Best Song: "(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again" (2019)

Scene from Rocketman

Welcome to Best Song, a new weekly column released on Sunday dedicated to chronicling the Best Original Song category over the course of its many decades. The goal is to listen to and critique every song that has ever been nominated in the category as well as find the Best Best Song and the Best Loser. By the end, we'll have a comprehensive list of this music category and will hopefully have a better understanding not only of the evolution but what it takes to receive a nomination here. It may seem easy now but wait until the bad years.

A Wrap-Up of the 2019-2020 Oscar Season

Janelle Monae

At long last, the Oscar season is over. And much quicker than usual this year. That is why it feels absolutely strange to be saying goodbye already. It feels like there should be another few weeks for people to catch up on Oscar nominees, hold a conversation about why Jojo Rabbit was the dark horse Best Picture winner some expected it to be. It's one of the joys/frustrations that are lost to this adapted schedule, but in some ways, it's for the best. Where some years feel interminable, lasting so long that one can't help but resent half of the nominees, this one feels like a blip. Maybe it's something that the lower-than-average viewer ratings would suggest. Still, it was an interesting year existing in "The New Academy," where a new generation is rising and the definition of a winner is changing slowly. Was it the best year? It wasn't the worst. It was somewhere in the middle, where there's a need for change, but is exciting for making bold wins that proved just how great cinema has been. 

Ranking the Acting Nominees of Oscars 2020

Scene from Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

Next to Best Picture, there are few fields as scrutinized annually at The Oscars as much as the four acting fields. Every year there is a constant buzz over who should've been nominated and what the final group represents to the industry. While there are hundreds of movies and thousands of performances to pull from, these are the 20 that were deemed worthy to make it to Hollywood's biggest night. What follows isn't meant to be a prediction of who should win, but how I feel the 20 nominations rate against each other, finding the best and worst in a group of talent that is now part of film history forever. Who deserved the cut, who didn't? Read on to find out.

Review: "Harriet" Only Gets So Far With Conventional Story

Scene from Harriet (2019)

There's no biopic that has as much pressure to live up to as director Kasi Lemmons' Harriet. It's likely that those who have been in a history class anytime over the past 100 years will know the achievements of Harriet Tubman, even vaguely. She is a prime figure in the success of The Underground Railroad, and that's just the start to something more exciting and empowering about her story. There's so much ground to cover to the point that it's impossible to fathom why it took until 2019 for Tubman to receive the biopic treatment. Harriet is a film that has to be something for everybody as a result, being neither too salacious for those discovering her story nor too sentimental and false. Where does one possibly go with this material for a first outing? The answer is somewhere safe in the middle, producing a film that is satisfying but lacks any urgency that will revive Tubman's legacy to a new generation.