2015 Alternate Oscars

Jason Statham has 56 credits on imdb.com. I've seen exactly half of them. Which makes me wonder how I missed the other half.

Gotta stop wasting time on things like sleep. And food.

Wish I could remember the TV series — In Plain Sight? Justified? — where one cop says to another, what'd you think of Downton Abbey (or some such) and the other guy shakes his head and says, "Not enough Jason Statham."

That about covers it for me. There hasn't been a movie made that wouldn't improve with the casting of Jason Statham, up to and including Gone With the Wind. If Jason Statham ever looks at you and says, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," you better duck for cover — the bullets are flying!

So what are my favorite Jason Statham performances? Glad you asked! (And if you didn't ask, you have my permission to skip down to the voting.) Here's a list of my top seven (a nice, even number). These are not limited to movies he headlines — he's often better in support and my list reflects that.

7. The Beekeeper (2024) — The distilled essence of a Jason Statham B-picture, here he plays a retired commando, lying low as a handy man who likes to keep bees. When his kindly landlady (Phylicia Rashad) commits suicide after getting fleeced by a network of scam artists, he sets out to get his revenge. You do not want to make this guy mad — by comparison, Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry looks like a volunteer for the Peace Corps. I could have picked any number of Jason Statham action pictures here — The Transporter 1, 2 or 3, Crank, The Mechanic and its sequels, Parker, etc. — but this is the most stylish of the bunch.

6. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) — Jason Statham came late to the neverending Fast & Furious franchise which has gotten more and more ludicrous (which is to say better) as it has gone along. I'll let Hobbs & Shaw stand in for all of them. Jason Statham as Deckard Shaw and Dwayne Johnson as Luke Hobbs are frenemies who must join forces to retrieve a deadly virus from an ex-MI6 agent (Idris Elba) who's gone into business for himself. The plot is beside the point — the pleasure here is watching the chemistry between Statham and Johnson, the Tracy and Hepburn of the Fast & Furious movies (I'll let you decide which is who).

5. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) — The first of director Guy Ritchie's Cockney gangster comedies. A lot of Tarantino and Elmore Leonard in its DNA, but also uniquely well-acquainted with the London underworld. The story revolves around a rigged card game, a half-million pound debt, a heist, a pair of antique shotguns, bags of cash, bags of drugs, shootouts, beatings, kidnappings, a traffic warden, and so many twists and turns, there's no point in trying to keep track. Like God, Guy Ritchie works in mysterious ways and he'll explain himself in his own good time. Or not. Statham in his first screen role, plays a friend of the duped card player, loyal, true, and like most criminals, only half as smart as he thinks he is.

4. The Bank Job (2008) — Statham heads up a crew of thieves who tunnel into a bank vault over a long London weekend. Based on a true story, what they find there rocks the British establishment. Statham plays a family man living the straight life but who agrees to do a favor for a friend. Intricate plot, lots of twists, and plenty of period 1971 detail. Note: I could have gone here with the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, which stars Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton and Donald Sutherland. Another nifty heist picture with Statham playing Handsome Rob in solid support.

3. Wrath of Man (2021) — I generally prefer funny Jason Statham to serious Jason Statham but this serious Jason Statham is terrific. He's a father grieving the loss of his son killed during an armored car heist. But of course he's more than that — he's Jason Statham! What, you were expecting Steel Magnolias? Co-starring Josh Harnett, Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan and Jeffrey Donovan. Directed by Guy Ritchie, it's must-see Jason Statham, but a word of warning: make sure you go into this one with the right expectations. There's none of the usual humor to lighten the mood or relieve the tension.

2. Snatch (2000) — Snatch is the (barely) more comprehensible follow-up to Guy Ritchie's surprise hit, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It's another Cockney gangster comedy and it's even better than the first, with an all-star cast that includes Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones — and of course, Jason Statham. The plot revolves around ... oh, who cares. What you want to watch is the interaction between Brad Pitt — playing a bare-knuckle boxer with an accent so thick even the Brits need subtitles — and Jason Statham who desperately needs this loose cannon to hit what he aims at. I think you could argue this is the best film on Ritchie's résumé (which also includes the aforementioned Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Sherlock Holmes, its sequel A Game of Shadows, The Man from Uncle, The Gentlemen, Wrath of Man, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare).

1. Spy (2015) — Not the best movie Jason Statham was ever in, but his best performance. A spoof of every James Bond movie ever made, Spy stars Melissa McCarthy as a CIA desk-jockey who winds up in the field on the trail of a stolen nuclear warhead. Statham's character, Rick Ford — described in the press kit as a cross between Rambo and Inspector Clouseau — is a perfect send-up of every character the actor has ever played and while he's almost always wryly funny, it's a shock just how great he is at straight up comedy. With Rose Byrne, Jude Law and Allison Janney.

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 ✱.

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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. 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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. 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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. 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 ✱.