Author: Thomas Butt

While I find the telecast and background discourse surrounding it all to be tiring, I can’t get enough of the Oscars as it relates to the outcomes of the actual awards. This past day randomly at 5:00PM, I lied down trying to recall the five nominees for Best Actress from last year. I was even blanking on the winner, which is usually money in the bank. I thought I could pull it off by asking “did they make a comment attempting to relieve the tension in the post-Will Smith slap environment?” Ten minutes of mental deliberation later, Jessica Chastain for The Eyes of Tammy Faye leaped into my consciousness, which can’t be said about anyone else on Earth, even by those who watched the movie. When I start to catch others losing interest in me, I ask them to rattle off random years so I can give them the corresponding Best Picture winner of that year. So far this skill (let’s call it that) hasn’t gotten me a free round of drinks or anything.

I very recently got the itch to start delving into Oscars season, now about a month into festivals where most of the potential contenders first premiered. While the field is always so scattered in the fall and continues to be through the announcement of the nominees, I ought to finally walk the talk and stand by predictions of the Best Picture nominees for the 2022 Academy Awards. (P.S. Can we stop referring to Oscar shows by their calendar year? Last year was the 2021 Oscars, and the 2021 BP winner was CODA.)

1. The Fabelmans – The easiest lock of all time. No doubt about it. It’s Spielberg. It’s sentimental. It’s about the love of da moviesh. While we suspect it’s not his last joint, this could be the perfect swansong treatment for the iconic director, and the Academy would gladly vault him into the club with Frank Capra, William Wyler, and John Ford as the only directors with more than two Best Director awards. To top it all off, this could be John Williams’ last score of his luxurious career. I have to be hesitant about The Fabelmans winning it all though, as the early fall favorite (Belfast, The Irishman) that checks all the boxes as Best Picture friendly has been doomed.
2. Babylon – This one seemed like just as much of a lock as The Fabelmans a month ago. Once again, we have a film about Hollywood, and no one is more obsessed with themselves than the awards body. 2016 Best Director winner Damien Chazelle is a mainstay for the awards circle and leads a cast of big stars. Where I think this could get tripped up is that the film is simply too brash and unflattering in its depiction of golden age Hollywood. And if the lack of major consideration of First Man showed anything, it’s that Chazelle’s seemingly Oscar-friendly projects (portrait of a Great Man) might be slightly off-kilter for voters.
3. Top Gun: Maverick – This Tom Cruise guy may have saved movies. The best thing to ever happen to this movie was COVID-19 and shitty Marvel VFX. There was so much anticipation for this movie after numerous delays and from desperation of a satisfying Hollywood blockbuster in the midst of MCU movies that look more and more like they were completed at the last minute of post-production. While I enjoy it very much, I still stand by that most of the overwhelming praise of the film stems from the general moviegoing population being stranded on a desert and dying of thirst, and Cruise and Joseph Kosinski emerged from the clouds and gave us a cold bottle of water. As it’s been said to death, the Academy loves the da moviesh, and Maverick vitalizes the spirit and magic of the art form enough to disguise it from being a familiar but effective action movie sequel to a cheesy 80s movie.
4. TAR – Mark this as this year’s Power of the Dog. Without seeing it myself, I see this as a highly divisive, visually stunning, bold arthouse film that picks up front runner status in January but slowly loses enthusiasm. Todd Field had success picking up nominations for BP and acting going back to 2001 with In the Bedroom. 
5. Armageddon Time – I see this listed as missing the cut in many articles I read, but I think this will hit the spot for voters. James Gray will finally get his due in the BP pool, with the help of the presence of Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway, and a coming of age story set in New York. This appears to have a take on the American Dream and its myths and realities, and if not, it sure ought to demonstrate the story of a family, an Academy staple favorite.
6. Avatar: The Way of Water – James Cameron returning to Pandora after 13 long awaited years. It doesn’t get much more “MOVIES!” than this. I hope this gets the nod more than anything just to see the naysayers mad. Just admit it, Jim Cameron is your king. This won’t reinvent the wheel story-wise, but just like its predecessor, it will be a big, sweeping tale with a limitless scope. 
7. The Banshees of Inisherin – I initially was going to have this miss the cut, thinking it would be too small and leave too quiet of an impact at the box office, but I have to imagine that the overwhelming critical approval of this will translate to a nomination.
8. Women Talking – Ditto from above.
9. Everything Everywhere All at Once – This is the kind of movie I immediately shut down from Oscar contention time and time again. A surprise genre hit released in April? Stop talking yourself into it. But of course, there’s always a Get Out. And this idiosyncratic film from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert embodies the same kind of magic of the movies as Top Gun and Avatar. This was a throwback word-of-mouth success that the Academy would love to embrace.
10. Triangle of Sadness – So all of these picks aren’t really that bold. If anything, it’s what I’m leaving out that is more noteworthy (Wakanda Forever will be met with muted enthusiasm and thus miss out on a BP nod). We seem to be guaranteed a foreign film nomination every year, and this NEON release will sneak up on everyone, even if the critical reception is muted. Perhaps this is the 2022 CODA?

