Year: 2022

Glitter is a word that can strike instant panic into even the most crafty parent. It’s something that a lot of parents (and many schools) won’t allow across the threshold because it’s known to stick around for months, sometimes years. It gets stuck to everything, even your child’s hair. No one is immune from its sticky little wrath of sparkle. But what if you succumb to its allure? Or your job requires you to work with those little shiny flakes? How do you keep tiny hands out of the pot when you’re not around?

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For one mom, keeping it hidden away in her craft room was the solution and it worked out well. That was, until her toddler found her way into the space unsupervised and decided to turn a perfectly tidy room into a snow globe of glitter. Hayley Colton, who makes custom tumblers and shares her work on TikTok, recently discovered that her toddler set off a glitter bomb in her workspace. But instead of getting angry and yelling, Colton realized her daughter was emulating what she saw her mom do on a near-daily basis.

Colton posted a video to TikTok to explain: “So my daughter got into my glitter and made her own little glitter mixture, and rather than flipping out like I probably do too often, I sat back and thought about it and realized she watches me every day make stuff and play in this glitter. I can’t blame her for wanting to play in it too.”

@hayleybug.artstudio

Please excuse my voice I know I hate it too 😩 #toddlerlife #toddlermom #stayingcalm #parenting #glitter

@hayleybug.artstudio

Please excuse my voice I know I hate it too 😩 #toddlerlife #toddlermom #stayingcalm #parenting #glitter

After the incident, Colton collected as much of the glitter as she could pick up and put it in a small box so she could turn her daughter’s mixture into something she could use every day. She grabbed a small metal tumbler and got to work coating it with epoxy and sprinkling the glitter onto the tumbler, adding some lettering. The adorable little tumbler reads, “If I’m a mess, that means I have been learning #toddlerlife.” Colton admitted she loved the glitter mixture her daughter made and thinks the tumbler turned out pretty cute.

Commenters on the video loved how Colton handled the situation and praised her for being calm, when it would’ve been easy to be upset. One commenter said “We love non toxic parenting,” with a smiling emoji with floating hearts. Another wrote, “Question: Did you have any kind of calm discussion about like asking first or boundaries after this happened?” To which Colton replied, “Yes, of course we had a talk about only mixing glitter with mommy and not by herself.”

Parenting can be hard sometimes, and it’s helpful to see how other parents handle stressful situations, and maybe pick up some tips. Colton handled this situation like a champ and by sharing about it publicly, she’s showing other parents how to turn mess into art. Looks she’s got a future business partner on her hands.

Jimmy Kimmel made headlines earlier this year for saying that Spider-Man: No Way Home should’ve been nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards — whose awards telecast (finally) take place this Sunday. Forget the matter of whether or not Kimmel was being sarcastic at the time (at least partly, in my opinion), it was the perfect clickbait story because it gave people on the internet the opportunity to do what we do best: argue with each other. And on shaky pretexts.

Does saying Spider-man deserved to be nominated for Best Picture mean it’s in your top 10 for the year? Or does it just mean that it’s better than at least one of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture? For me, the answer to the first question is absolutely not, and the answer to the second question is… maybe? For his part, Kimmel singled out Don’t Look Up as an undeserving Best Picture nominee that Spider-man could’ve potentially replaced, and… sure, why not. I suppose it all comes down to how you rank a flawed, sporadically entertaining attempt at something against an incredibly slick achievement in giving the piggies three different kinds of slop. I’d probably agree with Kimmel and go with the latter; Spider-man was pretty good slop.

This is all a long way of saying that it’s easy to argue that a particular movie should or shouldn’t have been nominated for an Oscar (where is the love for Green Knight and Red Rocket, you ignorant apes!), but for better or worse, our choices have been set. Now is the time to argue about which is the best.

To that end, I’m offering you my own rankings as tribute. The following is how I would rank the best 2021 movies nominated for Best Picture at the 2022 Oscars. This is obviously a work of subjective opinion, so if you find yourself disagreeing with anything here, just take a deep breath, find a bathroom, and say “it’s okay to be wrong” three times into the mirror. At which point I will materialize by your side and pull down my pants.

10. West Side Story

I didn’t even review this, my sense at the time being that a two-hour and 36-minute musical version of Romeo & Juliet, remade from a 1950s musical, wasn’t going to be my cup of tea. I caught this on HBO Max the other night and… now I can confirm. It is not.

A lot of people blamed West Side Story‘s relatively poor word of mouth and subpar box office gross on people not liking musicals, but I’m not so sure that was the issue. At least, not exactly. People might say they don’t like West Side Story because they don’t like musicals, but that’s probably because West Side Story isn’t offering much beyond the general idea of being musical. There’s no particular point of view or compelling take on an old story or undeniably catchy music that would make it either an entertaining romp or a compelling story. As an artistic gesture, it’s more like “Hey, you guys like musicals, right? Well here’s a musical for ya!”

