Five Must-see Movies That Were Ignored by The 2021 Oscars
This April 25 will be the Academy Awards, and the nominees will set the tone, but are they the only good films of the year? Of course not. Here is a shortlist of productions that could well have competed for some of the most important awards if they had not been forgotten along the way.
1. The Assistant
It’s hard to understand the absolute omission of Kitty Green’s debut. This story about a young production assistant in a movie studio who realizes the boss’s power and sexual abuse may have been a lot for the Academy. Still, it’s also surprising that it has been overlooked for most of the awards season. That is if we talk exclusively about the film because it is even more tragic that the excellent performance of its protagonist, Julia Garner, has only been nominated for a handful of awards, even though since its premiere at the beginning of 2020 (something that undoubtedly has played against) he positioned himself as one of the solid names for his acting masterclass on The Assistant. Here is the website where you can watch the latest movies on UwatchfreeMovies, before you use it you should know little about it.
2. The Girls
The Best International Film category (which until 2019 was called Best Non-English Speaking Film) also suffers from several absences. Still, if there is one that draws attention, it is the Spanish Las Chicas. Pilar Palomero’s film follows an 11-year-old girl named Celia (Andrea Fandos), who when adult responses are no longer satisfying, and the world is a big question mark is better to travel with friends. This title swept the Goya (Best Film, Screenplay, New Direction, and Photography) and on the Spanish circuit, but unfortunately, it has not left the borders of that country’s cinema. As its specific story is set in ’92, a shame will resonate with particular force on this continent, especially among the millennial generation.
3. Dick Johnson is Dead
Perhaps no one wants to put more competition to Agent Mole, our letter at the Oscars, but if we talk about absences, the category for Best Documentary had a lot to choose from. And one that could ideally be included in the selection was Dick Johnson is Dead, with which its director, Kirsten Johnson, filmed at the same time an unconventional letter of eternal affection to his father. The latter loses his memory and a strange reflection full of black humor about how we approach death. But if you think you will find a dense and sad documentary, nothing could be further from the truth: This is the celebration of a woman for still telling her father alive, although sometimes the roles between father and daughter are reversed.
4. The Human Voice
When it became known that the next project by Pedro Almodóvar, a beloved of the Academy, would reunite him with the always passionate Tilda Swinton in the adaptation of a theatrical monologue by Jean Cocteau, it was taken for granted that the Spaniard would go up to look for the statuette at Best Short Film. But, to everyone’s surprise, he wasn’t even nominated. In La Voz Humana, the director and the actress navigate the stormy storms of a love break during an afternoon in a hotel in a 30-minute short that concentrates the visual style and the drives that characterize the filmmaker.
5. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always
One of the year’s movies for the world of cinema, less for the Oscars. Eliza Hittman’s third feature film follows adolescent Autumn (splendid Sidney Flanigan) as she attempts to travel from Pennsylvania to New York to have an abortion without her family knowing. Filmed with a camera that combines an almost documentary realism -which avoids sentimentality and discourse-, sorrowful silences and knowing glances, with sharp observations about being a teenager today, leads to a heartbreaking scene that gives the work its title. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always it walked at a safe pace through the circle of independent awards led by its director and its two stars: Flanigan and Talia Ryder, who we are not talking about here because their interpretation would merit an article of their own.