Image by Jim Cooke

Oh God, it’s Oscar time again. Just what I needed in the middle of the fucking apocalypse. Donald Trump is President. Russia has hacked all of our phones and is actively watching us masturbate. And every public school is going to teach your kids that gay people come from the fucking moon. These are shitty, horrible times, and now I gotta sit there and watch, in growing horror, as I realize that the most prominent and vocal leaders of the so-called Liberal Resistance are THESE PEOPLE. Christ. Trump’s approval rating will jump 70 points by the end of this goddamn telecast. I hate the world and welcome its immolation.




Anyway, this calls for us to resume for our hallowed tradition of saying nasty, rude shit about every major nominee in the running. As with any good Hater’s Guide, I am approaching this year’s edition with a deep and profound ignorance. I think I’ve watched exactly three of movies listed below. Why, I’m nearly as ignorant as the Academy itself, which tried to correct last year’s scourge of white nominees by nominating a far more diverse crop of movies and actors this year, only now it will end up handing all the major honors on Sunday night to a fucking Segregation-era musical throwback. With one of the Man Show guys presiding over all of it (Christ, there’s gonna be a Cousin Sal bit during this, isn’t there). Also, Mel Gibson will be there. Should be a great night!

Let’s get into this, and please note that SPOILERS abound down below. I know all you Fences fanboys out there don’t want me to ruin that surprise Doaker Charles appearance that happens after the credits roll. The August Wilson Cinematic Universe is perhaps the most lucrative coming franchise of all.


Best Picture

Arrival. I can’t believe they made a movie about fucking aliens landing on Earth and took such great pains to envision how it all really play out, and then, in the end, turned it into a movie about Amy Adams magically foreseeing the death of her own kid. WHAT ABOUT THE GODDAMN ALIENS, MAN? They just leave after Adams has a premonition about hanging with the Chinese President and that’s it? I’m supposed to care that she wrote a best-selling dictionary? Now I’m the one grieving. Bring the heptapods back and give me my SPACE WAR. Jeremy Renner didn’t even shoot anyone with a bow.

By the way, this is one of the few nominated movies I actually watched because I am horribly depressed and this seemed like the ONE movie of the bunch that wouldn’t have a dead kid in it. And then what happens? DEAD KID. I’m livid. I want a big read label warning DEAD KID on all movies from now on.

Fences. Never watch a movie that was also a play, especially if an actor directed it. It’s like watching an iPhone video of an eighth grade dance recital. By the way, there’s nothing actors love more than droning on and on about how the theater is where REAL acting is. Meanwhile, the only reason they ever really do theater is because they’re on break from a paid movie gig and are thirsty for both a Tony and/or guaranteed live applause. Vin Diesel could go on stage as Hamlet and fuck up a dozen lines and he’d still get his needed dose of clapping.


Hacksaw Ridge, aka KnifeBalls Gulch, aka Dismemberment Valley, aka Cannibal Mountain, aka Bloodthroat River, aka Spineripper Street 4, aka DeadBaby Forest, aka Necksnap Notch, aka Bleeding Rectum Peak, aka Torn Nipple Hill. This movie, of course, represents the career rehabilitation of Mel “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE LOOKING AT, SUGAR TITS?!” Gibson. Never forget. Gibson is living proof that anyone can make a comeback in Hollywood, even if they never really went away and even if they didn’t really do anything to make amends for their transgressions. Mel Gibson still has a library stocked with alternative literature on THE JEWS and is still making the same blood-soaked movies he’s always made. Oh, but somehow he’s chill now. Surrrrre. I’m sure the wealthy old boozer who gives no fucks and just watched Alex Jones rise to political prominence is totally on the level now.

Hell or High Water. Aw shit yeah, it’s Redneck Heat! Let me tell you, you have never watched a better piece of Trump voter porn in your whole life. Look at all the abandoned towns! Ooooh, and look at the big mean banks holdin’ down our truck drivin’ heroes! And look at Jeff Bridges, whose character is horribly racist but also the good guy! And watch Ben Foster turn away an entire squad of cops and vigilantes on a road just by, like, firing a machine gun at them! Finally, a movie for REAL FOLK like you and me! These fancy Hollywood types don’t get what it’s really like to be a dumbfuck living in the armpit of Texas!