When that’s the pitch, of course the person who turns it down is going to blame musicals. I think we can all agree that Steven Spielberg shoots a gorgeous scene, and West Side Story is certainly nice to look at, but I have more or less the same questions about West Side Story as I did about Cyrano: What are we doing here?

This was definitely a gorgeous, lovingly-crafted version of a thing, but I don’t quite understand what made the filmmakers want to make that thing. West Side Story is a musical created in the 1950s, retelling Romeo & Juliet with rival Puerto Rican and Irish gangs as the Montagues and Capulets. Romeo & Juliet was already an old story in the 16th century, sort of the definitive version of “crazy love.” West Side Story was certainly a dutiful retelling of that, with a new setting and songs, but not much in the way of a hook. Even Steven Sondheim admitted at the time, “I’ve never met a Puerto Rican.”

Which is to say: there’s a big hole where an actual perspective should be. Spielberg’s version “fixes” the most basic of issues with the original — like not having white actors in brownface play the Puerto Ricans, and not using subtitles for the Spanish dialogue (uh… sure?) — but it fails to find what it needed most: any take on the material that might’ve made it interesting to someone in 2021.

So what is it, then? A museum piece for people who want to see a “truer” version of a corny fifties musical? It has a story that’s fine, with some songs that are fine (the “Cool” number was easily the high-water mark) and combining the two doesn’t make the whole any better than fine. It just makes it long.

For my money, nothing in West Side Story was as good as Channing Tatum’s “No Dames” number in Hail Caesar.

This was a brilliant parody of the format, a cool production in its own right, and hilarious to boot. Now that I would’ve watched two more hours of.

9. King Richard

I admit it, after Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, Straight Outta Compton… part of me hoped that we as a culture would be done with the vanity biopic. Then came the story of Richard Williams, father of tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams, as told in a movie produced by the Williams family. Would you believe that Richard Williams was an unorthodox genius, according to this film? Who protected his daughters from a ravenous media and defied the conventional wisdom while raising a pair of champions? Who never misbehaved, even as teenagers? Gosh, what a story!

Watching fictional Ice Cube, played by Ice Cube’s son, pen the first lines of the screenplay for Friday in Straight Outta Compton was sort of funny, even if I’m fairly certain it didn’t happen quite that way in real life. In King Richard, there’s a scene where a neighbor calls CPS on Richard Williams for being so hard on his kids. In the movie, she’s clearly just a jealous hater, but it’s impossible to watch without wondering what that scene actually looked like from an outsider’s perspective. Taking King Richard at anything resembling face value would require a level of credulousness and subtext-blindness I just can’t muster.

Even if you could, what would you really get out of it? The knowledge that Richard Williams was right all along? The joy of watching Will Smith overact? Please just give him an Oscar already, he’s trying so hard.

8. Don’t Look Up

This was the movie Jimmy Kimmel chose to single out, and for good reason: it became the basis for the biggest movie fight we had all year (“we” defined here as those of us who compulsively overshare our movie opinions online). If you didn’t like it, it was because you didn’t understand the climate change metaphor or care about climate change as a phenomenon. If you did like it, you were a smug prick in love with your own voice and with heavy-handed metaphors. I saw one of those “brutally honest Oscar ballot” posts recently where the anonymous Academy voter called it “a one-joke movie.”

Which is bizarre, because say what you will about Don’t Look Up, it did have a lot of jokes. Anyway, I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. A lot of people are rightly sick of Adam McKay’s whole deal, but there were a lot of great things in Don’t Look Up — Cate Blanchett’s news anchor, the grace scene, Jonah Hill playing what I assume was more or less Jonah Hill, the end gag with the alien thingy — even if it was too long and didn’t really hang together as a complete movie. It wasn’t great but it was fine.

7. The Power Of The Dog

I’ve essentially become a conscientious objector when it comes to Jane Campion movies. I accept that many people love them and that they never do much for me. She’s great with actors, with textures, and with setting compelling scenes, to the point that I’ve never considered not finishing one of her films. They’re always compelling, in that sense. Yet when I get to the end of her movies, I always find myself thinking “that’s it?”

That was basically the deal with The Power Of The Dog. It was interesting enough, and I appreciated the Bronco Henry storyline for basically being the arthouse Bill Brassky, but that Big Surprise Ending felt more like a late-second-act complication than something that tied the whole movie together. Mostly I appreciate Kodi Smit-McPhee for being an excellent human sight gag.

6. Nightmare Alley

Guillermo del Toro doing a movie about 30s carnies felt like a match made in heaven for the first two-thirds or so of Nightmare Alley. Then Bradley Cooper’s character left the carnival and fell in with Cate Blanchett’s character (who was too subdued and not really one of her best roles) and the whole thing got a lot less interesting. It did look great though.

