Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

First Reformed for Best Picture. Nothing on the slate moves me.

Cuaron for his technical skills and precision as Director for Roma.

Such an easy choice for me.

Roma and Cuaron with Pawlikowski fairly close in second place.

The Favourite & Yorgimos are the easy choices for me, though I would not have had a problem with BlacKkKlansman & Spike Lee.

Not great films, although I enjoyed that for once it seemed as though we had a group of films that were at the very least widely seen and most if not all touched something in the zeitgeist. No Philomenas.

The Favourite is the only nominee of the bunch that I love, so Best Picture is an easy choice. My nearest runner up would be BlacKkKlansman, which is at the very least an entertaining, original mix collision of tones. Even though I much prefer The Favourite to Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski's direction is so much more integral to his film's success and deserves to be cited as a singular achievement.

The Favourite and Pawlikowski.

I liked BlacKkKlansman and A Star is Born too, but neither of them were even in my top twenty of the year. Bohemian Rhapsody only worked out to be my third least-favorite of these films, which is probably the closest to a nice thing I'll ever say about it.

I would be surprised if anything other than The Favourite and Yorgimos win this one, and they wouldn't be undeserving.

The Favourite is one of only three nominees that makes my ten-best list and Yorgimos is one of only two nominees that makes my list of the year's top five directors.

The three films that I liked more than The Favourite were, in order, the non-nominated First Man and the Oscar-nominated Green Book and BlackKklansman which makes Green Book my default choice here. Spike Lee, however, is not a default choice. He is my number one choice for direction. I think BlackKklansman features the most assured direction of his career. Odd as some may find it, I don't see any irony in liking both Green Book and BlackKklansman. I find them both true to their very different times of only a decade apart.

Besides First Man, other films that I think should have been nominated for Best Picture include If Beale Street Could Talk if only five, Can You Ever Forgive Me? if six and First Reformed if seven. My eighth, ninth and tenth choices would be Lean on Pete, Leave No Trace and Searching, but I really had no expectation that any of them would be among the Oscar nominees.

I liked Black Panther and Bohemian Rhapsody for what they were, a well-made comic book movie and a joyous celebration of music and music makers, but I didn't really see them as Best Picture candidates. Roma was beautifully photographed, but overpraised. A Star Is Born might have been OK if it were more about the star being born than the one dying. I have no idea what anyone saw in Vice. It regurgitated old news without adding anything to it. As evil as Cheney and Rumsfeld were, and probably still are, they have nothing on the current Republicans in charge of wreaking havoc on the world.

Besides Lathimos and Lee for direction, I would have nominated Damien Chazelle for First Man, a far more rewarding film than La La Land for which he won his Oscar; Peter Farrelly for Green Book and Barry Jenkins for If Beale Street Could Talk.

I would have limited Cuaron's and Pawlikowski's nominations for Roma and Cold War, respectively, to one each - for cinematography.

McKay shouldn't have been anywhere near Oscar for anything.

Voted for The Favourite and Lanthimos

We come to the seventh of our eighth polls for 2018 categories - a combined poll for Best Picture and Director. Best Cinematography will have to wait until Never Look Away is released on home video so that more people have access to it. It currently has a release date of May 14th, but could be delayed.