By the way, there’s no way Chris Pine gets away with it in real life. None. The end of the movie is just some Fed telling Jeff Bridges, “Hey, this guy’s clean!” and that’s that. My ass.

Hidden Figures. Oh God, is this one of those movies where you learn stuff? I hate movies like that. Get it away from me. Less learning more gunfire, please.


By the way, there’s a scene in this movie where Kevin Costner takes a crowbar to the “Whites Only” bathroom sign and says, “At NASA, we all pee the same color.” I can guarantee you A) That never happened, and B) Costner demanded that part be included to give himself a heroic anti-racism moment.

La La Land. Whoa hey, you’re telling me that the odds-on favorite to win is a movie ABOUT the movies? And that it pays homage to old movies while being about the movies? WELL KNOCK ME OVER WITH A FUCKING FEATHER. God, this movie. I bet Seth McFarlane orgasmed INSIDE himself while watching it.


Who could’ve guessed the Academy would eat up this kind of shit? These people are the easiest marks on the planet. Does anyone even remember The Artist, apart from the stupid fucking dog? I think this movie even used the same goddamn font as that one. Next year I’m gonna make a movie called The Movie, starring the corpse of Mickey fucking Rooney and employing a thousand people who live in LA proper and are Academy voters. It’ll be screened exclusively on nickelodeons and win 87 Oscars. I am so, so fed up with this. TV is beating your ass, movies. Maybe you could keep up if you weren’t so busy fingering your own butt.

Lion. What is this? Was this really a movie? Is there a real lion in it? No? Then fuck this.


Manchester by the Sea. I just watched the Patriots come back from 25 down to win a fifth title. I don’t need yet another goddamn victory for New England. This movie can go to hell. WAHHHH I’M FACKIN’ TORCHAHHHHED AND I HAVE A STRAWNG ACCENT. No more. There should be an executive order banning New England movies from this country. It’s a cartel at this point. Oh, you’re telling me that this is yet another movie shot entirely in GreyScope about people living in New England who are SAD? Pass. Maybe you guys wouldn’t be so mopey if you didn’t live in a backwards shithole. Try Playa Del Carmen by the Sea next time.

Moonlight. This is a movie about a gay black kid so if I try to make any joke about it I will be sent straight to Internet jail for life. Anyway, if you are a white dude looking for a way to publicly demonstrate precisely how woke you are, this is the movie for you.


Right on, Mark! I like being able to turn the simple act of watching a movie into the world’s laziest form of social activism. And where is The Nice Guys on this list? This is a goddamn outrage.


Lead Actor

Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea. They’re really gonna do it. They’re really gonna give a fucking Oscar to Ben Affleck’s brother. Why not hand them out to Mark Wahlberg’s posse while they’re at it? “Yeah, let’s get a fackin’ Oscah for Sully, and Sully 2, and Sweet Lou, and Frankie The Quee-ah!” Give me a break. This is worse than the Mara daughters getting regular work.


Andrew Garfield, GunButt Beach. I don’t care how many Oscar noms Garfield gets, he will always go down in history as Bad Elderly Spider-Man. Anyway, Garfield’s main duty in Arterial Spray Creek is to play a pacifist so that Gibson has a convenient excuse to paint the screen with as much blood as humanly possible. And given that Mel Gibson is the guy who once reportedly said, “Fucking Jews... the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” it makes sense that he would cast Garfield as a heroic Christian who refuses to fight in one of Their Wars even though he was conscripted.

By the way, if you’re wondering whether or not Garfield inanely covered for his director’s piggishness, as every actor does for Woody Allen, here is your answer:

“He’s all flesh and blood and passion. [He] wears his heart on his sleeve. You always know what he’s thinking. Which, you know, is interesting sometimes. With someone who’s so emotional, and instinctive, there were times where he would give notes, and coming out of anyone else’s mouth, they would be insulting, but they weren’t coming from him, because he’s got this childlike, guileless kind of quality.”


Yes, that’s right. Mel Gibson, a 61-year-old man with nine kids and thoroughly unhinged views about the world, is just like a CHILD out there. So innocent.

