So, What was the Best Film of 2019? (Oscar Edition).

A frame from Honeyboy, a film unfortunately not nominated for Best Picture at the 92nd Oscars.

So, the Oscars are tomorrow, and for one of the few times in my life I've seen all of the nominations for Best Picture. And since they expanded the slate to include way more than five films a few years ago, that means the Best Picture race is more open than it historically has been. This year nine films representing 2019 are nominated for Best Picture. The official ballot is power-ranked.

Unfortunately, I don't have an official ballot. But I am good at power ranking things, so I'm gonna fill out a ballot anyway, as if I had the authority. Here's my very unofficial Oscar ballot for Best Picture 2019.

9. Marriage Story

Straight up, this movie is not good. I understand why it was nominated - because Noah Baumbach is a force in Hollywood and this is literally his life in film - but that doesn't mean it should be. I was so looking forward to this movie, and maybe my expectations were a little too high, but "letdown" doesn't even begin to encompass why this movie is bad. Here's why.

It may be the slowest movie I've ever seen (second only to If Beale Street Could Talk). It's technically just over two hours, but I swear to god, I aged years watching it. YEARS. I was afraid when I finished the movie all of my loved ones were going to be long gone, dust in the wind. That's how slow this movie is. It's like watching a divorce in real time. Actually, I think most divorces take less time than this movie. 

The other terrible thing about this movie is that the plot is so clearly skewed towards the husband, Adam Driver's character. It's not subtle. It's not nuanced. It's just a blatant bias embedded in the film because it's about the man who wrote it and the divorce he went through. And while it's fine for a movie to be autobiographical, I won't believe for even a second that any character played by the lovable Scarlett Johansson is supposed to be the antagonist. I know we weren't supposed to be rooting for her, but I was. She seemed like just as good a parent - if not better. Why would I root for Adam Driver?? He's literally Kylo Ren.

The only redeeming part of this movie are the performances by Johansson, Driver, Alan Alda, and to some degree Ray Liota. I won't agree that Laura Dern gave a great performance (even though she'll win the Oscar for it) because she literally just played herself, and she was also never the best actress in any scene she was in (which I feel like should be a prerequisite for winning the Oscar).

The other four performances were very good. But they were nothing more. In fact, by the time the film ended I wasn't even sure the very good Alan Alda performance had appeared in the same movie I just watched end. That's how long the movie was. Its pace eclipsed its plot (which, just to reiterate, was also not good).

8. Joker

How this movie garnered more nominations than any other film of 2019, I don't know. 

It wasn't the worst film of 2019. It wasn't even the worst film nominated for Best Picture. Once again: LOL Marriage Story. But it's gotta be one of the worst films ever nominated for eleven Oscars. Good lord. 

The problem with the movie is that it's a one-note movie, and they don't even really nail that note. Is it some sort of social commentary on being mentally ill, being poor, being an incel? I don't really know. If anything it confuses the story we've always known about the Joker. It tries to make him more relatable, but it ends up making him even more confounding. I know that he's mentally ill. I don't know why he wants to send Gotham into destructive chaos. It isn't explained. It's confused.

What saves this movie is solely the performance of Joaquin Phoenix. He's going to win the Oscar for Best Actor. He rightfully should. Not because of this movie (although he was excellent) but because he was snubbed for The Master and Walk the Line. It will be another Lifetime Achievement Award type of Oscar - given to him because he's due. 

All Joaquin had to do was perform, and he does. He does it well, and it carries the movie, but it doesn't carry the movie to the top of the top. Not even Heath Ledger's performance could have carried this movie to the top. 

7. Ford v Ferrari

I'm gonna be honest, I had the lowest expectations for this film. It just looked so, so corny. So generic. But you know what, it's actually not half-bad.

Christian Bale and Matt Damon's chemistry is incredibly believable, and as always, Bale gives a stellar performance. The plot is straight forward. The concepts easy to grasp. You don't need to know much about cars to get into it. I imagine it will come to be a very re-watchable film, one that you can throw on with your dad and enjoy, even if you've both already seen it.

