#call me when barry has half the cultural impact honestly

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

You know I would have thought Leslie Jones would have had the star power behind her for us to at least pull the Comedy Guest Actress nomination, but apparently when you’re an anti racist queer romance that’s textual morality favors restorative justice you have to walk up hill in the snow both ways just to not get an Emmy nomination.

[oscar-isaacs-number-one-bitch]

The 3rd Annual Redford Awards - Winners

Hello, everyone, and welcome to what I’m calling “The Redfords,” named so because (as of this posting) the great Robert Redford has retired from acting, and naming these after him this time around felt like a decent way to honor that screen legacy, even though the name for what is basically the awards show I would run if it were my Oscars changes every year anyway, and it will likely change again for the 2019 awards (though definitely into something more permanent, I promise this time). It has been a long and arduous road getting here, so much so that I actually had to push back the announcement of these winners from the intended date by a day due to both scheduling issues and the greater context of what truly deserves Best Picture being really, really hard to parse out this time around, especially considering that the actual value of Best Picture has come to mean substantively more to me this year than in any year past what with the presence of Black Panther in the category at the actual Oscars and all that that means going forward for the broader culture. Still, I did manage to choose one; the awards have been completed, the winners have been chosen, and it is now finally time to announce the winners for the third annual Redford Awards.

 Best Sound Design: First Man

Usually when I do these things, I tend to just capitalize or italicize who the winner is as I post the nomination list a second time, but the fact is I already posted the nominees once (if you need a refresher I will post a link to them with this announcement) and I don’t want to take up a bunch of space being redundant when I could instead say something nice about the winners and explain why I chose them specifically. Suffice it to say even though First Man didn’t rake in what it should have at the box office relative to quality, its sound design was undoubtedly the most impressive thing about it apart from every element of the lunar sequence coalescing into a truly jaw-dropping stretch of filmmaking. The sound design, yes, did also contribute to that stretch, but First Man is also the movie of 2018 that did its sound the best all the way through, even considering that while A Quiet Place’s whole thing is pretty much built around sound, it’s more about the sound editing than the sound mixing, and one half of a victory won’t win you the whole thing.

 Best Visual Effects: Avengers: Infinity War

This one is generally pretty self-explanatory, but basically the central conceit behind picking a winner is not necessarily that it has the most visual effects, but that it has the ones you either don’t see or forget are visual effects during the movie because they make it believable that any of what’s happening is even possible. This year, sure, that happens to be the same movie, but what can you say? It deserves the prize, and I’m more than happy to give it out.

Best Screenplay: Daveed Diggs & Rafael Casal, Blindspotting

The Oscars had a decent line-up of screenplay nominations this year, but considering the sheer volume of immensely creative scripts they had to choose from, most of them are fairly mediocre choices, with the likes of Sorry to Bother You and even Bo Burnham’s critical hit Eighth Grade being left out of the conversation, which is a real bummer considering Original Screenplay was Eighth Grade’s best shot for any Academy Award nomination. Perhaps the most overlooked, though, even in terms of what people were saying should be nominated in the Original Screenplay category, is absolutely Blindspotting. This script is about as sharp as they come, with witty, insightful commentary on socio-political issues, characters that you grow to care about, enough comedy to keep the whole thing going without feeling too much like a drag, and one of the most creative, original, and tense climaxes to a movie not only of 2018, but of the past decade.

 Best Original Score: Justin Hurwitz, First Man

Future film lovers, and specifically film music lovers, will not look back kindly at the Academy’s decision to not even nominate this at the Oscars in this category. Justin Hurwitz’ score for first man is, both paired with the film and taken on its own merits, the most bold, unapologetic, and strangely unwieldy score of all of 2018, and while I do love Nicholas Britell (who should have won for Moonlight, by the way), this is the year that Hurwitz proved to all of us that yeah, he actually is the real deal.