Do we notice a theme between all these films? Allow this to be the first time I write the names Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. No streaming, all required to see in a theater. Da moviesh, baby. 2022, at the end of it all, will be the year of how we stopped worrying and loved the movies. Streaming for new original films has gotten such a bad rap that I’m hesitant to admit that sometimes there’s nothing better than waking up on a lazy Saturday morning and firing up Blonde with a cup of joe and a runny egg sandwich. Nonetheless, when we reached the nadir of streaming, with The Gray Man being a $200 million spy thriller with big stars going straight to Netflix, everyone being me, the Academy, and the public at large decided enough was enough. I believe the Academy is going to announce themselves this season as the protectors of cinema, with the likes of Top Gun and Avatar headlining the movie-going experience sentiment.

I’m sure everyone knows this, but Will Smith getting upset at a hacky G.I. Jane joke was the best thing to happen for the Oscars. If Jada Pinkett had the flu and couldn’t make it to the ceremony, there would be so much bad press for the awards body and telecast. Refusing to hire hosts, perfunctory montages, a general dismissiveness of movies (that Last Duel joke still pisses me off), another safe but forgettable Best Picture winner, and not to mention, ratings that continue to decline (23.6M viewers in 2020 to 16.6M in 2022. The COVID ceremony in between doesn’t exist). The Slap gave them a mulligan, and now the 95th Academy Awards this March is their chance to get it together.

I was sold a bag of goods about college.

For all of my life, sunshine was shoved down my throat about how amazing the college experience is. I got it from people who never enrolled! From all the good press I heard, going to a major, four year university would be the most formative experience of my life and make everything you did in high school child’s play. You’ll miss it when it’s over and wish you could go back for a second.

I finished my higher education this past May. It certainly flew by (COVID disrupted the concept of time), but it was a staggeringly unremarkable four years. I’ll be the first one to blame myself for failing to make a name for myself during this time, but there are so many aspects of the college experience that were more or less total hogwash.

• There are two claims from two opposite parties that were both false regarding professors. High school teachers spoke of college professors as the highest order of scholars who demanded excellence who refused to hold students’ hands. Wrong. Half of my classes felt like bad dreams of my worst memories of high school: when you simply don’t feel like talking and your frustrated and underpaid teacher begs you to raise your hand and answer questions in class. The only difference now is that the salary of a professor does not justify them to badger us. I certainly didn’t pay tuition to worry about class participation. You talk. We test. I used to say this in high school, but it only rings more true in college: enforce the message that the onus is on the students to pay attention in class. 
• However, the other myth about college professors comes from college students, which is that professors are actually the most down to earth people around, and just “one of the guys/gals”. Again, just more nonsense. While I never had anyone who was a straight up asshole, the idea of developing a personal relationship with any professor was infeasible. Just because you could call some of them by their first name doesn’t make them cool.
• People have told me with a straight face that college is an environment that makes you more mature and prepared for the world. If anything, I reverted in my progression of maturing and growing. Even by walking through the halls of academic buildings or the dining hall lobby, you can tell you’re not part of a great symposium of philosophy. I don’t mean this as an insult. My gripe is with the people who hype up college life. We’re all still young and dumb!

