2020 Kaedrin Movie Awards

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Welcome to the fifteenth annual Kaedrin Movie Awards! The idea is to recognize films for various achievements that don’t always reflect well on top 10 lists or traditional awards. There are lots of formal award categories and nominees listed below, but once those are announced, we’ll also leave some room for Arbitrary Awards that are more goofy and freeform. Finally, we’ll post a traditional top 10 list (usually sometime in early/mid-February). But first up is the awards! [Previous Installments here: 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019]

Standard disclaimers apply: It must be a 2020 movie (with the one caveat that some 2019 films were not accessible until 2020 and are thus eligible under fiat) and I obviously have to have seen the movie. As of this writing, I have seen 80 films that could be considered a 2020 release. This is significantly less than previous years and probably most critics, but probably more than your average moviegoer and enough to populate these awards.

It’s tempting to blame this entirely on the pandemic, but the truth is that there’s been a lot of small films available, I just didn’t do as well seeking them out until it was pretty late in the year. I’m still working through some things for sure, but delaying any more than normal seems ill-advised (I’m already posting this a couple weeks after most folks do their year end jamboree). The show must go on, and so here goes:

Best Villain/Badass
An interesting year for villainy with a few pretty solid choices, but to my mind, not a real standout. Complicating matters are two villains who turn out to be kinda/sorta not villains. Or at least more sympathetic than you’d usually expect out of a villain. In accordance with tradition, my picks in this category are limited to individuals, not groups (i.e. no vampires or zombies as a general menace, etc…) or ideas.

Best Hero/Badass
A solid year for heroism, and despite the number of lopsided movies (i.e. where you don’t have both hero and villain roles well filled), there’s actually something like parity between the Hero/Villain lists. Again limited to individuals and not groups.

  • Coach, played by Colin Farrell in The Gentlemen
  • Harley Quinn, played by Margot Robbie in Birds of Prey
  • Fred, played by Stephen Lang in VFW
  • Crystal, played by Betty Gilpin in The Hunt
  • Tyler Rake, played by Chris Hemsworth in Extraction
  • Andy, played by Charlize Theron in The Old Guard
  • Kyle, played by Liam Hemsworth in Arkansas
  • Chris, played by Mel Gibson in Fatman
  • Diana Prince / Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman 1984
  • The Protagonist, played by John David Washington in Tenet

Best Comedic Performance
This is sometimes a difficult category to populate due to the prevalence of ensembles in comedy movies (this year being no exception). I also noticed a distinct bias towards smaller side roles or cameos this year, which is neat, but makes it hard to pick those roles as a winner.

Breakthrough Performance
This used to be a category more centered around my personal evaluation of a given actor (rather than a more general industry breakthrough), but it’s trended more towards the youngsters breaking through as time has gone on (this year, we get a minor resurgence in relatively well established actors turning my head for the first time).

Most Visually Stunning
Sometimes even bad movies can look really great… A middling year for this sort of thing, perhaps leaning towards more sober, well-photographed beauty than flashy spectacle, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Blood Machines, a nominee for Most Visually Stunning category

Best Sci-Fi or Horror Film
It’s always nice to throw some love to genres that don’t normally get a lot of recognition in end-of-the-year lists. As an avid SF fan, it’s sad that the genre usually has to be combined with Horror in order to come up with a well rounded set of nominees. This year, though, I probably could have created two modestly populated categories if I wanted, as there were lots of good options in both genres.

Best Sequel/Reboot/Remake
Always an awkward category to populate, especially given my normal feeling on this sort of thing. This year complicates matters a bit because many sequels/reboots/remakes were delayed due to a goddamn plague, but there were still a few decent options.

Bill & Ted Face the Music nominated for best sequel

Biggest Disappointment
A category often dominated by sequels and reboots, but the relative lack of big-ticket franchise entries this year sees a downtick in this category… Some original films are picking up the slack. I should note at this point that sometimes I actually enjoy these movies… but my expectations were just too high when I saw them. Related reading: Joe Posnanski’s Plus-Minus Scale (these movies scored especially poor on that scale).

Best Action Sequence
This award isn’t for individual action sequences, but rather an overall estimation of each film, and there’s a decent enough range here, but I suspect the pandemic put the brakes on some of these too.

Best Plot Twist/Surprise
I suppose even listing that there is a twist is a bit of a spoiler, so I guess we’ll just have to risk it.

Best High Concept Film
A bit of a nebulous concept for this one, but I think the category fills out nicely, with a couple of standouts.

2020’s 2019 Movie of the Year
This is a weird category. Once I get past my top 10, I rarely tackle challenging material from the previous year, though I do sometimes find a few diamonds in the rough. This category emerged from one frustrating year in which I saw two movies far too late for the top 10, so I created this award to recognize them. Since then, the nominees are pretty lackluster (and indeed, the amount of films I watch that qualify are usually pretty low to start with). The last couple of years, for whatever reason, I’ve managed to see more things that would qualify for this than usual. None that I think would override my top 10 from last year, but it’s always nice when this category fills up.

So there you have it! Another set of nominations for the Kaedrin Movie Awards, well ahead of the Oscars, which have been delayed due to the Pandemic. This means that all the Kaedrin Movie Awards, including Arbitrary Awards and a Top 10 will most likely be posted before the Oscar nominations even come out, which will be a first (we’re usually well correlated, with only a week or so’s difference), though in true Kaedrin fashion, we’re still well after everyone else in the world has finished their 2020 recaps.

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