Friends like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein — and a beautiful French brunette (Marion Cotillard) who sparks something in Gil that his rich, stuffy fiancee never has.

Owen Wilson is the rare lead in a Woody Allen movie who doesn't play like he's doing a bad Woody Allen imitation — reportedly, Allen rewrote the part to fit Wilson when the actor came aboard, and you can tell: Wilson seems comfortable in his own skin in a way the likes of Colin Firth, Jason Biggs and Kenneth Branagh never did.

Equally good is Corey Stoll who is hilarious as Hemingway, macho and pretentious at the same time, and grumbling perfectly ludicrous Bad Hemingway to Gil's awestruck delight.

"And then the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face, like some rhino-hunters I know or Belmonte, who is truly brave. It is because they make love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds until it returns, as it does to all men, and then you must make really good love again."

As a lifelong Hemingway fan, I laughed so hard every time Corey Stoll was on the screen, I thought I'd have a stroke — because let's face it, while nobody was better at conveying action through words, when he started pontificating about life, nobody was more full of shit than Ernest Hemingway.

Pitch perfect takedowns of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Zelda Fitzgerald, Luis Buñuel, among others, played perfectly by, respectively, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Alison Pill and Adrien de Van.

And if that's all there was to Midnight in Paris, I'd still say it's the funniest movie Woody Allen has made since he saw his first Ingmar Bergman film.

But he also has some insightful things to say about the false promise of nostalgia and the trap of always living a life of "if only (fill in the blank), then I'd be happy."

First, be happy. Life will fill in the blanks.

Midnight in Paris is my favorite Woody Allen movie, and proof that no matter how false the artist, the art in this case is true.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2010 Alternate Oscars

That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing. — St John of the Cross

I think 2010 must be about when I stopped accumulating every DVD that came out. At least I don't think I own a single movie that came out in 2010. Is that because I got a bit less materialistic in my outlook? Or because they stopped selling them in local stores? Or maybe I just ran out of room ...

That's not a picture of every DVD I own, by the way. A hundred or so from the silent era are in a different cabinet and thirty or forty Criterion editions are on a shelf under the television. But you get the idea.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

2009 Alternate Oscars

Every fan of Quentin Tarantino has their own personal ranking of his movies. Here's mine. If you're not a Tarantino fan, skip straight to the voting. Otherwise, settle in. You're encouraged to post your own rankings in the comments section below.

10. Grindhouse (2007) — The only Tarantino movie that gives me no pleasure, Grindhouse is a loving homage to drive-ins and double features directed in two halves by Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror) and Tarantino (Death Proof). Tarantino's half is about a stuntman (Kurt Russell) who slums as a serial killer while driving a "death proof" car. The film is a faithful rendering of what you might have seen in a 1970s "grindhouse" movie — according to Wikipedia, "low-budget horror, splatter and exploitation films for adults" — but the nostalgia is lost on me. Double features weren't really a thing in my part of the country and the closest drive-in was in a swamp next to Mansker Creek — it was literally underwater most of the time.

9. The Hateful Eight (2015) — See my original full-length review here. Eight seemingly unrelated strangers wind up stuck in a cabin during a blizzard in the days after the American Civil War. True to all Tarantino movies, baroque chat and cartoonish levels of violence ensue. I mean that as a compliment. Ennio Morricone won an Oscar for his score, Jennifer Jason Leigh earned an Oscar nomination (and an alternate Oscar win). Also stars Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern and Demián Bichir. Katherine and I saw the 70 mm road show edition at the AFI-Silver. Great fun.

8 and 7. Kill Bill: Volumes 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004) — A martial arts movie released in two parts, Kill Bill stars Uma Thurman as "the Bride" who seeks revenge against a team of assassins who tried to kill her on her wedding day. She hops and chops, slices and dices her way across the globe, dispatching hundreds of trained killers along the way, until she confronts the leader of the assassins, "Bill" (David Carradine). If you're a fan of the martial arts exploitation films of the 1970s, this two-parter is for you.

6. Jackie Brown (1997) — Some people have this first, which is a reminder of how consistently great Tarantino really is. An adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, this is a story of a stewardess (Pam Grier) who gets caught smuggling laundered cash for a lowlife drug dealer (Samuel L. Jackson) and risks everything to get out from under. Along with Get Shorty and Out of Sight, this was one of the few adaptations of the great Elmore Leonard that understood what the man was up to. The most restrained of Tarantino's movies (and maybe a tad reverential for my tastes), Jackie Brown revived the careers of Grier (Golden Globe nomination, alternate Oscar winner) and Robert Forster (Oscar nomination).

5. Django Unchained (2012) — A pre-Civil War spaghetti Western starring Jamie Foxx as a runaway slave named Django and Christoph Waltz as the bounty hunter who helps him rescue Django's wife from a cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). Stuff gets blowed up real good! Waltz won his second Oscar for his performance, Tarantino his second Oscar for writing, but more importantly, Foxx took home the alternate Oscar.

4. Reservoir Dogs (1992) — Tarantino's first directorial effort, this one put the video rental store clerk turned auteur on the map. The story of a heist gone terribly wrong, Tarantino took fifty years of noir tropes, drenched them in blood, added dialogue worthy of William Shakespeare and changed crime movies forever. Stars Tim Roth as a gut-shot undercover cop, Harvey Keitel as the gang member he duped, and Michael Madsen as the psychopathic killer who doesn't trust either one of them. The infamous Lawrence Tierney (read about Eddie Muller's hilarious encounter with the noir legend here) is great in support as the gang's leader.

3. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019) — If you've never seen a Tarantino movie and you're feeling a bit reluctant to dive in, this is the one I would start with. An insider's look at Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, Once Upon a Time is the story of a washed-up television actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), his stunt double (Brad Pitt in an Oscar-winning role) and the real life Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Stars hang out, deals are made, work is done. And then Pitt gives a hitchhiker a lift and drops her off at her home with (uh oh!) the Manson Family. But if you think you know where this is going, well, clearly you've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie. Features Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Timothy Olyphant, Damian Lewis (as Steve McQueen) and Mike Moh (as Bruce Lee).

2. Inglourious Basterds (2009) — This is every great World War II commando movie ever made, only better. The story follows three broad narratives — "the Jew Hunter" Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-winning turn), and his favorite prey, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent); a British officer (Michael Fassbender) and his double-agent contact (Diane Kruger); and finally the Basterds of the title, a group of commandos (led by Brad Pitt) wreaking havoc behind the German lines. These three narrative threads converge on a small cinema in Paris where the Reich's leaders, including Hitler himself, are attending a movie premiere. It's my pick for the best picture of 2009. As someone says at the end, "I think this just might be my masterpiece!"

1. Pulp Fiction (1994) — If Tarantino had stopped making movies after this one, he'd still be one of the greatest directors of all time. This black comedy crime classic weaves together multiple unrelated storylines featuring a heroin-addicted hitman (John Travolta), his Bible-quoting partner (Samuel L. Jackson), a bloodthirsty crime boss (Ving Rhames), his dance-crazy wife (Uma Thurman), a washed-up boxer (Bruce Willis), and the glowing MacGuffin in a shiny black briefcase. Told in a thematic rather than linear fashion, it should be utterly confusing but somehow isn't, and it's still one of the most wildly entertaining movies ever made. Also features Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Harvey Keitel, Eric Stoltz and Christopher Walken. Tarantino and Roger Avery won a well-deserved Oscar for the screenplay. I have it down as the best picture of 1994 which is saying something — 1994 was one of the best years for movies in history.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.