— Cᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ Iɴᴅᴇx —

a Celebration of the year 2019 in cinema and related media.
“Hosted by” the Azure-Winged Magpie, the Crow, and the Spotted Nutcracker.
(Final post design by the Crow.)

ᴄʟɪᴄᴋ ʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴠɪᴇᴡ ᴘᴀʀᴛ ᴛᴡᴏ (ᴅᴇᴄᴀᴅᴇ)

ᴄʟɪᴄᴋ ʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛᴏ sᴋɪᴘ ᴛʜᴇ ɪɴᴛʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛᴏʀʏ sᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴ

ɪɴᴛʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛᴏʀʏ sᴛᴀᴛᴇᴍᴇɴᴛ
ʙʏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴀᴢᴜʀᴇ-ᴡɪɴɢᴇᴅ ᴍᴀɢᴘɪᴇ

(◔◡◔^✿)^!

Welcome to the 2^nd Annual Oscine Awards everyone! It’s been a long wait, and a longer year of films and TV! But it’s finally time! We’ve saved our crewmembers from the ninjas who nabbed ’em, collected and totalled all our votes, and we’re finally good to go! (We really tried to get around to this as early as we could, but, y’know… coding and… ninjas.)

We really tried to get all this done by the 4^th of February, but let’s just write this year up as a blip. Next year, when we’re all better organised and everything, the Oscine Awards will be held on time like they should be.

I hope you’ve all had a lot of cheesy bits and drinks while you waited for us to get our acts together (it’s been like… over a month). I know we ran out of our hors d’oeuvres a long time ago, so here’s a look at our main menus for tonight since you’ve got to be peckish. These are all things we know how to cook, so if you like any of them extra-special, we’ll start publishing the recipes so you can make them for yourselves later on. (Click on the pages for a full view!)

• 

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Pick what you like and settle into your seats, because it’s been way too long and we take hosting very very seriously. But it’s all come to this… this very special day. And jus’ to make this day extra-special, I’m making it official that I’m back onboard The Corvid Review!

Thaaat’s right! Mummy Magpie’s back to kick names and take bottoms! I’ve seen a LOT of films between The Rise of Skywalker and now and I guess I’ll be working on getting a few reviews out after these awards are done! The Crow’s still busy doing other things even though he jumps in for Star Trek: Picard every week, and I think this place needs a good bit of spring cleaning!

But anyway! Let’s talk about the awards!

We’re handing out more than just awards for the Best of 2019 this time! We’re going to be awarding a few super-special Best of the Decade Awards as well! We’ll be listing out the awards for the decade in a separate post due out in a few hours days since this one’s gotten so long (the post’s already done, but needs some updates to pictures and somesuch), so sit tight and hang on for the ride!

And! And! This year, we have actual awards! These awards were specially pen-crafted by the Crow and were made with special heaps of love (and approved by a really special Pokémon!). We’ve got three types of awards we’re handing out tonight:

• the Platinum Award for our “Best of the Year” winners
• the Gold Legacy Award for our “Best of the Decade” winners
• another award that comes in two options which I’m going to be keeping secret for now.

Just in case any of you’re curious what the coveted Oscine Awards look like, here’s the first award that the winners tonight (Best of 2019) are going to get! (click for full-view):

Also this year, we used a voting system (with help from a bigger group of acquaintances) to narrow down the winners between ourselves. The way it worked is going to stay a secret between us, but the system was weighted and we had some pretty nifty maths going on to pin down the exact final placements for everything that’s going to appear on the nominations tonight (but we won’t be making that public either).

While not everyone on the main list voted for everything (and one naughty boy didn’t make it at all), there was enough material for us to have a lot of arguments over films and TV. And did we ever disagree on so much! Feathers went everywhere!

But one thing I’ve got to point out is that unlike last year, we didn’t review most of the films or TV shows that are up for the awards tonight. 2019 was a rough year for us. We got scattered and plucked apart a little bit. But even though we didn’t review everything… what we did do was watch everything we could! That’s everything apart from Documentaries, which is a category we’re leaving out this year. Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes had three nominations to win Best Documentary among our allies and The Swan(!), but without more votes or nominations, we had to leave the category out.

