The Awards Show You Didn’t See Coming

And The Anti-Oscar Goes To: A 2024 Awards List With A Twist

From musicals nobody wanted to indie gems nobody noticed, everyone gets their moment to shine—or stumble. Think red carpets, rogue choices, and a whole lot of fun. Rahul Desai writes.

IT’S GLOBAL AWARDS SEASON — sort of. Instead of immortalising the cinema of 2024 in yet another year-end listicle, we thought adding a dash of colour would be better. Think a hybrid of the Oscars, Razzies, an obscure Indian everyone-gets-an-award function (the “Lighting up your life smile” trophy goes to…) and a questionable comedy sketch. You can’t deny, after all, that the year has given us cinema far beyond the big screen: good, bad, ugly, silly, smart and strange. It’s only fair that, to quote Oprah, you get a statue and you get a statue and you get one too. As Ridley Scott once (never) said: Let the games begin.

🏆 Best Awful-But-Secretly-Awesome Picture: Joker: Folie à Deux

Todd Phillips’ much-panned, much-discussed and much-Joaquin-Phoenix sequel to Joker was instantly dismissed the moment viewers discovered it was a…musical. I’d go ahead and say it fell prey to the whims of digital discourse, and of course Phoenix’s reputation as a flaky and temperamental artiste. The more profound themes of the comically dark drama — especially Arthur Fleck’s identity crisis — were lost in the cacophony of false perceptions. Never mind that Joker 2 elicited more noise and sarcasm than Donald Trump’s election victory.

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🏆 Best Most-Taylor-Swift Line In A Ridley Scott Movie: “Torture me, but please don’t lecture me” from Gladiator 2

Pedro Pascal’s inimitable delivery comes when his character — a noble Roman General with a conscience — is captured for planning a coup against his corrupt rulers. It almost sounds like Ridley Scott himself rolling his eyes at his producers and audiences alike. No ducks given.

🏆 Best Great-But-Potentially-Toxic Film: It Ends With Us

Where does one even begin? Between terrible marketing, the PR face-offs, not-so-lively conspiracy theories, bitter fandom wars and tragic sexual harassment allegations, the cinematic adaptation of the controversial Colleen Hoover novel has acquired the reputation of everything but the solid and empathetic domestic-abuse drama that it really is. There’s nothing worse than a good film getting lost in the chaos it allegedly emerges from. Since it’s fashionable to talk about everything but the movie, there’s always Ryan Reynolds, his perversely omnipresent Deadpool & Wolverine and his perversely addictive docuseries on his co-acquisition of a Welsh football club. It ends with who, really?

🏆 Best Director Who Cares: Payal Kapadia

The filmmaker-next-door feeling is strong with Kapadia, the talented director of All We Imagine as Light, who has single-handedly restored Indian Film Twitter (now X) to its pre-2014 goodness and forced a population to collectively google the term “aspect ratio” by insisting that her viewers get the best big-screen experience. It’s a sign of respect for the craft as well as the largely ungrateful country she hails from. All this, while patiently giving press conferences that feature local entertainment journalists who begin their questions with “Now that France has selected your film as an entry…”.

🏆 Best New-Mealtime-Watch Picture: The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror meta masterpiece starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as washed-out and young mutations of a former star features, among other appetite-swelling images, one body rupturing and breaking out of another’s skin through a bloody slit in the back. I get the super-smart indictment of Hollywood beauty standards and all, but the aesthetically tasty film’s real victory is replacing Friends, The Office and Schitt's Creek as the world’s new favourite meal-time watch.

🏆Best Pop-Romcom-With-Questionable-Timing Series: Nobody Wants This

Everybody wanted a piece of Nobody Wants This, the viral new romantic comedy series starring a weirdly Gen Z-coded Kristen Bell — but more importantly Adam Brody as the Jewish version of the Hot Priest who captures American imaginations (and loins) at a time nobody can distinguish between Zionism and antisemitism anymore. Given Israel’s Russia-coded war crimes and the West’s tone-deaf hypocrisy regarding Palestine, the timing of a cutesy show centred heavily on a conservative and religious-but-funny Jewish family and cross-cultural comedy is iffy at best. Propaganda, who?

