2019 Alternate Oscars

2019 was a strong year for movies led by three of my all-time favorites — Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, a wildly-funny and deeply-moving comedy about a goofy ten year old Hitler Youth (and his imaginary pal, Adolf) who discovers the Jewish girl his mother is hiding in the attic and learns what it really means to be a Nazi; Little Women, Greta Gerwig's brilliant refashioning of the Louisa May Alcott classic; and Quentin Tarantino's last film to date, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, a comedy about has-been actors and, sure, why not, the Manson family.

They were beautiful, funny, exciting ... and proof that Hollywood can make movies that are both wholly original works of genius and crowd-pleasing ticket-sellers.

You can rank them in whatever order you want.

And though this an alternate Oscar blog, for once the Academy's pick for best picture, Parasite — another wholly original crowd pleaser — is also a great movie. You can't go wrong there.

As for the rest, well, they're pretty great, too. The Avengers: Endgame, the final installment in the Avengers series, stuck the landing, and if Marvel had quit there, they would have gone out on top. Knives Out is a nifty whodunit comedy (I like its sequel, Glass Onion, even better). Ford v. Ferrari made me care deeply about a subject I really don't care about. 1917 is a taut action picture about World War I, one of the bloodiest and most meaningless armed conflicts in human history. And I love all John Wick movies.

Which leaves The Irishman by Martin Scorsese. Definitely not my cup of tea but it made your top ten so here it is.

But you can only pick one, right?

After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I went with Little Women, not only my favorite film of the year but my pick as the best movie of the decade.

In case you haven't read the novel or seen any of its many film or TV adaptations, Little Women is the story of the March sisters (Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth, played here by, respectively, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen) who come of age in Concord, Massachusetts during the American Civil War. The novel opens on Christmas day and follows the girls as they mature into young women, experiencing along the way love, tragedy and loads of comic misadventures.

It's a beloved tale and its film adaptations — particularly the 1933 version starring Katharine Hepburn and 1994's with Winona Ryder — have been commercial and critical hits. But let's be honest, the plot has problems that not even Louisa May Alcott was able to solve and I confess I wasn't exactly tingling with anticipation when I heard Greta Gerwig was taking yet another crack at this old chestnut.

Boy, was I wrong.

Five minutes into it, I was sold on Gerwig's time-shifting storyline. Ten minutes later (and many years earlier) — when the young Jo and neighbor Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) dance outside on the porch at a fancy ball — I was exhilarated. And by the final scene, when ... well, I won't spoil it for you ... I felt in my bones that Greta Gerwig had finally licked the unsatisfying ending that plagued the original novel.

I watch it every time it shows up on cable.



Gerwig drew on Alcott's journals and letters to flesh out the screenplay and reveal the frustrations and desires that drove Alcott to write Little Women in the first place.

"Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as hearts," Jo March says at one point. "And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as beauty. I'm so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for. I'm just so sick of it!

"But — I am so lonely."

It's a recurring theme in Gerwig's work: what is the role of an ambitious woman in a society that only values her for one thing? It's not an idle question — this is the central issue driving politics and dividing people all over the world.

I won't say Greta Gerwig's leap from first-time director to one of the all-time greats is the fastest on record — Orson Welles did after all direct Citizen Kane his first time out of the box — but still, the progression from Lady Bird to Little Women to the billion-dollar Barbie is astonishing. At this point she could direct a movie about the phone book and I'd be in line to buy a ticket.

Little Women is currently playing on Hulu. Seriously, see it. Today. Highly recommended.

A note before you vote: Brad Pitt won a well-deserved best supporting actor award for his work in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood. But in watching the movie again, I see that he was definitely a co-lead with Leonardo DiCaprio. Not to mention, Pitt did very good work that same year in Ad Astra, an outer space retelling of Heart of Darkness. So I bumped him up to the lead category where he belongs.

We occasionally do things like that here at the Monkey ...

In his stead, I voted Tom Hanks his second alternate Oscar (to go with two real ones) for his turn as Mister Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Tom Hanks can play anything — an astronaut, a soldier, a dying AIDS patient, a thirteen year old kid, a castaway, the lead in a rom-com, a pilot, a ship's captain, an FBI agent, a hard-drinking ballplayer, Forrest Gump, and a children's TV host in sneakers and a cardigan — and make you believe it. Yet somehow he's strangely underrated. A great actor.

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 ✱.