5. CODA

CODA tells the kinda schmaltzy, kinda corny story of a Child Of Deaf Parents trying to make her way as a teenager in Massachusetts. On paper, CODA is pretty lame, a girl who just wants to sing, whose parents just don’t understand, because they’re DEAF! They can’t even hear the music! (Did we not already cover this in Mr. Holland’s Opus?)

But CODA ended up being a record sale out of Sundance, I suspect partly because festival movies are often so dreary, meandering, flawed, challenging, dull… that when a slickly conventional feel-good picture comes along, it ends up feeling like a revelation by comparison.

CODA feels like an afternoon special, and as someone who grew up around a lot of deaf people (my father taught sign language) it seemed like they vastly overstated how hard it is for deaf people to communicate with the hearing. I don’t remember it being that hard, but maybe that’s just me only remembering being on the hearing side of things. Anyway, CODA is kind of a cheesy afternoon special, but it was mostly a pretty good afternoon special. If anything made it more than average, it was Emilia Jones’ voice. The girl sings her ass off. CODA used music to turn otherwise middling schmaltz into something more in exactly the way West Side Story mostly did not.

4. Belfast

Belfast is even closer to a great movie, a 60-year-old Belfast-bred actor’s answer to Ladybird or Brooklyn. Kenneth Branagh should do personal more often. And Jaime Dornan and Catríona Balfe both looked insanely good in wool, in a way that made it impossible not to swoon a little. There were a handful of cinematic memoirs that came out around the same time, and all things considered, Belfast was much better made and focused than The Tender Bar.

Even so, Kenneth Branagh is still kind of a cornball at heart. Even in his most personal film he still makes some obnoxiously conventional choices. Did we really need war depicted through the faux-innocent perspective of a child? Jude Hill was great for a 10-year-old, but he’s still a 10-year-old, and there are certain things you shouldn’t ask of child actors — like being the emotional anchor for scenes in your cinematic memoir with their faces framed in close-up, say. Child actors shouldn’t be a thing! It’s a harsh truth we all must accept! Just PEN15 everyone, you’ll hardly even notice!

Sorry, I always digress when I get to complaining about child actors. Anyway, Belfast‘s opening shots of the Belfast skyline were so beautiful that they made me wish the whole film had been in color. Instead, Branagh made the dubious decision to fade to black and white for the flashback scenes (which is to say, the entire movie). Wait, it’s in black and white because it’s the PAST? Oy. Isn’t anyone else sick of “it’s in black and white because art” yet?

And yet, here we are, talking about Belfast as a Best Picture nominee. I hate “black and white because art” as a concept, but I can’t deny it as a successful strategy. “Ooh, black and white, it must be art.”

(Do not take this opportunity to talk shit on The Artist, The Artist was great).

3. Drive My Car

Drive My Car is probably the movie I struggle with the most in this ranking. Maybe because it almost feels like two movies. There’s the one that’s almost painfully arthouse conventional — the protagonist mourning a dead child (and more!) who bonds with someone else who has also lost when she becomes his driver. The ol’ trauma plot! All suitably understated and full of people doing theater because ART. It’s Driving Miss Manchester By The Sea, as written by Noah Baumbach! Why must arthouse filmmakers persist in their delusion that grief is the most interesting emotion?

But then Drive My Car is also this other movie, one that I wholeheartedly love, a really weird story about a guy whose wife becomes possessed by a story demon after they have sex. He can only finish her script by collaborating with the man who has cuckolded him. That movie ruled.

Anyway, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend three-hour movies about grief, but ultimately I am glad that I saw this one. It helps that the whole thing looked gorgeous and had countless loving shots of a 1990s Saab. If you’re going to make a car into movie character, a 90s Saab is a great choice. Saabs look like they were designed by someone who had heard about cars second-hand but had never seen one. They’re like the Kodi Smit-McPhees of cars.

2. Dune

The first two movies on this list are my top two by a mile, but harder to rank against one another. I was a total Dune virgin when I saw this one and I loved Denis Villeneuve’s take on it, virtually without reservation. Dune made me feel the way I assume people who are really into Star Wars feel about Star Wars. Star Wars by comparison feels like trying to have the icing without the cake. In Dune, suddenly all the fighting and space colonialism and, yes, magic, has a logic to it, and one that doesn’t rest on “oh, well these people who are good represent ‘the light’ and these ones who are bad represent ‘the dark.’”

Dune gives all the players real motivations and something to fight over, without losing any of the goofiness and zany creativity. Do the sand dance or else the giant worms will eat you! Genius. Villeneuve’s natural seriousness (which has occasionally grated on me in certain movies) and flair for spectacle pairs perfectly with subject matter as naturally wacky as Dune, which seems to waffle between brutally cutting satire and deliciously eccentric flights of fancy.