Ryan Gosling, La La Land. He barely sings! Watch that movie and you’ll see Emma Stone singing her ass off, while Gosling barely opens his fucking mouth. You know where La La Land lost me? It was roughly half an hour in, when I had to sit there and listen to Ryan Gosling—Ryan Gosling, of all people—lecture Emma Stone, and the audience by proxy, on the importance of jazz. I don’t want that speech coming from Ryan Gosling. That’s like James Dolan lecturing me about the blues. Kill me now. Here we have Gosling playing his prototypical smug prick and I’m supposed to like him because he honks his horn for a really long time and is jazz purist? And I’m supposed to be SAD that he sells out and gets to hang with John Legend! No deal. I wanted him to drive off an embankment.


Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic. This wasn’t a superhero movie, huh? Then GTFO. By the way, Viggo is 58 years old. 58! I want his drugs.

Denzel Washington, Fences. You know what? I’ve had enough of Denzel. He plays Denzel in EVERY SINGLE FUCKING MOVIE. He starts off surly, and then gets surlier, and then at the end he is reluctantly a little less surly. This man has the range of Rip Taylor. Ask him to do a comedy and he’d probably cut your eyes out.


Lead Actress

Isabelle Huppert, Elle. This is a movie about a woman who is attacked and raped. In other words, it’s French. You can’t get ANY funding to make a movie in France unless you have at least one horrible rape sequence. It’s law over there.


By the way, this movie was directed by the legendary Paul Verhoeven, who is somehow revered despite the fact that’s he made only two good movies: RoboCop and Total Recall. And even though I like both those movies, they weren’t exactly Goodfellas, you know? Oh, are you one of those ironic revisionists who think Starship Troopers was an anti-fascist masterwork? No, no that movie was fucking stupid. You don’t get bonus points for making trash that winks at you about how trashy it is. Verhoeven is the kind of guy who likes to put his most perverted ideas on screen and then gets lauded for it because he’s, like, European. He can eat me.

Ruth Negga, Loving. I was gonna watch this movie on a plane and then the picture crapped out for half a second, which was all the excuse I needed to switch over to The Accountant. “Oops, looks like there’s something wrong with the acclaimed historical movie that will help expand my horizons! Welp, I tried. Time to watch Rain Man Affleck shoot people!”


Loving is the second movie to come out this year from director Jeff Nichols, who specializes in deathly serious movies set in the South where people stare grimly at one another for two hours. REALLY DEEP SHIT. He also made the movie Mud, which features a character literally named Mud and has other characters shouting out “MUD!” every five seconds on screen. Someone force this man to direct a movie set a Canada or something.

Natalie Portman, Jackie. I bet everyone who reads Vanity Fair magazine watched this movie in the nude. The real Jackie O was a legendary badass who watched her husband get murdered in cold blood, and then REFUSED to take off her blood- and brain-spattered dress when she sat with his corpse on a plane ride all the way back to Washington. Somehow, I doubt Queen Padme here was able to convey the gravitas of that particular moment in history, not when she’s emailing 9/11 Treasure Hunt guy whenever she’s hanging out alone in her trailer.


Emma Stone, La La Land. Congrats to Stone for taking Renee Zellweger’s place as the go-to pale actress who stars in Oscar-winning musicals and always looks like she’s about to burst into tears. Also, my favorite Oscar tradition is when they trot out bravely anonymous Oscar voters to MEH away the entire field, like here:

The girl in La La Land [Emma Stone] is going to win because she’s adorable and everybody loves her, but I don’t think she was as wonderful as people are saying.


That’s perfect. “Personally, I would have cast Dakota Fanning in the role.” This voter is the lady in La La Land who walks in on Emma Stone crying to tell the casting agent they have a phone call. “Oh, are you tearing your heart out right now? Can you hurry it up? I have a 2:00.” By the way, this same Oscar voter also said of Mel Gibson, “Even though I’m Jewish… I think he’s a different person now.” I bet you do.

Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins. This is the movie about the lady who can’t sing but gets to play Carnegie Hall anyway because she’s wealthy and well-connected? FUCK this lady. Even Ken Starr didn’t fail upward so blatantly.


And I’m getting tired of Meryl Streep getting an automatic nomination every year despite being in one forgettable movie after another: this movie, The Iron Lady, Into The Woods, Ricki and The Flash (whuh?), August: Osage County, Hope Springs. These are movies that dissolve the second awards season is over. Do an Avengers movie, lady.