My only real takes involve academics, because everything else was that unmemorable. My nights consisted of watching 70s films by myself in my room. Don’t get me wrong, those nights are my calling card. But in the end, I don’t identify any growth I had as a result of the collegiate experience. I did learn and expand upon ideas and concepts in the communication and film studies field in my courses, but I probably would’ve been better off commuting.

So it starts with a revolving door that may stop suddenly…

Excuse me as I attempt to explain from the broadest perspective what Jordan’s Furniture is to anyone not from New England.

Don’t be foolish. It’s not a furniture store.

You walk in and you see a Jelly Belly store. In fact, the floor is a painted design made up of jelly beans. There’s not so much of a lobby as it is when you go left, you see a gourmet burger restaurant. Past it is a hallway that on the right side, brings you to their furniture outlet, the largest section of the venue, but if you keep going straight it takes you to the lobby of a movie theater with two IMAX screens. You can still see the dinner table room of the furniture section from the theater lobby. However, if you take a right out of the entrance, your eyes will either draw you to the main hallway that leads to the furniture outlet or to the right of that which includes a waterworks stage in between a zipline course and an ice cream shop. There’s also a massive Wally the Green Monster sculpture attached to the wall. Did I mention that the ice cream shop signage is a giant banana split made up of jelly beans? There’s also Eliot, who has a ponytail. And the buttkickers. And on top of it all, you could’ve gotten free furniture if a Red Sox player hit a home run at one of their signs at Fenway a while back.

It’s not merely a furniture store, but it’s not really a mall when you break it down. That would be giving malls too much credit. No mall is named after one of the stores. You know what Jordan’s is? It is Jordan’s, an exclusive category on its own. It’s also the centerpiece of every fun night that I’m capable of having. My “Jordan’s nights” that I just thought of this second are the kind of pleasant nights that I thought would fizzle out once I joined the real world. The daunting and uncertain real world still has yet to come to fruition. When I, all alone, go about a two mile walk to Jordan’s, inebriate myself at the neighboring Chili’s, chow down on some burgers, watch a movie made for the movie theater (recently saw Nope and Jaws there), and head back to the Chili’s for more drinks, intellectually I know my life won’t get much better than that, but emotionally there’s something vacant. When they say to take advantage of when you have it good, I do everything but lick the floor during these times. I take pictures, stare off into the distance, what have you, all so I can consciously cherish the moment. I think about what I could be suffering through instead of cinema and suds. Forcing myself to appreciate my easy living offers limited personal value. Perhaps I just need more friends.

Ah, yes, Jordan’s Furniture! Great place! This wasn’t an ad, by the way, which is evident by my sudden philosophical reckoning. I can’t properly explain Jordan’s concisely. Just visit the place, no matter where you are located.

It’s easy to say that you want this blog to be continuously active and inspiring. It’s very easy, actually, to the point that you can get reckless about it. I hate that this website hasn’t been updated with a new post since March. A high level of confidence in January slowly waned to doubt in February, all the way to writing myself off in March. I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody! This was my line of thinking in February. By March, I was thinking, “Terry Malloy and Jake LaMotta were lucky. They HAD a chance. I was doomed from the start!”

Not to turn this into The New York Times best selling self-help author hour, but this mindset will get you nowhere. I’m not reinventing the wheel here. On a good day, I want to talk about the ethos of an 80s Clint Eastwood joint. I don’t write particularly funny, and I take movies too seriously as it is already in my everyday life, so I ought to just have at it with writing completely sincerely. There’s enough hacky material at the expense of a variety of films online and on an Oscars telecast. 

I sure hope a miracle comes my way, because the older I get, I’ll start beating up on myself when I remember that Spielberg was 26 when he directed Jaws and P.T Anderson was 27 on the set of Boogie Nights. I’m lucky to be cooking dinner for myself by 26.

