2017 Alternate Oscars

A couple of first-time directors announced their presence with authority in 2017.

Heretofore known as half of the comedy team Key & Peele, Jordan Peele wrote and directed the best horror movie in years, Get Out, about a young Black photographer who visits his White girlfriend's liberal parents only to discover that all the new politics is just a fresh way of expressing all the old evils.

Peele, who won an Oscar for his screenplay, asks whether anything has really changed if the same self-serving monsters are still running the show — all while scaring your pants off.

And then there was Greta Gerwig, an actress in such critically-acclaimed features as Frances Ha and 20th Century Women, who wrote and directed the autobiographical story of a high school fish-out-of-water (Saoirse Ronan) who has reinvented herself as "Lady Bird" — an aspiring artist chaffing against the strictures of her loving, hardworking but utterly conventional mom (Laurie Metcalf).

Oscar nominations all around (picture, director, actress, supporting actress, screenplay).

Gerwig would go on to bigger and better things — 2019's hit remake of Little Women, and 2023's billion dollar box office bonanza, Barbie. But it was the surprise success of Lady Bird that opened the door.

Along with Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, a couple of quirky hits that took home Oscars — The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — and the shockingly fabulous comedy Paddington 2 about a talking bear with a taste for marmalade, 2017 was an all around good year for movies.

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 ✱.