🏆 Tearjerker Of The Year: The Wild Robot

I’m not crying, YOU are. I’m not surgically extracting the lump in my throat, you are. And I’m not loving a familiar robot-in-wilderness-with-animals tale about motherhood and digital emotions, you are.

🏆 Queerjerker Of The Year: Challengers

Did you say a toxic tennis throuple starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor scored to a throbbing techno soundtrack where the sexual tension between the Italian director and a sport he knows nothing about eclipses the sexual tension between love, ambition and bromance? What’s not to like?

🏆 Best Woke-Sensation-With-A-Twist Series: Baby Reindeer

Richard Gadd’s self-curious and self-critical tragicomedy — mined from his own experience with a female stalker — came like a bolt from the Netflix-populated blue. There’s nothing like waking up to a pop-cultural moment, and Baby Reindeer is such a nuanced entry in the gender-violence and sexual abuse canon. On paper, it’s about a male survivor, and this concept alone could’ve gone woefully wrong in this age of hyper-wokeness and binary reactions. Spoiler alert: it did not. If anything, it’s a strong indictment of this age of posturing.

🏆Best Crash-And-Burn Spectacle Of The Year: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

George Miller’s long-anticipated sequel-but-prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road didn’t exactly set the box office and critic registers ringing. That doesn’t change the fact that Furiosa is a genuine-action Tour de force that time will no doubt be kinder to. Its dismissal in an era of VFX-heavy and incoherent superhero vehicles is a tragedy. But it’s also proof of pure and unadulterated cinema.

🏆Best Indie-That-Will-Be-Neglected-In-Awards-Season Picture: Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass’ neon-lit and violent lesbian love story between an introverted gym manager (Kristen Stewart) and a troubled bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) is so good that it’s destined to be ignored by the Academy. Call it The Iron Claw syndrome. Oscar voters usually have a very specific taste for independent darlings, and this beautifully gory and expressive retro romance that lit up Sundance is not it.

🏆 Best Sequel In The History of Unnecessary Franchises: Inside Out 2

I was anxious about Anxiety being the new anxious core of the Pixar sequel to arguably the greatest animated film of all time. But that anxiety was both founded and unfounded. Inside Out 2 more than justifies its 1-billion-dollar existence, becoming a rare sequel that doesn’t exist for the cash-grabbing heck of it. Riley’s complicated teenage emotions spar against each other in a film that makes up for in difficult truths what it loses in narrative and artistic novelty. Go sadness!

🏆 Best Move-Over-Sydney-Sweeney Award: Adria Arjona

The talented Puerto Rican actress sets the (small) screen on fire in Hit Man, Richard Linklater’s assassin satire that already stars heart-throb Glen Powell in his Tom Cruise era. Arjona is pure aura and sex appeal as Madison Masters, an unhappy and slightly unhinged woman who hires a ‘fake’ hitman — and gets attracted to him without knowing his true identity — to kill her abusive husband. It’s not even supposed to be her film, but the camera can’t stop itself from falling in love with her. Who can blame the poor viewer?

🏆 ‘Nicole Kidman Era’ For Best Actress: Anne Hathaway

In the “age-gap romcom” The Idea of You, Anne Hathaway’s performance as a divorced art dealer who has a torrid romance with a British pop star half her age transcends all the tropes of a genre that is currently monopolised by Nicole Kidman. Hathaway prevents the film from entering porn-fantasy territory and once again nails a role that requires plenty of introspection, poise and mature tears.

🏆 Best Actress: Mikey Madison for Anora

Sean Baker’s middle-finger-to-Hollywood-formula, Cannes-winning and class-coded film is built entirely on a mesmeric performance by Mikey Madison in and as Anora, a Brooklyn-based stripper who gets sucked into a Cinderella anti-fairytale. Madison is boisterous, fluid, free-spirited, naive, spunky, and therefore heartbreaking in the most unassuming moments. She humanises a movie that has all the tropes of a cultural comedy — falling in love with a billionaire Russian heir only to realise that she is closer to the bodyguards and immigrant goons hired to babysit him. It’s entertaining if it weren’t so damn sad. Expect “real” awards.