Another little change is that instead of looking at the Best “New” TV Programme of the year, we’re looking at the TV Programme that had the best season in 2019. We think that evens the playing field a lot more than the old award.

And with all that dusted… let’s get on to what’s important! We’ve been arguing about 2019 since… well… 2019 started. And it’s finally time! Welcome one. Welcome all.

“Live” from London, “live” from Bristol, and “live” from Osaka…
This is the 2020 Oscine Awards!

The 2^nd ANNUAL
OSCINE_AWARDS

Right! Let’s get to the awards!

The Spotted Nutcracker’s going to kick things off. And once she’s done announcing the first winner (who knows? Maybe… winners) of tonight, the Crow and my own self are going to drop in. Like always, everyone’s going to be marked out and colour coded separately so you won’t have any confusion getting through this ceremony tonight. But just in case… here’s a quick preview:

The Crow comes in command red and writes in black. I (the Azure-Winged Magpie) come in science blue and write in lilac. And the Spotted Nutcracker comes in operations gold and writes in grey.

And how about that award eh? Let’s take another look at the pretty while the Nutcracker gets over her “stage” jeepers (she’s just slow at writing). I love how nice and simple it looks.

Now that you’ve got all comfortable and you can’t wait to find out who the big winners are… let’s put all our hands together for Lieutenant Nutcracker!

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Best Season of TV Programming, 2019

The Spotted Nutcracker: In 2019, there were some ups and some downs when it came to TV. Out of all the things which came out last year, The Corvid Review reviewed Star Trek: Discovery, the final season of Game of Thrones, and American Horror Story: 1984. While all of these were disappointing (and will show up later in the ceremony), 2019 had some a lot of success on the small screen too.

Here are the nominees for the Best Season of TV Programming, 2019:

• BoJack Horseman (Season 6)
• Chernobyl
• Cobra Kai (Season 2)
• Killing Eve (Series 2)
• Line of Duty (Series 2)
• Mr Robot (Final Season)
• Peaky Blinders (Series 5)
• Stranger Things 3
• The Mandalorian
• Watchmen

And the winner is…

Chernobyl

Chernobyl was amazing. Even though we don’t have a category for Best Documentary this year, the TV show that’s closest to a documentary wins its category. Chernobyl was a front-runner for the award right from the get-go and even though a few of the other nominees really pushed to win the award, the series never lost its stride. Even though it’s only five episodes long, it’s head and shoulders over the competition because of how well it portrays the nuclear accident.

Here’s to the winner of the first Oscine Award in 2020!

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“Greatest Disappointment” of 2019
[TV + Cinema]

The Crow: This is a section dedicated to the productions which gave us hope that we would be entertained, but let us down in a most profound way. Unlike last year, this award applies to both feature productions as well as those made for TV — for reasons that will undoubtedly become clear once the winner is announced.

Given the variety of expectations — and tastes — we have on The Corvid Review, however, the following shall be rather a strange collection of nominees. There are some names on this list which might surprise even the most cynical among you.

The nominees for the “Greatest Disappointment” of 2019 are:

• Ad Astra
• Avengers: Endgame
• Black Mirror Season 5
• Dumbo
• Game of Thrones Season 8
• The Lion King
• Messiah
• The Witcher
• Velvet Buzzsaw

And the “Greatest Disappointment” of 2019 is:

Game of Thrones
Season 8

There should be no surprise that the final season of Game of Thrones is the near-unanimous greatest disappointment of last year. Fans of the show have even gone as far as to say that the season was so disappointing that it has retroactively made the entire show worse.

And to add — by however little — to its infamy, the final season is the entire reason our Greatest Disappointment category has been opened up for TV entries this year.

In reference to the names which might surprise some that I mentioned; Avengers: Endgame received two votes from our committee — horrifying the rest of us. A few other surprise appearances included 1917 and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which makes me seriously question the tastes of some of the “acquaintances” who were invited to take part in our larger voting pool. Then again, cinema is nothing if not subjective.

