Oscars Preview: Modest Achievement Awards

Best Comic Book Movie

• Captain America Hates America – Afraid to have Captain America be, you know, patriotic, and risk foreign bank and domestic reviews, Marvel did the least courageous thing it could do: make a “courageous” movie where the foe is domestic. Reviewers obligingly swooned, always hip to criticisms of a straw man majority that hasn’t existed since Captain America was first fashioned. Worst of all, taking the coward’s route meant abusing the worst nonsense plot in the Hollywood canon – “they sent their best agent to do the job no one else could do…now they have to kill him.” Why not send the second best agent and then have the best agent kill him? Why not just not betray your best agent in the first place? Mainstream movies embrace absurdist anti-American conspiracy when they don’t have the courage to let their audience decide. That, or take on someone who will fight back; America, unlike North Korea, doesn’t hack back or, like China, restrict market access. Perhaps we should. Pitching conspiracist tripe to impressionable children is worse than showing a few vaginas and the film ratings board should start giving it the NC-17 rating it deserves.
• Edge of Tomorrow – The rare high-concept sci-fi that works.
• Guardians of the Galaxy – Marvel loves the stories you don't know.
• Spiderman 2 2 – …And hates it’s licensing deal with Columbia Pictures ruining the property you do know.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past – I'm confused still - is Richard Nixon the good guy? As a comic book this was fun but as a voice for ideas it was just weird.  

WINNER: Edge of Tomorrow. OK, fine, Guardians of the Galaxy. Because Chris Pratt. 

Most Appropriate Career Disaster

Cameron Diaz – Annie, The Other Woman, Sex Tape. When last we saw Ms. Diaz, she was humping a car windshield. This year, she managed to make Kate Upton seem like a viable actress.

Cable-Worthy Comedy of the Year

• The Interview – I still can't believe that Dennis Rodman wasn't involved.
• Let’s Be Cops – The script is the perfect framework for improv greatness, letdown by casting two guys who just aren’t that funny.
• Neighbors
• Pride – The annual charming British comedy with Bill Nighy, this has a gay protest group joining the anti-Thatcher mining strike. Even if it doesn’t care enough about the miners, it’s still charmingly British. Or Welsh rather. Charmingly Welsh...auto-correct keeps trying to correct that to "Grittily Welsh" because nothing Welsh is charming. 
• Ride Along – Kevin Hart is successfully less annoying than Chris Tucker.

WINNER: The Interview. Yes it’s funny. More than that, let’s hope this leads to more direct-release to digital. One overrated North Korean mammal and five craven movie theater CEO’s shouldn’t be allowed to tell us what to watch. The internet is our bulwark; low-brow comedy wants to be free.

Tolerable RomCom of the Year

Magic in the Moonlight – One of the downsides of Woody Allen forcing himself to grind out movie after movie is that he rarely pauses on a moment of inspiration to give us a full two hours of genius. The last twenty minutes of this movie are brilliant and the solid set-up just needs some touching up. There are two critical flaws that prevent this from becoming a classic: the magic and the moonlight. What’s wrong with the magic is that the talented Emma Stone cannot do Jazz Age period work. She is firmly of the here-and-now and without the magic in his paramour, Colin Firth seems oddly overinspired. The problem with the moonlight is that the big love scene at the observatory is less a Starry Night to love and more blurry from a lack of flash.

Movies I Wanted to Like More Than I Did

• A Most Violent Year – It shocks and allures with its lack of violence. And then disappoints with a Mystic River-level bad denouement. This movie needed the kind of Long Good Friday unhappy ending that satisfies.
• America: Imagine a World Without Her –If the movie had stuck to its premise and just elaborated on its counter-revisionist points, it would have been a nice entry in the diatribe-cum-documentary field. But the last 20-30 minutes are a political dead zone filmed with the subtlety of the daisy commercial.
• Big Hero 6 – Sanfransokyo is the pinnacle of focus-group-tested, CEO-approved art that inspires a generation of children to grow egg-shell souls.
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – Too bland in its competence to merit comment.
• Godzilla – Inexplicably they kill the good actors and keep the cypher. An intellectual property in need of The Rock’s loving care.
• Inherent Vice - The Big Lebowski without the charm
• Nightcrawler – Has the artful misery of Raging Bull that makes you wonder, “Who wants to make these movies?”
• St. Vincent - Can we convince ourselves that Bill Murray is secretly a good person? In a movie maybe. In real life, no. Because, in real life, Bill Murray is insufferable. To quote Richard Dreyfuss, in response to the question ‘What about What About Bob?’ “It’s a testament to how funny Bill Murray is that I can still see him on TV and laugh having worked with him.” But instead he keeps making semi-serious films. Perhaps he’s learned from Jim Carrey that you can’t be funny forever. Also, I’d ask what Naomi Watts is doing here but Harvey Weinstein is the producer. If he wants you to be a Russian hooker, you’re not allowed to argue.

Movies I Liked More Than I Should Have

• About Last Night
• The Judge
• Locke
• Robo-Cop