Dune also felt like further confirmation that even if Hollywood hasn’t turned Jason Momoa into a brilliant actor, they have gotten great at figuring out which movies and scenes could do with more Jason Momoa. I don’t need Jason Momoa to be Daniel Day-Lewis, most times I just need him to be Jason Momoa. “Okay, now for this scene, I want you to really get in there and be Jason Momoa. Action!”

In Dune he got to be Extremely Jason and Incredibly Momoa and it was perfect.

1. Licorice Pizza

Licorice Pizza is a bit of a shaggy dog story, but then all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies are kind of like that, aren’t they? Yes it “meandered.” No, it wasn’t “tight.” But when your scenes are this beautiful and your episodes this memorable a sort of episodic structure works just fine. His movies have quiet parts and loud parts, like a Pixies song. When was the last time a filmmaker made Sean Penn this likable?

Who else would even be brave enough to set a film in Southern California starring a bunch of legacy celebrities and have it be about an inappropriate love affair between an adult and a teen? It’s like Anderson spent this entire film whacking Q-Anon’s cage with a stick and tossing in chunks of raw meat.

For me Licorice Pizza was more than just the tale of two fucked up people seeing in each other only the stuff that they wanted to, it was like a rosetta stone for Paul Thomas Anderson’s brain. It contained all his standard characters and pet themes, from lovable hucksters to pseudo-celebrities to overgrown children running around (literally running, in many cases) with no adult supervision — set in his favorite decade, the 1970s, the decade of no adult supervision. Only this time the story was so clearly personal that it offered not just his pet themes but an exploration of how they came to be his pet themes.

When you watch almost every shitty movie that comes out as a job, you occasionally get to wondering how you ever did this for fun. Then a movie like Licorice Pizza comes out and reminds you how good movies can be.

The Academy Awards take place Sunday March 27 at 5 pm ET. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can check out his film review archive here.

While meeting with NATO allies in Brussels, President Joe Biden was essentially asked by an ABC reporter if he was perhaps too quick to rule out starting “World War III” as a means of deterring Vladimir Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine. It was an odd moment to say the least, and while Biden fielded the question well, you can tell by the puzzled look on his face that he can’t believe what he was just asked.

Here’s Cecelia Vega’s full question, and while you can kinda see where she’s coming from, it’s hard not to interpret her line of thought as endorsing engaging Russia militarily, which would end badly for everyone. There’s a reason why the Cold War was cold, people.

“Sir, you’ve made it very clear in this conflict that you did not want to see World War III. But is it possible that, in expressing that so early, that you were too quick to rule out direct military intervention in this war. Could Putin have been emboldened, knowing that you were not going to get involved directly in this conflict?”

Biden’s response: “No and no.” You can see the exchange below, and Biden’s facial expression really ties the whole thing together:

Meanwhile, on social media, people can’t believe that a journalist for ABC News is literally out here asking if maybe Joe Biden made a mistake by not immediately sparking a global conflict that could end in nuclear war. Folks had a lot of thoughts about the current state of the media, but there was also a considerable amount of praise for Biden shutting the whole thing down like day-old malarkey.

(Via Aaron Rupar on Twitter)

This wasn’t initially the plan, to try to watch every movie that ever won Best Picture, then write a piece dissecting what that even means during the week leading up to the Oscars. It started when I saw a tweet about “the most recent movie to win Best Picture that I haven’t seen.” So, at that moment, I decided I would watch mine, which was, at the time, Shakespeare in Love, a movie I’ve avoided kind of out spite because of the whole Saving Private Ryan thing. A movie that turned out to be completely fine, but for the life of me I still don’t understand how it won Best Picture. But, then, as you probably realize, every time I took a “most recent Best Picture winner” off the board, another one replaces it. And that new one would taunt me until I watched it, too. It’s a funny thing, because that feeling of not understanding how this movie won Best Picture? Yeah, I had that a lot. When I started this my most recent Best Picture winner I hadn’t seen came out in 1998. As I type this, the most recent Best Picture winner I haven’t seen is Cimarron, which came out in 1931. [Update: I am now to The Broadway Melody.] Before the Oscars air on Sunday, I will have seen them all.

When you watch as many Best Picture winners as I have in this short amount of time, it starts to become like a word that you say to yourself over and over again until it sounds alien. Where you can’t help but question everything about what these movies are supposed to represent, what it means they won Best Picture, and why I was even doing this in the first place. When I started my attitude was, “Surely I’ve seen most of these already.” Yes, technically that was true. Come Sunday there will be 93 winners and, yes, even before this, I had seen most. At first it would fill huge gaps. For instance, after I watched Ordinary People*, I got to skip the entire decade of the 1970s and head straight to Oliver!.

