leebutler Editorial

Oscar Predictions – 2025

Every year on this blog I talk about the Oscar nominees and the potential winners in each category. It’s the reason this blog exists and it’s a fun thing to do around this time of year, even when (thanks to a real-world job that takes a lot of my time) I’ve missed a few of the bigger films that got a bunch of nominations. I still can look at some of the bigger trends and have a guess about how the ceremony is going to go… it also doesn’t help that, as usual, some of these films are incredibly hard to find in Australia in a way that I can legally see them at a convenient time. So, here are my predictions for what will win, what should win and the wild card choice that might sneak in at the last minute.

Besides, if the members of the Academy can vote for movies to win the award without ever watching them, I can predict what they’re going to do without seeing everything.

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leebutler Editorial

Best Performances of 2024

Every year it’s remarkable how much a good performance can salvage a film. Your film can be a boring waste of time but a single great performance can make it worth watching. Every year film nerds love guessing who is going to be given the awards for Acting, those of us into horror are often left disappointed because our faves don’t win, but lists like this let us throw a tiny bit of praise out into the void and so that’s what we’re going to do here.

In normal years this list would be 20 entries long but this isn’t a normal year, I didn’t see my normal amount of films so this is only going to be 10 entries long but god damn are these some memorable entries. 1 entry per film, no honourable mentions this time, here we go.

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leebutler Drama, Horror, Review

The Substance (2024) – Substantially Brilliant

Released: 19th September
Seen: 19th October

In April 2015, the show Inside Amy Schumer aired an episode titled “Last Fuckable Day” which contained a sketch featuring Amy alongside iconic actresses Tina Fey, Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette. In the sketch Amy comes upon Tina, Julia and Patricia celebrating Julia’s Last Fuckable Day, the day that an actress goes from being considered fuckable to just being considered an elderly woman reserved for mother roles. It’s a hilarious and scathing indictment of the very real agist sexism that pervades the entertainment industry and how it treats women. Over the years there’s been several ways to talk about the culture’s obsession with looks, youth and fuckability in the media. Still, for the longest time the strongest indictment I saw came from this silly mid-2010’s sketch comedy series… and now we have The Substance, proving that horror is still the best genre for exploring complex concepts like this.

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leebutler Review

Songbird (2021) – Novid-19

Released: 20th May
Seen: 20th May

Songbird Info

When a disaster happens, it’s only natural for it to somehow end up being a part of people’s art. People process things in different ways and that includes filmmakers. With this deadly pandemic spreading worldwide it’s only natural that people would work it into the art they were making. TV shows like 9-1-1 have been working covid into the background of their stories, movies like Host have used the lockdown as an element of the story. Key word in that sentence is “ELEMENT”, what would happen if someone made an entire film that was just “What if the current pandemic… but worse?”… that person would be making Songbird and I would not like them very much.

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