There’s been a lot of talk about the magic of going to see a film at a theater over the last two years. Streaming is nice and all, but you can never capture the emotions of the big screen, the surround sound, the concessions vendor, and the communal experience. I endorse theaters for all reasons minus the last part. I could do without having a mass amount of people at a showing of a movie, with the exception that the people are not chatting, coughing, laughing too hard or too often. or cheering. You rarely get those exceptions. Let’s normalize going to the movies alone. Not to pull a Jerry Seinfeld set, but WHYYYYYYY do people insist on going to the movies together? YA CAN’T TALK TO ANYONE! Otherwise, my plain old TV has nothing on the big screen, so theaters will always have a place in my heart. I even love the carpeting.

This was just a prelude to run through the old memory bank and look back on (with possible rage) the most annoying theater-going moments from the great people of Earth.

The Many Saints of Newark – I skimmed through parts of the movie on HBO Max the other day, and I think I was too generous to this movie when I first saw this at the Regal Cinemas in Newington, NH in October. Pretty awful, a Sopranos movie made for the fans who skip the therapy sessions and dream sequences. During the showing, an old guy was chatting the whole time, pointing out the ham-fisted references for the people there that somehow didn’t watch the show. When Vera Farmiga Livia said “poor you!” the guy responded, “she said that on the show”, presumably talking to his wife. I found this one a little more amusing, who needs to pay attention to this thing on screen anyways.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Okay, now we’re talking if you want me pissed off. My hype for this was through the roof. I love it now, which I can’t entirely say about all of Tarantino’s filmography as I’ve gotten older, but I was afraid to admit that I wasn’t infatuated by it when I first saw it in July 2019 at the Showcase in Woburn, MA. A group of fucking assholes, I couldn’t tell if they were like the shitbags I go to school with or just a rowdy big family with teenage kids, were chatting their way through the first half. They each had a whiff of the “yeah bro, that’s fucking sick” college kid. Someone, unfortunately not me, finally told them to shut up, and the second half was peaceful, but it was too late. I was simply not in the right mood to enjoy Quentin’s most wholesome film yet. This should’ve been an all-timer theater experience for me, and I still blame those fuckheads today for depriving me of it. I really, really hope the pandemic wasn’t tough on them at all.

Creed II – An old guy coughed out his lungs throughout the whole second half, also at the Showcase in Woburn. Theaters, don’t feed the elderly with popcorn. Those seeds stick in your throat.

Avengers: Endgame – Can’t believe I’m admitting seeing this on its opening weekend. Might as well go all out now, I liked the MCU at that time. Maybe I was happier back then, maybe I didn’t watch enough movies back then. Will anyone give a shit about me watching more movies? No, they won’t show up to my wake because I was a stuck-up cocksucker. Anyways, I was starting to get more cynical about these movies when I saw the big one in April 2019 at Jordan’s Furniture IMAX Theater in Reading, MA. For Infinity War, the cheap fake-snarky jokes, overbearing fan service, shitty visuals, and the quantity over quality mentality sucked me in. I was not having it this time around. Clapping? CHEERING? But please, tell me it’s not an amusement park. Feige really knows how to play it right down the middle. None of his movies are all that shitty. They are just so goddamn pedestrian. Things like the Venom movies are way more impactful because they embrace the goofiness. The MCU thinks it’s in on the joke but they lack any sense of earnestness.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout – From a pure visceral experience, this movie kicks ass. I hate that the beginning of the third act wants you to legitimately care about the convoluted plot and melodrama and halts all momentum, but I can let that aside. Somehow, only in the way I can, I found myself feeling disheartened after seeing this at Jordan’s in Reading in July 2018. Birthday weekend. Easy Friday at work. Fuddruckers dinner. IMAX screen. It was all lining up for me. This time, the person I am mad at the most is me. Why was I grump during this? Cruise and the boys gave me everything I was expecting. Why did I relentlessly try to grapple every minute detail about this ridiculous plot!?!? “But wait, this guy him and Cavil are fighting needs to be…” Dude, SHUT UP and cherish this bathroom fight! Like everything in my life, I never appreciate my good fortune. I think about this when I sit in an empty theater for a gruelingly average movie like Belfast. Not to mention, there was a culprit of one of the worst offenses sitting in my row, the obnoxious laughter. Every footstep from a character got a chuckle from this guy. When Simon Pegg is almost killed via hanging in the climax, this fucking guy was HOWLING like it was the zipper scene in There’s Something About Mary. Hope you enjoyed the picture, big guy, wherever you are.

