Skandies: #11 (Patreon)
Content
Picture: Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (60/5)
Director: James Cameron, Avatar: The Way of Water (67/8)
Actress: Anamaria Vartolomei, Happening (60/8)
Actor: Viggo Mortensen, Crimes of the Future (71/8)
S. Actor: Pedro Pascal, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (63/6)
S. Actress: Marcia Gay Harden, Confess, Fletch (67/6)
Screenplay: Jordan Peele, Nope (64/5)
Scene: Breaking out the tape measure, Barbarian (52/5)
[Not online, sadly.]
HISTORY:
Cameron improves on his placement for Avatar (2009), which landed him at #17. He also finished 2nd for Titanic (1997), behind Atom Egoyan. (Remember when Egoyan was a world-class director? That was awesome.)
Mortensen makes his sixth appearance, four of them in Cronenberg films. He placed 2nd for A History of Violence (2005), 5th for Eastern Promises (2007), 7th in Supporting for A Dangerous Method (2011), 19th for Jauja (2015), and—inexplicably, to my mind—20th for Green Book (2018). Never got excited about him as Aragorn. Harden gets her first nod in almost 20 years; we last loved her in Mystic River (#16s, 2003), and also named her 2000's 13th finest supporting actress for delivering the line "You've done it, Pollock. You've cracked it wide open" with a straight face. Vartolomei and Pascal are new.
Peele's screenplay for Get Out (2017) placed 2nd, bested by PTA's for Phantom Thread. He also squeaked in at #18 in Screenplay for Us (2019).
Apollo 10½ is the ninth Linklater film to make our Best Picture list. Before Sunset and Boyhood both placed 3rd, Before Midnight 4th, Everybody Wants Some!! 7th, The School of Rock 9th, A Scanner Darkly 12th, Waking Life 15th, and Bernie 18th. Only the Coen brothers, who are 10-for-13, have more. (Their whiffs are the ones you'd guess: Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, and Hail, Caesar! Plus The Tragedy of Macbeth for Joel solo. I have little doubt that at least four of their first five pictures would have made the cut, had the Skandies then existed; two of those, Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink, made our top 20 of the '90s.)