2024 Kaedrin Movie Award Nominees

Welcome to the 2024 Kaedrin Movie Awards 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 | 2022 | 2023]

Standard disclaimers apply: It must be a 2024 movie (with the one caveat that some 2023 films were not accessible until 2024 and are thus eligible under fiat) and I obviously have to have seen the movie. As of this writing, I have seen 104 movies that could be considered a 2024 release. This is a little ahead of where I was last year, but there are still tons of films I want to catch up with. I’ve probably seen less movies that a lot of critics, but more than your typical moviegoer and certainly enough to populate the nominees. I think that’s enough preamble, let’s get to it:

Best Villain/Badass
Another moderate year for villainy, though I will say that there are actually a few true standouts, and while the list isn’t as long as the Hero list below, it’s still filled with solid options. 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. This exclusion also, um, includes inhuman monsters or creatures (sorry Godzilla, we’ll hit you up in the Arbitrary Awards). Sometimes there’s a fine line here and certain nominees might be borderline, but we’re all just going to have to learn to live with it.

Best Hero/Badass
A pretty good year for heroism, certainly better than villainy, and the list grew quite long, such that there probably could be another 5-10 nominees, but I felt like I should probably narrow it down a little bit. I mean, these are my awards and there’s no rule limiting the number of nominees or anything, but still. Same disclaimers as the villains: 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). Also because the number of straight comedies being released has become quite low in recent years. Offsetting that is other genres that incorporate humor, which means some of these movies aren’t strictly comedies, but they might still have a solid comedic performance. Anywho, a few standouts this year for sure.

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… Worth looking into: How many of these are shot on film as opposed to digital?

Dune 2

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 in this category, but I feel like this year’s list is longer than usual, in part because there were a lot of options (not to mention a lot of overlap between the two genres).

Best Sequel/Reboot/Remake
Always an awkward category to populate, especially given my normal feeling on this sort of thing (i.e. I’m not a huge fan of sequels), but this year wasn’t that hard.

Biggest Disappointment
A category often dominated by sequels and reboots, but the occasional original film makes an appearance. 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. As with the last few years, this category is pretty easy to populate. 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
Always 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.

2024’s 2023 Movie of the Year
This is a weird category that is sometimes difficult to populate. The idea centers around movies I never caught up with last year during the Kaedrin Awards season, but which are worthwhile in their own right. 

So there you have it, please congratulate all of the 2024 Kaedrin Movie Awards nominees! Stay tuned for the winners (probably next week, but you never know), followed by the Arbitrary Awards and (eventually) the Top 10 list. I’m still catching up with a bunch of movies, as this has been a bit of a strange year, so there are a few high profile movies that might actually deserve nominations (maybe you’ll even see one of the winners be a movie that wasn’t nominated – not an unprecedented event!) Only time will tell.

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