*Now, I had seen Ordinary People before. When I was six years old my mom wanted to see it and instead of getting a babysitter, or leaving me with my grandparents, she took me with her. At this point in my life, to the best of my memory, I had seen two movies in a theater: The Empire Strikes Back and Any Which Way You Can. I was under the impression all movies were either set in space or featured a fun-loving orangutan. Ordinary People is neither set in space nor features an orangutan. Ordinary People plays much better now as an adult than it did when I was six. Also, my rule became that if I hadn’t seen a movie since I was a little kid, I had to watch it again.

As the years got older, the movies I got to skip because I had already seen them got less and less frequent. And I was starting to realize that there was probably a reason that these were the Best Picture winners (35 to date and 39 when it’s all said and done) I hadn’t seen. Namely, either they weren’t very good or they are incredibly long. (With a few notable exceptions.)

There does, historically, taken as a whole, seem to be a certain type of movie that wins Best Picture. But what is a Best Picture winner anyway? At its most distilled, it’s a movie that a finite group of people liked the most during a set period of a few days without the guide of any historical context. And there’s no doubt another movie could have easily won if that same vote was taken a month earlier or a month later. No one in their right mind would ever argue that each one of these movies are the best movies from each individual year, yet they get to have that title for eternity. The Greatest Show on Earth, a movie about the circus and not much more other than a pretty cool train crash scene, is not a better movie than High Noon, a meditation on heroism and violence. It’s not even close. The Greatest Show on Earth is the Best Picture from 1952 and nothing will change that.

Historically, movies that seem to win Best Picture fall into a few categories. There are obviously the epics, which take place over a long period of time, and started winning these things in the early 1930s, like Cavalcade. Eventually, starting around Gone With the Wind, these added the aspect of “shooting outside,” which gives us beautiful landscapes to look at that people still like today, as we saw in Nomadland just last year. So much so that even a movie like Gone With the Wind is going to win Best Picture. A movie, rewatching today, isn’t simply littered with offensive stereotypes “of the time,” but has a distinct point of view that the Old South was great until the Yankees showed up and ruined everything. (This is another movie I had not seen since I was a little kid. I was expecting some not great stuff, but I did not remember this was an almost four-hour lecture about the merits of the Confederacy.)

War movies are popular, especially if they are a metaphor for a current war, even though the war being depicted is another war in the past. Though, it was interesting during World War II how many Best Picture winners were about a war that, then, no one yet knew the outcome. Casablanca obviously (a movie, for the record, I’ve seen many times before), but also Mrs. Miniver, a movie that will, from now on, be the answer to, “What movie surprised you the most?” I had avoided Mrs. Miniver because I had assumed it was about “London high society.” And there’s some of that in the first act, but that’s by design. I had no idea Mrs. Miniver is a full-on war movie. From the revelers in London bars assuming Germany was bluffing, to the horrific bombing of London, to a recreation of Dunkirk only two years after the actual events occurred, Mrs. Miniver has a lot of eerie parallels to the events we see today in Ukraine. It’s a fantastic film and, alone, was worth doing this project. (I will add, William Wyler’s other Best Picture winner from this era, The Best Years of Our Lives, is also terrific. But that didn’t come as a surprise.)

The movies that hold up the least well feel like movies voters voted for because either, “I’ve never seen that before,” or felt unique in some way. Movies like the aforementioned The Greatest Show on Earth, “Ohhh, the circus!,” or Around the World in 80 Days, which has no real plot and is just an excuse to show scenery. Or Tom Jones, which is kind of wacky in a modern way, but also clumsy because that form of wacky hadn’t been quite figured out yet. A more recent example of this is The Artist. A movie, I admit, in 2011 I was kind of all in on for all the reasons I just laid out, then haven’t thought about since and will most likely never watch again. The 1930s feature some good movies like It Happened One Night (a movie I had seen), but for the most part the concept of movies with sound is still fairly new, so I can see why people got dazzled by something as bad as The Great Ziegfeld.

But the most baffling winners are movies like 1944’s Bing Crosby vehicle Going My Way. It’s not bad, but there’s also nothing remarkable about it. Some of the truly bad movies winning make more sense because they fit into that “unique” category. Driving Miss Daisy has no business winning Best Picture over Do the Right Thing, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense it won. It’s a movie about race that makes white people feel good about themselves, which also seems like a key to victory, which happened again just three years ago with Green Book. (I’ve noticed movies considered ahead of their time do not win. Which makes sense because, by definition, a movie ahead of its time can’t win anything the year it came out.) But a movie like Going My Way, I can’t even begin to think of an explanation, especially up against far superior movies like Double Indemnity and Gaslight. (My only guess is, as we know today, sometimes there are votes to make up for past snubs. Unfortunately, I don’t have near the time to get into the weeds of every year’s individual votes, but I suspect some of these odd choices stem, sometimes, from something like that. (Oh, as an aside, if you put “God Save the Queen” in your movie, that has to increase the odds of winning. I can’t believe how many times I’ve heard that song over the last month.)