🏆Best Not-For-Weak-Hearts Documentary Feature: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

Good luck sitting through this gut-wrenching documentary about a Norwegian boy who dies young and sick only for his family to belatedly discover that he changed the lives of strangers and friends as his World of Warcraft video-game avatar. Good luck, really.

🏆 Best Whadda-Playah Award for All-Round Acting: Chhaya Kadam

An India-coded category, yes, but why not? Chhaya Kadam as a “supporting actor” has had an MVP year, playing kickass man-agnostic women in Oscar hopeful Laapataa Ladies, Kunal Kemmu’s comedy Madgaon Express and of course, All We Imagine as Light. Nobody deserves it more.

🏆In Memoriam: The Great White Sharks from Devara: Part 1, Kanguva and Gladiator 2

It hasn’t been a great year for apex predators (including the offenders named in the Hema Committee report) across cinema in general. But I’m pretty sure that the vintage sharks that feasted on warrior bodies in a water-filled Colosseum in Gladiator 2 and the ones that feasted on Bobby Deol’s cronies in Kanguva were vengeful cousins of the ones that died in VFX battle in Devara: Part 1. Given their sharp memories, maybe it’s time to bestow upon them the honourable title of ‘elephants of the ocean’ (because the elephants themselves were called ‘architects of the forest’ in Poacher).

🏆Best Netflix-bait Documentary Series That Didn’t Go Viral: Mr. McMahon

If you listen to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson sing (terribly) as demigod Maui in Moana 2, it’s clear that he is still haunted by his former life as a WWE superstar under predatory and sociopathic boss Vince McMahon. The documentary miniseries laid bare the genius and cold-blooded horror of the world-famous CEO, but it didn’t exactly set the internet on fire the way most American Netflix ‘investigative’ shows tend to. Apart from WWE loyalists and ex-loyalists, nobody really cared. After all, their incoming President is no different.

🏆 Best Self-Sabotage International Film Entry Award: India

Following in France’s footsteps from last year (when the French National Film Center chose The Taste of Things over Anatomy of a Fall as their International film Oscar submission), India has outdone its 2013 self (when the Film Federation of India chose Gujarati film The Good Road over sure-shot contender The Lunchbox) by picking Kiran Rao’s sleeper hit Laapataa Ladies over Payal Kapadia’s Cannes-winning and general-acclaim-winning All We Imagine as Light. No fault of Laapataa Ladies here, of course, but it’s unfortunate that it suddenly finds itself as the villain in a situation where obvious politics have ruled out Kapadia from representing her own country (in what might have been a neck-to-neck battle with France’s Emilia Perez directly for the Oscar). Such is the state of affairs, an entire administration ‘punishing’ an independent filmmaker for their student rebellion against the State — not surprising, but exhausting by now. It doesn’t matter what All We Imagine as Light goes on to do in the main categories, because the problem lies within the nation her stories are about.

🏆 Best Concert Film: Trap

M Night Shyamalan made the millions of fans attending Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras’ Tour around the world think twice with Trap, an oddly touching ode to his daughter parading as a wildly entertaining serial-killer-at-a-concert movie. Josh Hartnett’s performance within a performance remains one of the on-screen images of the year, coupled with Shyamalan’s own memoir-like script that secretly equates film-making (Harnett might just be a stand-in for him) with bloodlust while paying tribute to the smartness of the much-maligned Gen Z.

🏆 Non-Thanksgiving Turkey of the Year: Madame Web

What could possibly go wrong with a cash-grabbing, thirst-trapping SSU (Sony’s Spider-Man Universe) superhero movie starring an embarrassed-looking Dakota Johnson and an oblivious Sydney Sweeney, featuring the totally unironic line “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”?

🏆 Best Nobody-Saw-That-Coming Sleeper Hit: Rebel Ridge

Jeremy Saulnier’s simmering crime anti-procedural about a Black Marine Corps veteran having to confront police brutality, institutional corruption and racism in a small Louisiana town alters the grammar of the outsider-action-hero template. The sharp film-making aside, it has a star-making turn by an actor expected to challenge Glenn Powell for the aura-meets-craft throne in the near future. Aaron Pierre, remember the name. And remember those non-villainous light eyes.

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