 Best Cinematography: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Just about anyone in my immediate sphere (in fact, even most people out of it) is already aware of the Academy’s decision to air this category (as well as editing, makeup, and short live-action film) during the commercial breaks at the Oscars, how stupid a decision it was, and how it’s been reverse due to film professional, critical, and general audience backlash, so I’m not going to get into those here because it’ll take too much time, and other people have ways of explaining it better than me anyway, so I’d recommend reading one of those posts/twitter threads/whatever. But yeah, let’s not play too much with our food; by far the best shot movie of the entire year is the one the writer and director of Children of Men and Gravity shot himself without the assistance of his usual go-to guy, Emmanuel Lubezki. The black and white brings a sharpness to the picture not often seen, the long, sweeping shots of life for Yalitza Aparicio’s Cleo as well as the city she lives in are well-staged and executed, and it’s all handled so smoothly you’d be forgiven for thinking this one was shot by an actual perfectionist A.I. or something. Seriously, folks, it’s stunning to look at.

 Best Editing: Barry Alexander Brown, BlacKkKlansman

Studying film more and more over the years of doing this movie critic thing just because I want to and enjoy it has given me a lot more appreciation for the nature of film editing. A perfectly time cut or a long, unbroken sequence that’s well-shot will sometimes do the trick, and occasionally it’s more about what you don’t notice, but sometimes the best editing is just in how it feels to watch a movie strut its style and stick in your memory, and no film in 2018 did that like BlaKkKlansman.

 Best Character Design: Ruth E. Carter, Black Panther

This category is really a combination of the Makeup & Hairstyling and Costume Design categories at the Oscars, made so in large part because I don’t understand enough about how much make-up and hairstyling impacts an overall movie (unless it’s like, really drastic, like Shape of Water fish suit drastic) and they’re both extremely important elements contributing to an audience’s overall impression of a character without said character even talking or doing anything. Presenting the whole package as one unit also acknowledges the aesthetic choices involved in a character’s overall look, and I like that, so that’s how I made it. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse very nearly took this category for how beautifully and differently rendered most of its characters were (especially the titular ones), but ultimately I think this one should go to Black Panther, not just because African tribalism and the clothing therein is a refreshing thing to see presented on screen in such vibrant and prideful fashion, but also because adapting costumes from comics into live-action is far more challenging than it sounds, and the fact that they pulled it off this well is something to commend.

 Best Production Design: Eugenio Caballero, Roma

I was really tempted to go with Crazy Rich Asians on this one, but I soon realized that I was continuously thinking of this the same way most people probably think about visual effects: that the best production design meant the most production design. And while the production design in Crazy Rich Asians is beautiful and vibrant and deserves praise, it didn’t necessarily give the audience a whole lot of information about the characters beyond how rich Nick’s family actually is. Roma, on the other hand, had five entire blocks of Mexico City built from scratch based solely on its director’s memory, with not a single misplaced building, prop, or set piece in its entirety. Maybe there’s just something special about that that hits me harder than the design for Crazy Rich Asians did, but I also think it was the best production design in service of its story (both thematically and narratively) in 2018.

 Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz, The Favourite

And now we’re into the acting categories, the final stretch of road on the way to crowning that Best Picture winner I agonized over for almost an entire month. Marina de Tavira’s fantastic turn in Roma almost stole this one out from under Rachel Weisz, but like the viper she is in The Favourite, Weisz bit down hard and came out the other side with a Redford in her hands. It’s honestly astound how well she commands the screen in this movie (and a little bit scary), but it is all the more impressive when put next to the caliber of performances her co-stars are giving and allowed to shine just the tiniest bit brighter.

 Best Supporting Actor: Ben Foster, Leave No Trace

No one except critics online talked about Leave No Trace during awards season, and I’m sad about it. That’s not the reason I’m giving it an award, but I just wanted to put that out there for good measure. Truthfully though, this is a fantastic performance once again from an increasingly underrated and undervalued actor (perhaps the best he’s ever been), and the best supporting performance from any male actor in 2018. I really do hope that sometime soon, the Academy and everyone else will finally give Ben Foster the recognition he deserves beyond his Hell or High Water nomination a few years ago.

