2020 Alternate Oscars

You may have heard about 2020. The worldwide Covid-19 pandemic killed millions, wrecked the world's economy, and of least importance, but for the purposes of an alternate Oscar blog, of most relevance, shut down movie theaters for most of the year.

To say it was a thin year for movies would be an understatement. Not only did Hollywood punt many premieres into 2021 but studios also took the opportunity to beef up their streaming platforms by releasing movies directly into your living room, bypassing theaters altogether.

Back in the day, this would have precluded a film from Oscar consideration, but times change and so, apparently, did the rules. I'm sure Netflix was thrilled (although we now know the streaming boom was a mirage) but it leaves me wondering what counts as a movie and what doesn't.

Did any movies nominally released in 2020 enter the public consciousness? Or will that year forever be a black hole in our memories filled only with death, Zoom calls and the yammering of nitwits claiming that science isn't real?

For once I don't offer an opinion as to who and/or what should have won — most of these are what I have previously referred to as "consensus picks." Some are starting to trickle out onto basic cable (e.g., Promising Young Woman, The Personal History of David Copperfield), but many remain hidden behind various streaming paywalls.

Hard to tell what's catching the public's eye.

(I miss the communal experience of my youth, the Beatles in real time, a new movie hitting theaters. Now the culture is completely Balkanized. "The Moon Landing — exclusively on Apple TV!" No wonder we share no common ground.)

I did include a couple of my personal favorites (Enola Holmes, The Gentlemen) that were largely ignored come award season, but which I liked. My blog, my rules.

And I will say that declining to give Chadwick Boseman (nominated in two categories) a well-deserved posthumous Oscar when it had the chance is all the proof I need that the Academy is willfully hostile to its own audience and has long outlived its usefulness as an arbiter of what is good and great about motion pictures.

A note: From this point forward, I'm changing up the alternate Oscar format. Instead of ten best picture nominees and five in the other categories, I'm rounding up twice the usual number of suspects and hoping that somewhere among them is one deserving winner. Because, let's face it, at this point I'm just taking the proverbial wild-ass guess at what movies are actually going to emerge as all-time greats.

We can always revisit the issue later ...

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 ✱.