oscars

March 08, 2024

The Zone of Interest and the Family Next Door

Jonathan Glazer has been nominated for two Oscars, as writer and director of The Zone of Interest, a movie about Nazis that was also nominated for Best Picture and Best International Film. Continue Reading...

February 20, 2024

Oppenheimer and a Future Worth Waiting For

I remember looking at all the social media reactions of critics and friends who had seen Oppenheimer, now up for a Best Picture Oscar. So many of them described walking out of the movie “devastated” and “depressed.” Continue Reading...

March 30, 2023

Pinocchio as Anti-Fascist Superhero

Guillermo del Toro’s career is evidence that the Oscars still favor the romance of the left. He has just won the Best Animated Feature award for his Pinocchio, which he set in Fascist Italy. Continue Reading...

March 01, 2023

Tár Falls Just Short of Greatness

One of this year’s Oscar darlings, Tár, also turns out to be the only major movie since #metoo to mount an attack on cancel culture. This is paradoxical, of course, as we see from the three nominations—Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Original Screenplay—received by the artist behind the movie, Todd Field. Continue Reading...

February 14, 2023

Women Talking Will Definitely Have You Talking

The film Women Talking opens with what amounts to a warning: “This is an act of female imagination.” That’s because it’s not actually a telling of the events on which it is based, the horrific story of rape and abuse of more than 130 people in a small Bolivian Mennonite community called Manitoba between 2005 and 2009. Continue Reading...

February 07, 2023

Top Gun: Maverick: Our America Is Back

The surprise hit of 2022 was Top Gun: Maverick, a man and machine heroic picture, sentimental and nostalgic, the sort of thing Hollywood just doesn’t do anymore. At first glance it seemed way too old-fashioned, yet it made more than $700 million in America and just a bit more than that in the rest of the world, without even opening in China. Continue Reading...

March 23, 2022

The Power of the Dog is everything that is wrong with Hollywood

My long series on Oscar movies is coming to an end with angry words about Hollywood. To summarize, I liked Wes Anderson, loved Paul Thomas Anderson, was amused by Ridley Scott, disappointed by Steven Spielberg, and disgusted by Guillermo Del Toro. Continue Reading...

March 03, 2022

Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a dead end

Guillermo del Toro won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Shape Of Water (2017), a movie infamous for a leading lady so desperate for intimacy that she makes love to a fish, probably the best metaphor for the ongoing moral collapse of the women who like such movies. Continue Reading...

February 17, 2022

Steven Spielberg’s woke West Side Story is a self-contradictory disaster

Steven Spielberg has recently made a number of movies nostalgic for midcentury liberalism, Bridge of Spies and The Post, especially, very mediocre stories that won him Oscar nominations and praise in the mainstream press at the price of the popularity he once enjoyed. Continue Reading...

March 03, 2016

Rev. Sirico on ‘Spotlight’ and Hollywood Hypocrisy

The film “Spotlight” won 2016 best picture and original screenplay Oscars but Acton Institute co-founder and President Rev. Robert A. Sirico “eviscerated the Academy for embracing ‘Spotlight’ while it celebrated a child molester in its own ranks,” according to the Hollywood gossip site TMZ. Continue Reading...

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