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 ✱.
Green Book is a nice little odd couple movie about racism in the early 1960s, and Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali (who won his second Oscar in support) are very good in it. But the best picture of the year? I didn't see that coming.
I'd argue that two other best picture nominees — Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman — have much more interesting, and frankly, more entertaining things to say about race relations in America.
The former, the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a primarily Black cast, is the story of T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the newly crowned king of Wakanda, who must decide whether to use his hidden kingdom's immense power and wealth to help the world or to take revenge for centuries of colonialist exploitation. The film was a smash hit and a cultural phenomenon.
The latter, Spike Lee's most successful movie since 2006's Inside Man, is the true story of a Black FBI agent (John David Washington) who infiltrated the Klan in the 1970s. Funny and infuriating at the same time — racists are so stupid and unfortunately so real.
For my money, both are not only better than Green Book but are also more likely to stand the test of time. But that could just be me. Hats off to the Academy for nominating all three of them.
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 ✱.
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 ✱.
This is the first Oscar year where I (mostly) relied on you, my faithful readers, to vet the potential nominees.
The top three movies among critics in 2016 were Moonlight, La La Land, and Manchester by the Sea, in roughly that order.
Moonlight and Manchester are thoughtful, well-made art films that never quite drew me in.
As for La La Land, a celebrated musical that won the Oscar for best picture until it didn't (oopsy!), well, I'll bet I could name 100 musicals I liked better. 130, in fact, if my own IMDB ratings can be trusted.
Your mileage my vary.
Any nominees I did like? But of course.
Arrival is a slow-burn sci-fi thriller featuring the incomparable Amy Adams. Deadpool, starring a personal favorite, Ryan Reynolds, is a hilariously foulmouthed send-up of the superhero genre. Hell or High Water is a modern-day cowboy noir written by Taylor Sheridan of TV's Yellowstone fame. Hidden Figures is a terrific biopic about the African-American women who were the backbone of NASA's computer science team during the early years of the space race. Love & Friendship is a very funny comedy of manners based on a novella by Jane Austen. And Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie since the first one back in 1977.
Have at it.
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 ✱.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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