98th Academy Awards

Originally watched on 6-17-2025, rewatched 2-1-2026

100% my favorite movie of the year so far (as of 2-20-2026) and I seriously doubt I will change my mind about this one deserving Best Picture the most, even if one of the films I haven't watched yet ends up being my favorite.

The "I Lied to You" scene will certainly go down in film history. I've been coming back to this scene all year. It makes me so emotional in this beautiful way that I struggle to describe. It's just such an amazing depiction of music and culture and history.

Outside of the film itself, the industry accomplishments of this film are extremely impressive, especially the insane rights deal that Ryan Coogler got from Warner Bros and setting the nomination record (despite being both a horror film and black cinema, two types of film that have been historically ignored by the academy).

Even if Sinners loses best picture to OBAA this year, I can tell that it will definitely beat OBAA in terms of long-term cultural recognition. People will be talking about this much more than OBAA in 20 years.

5/5

Watched on 11-11-2025

Compliments first: the movie was pretty, and I liked the performances.

Overall did not like this one. I didn't totally get what it was going for in terms of message or theme. I am personally against the idea that movies should be parables, I was not looking for a super clear PSA here, but I do feel that it should be clear what the movie is generally going for, if that makes sense? Especially when, like this movie, there is clearly an intention to say something. If a film is clearly trying to say something, then it should be clear. To compare to another film with political themes this year, One Battle After Another, that one didn't really say something specific either, but I didn't feel that it was necessarily trying to. I do have other problems with OBAA, but the lack of clarity didn't bug me very much because it didn't feel like it was trying to say something specific. Bugonia did (to me, at least).

I also just couldn't get into the characters. A lot of people are able to sympathize with the conspiracy theorists, I just couldn't. I couldn't get behind what they were doing, even if it was to a CEO.

This movie seems a bit naive about conspiracy theorists? "Oh they're just doing crimes and believing these things because the system is oppressing them" I agree but I also think the system is currently feeding them these beliefs and benefiting from it. It's not very punk to be a weird conspiracy theorist the large majority of the time, especially when, in the real world, the majority conspiracy theories have some roots in white supremecy. Most conspiracy theorists aren't harmless centrists like Jesse Plemons in this movie. And it feels weird to act like conspiracy theories are going against the system when the fascist US president is currently benefiting from conspiracy theories like crazy.

In conclusion this movie annoyed me. It was pretty looking though, and the actors were good.

2/5

Watched on 11-21-2025

It was good. It worked as a Frankenstein adaptation pretty well in my opinion, although I haven't read the book since High School and when I did I read it in pieces because I was constantly not doing the assigned readings on time. I really liked Princess Weekes' video on how this movie works as an adaptation, if you want a more researched opinion on that than mine.

The special effects were amazing! I absolutely loved how that stuff looked. I really need to watch more Del Toro; I think this is the only Del Toro film I've watched in full, but in this movie I loved how he interpreted the creature and how he seems to view monsters.

I really liked Jacob Elordi as the monster in this. His performance had a huge effect on my mom, who watched it with me. She was so, so sad for the creature, and was even talking my step-dad's ear off at night thinking about the movie because of how she felt about the creature. She absolutely hated Frankenstein, understandably.

4/5

Watched on 1-29-2026

This movie is very pretty. But also it was very boring to me and I spent at least 75% of it waiting for it to be over.

I personally could not seem to connect well to the main character or the setting, and those are the main things this movie is about, so it was hard to enjoy it.

I don't really have any good criticisms of it, and that makes me think that this movie probably just isn't meant for me. But also, I literally just watched it (as of writing), so maybe I'll have a better understanding of what didn't work after some time has passed.

Update after a while (2-20-2026): film still feels very boring to me. I've hardly thought about it since watching it, and I can't even produce any thoughts about it right now.

2.5/5

Watched on 12-13-2025

I'll put my thoughts here later. Poster is obviously a placeholder.

3.5/5

Watched on 2-7-2026

I'll put my thoughts here later.

3.5/5