There’s a great line from Robert Altman’s (perhaps my personal favorite?) The Player from Greta Scacchi’s character: “I like words and letters, but I’m not crazy about complete sentences.” This is how I feel about writing. (Although it even applies to my reading habits. I haven’t read enough books considering the outrageous amount of free time I have). I like to have written, but I don’t like to write. I know there’s something in my brain that can produce coherent blogs on a weekly basis, yet I find myself going through this game every time. At some point, writing about how you have nothing smart to write about runs its course. It may have already done so last time.

Fine, I’ll talk about The Batman.

I enjoyed it. For all the talk about it being dark and gloomy, this was very satisfying in the theater. I figured every Batman iteration from here on what would be actively attempting to replicate the Nolan trilogy, both with its tone and scope, but I think Matt Reeves actually crafted his own unique vision of the character and Gotham City. I was ready to be somewhat dismissive of the film and its baggage: self-seriousness, false claims of originality, and a fanbase championing it into the prestige. I’d argue even the positive takeaways from the movie are more modest. Either way, all the performances rocked.

This was the most packed a movie theater has been since the pandemic…. and it was probably a quarter full. Granted, the theater was not exactly in a highly populous area. However, we almost had a major crisis on my hand when, after a seating mishap from an individual and a party of four or five, I ended up having to sit next to someone. The first ten minutes of the movie was also my personal countdown of when it would be appropriate to leave the row and change seats. I never book a seat in the back, because that’s always the most crowded area, but I thought every screening of Batman would be getting sold out. Those recliners seats are a lot closer to each other than they seem. Half of the problem is my own, I think self-manipulated, claustrophobia, and the other is the stupidity of us humans that we squish ourselves in the back when the whole third row was empty.

By the way, if you didn’t know, going to the theaters alone is a utopia. Speaking of theaters…

I really wish I could’ve caught Red Rocket in the theaters. It went away in a big damn hurry. That sucks because it is PHENOMENAL. And I always misspell “phenomenal”, so that’s how serious I am about it. The best film and best performance of 2021 by Simon Rex. The less said the better for your own enjoyment, but it placed Sean Baker on my list of filmmakers who I will automatically look forward to seeing again.

Yes that’s right, you don’t have to hear me aimlessly ramble about a 25 year old movie at the end of the blog. At least for this week anyway. Life is too short to follow these phantom rules I made for myself when I was depressed and clinging on to this website as a possible career endeavor. Internships? Who needs em’! Let me shoot the shit with you guys about a Mike Nichols movie!

For as much as I enjoy watching movies, I struggle to articulate my thoughts and analysis of them for the life of me. The experience is very cerebral for me. There’s an innate quality to the movies that I like and don’t like that can’t be summarized on text. Perfect for an aspiring writer. If I even had half of my own ability in disliking my college classmates put into writing something witty about what I watched on Wednesday night, I’d be golden. I had to put a lot of thought in writing that awkwardly botched description because idiots are outside yelling and bothering me.

As I came back to writing this a few days later, geopolitical affairs are going on or something like that. I try my best not to care, simply because life is too short. But per usual, my body never lets me relax, and part of me is legitimately anxious about war and escalating gas prices. But as I wrote about in my introduction to this blog, all out nuclear war would be a perfect excuse for me not succeeding in the life. Yes, I can say with a straight face that I’d rather be in the throes of a global apocalypse than apply for a job. This says nothing about the state of the economy for undergraduates relative to the weakness of myself. My issues are my own nuclear disaster. It’s good that I have a thoughtful and intelligent therapist. Oh, wait, he just left me to pursue a new job. I told him it was better for his own mental health not to hear my woes.

The fact that I worry about politics and current events is a sign that in the moment, nothing else is bothering. At this precise point in time, no one is blasting music, slamming the door, yelling in the hallways. That will change soon, and then I’ll forget Ukraine even exists.