The 24 Hours of Le Mans race that fills that last third of the movie is one of the best parts of any film from the last twelve months. In its entirety, it is thrilling, captivating, and nerve-wracking. The entire movie rides on them pulling off the climactic Le Mans race, and they do it so incredibly well. Will Ford win? Will Ken Miles crash? Will the Ford execs pull the carpet out from underneath them? All of this, the entire plot, coalesces in one race. The movie never wavers from the race. It doesn't juggle other plots. It doesn't cut away. You're there for all 24 hours of that race, and it's utterly terrifying in terms of climactic gravity. 

The problem then with Ford v Ferrari is in what comes after the 24 Hours of Le Mans. They completely whiff the ending. It's cheesy. I know it's a true story, but even then, the ending is cheesy. You can't follow up a ultra-compelling 45 minute climax with a lackluster ending. Or you can, but you won't win Best Picture.

6. The Irishman

Here's the gist with this movie: it's three and a half hours long, based on true events, and has about as many moving parts as 2018's Vice. In fact, it probably has more moving parts. It's like if someone took all the plot lines from Vice and The Dark Knight, combined them, shook them up, and poured them into one film. Here all those plot lines from Vice off the top of my head:

• Dick Cheney fixes power lines.
• Dick Cheney does political stuff.
• Dick Cheney does some more political stuff, but this time his wife is also involved.
• Dick Cheney meets with George W. Bush (who is played by Sam Rockwell. Fantastic).
• Dick Cheney orchestrates the War on Terror.
• Tyler Perry appears in the movie. Apparently he's playing Colin Powell. But he's also in the movie for all of 5 minutes, so it doesn't really make much sense. Big actor. Bigger politician. No screen time. Okay, moving on.
• Dick Cheney shoots someone in the face.
• Jesse Plemons is revealed to be the narrator of what has up until now been a rather 2D film, as in they aren't breaking the fourth wall Big Short style every few minutes.
• I wonder where I know Jesse Plemons from. He seems so familiar.
• Jesse Plemons gets hit by a car.
• Dick Cheney turns on his gay daughter. Further proof that Dick Cheney was pretty evil.
• Oh yeah, Jesse Plemons was in that last season of Breaking Bad.
• Weird.
• Wasn't his character's name Todd? 
• Weirder.
• Dick Cheney's organs start to fail. Hooray!
• Jesse Plemons, a.k.a evil Todd, dies in the hospital and his organs are transplanted to ole Dick. Fuck.
• Dick Cheney very suddenly turns towards the camera and does his best Frank Underwood impersonation. "I am not a crook!" Wait, no, sorry. Wrong politician. "I never said I was a good guy!" That's it.
• Credits.

Now, here are all the plot lines from The Dark Knight off the top of my head:

