The Oscars have once again passed, and I have a few things to say about the winners. Or more accurately, the movies, and actors, I personally think should have won. Since the pandemic was still going on throughout this past year, I wasn’t able to go out and watch a lot of the bigger movies that came out this year, so I’ll mainly focus on the big releases on streaming platforms. With that said, let’s get to which movie should’ve won their category.

Last November, the movie “tick, tick… BOOM” was released on Netflix. At first, I was hesitant to watch it since I’m not the biggest fan of musicals. However, I do love Andrew Garfield as an actor, and just the fact that he was in this film had me interested, so I watched it. The storytelling was so good and the music never missed, and as I expected, Andrew Garfield’s acting was phenomenal. The movie was nominated for Best Film Editing and it has a really good sense of pacing because of its editing. The movie did get beat out by “Dune” and in fairness, the editing and pacing may have been better, I haven’t yet watched it. Luckily, “tick, tick… BOOM” was nominated for other categories too. Andrew Garfield was nominated for “Best Actor in a Leading Role” for his performance and while I’m not saying he should’ve won that award, he should have definitely won that award. Even with Garfield losing the award being a big surprise to me, the biggest surprise was an action of the actual winner, Will Smith. I think both Chris Rock and Will Smith were in the wrong. The jokes were in bad taste, but I do think Smith could have reacted better.

For the next award, it’s well known that “Encanto” has some of the catchiest music since “Frozen,” so it’s no surprise that it was nominated for the “Original Score” award. With songs like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and “Surface Pressure,” it should’ve blown the competition away. Not only was it nominated for that award, but one of its songs was also nominated for the “Original song” award, that being “Dos Oruguitas.” Compared to the rest of the songs, “Dos Oruguitas” is a beautifully written emotional song that made me feel so much when it first came on during the movie, and it still gives me chills listening back to it. Yet, “Encanto” lost both of those nominations and I’m honestly pretty shocked. I thought that at least the original score would’ve been enough to win, but even that wasn’t enough. Just another of my predictions beat out by “Dune.” The song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” did get a live performance, but much like Bruno, we shall not speak of it.

The last category I’m interested in, being the “Visual Effects” category, has three of my favorite movies by far this year. “Free Guy” was just a really fun movie all in all and the visuals were a bit spotty at points but they were still really strong for what it’s worth. “Spiderman: No Way Home” was probably the biggest movie of the past year. The visual effects were pretty insane in this movie and I would say I would’ve wanted this movie to have won if it wasn’t for the next movie on my list. “Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings” beats out all of these movies in my opinion. There were certain scenes that just looked flat out beautiful with the visual effects in play. Especially the big fight at the end with the 10 rings. But of course, even these movies weren’t safe from the mad titan that is “Dune.”

So with that, it seems that I’m going to have to watch “Dune” since it’s apparently the greatest movie made last year. Even though not many of my choices won, The Oscars were still an interesting watch this year, with or without the Will Smith incident.