Oscar Nominations

What was the Best Picture of 2025?

Seeing movies in a theater goes as far back as 1899 in Paris and 1902 in Los Angeles, so it’s a fading art form that took a nasty tumble when movie theaters were shut down during covid and people fell out of the habit of going to the show. Box office was down about 40% in inflation-adjusted dollars from 2019 to 2025.

This doesn’t mean humanity is going to stop watching moving pictures, but the decline of leaving the house to see a movie means there is less reason to make movies that are approximately two hours long.

But of course they still make movies and still give them awards. The Oscar nominations are out now, so here are some comments on ones I saw:

Marty Supreme - A movie about a pushy ping-pong player should be a comedy, but Marty Supreme is a drama. They used to make comedies about obnoxious guys, like Chevy Chase in Fletch and Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. (But do they make comedies at all anymore?)

With only two or three laughs over 150 minutes, however, Marty Supreme is a whole lot of ethnic yelling, and for no particular emotional payoff.

Granted, a lot of fairly interesting stuff happens during the movie, but (other than a tacked-on three minute coda), the story doesn’t build to anything.

In contrast, for the last 20 years, it seems like one out of every two movie trailers ends with the narrator intoning “… that will change his life FOREVER.” The reason that that’s become a cliche is that it’s a promise that you are going to see the most important event in somebody’s life. Marty Supreme, on the other hand, seems less like a carefully-crafted story that builds to an important climax, and more like a fairly random slice of this hustler’s hectic life. There should be a title card at the end that reads “And then a whole bunch more stuff happened over the next 50 years.”

Sinners — Better than …

Paywall here.