You Hate Poor People (And Other Things I Want to Tell the Academy)
[This commentary on the Academy Awards nomination was published on the day the 2018 Oscars Ceremony was broadcast.] I think that Oscars shouldn't be for favorites but instead for great productions, great filmmaking, a great combination (especially the technical aspects) of all the best things that make movies great: technical aspects, performances, writing, direction, set design, everything. Basically, Best Picture is for a film on which just about everything is working together perfectly. Five of my favorite movies of the year weren't nominated for Best Picture, and I think they should've been. The first two of these are Hostiles and Wind River and what's most interesting to me about these omissions is that they make such nuanced statements about the way Native people have been treated in this country. In a time when Hollywood and the Twittersphere like to claim that they're "woke" they still don't give a damn about Native Ameri