 Best Actress: Olivia Colman, The Favourite

Most, if not all, critics and general audiences (including myself) peg this award as going to Glenn Close at the Oscars this year for her performance in The Wife; however, I haven’t seen that movie, so I can’t nominate her for an award in an awards package that I personally put together, but best of luck to her at the ceremony. Despite her absence, there’s still an absurdly strong field of nominees, and none stronger than Olivia Colman’s performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite. She genuinely makes every single moment she’s on screen feel like something she, and only she, could believably do, wordlessly running the gambit from hilariously emotional to genuinely terrifying and making it all seem true.

 Best Actor: Christian Bale, Vice

I don’t love this movie nearly as much as the Academy does, but the one thing we do both agree on about it is that Christian Bale absolutely stuns as former VP Dick Cheney, though a little help from the makeup department didn’t hurt and they’re sure to win that award at the actual Oscars ceremony. Plenty of other actors gave admirable performances in 2018, especially Bradley Cooper and Rami Malek (who also happens to be the best thing about his mediocre movie that no one seems to recognize is mediocre), but none of them ever truly became their characters quite the way that Christian Bale did with this terrifyingly accurate portrayal of perhaps the most powerful vice president ever to set foot in the White House.

 Best Director: Spike Lee, BlaKkKlansman

Yes, absolutely, Alfonso Cuarón will be winning this one at the Oscars and probably deserves it more from the Academy’s perspective, but Roma relies on more than just the direction to keep it going. So does BlaKkKlansman I suppose, but the point is that the latter is fueled by its direction while the earlier is more guided. Both are spectacular feats and truly fantastic jobs done by both Cuarón and Spike Lee, but if BlaKkKlansman doesn’t have Lee’s fingerprints all over it, the entire thing could cascade and fall apart as a movie, whereas Roma might be okay but just might not look as pretty and feature a few more cuts; and that is why I’m giving Spike Lee Best Director.

 Best Picture: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

When people typically think “okay, what is the best movie I saw this year,” they’re usually actually thinking about their favorite because art is a subjective medium in and of itself and there are only so many things you can study and observe about filmmaking and how it all comes together that aren’t subjective inherently, so they can’t really be blamed for it. What’s the best to you may not constitute what the best is to someone else, and it plays out like that with most people, and generally always will. Best Picture in the context of something like the Redfords, then, owes its justification to a few key beliefs I have about what a film I want to call the best of the year might look like; namely, these beliefs are that it should have something to say (whether positive or negative) that resonates with the audience it’s trying to reach, tell its story in an innovative and unique fashion, and set the stage for whatever corner of the medium it occupies to engage in an acceptance for change going forward. The change doesn’t have to be big or even particularly important necessarily, but it should be there nonetheless. This awards system and set of beliefs is often why what I consider the Best Picture of the year for an awards package like this doesn’t usually line up with what my favorite movie of that year actually is. That all being said, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is what I truly believe to be the best example of this from 2018. It reformed and re-shaped the genre it was in to such a degree that it elevated the status of the animation medium, the message about anyone being able to “wear the mask” of one of the most popular and beloved pop culture icons of all time also being a metaphor for facing fears, accepting yourself, helping others, and being an inspiration to people as you lead by example is a genius move that I can’t believe a theatrically-released, feature-length Spider-Man movie hasn’t attempted before (but is so perfectly suited to animation I guess I understand the hesitancy), and the method by which it told its story was so incredibly unique and innovative that every subsequent attempt to animate the same way this movie does to adapt anything will inevitably be compared to Into the Spider-Verse for the rest of time. That, and the fact that it’s also probably the most widely accessible movie of the three I had running for this award (the other two were Roma and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? for context), make it not only the ideal candidate, but the appropriate choice for the Redford Awards’ title of Best Picture.

 And there you have it, the Redford Awards are now officially complete. I’ll forgive you if you saw the length of this post and just “nope”-d outta there, but for the rest of you who stuck around and read to the very end, thanks for sticking with me all this way, and I hope you enjoyed your read. See you next year!

Link to nominees: https://thefriendlyfilmfan.tumblr.com/post/182203750531/the-3rd-annual-redford-awards-nominees