I see Men in Black the same way. Great year, but without a doubt that was the Best Picture, and due to a lot of the Awards' quirks it didn't even place, winning instead in categories with little competition for it.

That's certainly one way to characterize a quality entry in the series that "Waterworld" ripped off…

I'm just gonna add… how on Earth does Matt Damon give a noteworthy performance in The Martian? The best word I can find for that performance is "subdued", which can be a feat, but not in a role like that, in a movie like that, where otherwise he'd be doing a plain bad job.

I'd say Mad Max elevated its genre, as a direct object to the verb "to elevate". It's hazy to me whether that should factor into an award like this, or what should, really.

Stallone does … as well as ever, but Jordan destroys at a role that seems like it might bury its actor in audience nostalgia.

I didn't like that movie but I agree 100%. I might have liked that movie if Pena, and his character, had been front and center.

If pure principle can yield to the empirical, it's still a lot less likely that a CGI dollhouse is a better film than one where CGI is used sparingly. There's nothing preventing it… again, in principle. That's just where we stand today.

Wow… you folks and I are on the same wavelength on Jordan in Creed. I said almost exactly the same thing on the way out of that movie: that guy would be a shoo-in for the Oscar if he weren't a black man playing a character that old men in Hollywood will see as "the son of the black guy from…"

Looks good to me.

It's just like… an essay, about a thing. There's tons of them, no one will remember them, and it's not any different from anything someone might write on a similar topic from fifty years ago that might end up in an archive somewhere. It doesn't seem like a thing from the here and now particularly.

I concede the point that this guy isn't interesting enough for us to remember him.

Was that him? Was that a Bateman, or Baldwin or something?

Eh, I can kind of see it. Remember that time travel movie with Denzel Washington?

There's that car commercial hitting the recently vulcanized Ryan Reynolds peak right now. He's pretty good in it. I remember him and not what car will stop before it hits a sexy Ryan Reynolds in a neighborhood full of tussling Ryan Reynoldses and that's good news for him, I guess, since I didn't see Deadpool.

One more year of work for Kevin Costner!

On the other hand, Batman movies make them a lot more money.

What would have been slightly harder and a hundred times more interesting is if they'd made a movie where Superman and Batman met and just became pals who fought crime and won. That would never happen even though it sold pretty well to toy-demanding children for close to twenty years and also sounds like the sort of…

How were we not going to get a Batman trailer when the movie is also the new Batman reboot? Were you saving up your anger until it inevitably happened?

I doubt this will rank among the best Batman movies but, for better or for worse, that scene at the beginning was the first time since 1966 that Batman in the movie looked like Batman from the comic. Like, from any comic

There’s still resistance to the character among a certain strain of old-school comics fans,