Remember the Oscars? Believe it or not, more than 13 months have passed since Bong Joon-ho and his masterwork cleaned up at the Academy Awards. To some Parasite winning Best Picture is still the last good thing to happen in a since ravaged world. The film year that took place in those intervening months saw theaters closed and many would be awards contenders pushed back. Despite the migration of prestige films to 2021 and beyond, plenty of great films find themselves in contention this year. With nearly every title accessible at home in some form, the 93rd Oscars may be the toughest to prognosticate yet.

We’re a year into a pandemic that has fundamentally changed every facet of life. Given that the coronavirus has been front of mind for so long, it’s no surprise that a lot of films have begun to emerge with plagues, disasters and COVID itself at their core. What is surprising is just how many pandemic films were made before the real life pandemic.
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At first glance Raya and the Last Dragon looks like it was crafted exactly for the COVID era. Here is a film about a fiercely divided nation consumed by an indiscriminate plague. If the factions could come together for the collective good, they could stop the threat they jointly face, but distrust and self interest simply won’t allow it. Sounds like a pretty accurate picture of life in 2020, impressive for a film conceived of and written years prior.

If there is one thing Marvel Studios is world class at, it’s fumbling the ball. The studio has nearly a century of characters with rich backstories to draw on, a seemingly bottomless pool of Disney money to spend and the whole of Hollywood’s A-list of actors and directors from which to cast. Yet despite the their unparalleled basket of ingredients, the Marvel recipe consistently spits out finished products that fall well short of the sum of their parts.

Among the many beauties of life and love coexists the tragedy of loss that inevitably follows. To get close to someone or something is to know that eventually they’ll be gone. For most that bargain is one worth making but for so many others burned by it in the past, loss can be just too much to bear. Battered down by the pain of losing everything she loved is the starting place for Fern (Frances McDormand) in Nomadland. Already reeling from her husband’s death, the financial crisis soon followed to uproot the factory town they had called home. Fern was forced out on the road, in part to find work but in reality to escape being haunted by the memories that creep into an idle mind. She pays for a storage container to house all of the material remnants of the life she left behind, neither able to let go of the tether to her past nor able to carry with her the mental burden they represent.
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