By Massimo Usai

In a year dominated once again by the pandemic, books, music, and movies occupied our days the most.

Of the best records of the past year I have written abundantly in recent days (read here and here), but I want to go and make a small list in this post on the movies.

It is the first of the year, and the greetings are a must, and it is useless to tell you how the year just passed was because it was a different year, but a year that recorded some positives, especially if contextualized with what has turned around us.

For sure, like you, I have seen many movies. I haven’t seen any films at the cinema, because I didn’t feel like sharing a room with people.

I do not yet feel ready to share spaces, neither for a film nor for a concert or dinner in a restaurant, especially indoors.

But here are the films that I liked the most in the year that ended last night.

The five films I would nominate for this year’s Oscar.

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun – Wes Anderson
The Dig – Simon Stone
The Mauritanian – Kevin Macdonald
The Hand of God – Paolo Sorrentino
Cruela – Craig Gillespie

These are the ones that I would nominate and give the Oscar to Sorrentino, for me the most beautiful film of the year.

So The Hand of God is my movie of the year!

But the Oscar will be won by The Power of the Dog Directed by Jane Campion.

It is a film made perfectly, like a record for the GRAMMY, where it no longer says that something is not treated ideally, but that it has left me little.

Let’s be clear, it is a movie that I liked. It’s impossible not to appreciate the actors who acted sublimely, and the Oscar to Benedict Cumberbatch should be given without too much discussion.

The photography is “wow”, but in the end, there is too much perfection that leads me to distance myself from the real story of the movie.

That keeps me away from the emotions a film should give by the story.

The five that I put on my list were definitely closer to my feelings, even Cruella, which is the funniest movie I’ve seen this year.

To be fair, I must admit that I have not yet seen films like Belfast, The Lost Daughter, and The Tragedy of Macbeth, which are coming out these days and with 5/6 others that I have in reserve to see, could make me change my mind about the final list and the best actor of the year.

Let’s do so; I promise the post will be updated in a month.