Oscar Death Race – What It Is and The Why of It All
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The Oscar Death Race is the nanowrimo of movie watching. The rules are you must watch every Oscar nominated film before the Oscars air. That’s all of them, not just the Best Picture nominees. This involves some strategy considering not everything is readily available in some of the smaller categories like Best Foreign Film and the short film categories. Torrenting is going to happen, but of course we’ll give it distributors up until the last minute to release the harder to find films.
Someone needs to let the distributors and movie studios know that it’s 2018 and your award nominated film shouldn’t be difficult to watch. I would gladly pay the $4 to rent any of these films instead of having to resort to deep interest searches.
The idea started with this NPR article.
Sarah Bunting is an accomplished internet fansite writer from the late 90s that decided to challenge herself to something silly like this and now the phenomenon has gathered a bit of steam. There is an Oscar Death Race Sub Reddit, that you’ll find me on semi-often and where people will help you watch some of those harder to find films.
Movie Pass will be an important factor in not being poor while watching these movies in the theater. For those that don’t know, movie pass is a service where you pay 9.99 and get to watch one movie per day for free in the vast majority of theaters are the country. Right now there are at least five nominated movies kicking around in most theaters, you can do that math. Movie Pass, the Netflix account I have anyway, the Amazon Prime account I have anyway, will be important tools in the death race to come.
My plan is to write articles, raw reviews and mini-essays about as many of these films as possible. It’s easy to get behind on that but I’ve already ready written three (I thought Downsizing would get nominated for something but I was wrong). My essay on Lady Bird has already been posted. Others are posted on Vocal.media, but I won’t link to those because I will end up just posting them all here.
What’s the point of all this? After all, I haven’t even been able to get in all of the Best Picture films in past years, so why even bother? I don’t really have an explanation for any of this. Part of it is my weird gamification tendencies, which would explain the racing to finish before the Oscars air. The more important part is where I like put myself in a position to watch or do things that I might not do otherwise.
The truth is I am attracted to super hero movies and Star Wars and other stuff studios pay millions of dollars to market to me. I enjoy the kinds of films that get nominated for Oscars and I enjoy foreign films, but they never draw me in. Also just like any random Marvel movie some of these artsy films can be bad on their own and the Oscar nominations act as quality regulator (that being said there are nominated films that suck). I’m not going to watch 25 foreign films but the five or six that get nominated is a reasonable number and they’re movies I’d never think to watch.
So the nominations were announced and a death racer has 59 movies to watch between now and March 4th. The good news is if you’re me you’ve already watched some of the low hanging fruit, Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy for example were both nominated for the visual effects award. They aren’t easy to find, but the short film categories for live action, animated and documentary will cut 15 movies from the list of 59. Alas I am only at 10 so far and was in the middle of the documentary “Last Men in Aleppo” when I decided to finish writing this post. Maybe I’ll be at 11 by the time this goes up.
Since the categories are meaningless in the death race I won’t post nominations by category instead here a simple list, in alphabetical order, of everything one would need to watch in order to complete the death race:
A Fantastic Woman
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
All the Money in the World
Baby Driver
Beauty and the Beast
Big Stick
Blade Runner 2049
Call Me by Your Name
Coco
Darkest Hour
Dear Basketball
DeKalb Elementary
Disaster Artist
Dunkirk
Edith + Eddie
Faces Places
Ferdinand
Florida Project
Garden Party
Get Out
Greatest Showman
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405
Heroin(e)
I, Tonya
Icarus
Knife Skills
Kong: Skull Island
Lady Bird
Last Men in Aleppo
Logan
Lou
Loveless
Loving Vincent
Marshall
Molly’s Game
Mudbound
My Nephew Emmett
Negative Space
On Body and Soul
Phantom Thread
Revolting Rhymes
Roman J. Israel, Esq.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Strong Island
The Boss Baby
The Breadman
The Eleven O’Clock
The Insult
The Post
The Shape of Water
The Silent Child
The Square
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Traffic Stop
Victoria & Abdul
War for the Planet of the Apes
Watu Wote/All of Us
Wonder