The 2022 CSP Movie Awards

How to sum up 2022 in film? Uneven? Unsettled? Unsettling? The same as it ever was?

It was supposed to be a pandemic comeback year. It was if you’re named Tom Cruise. Meanwhile, awards-positioned movies are dying on the vine theatrically. There were heartening upstart surprises (from Barbarian to Everything Everywhere All at Once) punctuating mind-bogglingly bare weeks at movie theaters (in terms of titles as well as dollars).

Movies are under threat like always, but the masters—from Claire Denis to Steven Spielberg to Park Chan-wook—kept mastering. The film lovers kept loving. Let’s set broad strokes aside and hand out some year-end accolades.

Best Oregon Feature

After years of fastidious filmmaking, two locally made stop-motion animated dark fairy tales dropped on Netflix this fall. With respect to Wendell & Wild, Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s Pinocchio is the achievement. With aptly rough-hewn puppets and stunning dioramic vistas, the film widens the Pinocchio fable into a clear-eyed delivery system for equally inevitable pain and hope. (See also: Rehab Cabin, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff.)

Best Bacchanal

In a season of prestige movies desperately trying to reconvince us of film’s power, Babylon is actually powerful. Depicting the silent-film era as an anything-goes soirée—where parties and film sets have the same zealous carnival quality—director Damien Chazelle throws down visually in the moviemaking equivalent of Whiplash’s climactic drum solo. (See also: RRR, White Noise, Fire Island.)

Producer of the Year

Tom Cruise’s softly cocky, regretful performance comes easily to him in Top Gun: Maverick. Far more impressive was Cruise’s shepherding of the film. He stiff-armed Paramount+ and waited for theaters to the tune of nearly $1.5 billion worldwide. He believed in this sequel, which is easily twice as good as the original, and—more importantly—in audiences.

Best Original Horror

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair employed lo-fi YouTube aesthetics to disturb us both with the fantastical and real implications of online obsession. Then, Pearl saw director Ti West and star-turned-co-writer Mia Goth immediately follow up X with a prequel that challenges slasher conventions and anoints Goth a new kind of scream queen—one who’s also swinging the ax.

Best Unorthodox Airborne Weapon in an Anti-Colonialist Bloodbath

It’s obviously a tie between the Predator frisbeeing a bear trap in Prey and Bheem hurling a live leopard at an imperial guard in RRR. Duh.

Best Superhero Movie

With a grim nod to The Batman, it’s RRR again. With unchecked spirit and spectacle, this Tollywood action extravaganza chronicles the bond of two friends—more or less depicted as fire and water demigods—who lead the Indian independence movement.

Best Portrait of an Artist

Moonage Daydream and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed honored revolutionary creators by throwing out playbooks and finding their subjects’ wavelengths. Moonage Daydream uses a fire hose of imagery to sublimate David Bowie in the iconography he inhabited and absorbed. Bloodshed seeks the soul of photographer and activist Nan Goldin by tracing her life’s deepest themes, not facts.

Best Animal

Jenny the Donkey, from The Banshees of Inisherin, we love you. (See also: EO, for other nice donkeys.)

Best Feature-Length Film Appreciation

Like all great movie essays, Elvis Mitchell’s Is That Black Enough for You?!? will beef up your watchlist. But the critic turned filmmaker also puts forth original, convincing theories about why and how 1968-1978 became a Black cinema heyday.

Guiltiest Pleasure

Remember Deep Water? Ben Affleck made lobster bisque and kept snails for unexplained reasons. Ana de Armas drunkenly played piano and got bitey during fellatio. Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne, 81, seemingly got to do everything and nothing he wanted. Incredible.

Worst Sign of the Streaming Apocalypse

In a historically desolate August at American movie theaters, Amazon had the bright idea to send Ron Howard’s visceral, sprawling rescue drama Thirteen Lives right to small screens. He filmed in real caves for this!?

Best Sign of a Theatrical Future

Nope, Barbarian, The Woman King, Smile and Everything Everywhere All at Once all demonstrated that enthusiastic word of mouth still matters.

Best Directorial Level-Up

In his sophomore film—the compassionate, speculative family drama After Yang—director Kogonada (Columbus) padded softly into science fiction and asked us to more deeply consider each other’s inner worlds as technology diversifies the meaning of life.

Chance’s Top 10:

1. After Yang

2. Nope

3. Top Gun: Maverick

4. Barbarian

5. Triangle of Sadness

6. TÁR

7. Aftersun

8. Everything Everywhere All at Once

9. RRR

10. Stars at Noon