Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

About three dozen feature films are nominated for Oscars this yea r, just over 10 percent of the 347 movies that were eligible.  The nominations themselves lead to talk about snubs and inconsistencies, some self-inflicted: how can you have 10 best picture nominees and then only five nominations for best director? How are Mahershala Ali of Green Book , and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, both of The Favourite,  all in supporting-acting categories when clearly they are leads in their films? (Indeed, I'd argue that in most respects Olivia Colman, nominated for best actress for The Favourite could have been put in supporting instead.) Still, beyond what we say about the nominations themselves, every year I find myself with a list of movies that received no Oscar love at all. (I talked last year about some of the reasons for this .) In a year where the academy's best-picture contenders suggest diversity in Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book  and Roma, it's important...

For most of my adult life, I’ve not been a big fan of horror movies. Well, of a certain kind, anyway – mad slashers with no clear motivation, exercises in gore, movies where narrative takes a back seat to the slaughter of the innocent and the guilty (with both categories including a lot of young people, and a fair amount of sex. Classic horror – where tension was as important as terror – I still embraced. But newer movies would roll out, and I would roll on. Except lately I have not rolled as much. I credit “Get Out” for a renewed willingness to see horror, because “Get Out” was about far more than carving up victims; it used that for a meditation on race and identity, doing so in a way that could still be unnerving – that argued the Old South was still around, and still eager to maintain white superiority. It was a movie for the it’s-OK-to-be-racist times that Donald Trump and his minions have brought back to Main Street. So now I will risk getting the willies, in selected c...