The Second Annual Deeper Into Movies Awards
+ more important than the Oscars
First: I have some exciting news. I’m reconnecting with my roots as a DVD connoisseur, and next month’s newsletter will be an exploration of the brilliantly trashy 1989 sci-fi rom-com, Earth Girls Are Easy. The film stars Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans, and is available for free on Tubi and Pluto. Catch it and we’ll discuss in March!
Welcome to the Deeper Into Movies Awards!
I started the tradition of doing my own awards last year as fun alt-coverage: a reprieve from the dullest quadrant of the cinematic year. It’s my own fault that I think, at the beginning of every award season, that this time it’ll be different. “I swear, Charlie Brown.” Lucy says. “This time I won’t pull away the football.” Every year, I find myself flat on my back.
The one useful thing about award season is that it’s an opportunity to look back at a year in cinema as a whole. To identify the trends that will come to define the year and eventually the decade. The best thing about the Deeper Into Movies Awards—the Deepies, perhaps—is that YOU, reader, get to vote. Without further ado, I present to you the nominees for 2024!
Nun of the Year
Possibly the most anticipated category of the year. I questioned the onslaught of nun-dramas back in April of 2024 (and created a one-in-a-lifetime graphic). I wonder what could have happened on June 24, 2022 that has people thinking about the choices society permits women make with their bodies. Hm!
Isabella Rossellini’s marvelous turn as Sister Agnes in the rare cardinal-drama, Conclave, is an obvious front-runner. It’s a small role, but her performance is key to the film’s deliciously soapy intrigue. Unfortunately for Sisters Cecilia and Margaret, Immaculate and The First Omen share a lot of DNA1 as body horror movies about young women controlled by a religious patriarchy, which makes them hard to distinguish months later.2
Though Small Things Like These is far quieter than either of the three, it’s a lovely adaptation with a marvelous, steely performance from Emily Watson that gets at a depth of absolute power in a way that none of these other films can. Finally, by my roommate’s suggestion, I’m including Rebecca Ferguson’s masterful turn as Lady Jessica in Dune: Part Two. The Bene Gesserit might not be nuns as we know ‘em but like the real life Church, they’re an ultra-secret, Latin-named hierarchy obsessed with mystic birth.
The idea of women creating their own community, even if it's in service of an inherently misogynistic religious structure, will always be irresistible to me—and obviously to the audience that keeps going to these nun movies. I hope that appetite isn’t sated: I would love to see more movies that wrestle with that tension, and the mysticism that undergirds it.3
Film Most Improved by Adding Anora from Anora
Mikey Madison’s firebrand performance as a sex worker from Brighton Beach was one of the most unforgettable of the year. It was also one of the loudest. Anora and Anora stand out to me in a cinematic landscape that increasingly defines female labor as suffocating, and female workers as voiceless and victimized.
While watching a slate of womanish tragedy flicks, I started imagining how quickly they would end if there was a single woman even briefly capable of asserting her worth and making a decision. Anora would have pushed Heretic’s Hugh Grant down the stairs before she sat through his boring powerpoint, much less participated in his New Atheist Jackbox Games. Harris Dickinson’s American chav would have had that glass of milk thrown in his face in the insipid Babygirl. Anora would have gotten cash, up front, before she agreed to go to the Sex Criminal Island at the center of Blink Twice, and would have absconded before the night of didactic male violence could even begin. And finally, The Last Showgirl was in desperate need of some (any) authentic desire that could have been readily supplied by Ani. Her presence might have also allotted less screentime to Jamie Lee Curtis, who surprised no one with one of the worst post-Oscar performances of all time.
Worst Needledrop
All music directors should be forced to watch the scene from 30 Rock when Liz Lemon says “You don't just create an ending out of thin air by playing music or having people give each other meaningful looks” and then she and Jack Donaghy do just that as OneRepublic crescendos in the background. How is it possible that TWO movies this year ended with Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good?”
The Quiet Place prequel ends on our cancer-stricken orphaned misanthrope with a heart of gold (Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o) blissfully listening to the canonic anthem. The film sadly does not have the courage to show her getting ripped to shreds by aliens.
Perfect Days is far less stultifying, but Hirayama’s basic Golden Oldies music collection was my biggest issue with the movie. Anyone who knows a “Cassette Guy” knows that 95% of their collection is music nobody has ever heard of, much less exists as a “Dad’s Sunday Garage Faves!” playlist on Spotify. In that vein, when “Roxanne” played as Monkey Man’s titular Monkey Man (Dev Patel) entered the high-class brothel, I thought maybe it was a joke (it wasn’t).
So as to not split the vote, I’m lumping the Babygirl trifecta together: “Dancing on My Own” plays as Nicole Kidman gawps at Harris Dickinson, and both “Never Tear Us Apart” and “Father Figure” accompany various boring sex scenes.4 Perhaps these were meant to be examples of Halina Rejn’s famous Dutch wit. Okay.
Hardest Working Pop Diva
There have been plenty of contemporary woman-in-music dramas—A Star Is Born, Vox Lux, Her Smell all riff on real life megastars and explore the potency of music and female stardom. On the heels of Taylor Swift’s money-printing world tour, there’s been a massive proliferation of the glamorous female musician movie. However, the stars of this category do far more than just “make music.” Those much-discussed remote workers with three email jobs have nothing on these pop principessas, who chase essential secondary callings while pursuing international superstardom.
Critics5 raved over Angelina Jolie in Maria as opera diva Maria Callas who is, as is Pablo Larrain’s want, also a beautiful dying woman. I was far more tickled by Vesta Sweetwater, the virginal singer-sweetheart at the center of an inexplicable Birtherism/sex scandal subplot in Megalopolis. Finally, we got two true pop stars in Smile 2’s Skye Riley, who hunts demons while shilling for Voss Water, and Lady Raven of Trap, who successfully catches a prolific serial murderer.
Most “This Came Out This Year?”
I had eight movies in this field before I realized Substack limited you to five, so let me clarify. Despite what the nominations might lead you to believe, this award is not necessarily for a movie that is just “forgettable” or “bad.” It’s for a movie that seems to exist on a different media timeline than our own, in the way that it doesn’t seem possible woolly mammoths were still around when the pyramids of Egypt were being built.
And yet, the movies that made this list could have only come out in 2024. A year where we had to invent phrases like “AI slop” to describe a new type of human waste product. A year where we heard dozens of CEOs, and watched thousands of social media users, admit they either cannot tell or do not care if a picture of a dog with human arms carrying a child out of floodwaters isn’t real. It’s all just a digital image, in the same way that a quiet library and the inside of an active volcano are both empty places to gather your thoughts.
That is all for this year’s Deeper Into Movies awards. Please vote, whether or not you’ve seen every movie in the category (hey, Oscar voters do it) and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. I’ll see you in March for Earth Girls Are Easy!
Pun/spoiler
“Pregnancy is kind of the original body horror” says the subject line of one million Substacks written by people who have never given birth.
Also I have to write and sell my erotic monk screenplay, Nail.
At least I think they were sex scenes. I can’t remember the context because my eyes had already rolled backwards into my head.
Personally I couldn’t tell the difference between this performance and the one she gives in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, a movie which is 1) better 2) five minutes shorter.
"Anora would have pushed Heretic’s Hugh Grant down the stairs before she sat through his boring powerpoint, much less participated in his New Atheist Jackbox Games." 🙏🙏🙏 Ani's got no time for pages-long Black List monologues demanding me to appreciate how clever they are!
I’m STILL mad that Rebecca Ferguson was killed off in the Mission: Impossible films! The closest inkling of chemistry TC has had with a female co-star in YEARS!