It’s also weird to look at the movies decade by decade. The movies that won Best Picture during the 1970s are actually a pretty good representation of what was both good and popular during that decade. A decade where both The Godfather and Rocky would both win. As opposed to the 1980s where that is not the case. As movies got more commercial, voters short-circuited a bit and started handing out Best Picture to movies that at least felt like the old epics. At least that’s the only explanation for a movie like Out of Africa, a movie that kind of tricked everyone into thinking it was important. But long epics like Gandhi (actually, not bad), Chariots of Fire, Amadeus (good movie), and The Last Emperor (also not bad) seemed to win most years. (Terms of Endearment, Platoon, and Rain Man are the kind of exceptions that broke through as good movies people were actually watching that decade.)

Which brings us to now, and, in a historical context, the last decade or so of Best Picture winners is so scattershot it feels like both a correction of the last 93 years and a microcosm. Truly deserving movies like Moonlight and Parasite feel like corrections. 12 Years a Slave could be a correction, but it’s also an epic. Argo and Spotlight kind of fill the more traditional political thriller/scandal, mainstream movie. But then we still get a movie like Green Book in there. And then there are the oddities that seemed good at the time like The Artist and Birdman. (Again, the oddities hardly ever hold up.) And, of course, with The King’s Speech we get to hear “God Save the Queen.” (I suspect a lot of this has to do with the long-overdue expansion of the Academy and we are right in the middle of some sort of tug of war that will take years to sort itself out. As we are in real life, I suppose.)

The strange thing that happens while watching every Best Picture winner is, by osmosis, you become a sort of Best Picture expert. Or, at the very least, a “buff.” (Not in the prognosticator kind of way. I have no idea what will win Sunday. But in the historical way. Movies that, before, I had only seen the title on lists, like The Life of Emile Zola, I can now explain the plot in great detail and tell you when it won. In the past, I had a hard time remembering the names of all the movies that won Best Picture. This is no longer a problem. Recently a friend mentioned that 42nd Street won Best Picture. It took me half a second to, with all authority, say that it did not. I can do this now, because I am “a buff.”

But, to answer the question that’s proposed in the title, what is a Best Picture winner? Well, sometimes it’s certainly something. And sometimes it’s actually important. But, other times, it’s definitely nothing. And only history has a say on which is which.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

For the first time in the 42-season (!) history of Survivor, host Jeff Probst was forced to stop a challenge during Wednesday’s episode.

The challenge involved retrieving a ladder from the bottom of the ocean floor and using it to reach a key to unlock a set of sandbags, but it didn’t go as planned. “This was one of those days where you could feel the turbulence swirling in the air from the moment we arrived at the challenge location,” Probst explained to Entertainment Weekly. Everything went fine during rehearsals when the water was calm, but to paraphrase George Costanza, the sea was angrier than a White Lotus guest not staying in the Pineapple Suite that day, my friends.

“The two struggling tribes were in the water for 22 minutes. That is an incredibly long time in those conditions. At times, the ocean pulled them so far off the course they were running into our camera platforms. It was insanity. But to their credit, not a single player ever called for help. Nobody asked us to stop the challenge and rescue them. They kept fighting. They kept working together. They kept trying to finish the challenge. I was truly impressed.”

One of the three tribes was able to complete the challenge, thanks to the efforts of Jason Momoa stand-in Jonathan Young (Probst called it the most “dominating individual performance in any challenge in Survivor history”). But the other tribes were called back in and the swimming part of the challenge was stopped “because we could see that the conditions were continuing to get worse,” the host said. “The swells were getting bigger, the waves more intense. There was no let-up coming and we knew that they had exhausted themselves to the point of simply not having enough strength left to finish.”

They didn’t have much time to collect their breath, though: the keys were collected by behind-the-scenes folks, and play was resumed as soon as they were out of the shot. “THAT’S how you do it on Survivor,” Probst exclaimed. You can watch the clip above.

(Via EW)

While Red Hot Chili Peppers are best known for their upbeat rock/funk, that’s not all they do. Their latest Unlimited Love single, for example, is “Not The One.” The song, released today, is a tamer number in which Anthony Kiedis deeply contemplates a relationship.

Kiedis told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of the song:

“Flea had put together a drum machine and bass song in his cobweb-covered garage. It was not what you hear today for ‘Not The One,’ because the bridge was the verse and the chorus was the bridge, and it was completely inverted. Every day after band practice, I ride home and I listen to what we’ve done that day over and over and over and over hoping that it sparks something or that I hear the right melody or something, anything. In that case, I started hearing that entire song on the way home, but completely inverted from the way he had arranged it. When you start something, you get a little bit married to it.

