2022 Kaedrin Movie Award Nominees

1 Comment / 2022 Movie Awards / By /

Welcome to the 2022 Kaedrin Movie Award season, which we’re kicking off with nominees in our standard categories! The idea is to recognize films for 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 | 2020 | 2021]

Standard disclaimers apply: It must be a 2022 movie (with the one caveat that some 2021 films were not accessible until 2022 and are thus eligible under fiat) and I obviously have to have seen the movie. As of this writing, I have seen 94 films that could be considered a 2022 release. This is precisely where I was last year at this time, which makes sense given how similar my movie watching habits were for these two years. It’s below what many critics have seen, but probably a lot more than your average moviegoer and certainly enough to populate the awards… which we should get to right now:

Best Villain/Badass
Not the greatest year for villainy, though the category did end up filling out well enough in the end. 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. I’m kinda expanding this to include (er, exclude) creatures, even individual creatures. On the other hand, there is a robot on the list, so, I dunno, we’ll all just have to deal with it.

Best Hero/Badass
A better year overall for heroism and indeed, I actually pruned the list a bit (which, given how long the lists are for these badass categories, is saying something). One fun thing about both the hero and villain categories is that they are not as dominated by superhero movies anymore, even if there are a few token representatives from the genre… Again limited to individuals and not groups/creatures.

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). That being said, there were definitely a few standout solo performances this year that are definitely worth recognition.

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…

Most Visually Stunning
Sometimes even bad movies can look really great… But this is a pretty solid list!

Pinocchio

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.

Best Sequel/Reboot/Remake
Always an awkward category to populate, especially given my normal feeling on this sort of thing (i.e. not a huge fan of sequels).

Biggest Disappointment
A category often dominated by sequels and reboots, but original stuff has been picking up steam in recent years. Not sure if that’s good or bad… Note that these movies don’t necessarily need to be “bad” in order to be a “disappointment”. Basically, these movies scored poorly on Joe Posnanski’s Plus-Minus Scale.

Best Action Sequences
This award isn’t for individual action sequences, but rather an overall estimation of each film. We’ve got a pretty great, extensive lineup this year. The added accessibility of streaming DTV actioners has been a boon to this category.

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

Best High Concept Film
A bit of a nebulous concept for this category, but there’s some good stuff worth recognizing here because they took chances on a weird concept.

2022’s 2021 Movie of the Year
This is a weird category that is sometimes difficult to populate. During the pandemic, things were a little weird, but we’ve seemingly emerged from that weirdness. Still, there’s some decent stuff on this list that I’m glad I caught up with in 2022, even if I don’t know that any of these would kick something off my top 10 from last year…

So there you have it, please congratulate all of the 2022 Kaedrin Movie Award nominees! Stay tuned for the winners (probably next week, but you never know), followed by the Arbitrary Awards and Top 10 list. I’m still catching up with various flicks, because as usual, those 9 and 10 slots in the top 10 are a little difficult to fill (not, I should add, because there aren’t worthy candidates, but more because there are so many vying for those slots)…

1 thought on “2022 Kaedrin Movie Award Nominees”

  1. Pingback: 2022 Kaedrin Movie Award Winners - Kaedrin Weblog

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *