So as not to be accused of bad faith arguments, a disclosure: I did not watch the 2024 Academy Awards presentation ceremony. In fact, I don’t think I have watched the thing in over a decade. This year, I second-screened — I know modern things! — while I prepared meals and watched Cocktail (1988) on Criterion Channel’s pointedly curated collection of Razzie Award winners. For those without access to Wikipedia, the Golden Raspberry Awards is an anti-Oscars ceremony dating back to 1981, wherein the “worst” cinematic achievements of a year are honored. The whole affair is more than a little tongue in cheek and history has corrected a number of its selections, down the decades. In fact, a number of Razzie winners have emerged as more significant, if not better, examples of the cinematic arts than their anointed counterparts. As much as a gulf has grown between myself and the presentation of Hollywood’s self-congratulation, I remain a sucker for the machinations of the industry, following along now more closely and maybe with a greater understanding than in my genuine fan-boy days. As much as the institution of The Movies, particularly in America, is an ever-more diffuse, corporatized shadow of what we — with equal parts hindsight and false nostalgia — believe we once were, it is still an elemental cultural institution. Populist and elitist, high art and commercial garbage, inclusion and exclusion, luck and talent and tenacity all encompassed in a single silly endeavor: It’s the American experiment distilled. And if we’re honest, most of us still, perhaps in some secret corner of our psyche, see movie stars as our own perverted, slightly less insidious form of royalty. Love them or hate them or both, they (and their milieu) represent a rarefied, admittedly dumb version of the American Dream. While we know, consciously and academically, that the dream died probably a century ago, it’s in our programming to be fascinated, even if appalled by it. So on to what the purportedly much enlarged and diversified voting body of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got right and wrong this past weekend. I only watched two of the nominated animated feature films. As much as I believe Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse to be a vital and enduring contribution to the form, I can’t see betting against The Boy and the Heron unless Hayao Miyazaki made more than one movie…