The nominations for the 2022 Kaedrin Movie Awards were announced last week. The overall awards season still has not especially recovered from its pandemic era woes. The Golden Globes, plagued by scandals and corruption, have faded. The Academy Awards struggle to find an unobjectible host, and though last year’s slap may boost viewership this year, they’ve still got a relatability problem (though there are some popular choices they could make this year to reverse course on that front). But through it all, the Kaedrin Movie Awards carries on with the same delayed schedule that befits my status as “not a critic with access to screeners”. So while I’m finishing up with poorly distributed prestige pictures, I’ll hand out these more ridiculous awards, let’s get to the 2022 Kaedrin Movie Award Winners:
Best Villain/Badass: Chef Julian Slowik, played by Ralph Fiennes in The Menu, I’m actually a little surprised that the voting came out this way (and yes, there’s only one vote, mine, but still). This partly speaks to a poor year in villainy, but The Menu is a film that was surprisingly well done and deserving of recognition. It probably won’t be making the top 10, so this is a pretty good place for it, and to be fair, Fiennes’ fed-up chef is a wonderful villain with a demented plan.
Runners up to Stephen Lang’s performance in Avatar: The Way of Water, which is great, even if I wasn’t entirely taken with the story, and Jobu Tupaki, played by Stephanie Hsu in Everything Everywhere All at Once, who was pretty fun.
Best Hero/Badass: Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick. In a much stronger year for heroism, there as still a pretty obvious choice in Maverick. This is Cruise’s second win in the category, and I’d have to look it up, but this might be the first time an actor repeats with two different characters (he previously won for one of the Mission Impossible movies).
As for runners up, well, most of the other nominees are pretty great… they just can’t quite stand up to Maverick!
Best Comedic Performance: Saoirse Ronan in See How They Run. Another surprising win, I think, which befits the movie: I definitely wasn’t expecting to enjoy it that much, and a big part of that was Saoirse Ronan’s dry humor and delivery. Just perfect comedic timing, and a really underrated movie. Jackass Forever suffers from the ensemble problem here (I nominated Johnny Knoxville as the putative leader of the group, but they really deserve recognition as a whole – this is a common problem with this award that I have no real solution for other than this parenthetical). Otherwise, I really liked Daniel Radcliffe in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and John Hamm in Confess, Fletch – both underrated movies with poor distribution that are worth seeking out and very funny.
Breakthrough Performance: Mia Goth in X and Pearl. Horror movies tend to underperform in awards season, but not at the Kaedrin Movie Awards! Got put forward a trio of performances across Ti West’s unexpected series of ambitious slashers (with another apparently to come!) She plays a wide gamut of emotions and challenging scenarios. Acting against herself in a scene, seducing a scarecrow, stalking the grounds with an axe, or giving a corker of a monologue, she does it all.
Jenna Ortega in Scream (2022), X, and Wednesday was also under consideration here, but her roles were smaller and less varied (and as great as she was in Wednesday, it’s a TV show!) Finally, it’s worth calling out Gabriel LaBelle in The Fabelmans as a larval Spielberg stand-in that genuinely evokes the younger Spielberg character.
Most Visually Stunning: Mad God. I’m not entirely in love with the movie overall (I prefer a little more in the way of actual plot or story), but Phil Tippet’s stop-motion labor of love is truly something to behold, with wall-to-wall gorgeous grotesques populated throughout. A truly astounding and imaginative spectacle that’s unlike anything I’d seen before.
Speaking of which, Avatar: The Way of Water also deserves a bit of a callout as a unique theatergoing experience. I normally hate 3D and I’m not entirely sold on high-frame-rate, but I suspect the confluence of those two technologies, combined with James Cameron’s innate visual prowess, made it so that I didn’t get a headache like I do for every other 3D movie I see. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is another stop-motion marvel that, in any other year, might have taken the cake. Also just wanted to mention Three Thousand Years of Longing, which does its best to use digital filmmaking for vivid colors instead of dark, dull, muddy visuals (seriously, towards the end of the film Tilda Swinton is walking around in a park and the vivid green grass and bright lighting was so refreshing in this age of too-dark cinematography and color correction).