• The Joker (not to be confused with Joker) and some goons rob a bank.
• Bruce Wayne smiles at Alfred. Alfred frowns.
• Bruce Wayne, now dressed in a black leather suit and using the moniker "Batman" beats some people up.
• Batman beats up Scarecrow, a major DC villain who appears for less time in The Dark Knight than Colin Powell appears in Vice.
• Gary Oldman, whose character I'm pretty sure is also named Gary Oldman, calls Batman.
• "Batman, stop beating people up."
• "No."
• Harvey Dent, Gotham's top lawyer and civil rights icon, gives a speech insisting Batman stop beating people up.
• Harvey Dent is dating Bruce Wayne's best friend, Rachel. Uh-oh. Love triangle alert!
• Morgan Freeman appears. He's super smart. Makes a bunch of Batman's gear and covers up for Bruce when Bruce gets kinky in his black leather at night.
• Then - and this is the most inexplicable part of the movie - Batman and Morgan Freeman go to China, to deal with Chinese trading partners??? I don't really know. Anyway, Batman blows up a floor of a building and then escapes with a Chinese businessman on a helicopter.
• Meanwhile, the Joker makes a pencil disappear.
• The Chinese man is dropped off at Harvey's office. That incoherent plot fades away.
• The police have a march.
• Uh-oh, the Joker is in the march but he's not wearing make-up! He shoots Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman dies.
• Harvey is like, "Fuck this clown guy, we're gonna get him."
• They do not get him. Instead, he kills some more people.
• Bruce Wayne throws a party. Felt like weird timing for a party, but whatever.
• The Joker shows up. Bruce disappears. Batman suddenly appears. No one at the party connects the two. The Joker throws Rachel out a window. Batman jumps after and saves her. Whew.
• Harvey doubles down. Let's get this clown.
• Meanwhile, some little bureaucratic guy is pretty sure Bruce Wayne is Batman. Morgan Freeman gives him that God-like Bruce Almighty look. The guy starts sweating, but is still convinced.
• He goes on TV saying he knows who Batman is.
• The Joker doesn't want him to reveal Batman's true identity. Strange, I know. So he threatens to blow up a hospital if that bureaucrat isn't killed within a few hours.
• All of Gotham starts trying to kill this motherfucker. No one succeeds. In fact, Bruce Wayne saves him at one point and pretends not to know what all the hubbub is about.
• "You don't watch a lot of news, do you?" 
• The Joker blows up a hospital. He is, after all, a man of his word.
• Here's the crazy part - I know that before the Joker blows up the hospital he's turned Harvey Dent into Two Face by kidnapping Harvey and Rachel and making Batman choose between the two. Batman chooses Rachel, but actually ends up saving Harvey. Rachel explodes. Kaputt. Harvey is severely burnt on half his body and just lost the love of his life, so he breaks bad and turns all evil. Like Jesse Plemons. Uh, I mean Todd. I also know that before the Joker blows up the hospital, it's revealed that Gary Oldman is actually still alive. I also know that at some point the Joker was arrested before the hospital explosion and ended up breaking out of jail by planting a bomb inside another guy's stomach and blowing the jail up. When all of this happened, I don't know. We're working from memory here people, not a script.
• Anyway, back to the present: it's nighttime and Batman and the Joker are going at it. Boom. Boom. Boom.
• Batman flips an 18-wheeler over. Wow.
• The Joker says, "Hit me!" Batman does not hit him.
• The Joker gets away - or something, can't really remember - and escapes to a high rise under construction.
• Meanwhile, Two Face is out patrolling the streets killing off people that wronged him with the flip of a coin. Kinda like Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, but with more emotion.
• In the high rise, the Joker tells two ferries of people that their boats are rigged with explosives, and they have the controls to the other ferry's bombs. If one boat blows up the other, then they're free to live. If neither blow up the other, both blow up in half an hour. One ferry is full of regular moms and pops. The other is full of convicts. A fun social experiment in what's been an otherwise pretty uneventful film so far.
• The normal ferry folks vote to blow the other one up. But no one has the will to pull the trigger.
• On the convict ferry, one prisoner takes the detonator - a big scary guy, who clearly isn't in prison for tax fraud - but then he throws it out the window, relinquishing all of them from making the decision.
• Batman makes it to the Joker's high rise, but it's all dark. He can't see.
• Morgan Freeman - who I'm just remembering has the dope name of Lucius Fox in this movie - helps him by hacking every single piece of technology in Gotham and watching the world like Edward Snowden. Eyes in the sky, kind of deal.
• Batman beats up some baddies who are dressed like good guys with the help of Big Brother.
• Then he dangles the Joker over the edge of the high rise, but doesn't kill him.
• The Joker delivers an amazing final speech, the last piece of acting Heath Ledger will ever do.
• Moment of silence for Heath.
• Beat.
• Beat.
• Neither ferry blows up.
•  Batman finds Two Face with Gary Oldman and Gary's family. He has them hostage.
• Some pleading happens, but ultimately Batman tackles Two Face off of a building. 
• Two Face dies. Batman lives.
• "He's not the hero Gotham wants. But he's the hero Gotham needs." 
• Wow, very symbolic, Gary Oldman. A top ten movie of all time. Kudos.
• Credits.

This is all to say: The Irishman is both of these movies combined. But its ultra-convoluted plot is pulled off by a cast of almost 500 people, featuring eight All-Star performances from Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Stephen Graham, Bobby Cannavale, and Domenick Lombardozzi. (Unlike Vice and The Dark Knight, this film shockingly does not feature Christian Bale...) They're amazing, even if you get lost figuring out what they're doing.

I couldn't even begin to do the bullet point list of The Irishman's plot and I just finished the damn thing. That's Scorsese for ya.

5. 1917

I know, I know - this movie is going to win Best Picture. It shouldn't. But it will. Probably.

The case for it: It's a spectacular anti-war war movie done in the style of Birdman - one continuous shot. (Birdman did win Best Picture, after all.)