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Best Aesthetic Design

The Azure-Winged Magpie: The award for Best Aesthetic Design is all about the films which look pretty. And there are a whole lot of ways we see pretty. We’re talking fashion, makeup, sets, camerawork, everything! This is a category for films which show us that the people working on them knew what they would look and feel like, and had a reason for making it look and feel the way it did.

The nominees for Best Aesthetic Design are:

• 1917
• Ford v Ferrari
• The Irishman
• Jojo Rabbit
• Joker
• Little Women
• MidSommar
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
• Parasite / 기생충

And the winner is…

MidSommar

Okay. Okay. I’ll admit it. MidSommar is one mighty fine lookin’ film. It was a close call, this award. Every single one of these nominees came close to winning this one, but MidSommar had that little bit of an edge to it. And a lot of that came down to how it’s one of the few films in its genre out there which has no problems being all FLOWER-POWER! and happy and nice. Everything about the Hårga is pretty as, and it shows that the people making the film really cared about showing the little community off in all its glory.

The other films might get eights and nines when it comes to their aesthetic quality, and they could get as many votes as they want. But only MidSommar gets a…

🌸🌼🏵️🌷🌻 10/10 🌻🌷🏵️🌼🌸

in every department. Congratulations to the team behind MidSommar!

𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝑀𝒶𝓎 𝒬𝓊𝑒𝑒𝓃 𝑔𝑒𝓉𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝑜𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇 𝒻𝓁𝑜𝓌𝑒𝓇 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝒽𝑒𝓇 𝒹𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓈

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Best Audio
[OST + Score]

The Spotted Nutcracker: Audio has been a long-time problem for us on The Corvid Review. While we each like music, we aren’t really musicians. Or, at least, most of us aren’t. This category counts everything that can count as audio. That is: songs, soundtrack/score and editing. The biggest factor at play is how well we remember the sounds from the things we watched, and how those sounds made us feel.

The nominees are

• 1917
• Aladdin
• Ford v Ferrari
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters
• Jojo Rabbit
• Joker
• Once Upon a Time In Hollywood
• Rocketman
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
• Us

And the winner is…

Joker

This was a very close call. Us also had two nominations to win, but Joker broke the tie on the number of “second-best” nominations it received. Rocketman might have had the best songs of 2019, but Joker was the best at everything that counts as audio.

Because of the kind of film it is, it managed to squeeze songs in, had a dreary, gloomy Dark Knight style score in the background, and had some nice sound editing. But most importantly, the audio for this film made us sad in ways that stayed with us long after we’d seen it. And because of that, I’m happy to announce that the award for Best Audio goes to Joker. Congratulations to Hildur Guðnadóttir for (technically) winning her second Oscine Award tonight!

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“The Roast Turkey” Award
Worst Motion Picture of 2019

🗑️ (ಠ ◡ ಠ^✿) 🔪

The Azure-Winged Magpie: Oh yeah! It’s that time. It’s time to bring out… MY BUCKET! I’ve been waiting for this one. Regulars around these here parts know what these turkeys are all about! Lots of fluff and talk and what you end up with is a big burnt p.o.s.! (I apologise for anyone who had to suffer eating a turkey what I roasted…) This is for the bottom of the year’s bucket. The WORST of the worst.

Also… the two (!) folks in our voting committee who put Avengers: Endgame up to “win” this one are going to get thunked on the noggin by me real soon! Do the two of you not watch films?! 2019 was a pretty bad year for films, but then again… most years are. There’s a lot of films I didn’t put on this list since I could go on and on about my second-favourite genre. But if the nominees for the other awards (‘part from Mr Most Disappointing up there) are the cream at the top of a nice chocolatey hot drink, here’s the gunk that’s clogging up the bottom:

• 6 Underground
• Cats
• Charlie’s Angels
• Escape Room
• The Fanatic
• The Haunting of Sharon Tate
• Hellboy
• Jacob’s Ladder
• Replicas
• Serenity
• X-Men: Dark Phoenix

And the “winner” is…

Cats

Ha! You thought there’d be some other film on here?! You might need some brain surgery if you did… Cats is visual diarrhea. And no. I’m not censoring myself on this one. How the guy who made The King’s Speech (one of my favourite films of the decade) chundered this one up… I ain’t got no clue.