Supporting Actor

Mahershala Ali, Moonlight. Wait, this guy isn’t British? I’m stunned. I assumed he was a British actor pretending to be American like every other good actor, but it turns out I was wrong. How the fuck is Ali not British? I feel conned. I think he should have to return all his trophies for leading me on.


Anyway, no one seems to have anything bad to say about Ali because he’s a fine actor and gives tender awards ceremony speeches and is an impeccable dresser and totally got to hook up with Molly Parker on House of Cards and was even a fucking college basketball player. Yes, we’re just PERFECT LITTLE MAHERSHALA, ARE WE?! YOU AMERICAN FUCK. Anyway, Ali is the heavy favorite to win this award, which means he’ll lose it to an old guy. Ask Eddie Murphy or the Sixth Sense kid how the process works.

Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water. Here you go. Here’s an old guy poised to snatch an extra trophy for his case just because he’s old and RESPECTED IN THE INDUSTRY. Bridges could have played this role in his sleep, and I kinda think he did. He just wakes up every five minutes to say something racist and then tips his hat back down again. Then he cries at the end. Ben Foster got robbed.




Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea. It’s a long shot, but you may be looking at the very first ginger actor to win an Oscar. I swear I thought Eddie Redmayne was a ginger, because RED is right in his name. But no! No, turns out Eddie Redmayne is just a pasty British asshole. I’m actually shocked he wasn’t nominated yet again this year for playing an amputee heroin addict or something.

But I digress. All the other gingers to win a modern acting Oscar appear to be women. Young Hedgy here could strike a blow for our own Patrick Redford and other creepy gingers around the world by taking this trophy home. I really hope there’s a scene in this movie where Hedges breaks down and screams at Lil Affleck, “You don’t know what it’s fackin’ like to be a gingah in this town! WE AWLL HAVE OWAH SECRETS!!!”


Dev Patel, Lion. Again, not a real movie. But I’m impressed that the Slumdog Millionaire guy found his way back here. I bet the guy from Life Is Beautiful is wondering how he pulled that off.



Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals. Michael Shannon is clearly an insane person and they should probably give him an Oscar before he kills us all with his death gaze. For all I know, he’s standing outside your window right now, ready to break in and strangle you.


Supporting Actress

Viola Davis, Fences. Ah, the ol’ make-good Oscar, where they give you an Oscar for something forgettable to make up for the Oscar you should have won for something memorable (that would be the time Davis starred in The Help and lost out to Streep doing a funny accent). Anyway, they’re gonna give Davis her Pacino Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award and she should then throw it at Streep’s head.


Naomie Harris, Moonlight. See, now HERE’S a British person. Get your shit together, Mahershala. Please note that while Harris is being lauded for Moonlight, she was also in Collateral Beauty last year, and I don’t want ANYONE to forget how fucking insane that movie was. From the Village Voice recap:

Here’s a promise few movies can make. If you sink two hours into Collateral Beauty now, it’s guaranteed that for the rest of your life, when conversation stalls, you can save the night by asking, “Did you ever see that movie where Will Smith plays an ad executive so shut down with grief over the death of his daughter that his business partners — played by Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, and Michael Peña — hire actors to confront him in public in the roles of Death, Time, and Love, the abstract concepts to whom he has been penning and mailing angry letters?”


If you ever decide to star in yet another poorly disguised Scientology vehicle for Will Smith, it should haunt you from this life to the next. I will write to Death to ensure this happens.

Nicole Kidman, Lion. Time for my favorite game: What Does Nicole Kidman’s Face Look Like This Year? She’s 90% putty at this point.




Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures. I have been told that Octavia is NOT the sassiest character in this movie, which seems like poor sass management to me. If it’s a period piece and it’s got Octavia in it, I demand TRIPLE MEGA SASS, with a side of shit pie to boot.

Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea. Good God, does this woman ever NOT play a sad person? She was sad in Brokeback Mountain. She was sad in Blue Valentine. She abandoned her fucking dog in Wendy and Lucy. And now she’s nominated for yet another tragedy. If I see Michelle Williams’s name on the marquee, I know to smuggle a vial of iocaine powder into the theater so that I can kill myself.


Enjoy the Oscars, everyone!