2020 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

This is actually a strong year for the Best Picture Oscar category. Nothing even remotely approaching a great film but nothing too hideous either. Here are my rankings in roughly preferential order:

Minari - Comes perilously close to the cute line. But something about it continues to haunt me, probably its episodic structure, its unpredictable characters, its quizzical ending, etc. Grade: A-minus

Promising Young Woman - Consistently surprising (although I knew precisely who would turn out to be a pig) bleak comedy that reminded me of such 1940s melodramas as Leave Her to Heaven or Siren of Atlantis where women exact their revenge/wield the most power from beyond. Maybe a bit of Ruby Gentry in there too. Grade: A-minus

Nomadland - Loved the discontinuous editing that underscored the nomadic life; rued how much it left Amazon off the hook to portray the nomadic life as a personal quest. Grade: A-minus

Sound of Metal - Devastating. And the penultimate scene (usually the point where a film shits the bed) was handled with impressive ambiguity. Riz Ahmed = husband material. Best cameo: A Rudimentary Peni t-shirt. Grade: A-minus

The Father - A mainstream Celine & Julie Go Boating! Keeps you on your time-and-space-determining toes. But the narrative games get dreary since they're tied so conventionally to the father's deteriorating condition. Grade: B

Judas and the Black Messiah - In the Oscar tradition: yet another felt, well-meaning, terrifically acted (I think - I don't know from acting), style-neutral biopic. Grade: B

The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Purely as a zippy, vacuous entertainment, figure about an A-minus. As a grotesque Sorkinization of 1960s American leftism, especially in its appalling portrait of assistant federal prosecutor Richard Schultz as a conflicted sympathizer, a D+. So let's say....Grade: B-minus

Mank - I already ripped on it here. I'm not a betting man. But I predict it will win solely because it's my least favorite here.