Everyone’s heard how “Cats is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs” and I’m going to say it’s much much much worse than just that.

Since I went and watched this film (WHY?!), I can’t even look at a cat the right way without wanting to tell the kitty I’m sorry for what these idiots did to them. I’m pretty sure our one-shot reviewer with the same name is still curled up somewhere out the back because of the trauma she got from this one.

Spay and neuter the whole crew of this film! Do it quick before they cause any more damage.

Shame on them. Shame! Shame! Shame! There’s a reason I ordered a custom design for this award. It’s so that it HURTS when it goes up where I’d tell the crew to stick it!

And just to make up for what cats were made to look like, here’s the cutest cat gif I saw in 2019.

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Best Visual Effects

The Crow: We live in a time where most blockbuster movies rely heavily on special effects. From superheroes and kaijū, to historical wars and mobsters, visual effects have become an integral part of the moviemaking business.

Some of the following entries are movies which wouldn’t exist if not for the visual effects. A few of them qualify — in my mind — as animated movies which happen to have people in them. Because of the sheer scale and ambition of 2019’s movies, it was easy to narrow our nominees down to a handful of popular entries.

And those nominees are:

• 1917
• Avengers: Endgame
• (Pokémon) Detective Pikachu
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters
• How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World
• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
• Spider-Man: Far From Home
• The Irishman

And the winner is:

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

As convenient as it may seem for us — coming from the home of a few Godzilla super-fans — Godzilla: King of the Monsters roars to the top of 2019’s food chain as far as visual effects are concerned.

While we had expected the usual names (KotM, Endgame, etc.) to all be front-runners in this race, we had not expected the resulting tie between three of our front-runners to be as hard to break as it became. While I — like the rest of us — voted for King of the Monsters to be nominated (and quite high, at that), I did not expect the movie to perform as well as it did. Especially once it became clear that we were headed to a draw. But here we are: with Godzilla: King of the Monsters outperforming Avengers: Endgame (much like I predicted it would in certain other ways) and The Irishman.

The care the team behind King of the Monsters took to realise the “titans”, the detail present even in the most frantic of sequences, and the grandiose concepts flaunted on the screen all come together to make Godzilla: King of the Monsters a worthy recipient of the 2019 Oscine Award for Best Visual Effects.

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Best Original Videogame

The Azure-Winged Magpie: Here’s a new one! This category is all about original games. And by original I mean no sequels to games that come out every year (spinoffs are jus‘ fine). No long-running online games either. Nothing but the good, fresh, new stuff. We want to see new ideas even if the mechanics stay pretty much the same. We’re not against any kind of game, but we want to see things that don’t sound like Call of Battlfield Tom Clancy’s Modern Medal Recon of Honor.

The nominees for Best Original Videogame of 2019 are…

• Control
• Death Stranding
• Disco Elysium
• Resident Evil 2 (Remake)
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

And the Best Original Videogame of 2019 is…

Death Stranding

No surprises here (even though Disco Elysium came really close!).

We’re fans of the guy who made it and we loved Death Stranding! We loved it so much that we’ve even got a four part (FOUR!) review series going on about the game (which has been on hiatus since November since the Cap’n went AWOL).

It’s new because it makes walking (WALKING!) pretty much the whole point of the game. It’s fresh because it’s got a totally bananas story going on that we’ve not really seen before. And it’s just… great. It’s everything we want from an original game and it might take a while before we get another one like it.

I’m happy that Kojima’s finally been able to make something that has nothing to do with snakes (even though I liked the whole MGS series), and we’re happy that he’s able to make newer and weirder games for the world again. And even though he’s got bucketloads of awards already, this is his very first Oscine Award! Our first winner ever! Yay!