The case against it: Because it's all done as one continuous shot, the Call of Duty plot gets muddled and it makes it hard to believe that the soldiers really traveled as far as they were supposed to in the time shown.

It's a great film, don't get me wrong. Is it better than Dunkirk though? Eh... I don't know. Probably not. A great war film, yes. The best recent war film, I'm not so sure. The Best Picture of 2019, it absolutely should not be.

4. Jojo Rabbit

I'll likely never have an official Oscar ballot - which is probably a good thing. Because I bet most Oscar voters wouldn't dare put Jojo Rabbit in the top four. It simply isn't "prestige cinema." It isn't like The Irishman or 1917. It was just a movie. It's hard to pinpoint the difference between the two categories but it exists regardless. It always has. Full Metal Jacket - prestige cinema. Predator - just a movie. Both action movies. Both from 1987. But still very different pieces of art.

Jojo Rabbit fits solidly into the "just a movie" category, a category that rarely wins Best Picture. However, it is absolutely brilliant. It's the only movie to drive me into hysterics both laughing and crying in the last year. Taika Waititi, who wrote and directed the film (and who plays an unbelievably funny Imaginary Hitler), instills the movie with so much heart, you can't help but laugh and cry. And Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Roman Griffin Davis carry Waititi's vision to perfection.

Jojo Rabbit is exactly what the world needs right now. It needs satire. It needs humanity. It needs to sit down and just watch a damn good movie. Even if it is "just a movie."

3. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

There probably wasn't another 60 seconds left in this film when I leaned over to my mama in the theater and whispered, "Do you think the plot is gonna begin soon?"

Then boom. Credits. Since I'm sure you want more bullet point plot lines, here's the plot for Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood off the top of my head:

• Leonardo DiCaprio does some acting.
• Brad Pitt does some acting.
• Margot Robbie does some acting.
• Credits.

Seriously. For three hours, pretty much nothing happens. And you know what... it's fantastic.

The acting is so strong in this movie that a muted plot about Hollywood and the Manson family in a slightly adjacent reality doesn't ruin the movie. It actually makes it. Leonardo DiCaprio should win the Oscar for this movie. Brad Pitt will win the Oscar for this movie. And despite the lack of plot, Tarantino should win the Oscar for Best Writing or Screenplay or whatever. Something. Anything.

No movie with nothing going on has kept me as enthralled for so long. Some people hated it. Some were disappointed. (I think at first, even I was.) But it will stand the test of time, and who knows, in ten years maybe we'll be saying this should even have won Best Picture.

2. Little Women

It's brilliant. It's phenomenal. It's the best adaptation to be put on film in the last twelve months. It is every superlative you can think of. It's astounding how good Greta Gerwig's version of Little Women is. I didn't even know how much I loved it until I was filling out this ballot and realized, "Wow, wait a minute, it might really be the second best movie nominated for Best Picture."

Saoirse Ronan is a wonderful lead. Florence Pugh deserves the world and an Oscar for her supporting role. Timothée Chalamet is lovably complicated. Meryl Streep is Meryl Streep. And Emma Watson might barely be the fifth best actor in this film.

This adaptation will become the hallmark for how books should be translated into film. I'm so upset that Greta Gerwig was snubbed from the Director's category (more Hollywood politics at work for ya. Thanks Noam Baumbach.) But in lieu of winning Best Director, I'll gift Greta with the second place on my ballot.

It's not much of a consolation, but it's all I can give. If you haven't seen this movie, see it. Please.

1. Parasite

The best movie I've seen in theaters since Get Out. 

I didn't know what I was walking into when I went to see it. I hadn't watched the trailer. I hadn't even heard of it. Simply put, I was bored and lonely and looking for something to do. It was the next film playing at my local cinema.

And when I say it's transcendental, I'm not exaggerating. In the last year, no film has felt more organic. This one knew what it wanted to say. No film had as important a message. The class dynamics are unbelievably well executed. No film was as gripping, emotionally or psychologically. Even though Uncut Gems gave me an ulcer.

If you haven't seen Parasite, you must. It's required viewing. It's not only the best movie of 2019, it's one of the ten best movies from the last ten years, and it may be my favorite foreign film of all time. We don't give foreign films the Oscar for Best Picture. But we should. And if there's ever a film that deserved it, it's Bong Joon Ho's Parasite.