2021 Oscars Pick We Recommend for this Week
Okay, your binge fest shouldn’t really start until Friday pm, but who says you can’t stack up these 2021 Oscars nominated (and winning) movies? Plan a homecation with your vaccinated squaddies. Get the popcorn, the ice cream, the smarties, and start a countdown to Friday Night! Bliss!
We share 5 Oscars 2021 movies to choose from. We promise, no spoilers.
Nomadland
The Oscars winner for Best Picture, directed by award-winning Chloé Zhao, is a story of a widow in her sixties (played by Frances McDormand) who goes on a journey through the American West, after losing everything in the Great Recession. She lives out her life from a van as a modern-day itinerant.
The BBC calls it a movie ‘overflowing with humanity and tenderness.’
The movie is an adaptation of the book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, nonfiction written by American journalist Jessica Bruder.
See it on a large screen to truly appreciate the movie shots and lighting.
Rotten Tomatoes value: 94% Metacritic: 93%. Our rating: 5 stars.
Judas and the Black Messiah
First, you can be sure of an excellent performance when LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya are both cast in a movie. (Get Out, anybody?)
The movie that gets Kaluuya the Best Supporting Actor award is a biographical drama starring Stanfield as William O’Neal, the traitor of the Black Panthers. O’Neal is the Judas to the chairman of the Panther’s Illinois Chapter, Fred Hampton’s Jesus, after being offered a plea deal by the FBI to save his neck.
Writer Paul Assay of Plugged In says of this flick, ” [It] is, on one level, a historical drama. On another, it’s a movie very much of the moment.” And we agree.
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%, Metacritic: 85% Our rating: 5 stars.
Promising Young Woman
This Oscar winner directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Carey Mulligan from the Great Gatsby, is a tragedy with laughs.
It’s a story of a street smart woman, with double identities, seeking revenge for her dead friend who had been a rape victim. Critics called it one of the best movies of 2020.
Rotten Tomatoes: 90%; Metacritic: 73%; Our rating: 5 stars.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
If you loved Get On Up, the James Brown biopic played by Chadwick Boseman or Bessie that starred Queen Latifah as Ma Rainey, you will enjoy this movie about an avant-garde blues singer.
Tensions rise when Ma Rainey and her band get together for a recording session at a Chicago music studio. Ma Rainey is played by the extraordinary Viola Davies from Fences and How to Get Away with Murder. The movie was released in December 2020, four months after Chadwick Boseman’s death.
Rotten Tomatoes: 98%; Metacritic: 87%; Our rating: 5 stars.
The Man Who Sold his Skin
Although this Tunisian Oscar nominee lost the award for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars to Another Round, it brilliantly centres around one of the most poignant realities of this century.
Inspired by a real life event, it tells a story of a Syrian man who sells his back as a canvas for a famous artist in exchange for a European visa and an opportunity to be with the one he loves.
The Washington Post describes this movie as having the ‘flavour of an art-world satire’ as it critiques elitist art society and inhumanity towards international refugees.
Rotten Tomatoes: 94%; IndieWire: 2.5/5. Our rating: 4 stars
If you picked some or all of these movies – best bingeing!