Is it just me or has filmmaking taken a nosedive this year? Aside from one or two nominees, the Golden Globes has suffered from a lack of great motion pictures to choose from for their Best Picture category.
For once, I’m not blaming the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. I can’t really criticize the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for something they have no control over as they can only choose the best movies from a particular year to nominate for that year’s Best Picture category. It’s not like they’re the ones making these movies.
No, the reason why I’m absolving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association of blame for the nominees they chose for this year’s Golden Globes Best Picture is because it’s not their fault. It is the fault of the Hollywood filmmakers as to why the nominees in many of the Golden Globes’ categories this year are underwhelming at best and just boring at worst.
Now, I’m singling out the Best Picture category as it not only is the (arguably) most famous and popular category in all of entertainment, but it is also a great measurement to view how strong a particular year’s movie releasers were.
Take 2020 for example. The movies that were up for consideration for that year’s Golden Globe Best Picture award were 1917 (the winner), The Irishman, Joker, Marriage Story, and The Two Popes. Some people may not have liked Marriage Story and The Two Popes as they were both slower movies, but I really enjoyed them and felt that they were deserving nominees.
Plus, they both got a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of at least 90% and an Audience Score of at least 85%. The two weakest candidates (in my opinion) were certified great movies that easily would have won in almost every other year. As for Joker, The Irishman, and 1917, do I really need to explain how great these movies were?
All I’ll say is that all three of these movies received Acadamy Award nominations (Joker and 1917 won for various aspects of their films), they all were box office blockbusters (well, Irishman was a streaming blockbuster), and they currently all sit with overwhelming positive Rotten Tomatoes reviews.
Oh, how could I forget, the eventual Best Picture WINNER at the Academy Awards, Parasite, wasn’t even nominated for a Golden Globe. And neither was Quentin Tarantino’s fantastic Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood.
Simply put, 2020 was a stacked year for filmmaking and was probably a false dawn into how the beginning of the 2020’s would pan out.
As if you look at the last two winners for the Golden Globes Best Picture, it was Nomadland (2021) and The Power of The Dog (2022). Clearly, these movies weren’t terrible by any means, but every one of the movies I listed from 2020 would wipe the floor with these two if they came down to a head-to-head.
They’re just vastly inferior pictures to movies like Parasite, Marriage Story, Joker, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, and The Irishman.
(Paramount Pictures-Top Gun: Maverick-Official Trailer)
Back to the present list of nominees, it’s clear the Golden Globes and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has run into the same dilemma again this year. Aside from Top Gun: Maverick, the rest of the nominees (Avatar: The Way of the Water, Elvis, Tar, and The Fabelmans) suffer from being average- decent quality movies. They aren’t terrible, but they shouldn’t be considered for a Best Picture award in a good year for filmmaking.
Actually, they really shouldn’t be considered for a Best Picture in an average year for filmmaking.
You know, that Quentin Tarantino quote about his being the worst era of filmmaking may not be totally correct (as with the 2020 list of films), but it is definitely not baseless either. Right now, I’d say that his claim is 75% true, with some huge exceptions that break the mold.
I hope that percentage doesn’t get worse over time.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Wikimedia Creative Commons License/Author: Peter Dutton) (Peter Dutton from Forest Hills, Queens, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
In Text Image 1: (Paramount Pictures) (Top Gun: Maverick | NEW Official Trailer (2022 Movie) – Tom Cruise – YouTube