I came in the next day and I said, ‘Flea, I know this is not what you had in mind, but is it all right if I sing the verse over the chorus and the chorus over the bridge?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, do whatever you want.’ I was like, ‘Really?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ […] Because he wrote a beautiful thing, I thought maybe he wanted to keep it as it was written. On this particular day, he was so supportive and that was super helpful.

I think I was going through a very lonely and introspective month. This idea came out about I think I know who you are, but maybe I don’t. You think you know who I am, but maybe you don’t and especially in intimate relationships, like we know we all present something and people always have an idea, but what would happen if we just showed each other our very worst from the very start?”

Listen to “Not The One” above.

Unlimited Love is out 4/1 via Warner. Pre-order it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Babyface Ray, who is having a stellar year after his 2021 breakout thanks to the release of his debut album, Face, falls back on one of Detroit rap’s most reliable staples in his latest video from the album, “Motown Music.” Nice kitchen? Check… Wait, that’s the whole list? Cool. The video works, the same way similar clips like Sada Baby and Drego’s “Bloxk Party” have in the era of the fast-and-dirty, low-budget music video. Why blow your whole marketing budget on a yacht when you could pocket that money and still land a viral hit?

The video’s concept seems simple but it’s on-brand for Babyface Ray, who mostly eschews the fancier trappings of his chosen profession in favor of austere visuals for tracks like “My Thoughts 3” and “Dancing With The Devil.” The Motor City rapper seems to prefer to let the music speak for itself; likewise, he’s a relatively low-key presence throughout his own promotion, presenting a stoic demeanor to anchor a lot of the visual and sonic chaos that surrounds him (and the chaos of coming up on the streets of Detroit). While it may give fans who are used to flashier personalities less to grasp onto, Ray’s day-ones love him for it, and all the more loyal to him, which could turn out to be the winning strategy in the long run.

Watch Babyface Ray’s “Motown Music” video above.

Disclaimer: While all of the products recommended here were chosen independently by our editorial staff, Uproxx may receive payment to direct readers to certain retail vendors who are offering these products for purchase.

Welcome to SNX DLX, your weekly roundup of the best sneakers to hit the internet.

It’s springtime, and the sneaker floodgates are wide open as we’ve become inundated with more dope sneaker drops than we know what to do with. It’s honestly pretty relentless, we haven’t had a single slow week since mid-February, and if the sneaker drop calendars on various brand websites are to be believed, we’re not going to be getting a break anytime soon.

March 26th marks the annual Air Max Day, and while our roundup is light on Air Maxes this week, we’ve still got a big release celebrating the legendary silhouette in our top seven. Filling out the ranks are some dope Jordans, a double Yeezy Drop, and a few other gems worthy of picking up to color your spring wardrobe.

Adidas Yeezy BOOST 700 Wave Runner

It’s a big week for Yeezy fans as what is arguably the brand’s most popular colorway and sneaker, The Waverunner, re-stocks this week. First released in 2017, these shoes have long been a staple amongst Yeezy collectors and still stand as the best showcase of the 700 silhouette.

The ‘90s inspired dad shoe features a chunky design and a mesh and leather upper with solid grey, chalk white, and core black panels accented by deep teal and orange highlights.

The Adidas Yeezy BOOST 700 Wave Runner is out now for a retail price of $300. Pick up a pair at your favorite aftermarket site.

Air Max 9th 5 Matte Olive

It’s a bit grim for the spring season, but if you’re more than happy to ignore the typical soft pastel tones of the season, this earth-toned Matte Olive Air Max 95 might be for you.

Featuring a mixed canvas, denim, and kit upper, the Matte Olive features a grey to olive green gradient across the 95’s wavy rib design, offering a utilitarian aesthetic to match its durable mix of tough weather-resistant fabrics.

The Air Max 95 Matte Olive is out now for a retail price of $190. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app or your favorite aftermarket site.

Women’s Dunk Low Vintage Green

This week brings a new vintage-inspired Pro Green Dunk in women’s exclusive sizing. It’s not the most exciting release of the week, but it’s making up for all those years Nike didn’t bother sizing great Dunk colorways in smaller sizes.

The design features an aged midsole to give the sneaker a lived-in look right out of the box, saving you some of the break-in time that is required to make the magic of this design really shine.

The Women’s Dunk Low Vintage Green is set to drop on March 24th for a retail price of $110. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.

Air Jordan 3 Muslin

In a week full of some truly great sneaker drops, none rise above this Air Jordan 3 Muslin. Featuring a durably heavy-duty canvas upper with Cement Grey suede accents and University Red branding, the Muslin sits above a Sail midsole and stands as one of the greatest Jordan 3 colorways of all time.

