All Things Kevyn

Hello true believers and welcome to that annual thing of things - my Oscar Predictions! This year is as predictable as most years, but the funny thing about this year is that Best Picture is the one up in the air. If you had asked me a month ago - hell, a week ago - I would have said The Power of the Dog was a lock for the win. Most Oscar pundits would have said the same. But then the PGA's surprised everyone and awarded their prize to CODA. Add this to their surprise win at the SAG Awards two weeks back and it's beginning to look like a photo finish coming up. The SAG membership is the largest block of voters in The Academy. The PGA is the only other awards, other than The Oscars, that have a preferential ballot, wherein instead of voting on one choice, you list the films in order of preference. These two things combined make CODA suddenly look like a frontrunner. Technically I believe The Power of the Dog is still the frontrunner, but as voting was closing down (and Academy v

Let's start this off with a declaration. The reason Matt Reeves' The Batman is the best of its genre (and it may well be just that) is because it refuses to act as if it's part of the genre at all, instead going far above and beyond the typical theme park tentpoles swarming theatres these days. The Batman may technically be a comic book and/or superhero movie, but it owes more to films like David Fincher's Se7en or Zodiac , or Polanski's Chinatown , or even the works of William Friedkin or Fritz Lang than it does to and comic book and/or superhero movie that came before. The film, based primarily on the comic book Batman:Year Two, is a dark and brutal film, even by normal DCEU standards, which tend to be darker than their average MCU counterpart. This is a superhero movie, much like Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen, that deconstructs the genre and pretty much tears it apart. Is Batman, a masked vigilante who works above the law, really th