Best Sci-Fi or Horror Film: Nope. Jordan Peele does it again, and this is a sorta combo Horror and Sci-Fi picture, though it obviously leans horror. Honorable mentions to Everything Everywhere All at Once (best multiverse movie of the year), Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg’s back in body horror, baby!), Barbarian (surprising and deft tonal balancing act going on here), and X (Ti West’s ambitious, grimy sex and violence epic). A pretty solid and fascinating year of horror flicks, actually, and even stuff not nominated was pretty good.
Best Sequel/Reboot/Remake: Top Gun: Maverick. I usually try to spread the love around with awards, but like everyone else, I was taken with Top Gun: Maverick and I can’t really justify giving this to any of the other nominees. Which, to be fair, are a pretty good bunch for a category that I typically loathe. Special mention to Jackass Forever and the criminally underseen Confess, Fletch. Overall, a pretty solid list of nominees this year for a category I usually find difficult to populate.
Biggest Disappointment: Black Adam. I really wanted to get behind a Rock centered superhero movie, but this thing was an absolute mess, leading to probably the biggest chasm between expectations and disappointment. The other one that came close is The Bubble, which has a great cast and Judd Apatow, but was also just interminable. The other nominees weren’t particularly great, but I also wasn’t expecting that much out of them, so the disappointment was commensurately lower.
Best Action Sequences: Ambulance. Alright, who gave Michael Bay a drone? This award could very well go to Top Gun: Maverick, but I’ve already sung enough of its praises here (and this isn’t the last we’ll see of it), so I figured I’d spread it around to the underseen Michael Bay actioner that I really loved. Lots of other great nominees here, and I do want to call out a couple of DTV actioners like Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday and Lost Bullet 2: Back for More, both really fun little action flicks (and both sequels to same – all four movies are worth seeking out). The Big Four is another obscure one that I don’t see people talking about and is worth seeking out (it’s on Netflix). RRR also worth a mention, but I preferred the director’s previous work on the Baahubali films.
Best Plot Twist/Surprise: Barbarian. This is one of those awards where it’s a bit of a spoiler even talking about the vague concept of a surprise, so if you go into these movies with a “surprise me!” attitude, you might find it underwhelming. But Barbarian was one of those movies I went into knowing as little as I could about it, and so I was pretty consistently surprised throughout. Runners up nods to Bodies Bodies Bodies for almost retroactively making me love the movie, Athena for a comically provocative coda, and Decision to Leave for, well, let’s not spoil it.
Best High Concept Film: Crimes of the Future. Yeah, this category is a bit nebulous, but I’m always onboard with Cronenberg’s wholly invented areas of science like… whatever the hell is going on in this movie. Also high concept: whatever it is that Kristen Stewart’s performance is doing here (which, to be clear, I loved). I suppose Everything Everywhere All at Once deserves an extra mention, even if “multiverse” movies are all the rage these days. Brian and Charles is probably the most obscure but deserving nominee here as well, an earnest and oddly sweet mock-doc drama. Nope has sorta stealth high concept stuff going on, which puts a nice spin on familiar tropes. The other nominees are perhaps not as high concept, but all pretty decent…
2022’s 2021 Movie of the Year: The Rescue. I was really taken with this documentary about the rescue of twelve boys and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand, perhaps in part because it illustrates why I prefer documentaries over dramatizations of real life events… In other words, I preferred this documentary to Thirteen Lives, the Ron Howard dramatization of the same events which is actually pretty damn good. I just would rather watch documentaries about this sort of thing. Other nominees for this were also pretty solid, including a couple of Oscar noms that I caught up with late (or would have otherwise ignored) and some genre stuff that I let linger for some reason (but which were all worthwhile)…
Congratulations to all the 2022 Kaedrin Movie Award winners! And stay tuned, for next week, the awards go arbitrary!