Seriously, you may be looking at the best Jordan 3 colorway to release in 2022, so cop it if you can!

The Air Jordan 3 Muslin is set to drop on March 25th for a retail price of $200. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app or aftermarket sites like GOAT or Flight Club.

Nike Air Max 1 Blueprint

When the Nike Air Max 1 first dropped in 1987 it changed sneakers forever. The exposed air unit was a revolutionary design feature and pieces of the sneaker’s overall design would go on to influence each of Nike subsequent sneaker drops, even going as far as forever changing the look and feel of Air Jordans.

To pay homage to a sneaker that was truly a game-changer, Nike is dropping this special colorway that alludes to the Air Max 1’s blueprint status in the lineage of their great ‘90s silhouettes.

The Blueprint features production process-inspired technical graphics on the Swoosh with a globe graphic at the heel signifying the Air Max 1’s global appeal. Rounding out the design is a tumbled leather upper with reflective accents and a glow-in-the-dark outsole.

The Nike Air Max 1 Blueprint is set to drop on March 26th for a retail price of $160. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRs app or aftermarket sites like GOAT.

New Balance 574 LDG Ma Divina By Louis De Guzman

Made in collaboration with Chicago-based visual artist Louis De Guzman, this retailer exclusive, dubbed “Ma Divina,” is inspired and dedicated by De Guzman’s mother and her love of flowers.

The sneaker features a mixed suede and leather upper with a color-block design inspired by De Guzman’s signature color palette. Rounding out the design are small snippets of De Guzman’s current ongoing work In Between The Lines. It’s a color-rich and artful take on the 574 that feels perfectly geared to the season.

The New Balance 574 LDG Ma Divina by Louis De Guzman is set to drop on March 24th for a retail price of $85. Pick up a pair exclusively at Footlocker or Champ’s Sports.

Adidas Yeezy 450 Cinder

Kanye’s Yeezy brand has gotten pretty good at hitting a release cadence of one basic sneaker followed by one much weirder sneaker. Generally, they let a full week break up the drops, but this week they’re giving us a double drop. As exciting as it is to receive a restock of the Wave Runner, if you’re a fan of Yeezy Brand for their more envelope-pushing output, then you’re going to be all about the 450 Cinder.

Yes, it will make your feet look like an alien life form, but they are the furthest from “basic dad sneaker” you can get and offer an antidote for those who feel let down by the safeness of the Wave Runner re-release. Be warned, Yeezy Brand suggests ordering a half size up from your usual size.

The Adidas Yeezy 450 Cinder is set to drop on March 24th for a retail price of $210. Pick up a pair via the Adidas Confirmed App or Yeezy Supply.

The wildly popular (according to TikTok) novel The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo will be adapted into a new movie for Netflix, according to Deadline.

Released in 2017, The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo has sat on the New York Times Bestseller Paperback list for 54 weeks. The story was originally picked up by Freeform to become a TV series, with author Taylor Jenkins Reid set to be a screenwriter. Now, Reid will be a producer, with Liz Tigelaar adapting the bestseller for a Netflix film instead. Tigelaar most recently adapted another bestseller Little Fires Everywhere for the Hulu limited series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.

Spanning several decades, the story follows Old Hollywood royalty Evelyn Hugo who, at 79, decides to give a final interview to a young magazine writer named Monique, detailing her glamourous and dramatic career in movies in the ’60s and ’70s, including her notorious seven marriages and revealing jaw-dropping secrets along the way. Monique quickly learns that Hugo has a different agenda than she thought.

In addition to Evelyn Hugo, Tigelaar will also be adapting another novel by Reid, Malibu Rising, for Hulu. Taking place in the same universe, there is some character overlap between the two stories. A third series based on Reid’s Daisy Jones And The Six is also currently being filmed for Amazon, starring Riley Keough.

Jamie Lee Curtis is known for playing iconic characters who have gone through a lot of trauma, but she’s also known for being a pretty great mom. She has opened up about her daughter Ruby coming out to her last year, and now she is playing a huge part in Ruby’s wedding by officiating…as a World Of Warcraft character.

The actress stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live to discuss her latest movie Everything Everywhere All At Once and mentioned that she is preparing to officiate her daughter’s wedding as WoW character Jaina Proudmoore.

“It is a cosplay wedding. You wear a costume, you dress up as something. I understand it’s hard for you to learn new things,” Curtis joked with the late-night host, who seemed confused. “Everybody at the wedding will be in a costume, and I will be in a costume to officiate the wedding…I’m really excited.”

Curtis also admitted that she will be donning a handmade costume while officiating, though there is a delay due to the fact that she ordered it from Russia. “You know, there’s a little bit of a supply chain issue going on, and things are sort of held up now.” Kimmel joked that she could probably just wander around Hollywood and trade a costume for a “six pack of four loko.”

Check out the clip above.