Witten by Ethan Jones, Edited by Anfisa Semenova

If this year’s Oscar nominations left you somewhat unsatisfied, Ethan Jones is here with recommendations on some outstanding films which, although didn’t get any nominations at this year’s Academy Awards, still made the year and will be remembered by breaking down the “Academy’s arbitrary criteria.” You should definitely give these filmmaking masterpieces a shot!

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There are over 105 possible nominations for feature-films at the Academy Awards, ranging from the technical crafts of “Sound” and “Production Design” to more conventionally grandiose honours like “Best Director” and, indeed, the climactic “Best Picture” award. Hypothetically speaking, 105 unique films could be honoured every year. In reality, using this year as an example, less than forty different films were honoured in some way, with Everything Everywhere All At Once, as deserving as it may be, singlehandedly sweeping over eleven. Consequently, dozens of films every year go completely without a single nomination, with popular historical examples including Halloween, His Girl Friday, Reservoir Dogs and Tokyo Story. This year is no different, and while I have no personal power to rectify the criminal snubs listed below (for whatever reason, the Academy won’t return my calls), hopefully drawing some attention to them can give them some much deserved love.

The Woman King (Dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood)

From Top Gun: Maverick to Avatar: The Way of Water, critically acclaimed action blockbusters made a long overdue comeback at this year’s Oscars. With that in mind: the shameful omission of The Woman King is outright preposterous. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film is a superbly directed action-epic that follows a battalion of female warriors as they seek vengeance against the tribes that have wronged them. The cast is almost note-perfect, with particular emphasis on the perpetually captivating Lashana Lynch, but the real star of the show is the spectacle: Polly Morgan’s dynamic cinematography captures the action with a visceral clarity and remarkable tension, relying less on CGI to deliver over-the-top chaos and instead prioritising dynamic stuntwork and the untethered fury of a Viola Davis roar.

The Menu (Dir. Mark Mylod)

Pitched rather brilliantly as a scathing satire of class, art, and the obsessive pursuit for perfection, The Menu houses one of the sharpest and wittiest screenplays to be released in 2022. Mark Mylod masterfully strikes a balance between darkly comic and knowingly pretentious, frequently teetering on the edge of “too much” before always reeling the broadness back in to focus on the exceptional core cast. Ralph Fiennes, to this extent, is commanding as the devilish Head Chef, while Nicholas Hoult and Hong Chau help fill out the surrounding ensemble with a gleefully pathetic and deviously scary performance respectively. There are many reasons to watch The Menu, but if you are not convinced yet: it is vehemently, somewhat-savagely anti-Student Loans, and delivers one of the funniest jokes of the year in light of that.

Decision to Leave (Dir. Park Chan-wook)

Other than being an obvious choice for “Best International Feature” and, frankly, “Best Picture” outright, Decision to Leave is also a sharply edited and gorgeously shot mystery thriller from the devious mind of Park Chan-wook. Hae il Park and Tang Wei make for excellent romantic leads in the sordid and mysterious underworld that Park crafts, pitted together as a homicide detective frantically trying to solve a murder and the possible suspect he gradually falls for. Wei, in particular, is terrific here, almost echoing Rosamund Pike’s exceptional turn in Gone Girl. And while the film overall is not quite as grotesquely macabre as some of Park’s previous work – being both substantially less oedipal than Oldboy and cutting back on the sexual leer of The Handmaiden – it is nonetheless his most tautly directed and plainly thrilling: a complex intermingling of criminal plots and deceptions that maintain suspense and surprises until the very bitter end.

Bros. (Dir. Nicholas Stoller)

This is not an Oscar movie by even the broadest of definitions, being neither as directorially impressive as The Woman King, as narratively tight as The Menu, or as visually ambitious as Decision to Leave. And while both Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane are very winning romantic leads, they’re hardly reaching the depths of the human condition in the same way someone like Paul Mescal did for Aftersun. But greatness is not limited to the arbitrary criteria that the Academy instils upon its subjects, and Bros is a riot: consistently funny, impressively moving, a ground-breaking moment of queer representation in mainstream cinema that finishes on a surprisingly touching burst-into-song. Sometimes a pure rom com is all a film needs to be, and this one gets bonus points for being unabashedly gay on top of that!

Every Horror Film Released in 2022

105 possible nominations, and yet not a single horror film got in. Not Jordan Peele’s spectacularly directed Nope, which made Keke Palmer into the standout surprise performance of the year. Not Ti West’s X, which similarly boasts a star-making turn by Mia Goth and, on a purely technical level, could justifiably win “Make-Up and Hairstyling” outright (although Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, which also got completely snubbed, could certainly give it some competition). Going all the way back to the start of the year, Fresh was a commanding debut by Mimi Cave that made Daisy Edgar-Jones into a excellent final girl and Sebastian Stan into a dancing lunatic. Bodies Bodies Bodies had a near impeccable ensemble cast, while Men thrived with basically just two showstopper performances in the form of Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear. Both The Black Phone and Smile were impressively scary directorial efforts and among my favourite films of the year. Meanwhile, Bones and All, the latest odyssey about desire from Luca Guadagino, was a close contender for being my favourite film of the year, period. Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russel star as a captivating romantic duo whose appetites are … questionable at best, with Mark Rylance delivering one of the year’s best villain performances as the profoundly uneasy Sully. It is a grotesquely gnarly film about love, desire, snacking and self-discovery; a finger-lickin’-good feast that vibes its way into being one of the most transfixing cannibal movies of the past few years … which is certainly a weird sub-genre, but one I’m happy exists.