And what’s this?! Death Stranding finally releases on PC on my birthday?! June 2, 2020‘s the date folks! I’d better get lots of cake!

(And that final part of our review had better come out soon!)

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Best Writing
[Story + Screenplay]

The Spotted Nutcracker: Movies usually tell stories. The better the story, the better the film. While a bad film can still tell a good story, a bad story can never save a film. That’s what makes stories so important to filmmaking. And the way to tell a good story is by writing a good one. This category is a celebration of the best stories told by movies which came out in 2019.

The nominees are…

• The Irishman
• Joker
• Jojo Rabbit
• Little Women
• Marriage Story
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
• Pain and Glory / Dolor y gloria
• Parasite / 기생충
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire / Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
• Us

And the winner(s) is(are)…

Parasite + Joker

PARASITE: Parasite has a good story, sure, but a lot of its cleverness comes from how it hides its secrets throughout the story. It’s quirky, but it’s not too quirky. It’s the kind of story which everyone can watch without having to overload their brain the first time around, but it is still a heavy movie when you sit down and think about it. There’s a story about class divides that gets more intense the more you know about Korean culture (which I didn’t know much about when I watched it the first time). There’s a story about how aloof rich people (in any country) can be, but it gets worse the more you learn about Asia and how deep these things still go over there. There are a lot of things going on in Parasite and for me it was like a little puzzle the second time I watched it.

JOKER: Joker is a very different kind of story, but it’s also about the people society overlooks. Just like in Parasite, it’s about someone (and not a family this time) just trying to make it by in the big bad world. Going by how mental health is getting worse all around the world and how little help is avalable to people who can’t afford the best quality of medical care, Joker‘s the kind of film which becomes important because of when it came out, as well as how it shows how bad things can get. The film has a special way of making everything so sad in a way that starts becoming more and more aggressive the longer it goes on. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but what’s there is done really well.

Last year, the Crow and the Magpie awarded the award for Best Writing to a film very similar to Parasite. It’s pretty obvious that these “human” stories are the favourites here on The Corvid Review. And it’s because Parasite and Joker are very human stories, that they are both the winners of the second ever Oscine Award(s) for Best Writing!

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Miscellanea
[No Awards]

The Azure-Winged Magpie: We’ve been on a tear tonight haven’t we?! I think this is a nice place to call a break on things and let everyone get comfortable again. The next three sections are about thises-and-thatses that aren’t really up for awards but which we’d like to talk about anyway.

And to start us off, let’s look at the…

Best of The Corvid Review, 2019
[No Award]

Here’s a quick run-down of our top posts as of Jan 1, 2020:

• Most Popular Post from 2019 — Us
• Most Popular Post of 2019 — Possession
• HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION: Most Popular Post of All Time — The Blackcoat’s Daughter

And now over to…

Our Favourite Music Albums of 2019
[No Award]

The Spotted Nutcracker: We’re all different from each other on The Corvid Review and we all listen to very different music. So instead of making it into a competition, here are the “top” albums which were mentioned during our conference call for the Oscine Awards.

• Fear Inoculum — Tool
• In Cauda Venenum— Opeth
• Norman Fucking Rockwell!— Lana Del Rey
• thank u, next— Ariana Grande
• We Are Not Your Kind — Slipknot

I think it’s pretty obvious who chose what but I’ll leave all of that out for now.

And that’s it from me tonight! Hope you’ve enjoyed this post so far! If you’ve been upset with any of our choices up until now, just remember that that’s life!

— Bye!

“Most Anticipated Movie” of 2020
[No Award]

The Crow: There aren’t a great many names on this list, since there has long been a clear winner — before the voting sheet was even devised — and few other nominations. One of our early nominations has already been released due to our many delays in rolling out these awards; for those interested, the review is available here: Birds of Prey.

Our remaining nominees for the Most Anticipated Movie of 2020 are:

• Dune
• Godzilla vs. Kong
• No Time to Die
• TENET
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Wonder Woman 1984

And the front-runner for the most anticipated movie of 2020 is:

TENET

Christopher Nolan has only suffered one blip in his career so far, and it was mostly because of the fact that he wasn’t very enthusiastic about making the movie in question. That movie was 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, but he’s built up a lot of steam since with Interstellar and Dunkirk. TENET will be another original project of his, and the trailer — as well as the six-minute prologue — has been nothing but promising.

Time, spies, and Nolan are — of course — good ingredients for a spectacular movie. We trust in Nolan, and while you might be asking why we seem to have a “cover” image for a review even though the movie isn’t out yet. Don’t worry about it. Hasn’t happened yet.

And now, let us return to the awards:

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Best Individual Performance

The Azure-Winged Magpie: This is it! We’re finally in the Big Three! Woo! This award is meant for the best acting performance by any person in a single role, and it’s been a little bit hard to narrow this list down. There were a lot of performances that stuck out to us in 2019, and all of them were different and awesome in their own way. But enough talking! Let’s get to the names!

The nominees for Best Individual Performance are…

• Antonio Bandares — Pain and Glory / Dolor y gloria
• Adam Driver — Marriage Story
• Song Kang-ho — Parasite / 기생충
• Scarlett Johannson — Jojo Rabbit [1] + Marriage Story [2]
• Thomasin McKenzie — Jojo Rabbit
• Lupita Nyong’o — Us
• Joaquin Phoenix — Joker
• Florence Pugh — MidSommar [1] + Little Women [2]
• Saoirse Ronan — Little Women

And the actor who had the Best Individual Performance in 2019 is…

Joaquin Phoneix — Joker

No matter what I said up there, it was pretty obvious who this award was going to end up with. You can’t just talk about a performace from 2019 without defaulting to the one name that’s stuck out over all the rest. I already talked a lot about how good Joaquin Phoenix has been in this role and I don’t think I need to add to what I said, or what everyone (and their mum!)’s said about him as Arthur Fleck.

He’s relatable, he’s sad, and when his eyes start staring, he… stares. He stares through you and straight into that abyss we were warned about. And when the abyss stares right back at him he just laughs ’cause that’s what he does! And remember! Thaaat‘s life!

Clear winner.
Winner winner songbird dinner! Have an Oscine Award!

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Best Overall Composition

The Crow: The Award for Best Overall Composition is one of the two highest honours on The Corvid Review, and is by far the hardest to award. However, it is important to make a very specific distinction clear. The difference between this award and the award for Best Motion Picture is that the award for Composition is a strictly technical award, whereas the latter is more open to subjective opinions. And it’s due to this reason that both awards share the same pool of nominees.

The following are the nominees which we felt struck the perfect balance in all aspects technical:

• 1917
• The Irishman
• Jojo Rabbit
• Joker
• Little Women
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
• Pain and Glory / Dolor y gloria
• Parasite / 기생충
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire / Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

And the winner/s) is/are:

Jojo Rabbit + Parasite

Personally, I had long-campaigned for Parasite to take top honours at this years Oscine Awards. I had decided that 2019 would be a rather dull year for cinema in general. And I was mostly right. As usual, a number of strong contenders emerged towards the end of the year (the excellent movies Portrait de la jeune fille en feu and Dolor y gloria — the latter of which I watched late — come to mind), but I was staunch in my support for Parasite. Long-term readers of The Corvid Review will know that I staunchly support the efforts of both Bong Joon-ho (ever since The Host) and Park Chan-wook. If the Oscine Awards existed in 2016, Agassi / The Handmaiden would have taken most of the top honours at the time.

Then along came a rabbit.

And most of us agreed, despite the strong lobby Joker has enjoyed since its release. And so, here we find ourselves. For the second year running, the Award for Best Overall Composition is shared between two worthy contenders.

Jojo Rabbit

directed by: Taika Waititi
produced by: Carthew Neal, Taika Waititi, and Chelsea Winstanley

Parasite

directed by: Bong Joon-ho
produced by: Kwak Sin-ae, Moon Yang-kwon, Bong Yok-cho, and Jang Young-hwan

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Best Motion Picture

The Azure-Winged Magpie: Here we are! It’s finally time to announce the winner of The Corvid Review‘s Best Motion Picture of 2019! But before I jump into the nominees (which you folk already know but I’ll list out all the same), I’m going to let you all in on a secret…

When it came to this award, we were split right down the middle. There are two (three really, but one got dropped early) camps ’round these parts and neither was backing down, so we had to go with the numbers. This is going to cause a BIG OLD FIGHT somewhere down the line!

The nominees are:

• 1917
• The Irishman
• Jojo Rabbit
• Joker
• Little Women
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
• Pain and Glory / Dolor y gloria
• Parasite / 기생충
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire / Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

And the winner is…

Jojo Rabbit

directed by: Taika Waititi
produced by: Carthew Neal, Taika Waititi, and Chelsea Winstanley

We don’t usually explain our choices for the top two awards on The Corvid Review‘s Oscine Awards, since we like to let the films stand for themselves. And I’m going to keep it that way much as I can.

But let me tell everyone this… I started the Joker “lobby” ever since I watched it (before it came out even), and Joker came really close to snagging our Best Motion Picture Award along with Parasite. And even though I love Joker, even I’m going with Jojo Rabbit on this one. Taika Waititi’s been a bit of a superstar here on The Corvid Review ever since What We Do In The Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok, and he’s had a KO year in 2019 what with Endgame (kinda) and Jojo Rabbit. Parasite was great, and Joker was great, but the Rabbit made at least three of us cry, and the ones who say they didn’t are LIARS (apart from me of course).

All of the nominees are great films and they’re all highly recommended by us at The Corvid Review, but there can be only one winner for Best Motion Picture. And the winner winner for the songbird dinner (and not the ceremonial turkey) for 2019, at the 2^nd Annual Oscine Awards is…

Jojo Rabbit

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Summary & Round-Up

The Crow: A full list of the winners follow:

• Best Season of TV Programming, 2019: Chernobyl
• “Greatest Disappointment” of 2019: Game of Thrones Season 8
• Best Aesthetic Design: MidSommar
• Best Audio: Joker
• “The Roast Turkey Award” / Worst Movie of 2019: Cats
• Best Visual Effects: Godzilla: King of the Monsters
• Best Original Videogame: Death Stranding
• Best Writing: [TIE] Joker [x2] + Parasite
• Best Individual Performance: Joaquin Phoenix (Joker [x3])
• Best Overall Composition: [TIE] Jojo Rabbit + Parasite [x2]
• Best Picture: Jojo Rabbit [x2]
  
• Most Nominations: (no longer counts “Most Disappointing” and “Roast Turkey” entries)
  • Joker [6 nominations, 3 wins];
  • Jojo Rabbit [7 nominations, 2 wins];
  • Parasite [5 nominations, 2 wins];

This year — despite how close Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came in 2019 — Joker becomes the first movie to win three Oscine Awards. Godzilla: King of the Monsters finds itself on the shakiest ground amongst all our winners, whereas winners such as Death Stranding and Chernobyl see little competition amongst their peers. Another interesting observation I’ve been pointing out throughout this post is the repeated presence of Avengers: Endgame on the “worst of” nomination lists. For whatever reason, it seems that the overpouring of love we afforded to Endgame was not a sentiment shared by some of us.

As always, there are a great number of movies which missed out tonight. Many of them might have deserved better, and I personally think there have been quite a number of snubs. However, we only have so many awards to give out, and so many nominees we can name. And that’s only when considering 2019.

We will return in a few hours with a ceremony even more divisive than the one you have so far “attended”. In the meantime, consider all of our winners to come highly recommended by us at The Corvid Review. While we have not reviewed as many of these movies as we’d have liked to, reviews may appear in the future in case we feel like there are things we’d like to point out about these movies, but we aren’t making any guarantees.

Please allow us a short break while we finalise our preparations for the next set of awards. Until then — as is the trend these days — Live long, and prosper.

Note: Due to a servere complication, the Oscine Awards for the Best of the Decade have been postponed to Monday, the 9th of March, 2020.

— Team out