And the 2019 Braddies go to … Peter Bradshaw's film picks of the year
Once again, the awards season comes to its climax with my “Braddies” for the calendar year, a selection of my personal awards that exists entirely independently of Guardian Film’s bestof-the-year countdown.
As ever, there are 10 “nominees” in 10 categories: film, director, actor, actress, supporting Actor, supporting Actress, documentary, cinematography, screenplay, directorial debut. There is also the single-entry nomination in the special category: quirkiest future cult classic most likely to beoverlooked by the boomer MSM establishment. The nominees are listed in alphabetical order and readers are invited to vote below the line for their preferred winner – and complain about omissions.
Best film
Beanpole (dir Kantemir Balagov) Happy as Lazzaro (dir Alice Rohrwacher)
High Life (dir Claire Denis)
If Beale Street Could Talk (dir Barry Jenkins)
The Irishman (dir Martin Scorsese) Little Women (dir Greta Gerwig) Marriage Story (dir Noah Baumbach)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (dir Quentin Tarantino)
So Long, My Son (dir Wang Xiaoshuai)
The Souvenir (dir Joanna Hogg)
Best director
Pedro Almodóvar for Pain and Glory Ari Aster for Midsommar
Noah Baumbach for Marriage Story Alejandro Landes for Monos
Lee Chang-dong for Burning
Ken Loach for Sorry We Missed You Martin Scorsese for The Irishman Joe Russo and Anthony Russo for Avengers: Endgame
Peter Strickland for In Fabric Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Best actor
Christian Bale for Vice
Antonio Banderas for Pain and Glory
Robert De Niro for the Irishman Leonardo DiCaprio for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Adam Driver for Marriage Story Stephan James for If Beale Street Could Talk
Eddie Murphy for Dolemite Is My Name
Brad Pitt for Ad Astra and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Wang Jingchun for So Long, My Son Steven Yeun for Burning
Best actress
Olivia Colman for The Favourite Virginie Efira for An Impossible Love
Cynthia Erivo for Harriet
Scarlett Johansson for Marriage Story
Nicole Kidman for Destroyer
Kiki Layne for If Beale Street Could Talk
Aneta Piotrowska for My Friend the Polish Girl
Saoirse Ronan for Little Women Yong Mei for So Long, My Son
Renée Zellweger for Judy
Best supporting actor
Alan Alda for Marriage Story
Tom Burke for The Souvenir
Ross Brewster for Sorry We Missed You
Timothée
Women
Eero Milonoff for Border
Al Pacino for The Irishman
Joe Pesci for The Irishman
Clarke Peters for Harriet
Wesley Snipes for Dolemite Is My Name
Bernard Verley for By the Grace of God
Best supporting actress
Juliette Binoche for High Life
Chalamet for
Little
Nicoletta Braschi for Happy as Lazzaro
Judi Dench for All Is True
Laura Dern for Marriage Story and Little Women
Regina King for
Could Talk
Danielle Macdonald for Skin
Margot Robbie for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Tilda Swinton for The Souvenir
Julie Walters in Wild Rose
Katherine Waterston for Mid90s Best documentary
Amazing Grace (dir Sydney Pollack) Apollo 11 (dir Todd Douglas Miller) Are You Proud? (dir Ashley Joiner) For Sama (dir Waad al-Kateab, Edward Watts)
The Great Hack (dir Karin Amer, Jehane Noujaim)
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (dir RaMell Ross)
Maradona (dir Asif Kapadia)
A Moon for My Father (dir Mania Akbari, Douglas White)
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (dir Martin Scorsese)
Varda by Agnès (dir Agnès Varda) Best cinematography
Mark Jenkin for Bait
Ryan Eddleston for The Fight
Mike Gioulakis for Us
Julie Kirkwood for Destroyer
Robert Richardson for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Laurie Rose for Pet Sematary
Carlos Rossini for The Chambermaid
Robbie Ryan for The Favourite, Sorry We Missed You and Marriage Story
Laurence Sher for Joker
Jasper Wolf for Monos
Best screenplay
If Beale Street
Pedro Almodóvar for Pain and Glory Simon Amstell for Benjamin
Noah Baumbach for Marriage Story Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara for The Favourite
Roddy Doyle for Rosie
Greta Gerwig for Little Women Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman for Booksmart
Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty for Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part Steven Zaillian for The Irishman Best directorial debut
Simon Amstell for Benjamin
Lila Avilés for The Chambermaid Richard Billingham for Ray & Liz Chiwetel Ejiofor for The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Isabella Eklöf for Holiday
Jessica Hynes for The Fight
Reinaldo Marcus Green for Monsters and Men
Camille Vidal-Naquet for Sauvage Dolly Wells for Good Posture
Harry Wootliff for Only You Quirkiest cult classic: the film most likely to be overlooked by the boomer MSM establishment
One Cut of the Dead (dir Shini’chirô Ueda)
political timing with visceral clarity.
He would be seething at his death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against. We should never forget that. What Jack would want from this is for all of us to walk through the door he has booted down, in his black Doc Martens.
That door opens up a world where we do not lock up and throw away the key. Where we do not give indeterminate sentences, or convict people on joint enterprise. Where we do not slash prison budgets, and where we focus on rehabilitation not revenge.
Where we do not consistently undermine our public services, the lifeline of our nation. Jack believed in the inherent goodness of humanity, and felt a deep social responsibility to protect that. Through us all, Jack marches on.
Borrow his intelligence, share his drive, feel his passion, burn with his anger, and extinguish hatred with his kindness. Never give up his fight.
To Jack Merritt. Now, and forever.
how it was carried out, so school boards or school IT departments were not making these decisions unilaterally.
Vanessa Cumming, a parent in Broward county, Florida, said she wanted to see more proof that school surveillance was actually helping students in some way.
“There’s no validated evidence that there’s tangible benefits that have been demonstrated from having this type of surveillance, and I can see all types of risk,” Cumming said.
“I think it would be unrealistic to say I don’t think it should be used at all,” she said. But, “If it’s going to happen, I think there should be some evidence out they’re that you’re making a good, informed decision about how you’re going to do it.”
Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students?
Her daughter, who is 11, loves hiphop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said. •••
Some parents have begun to organize around the issue of school data collection. The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.
The coalition currently has about 4,000 people on its mailing list, and nearly 100 active core members, according to Leonie Haimson, one of the co-founders of the group.
“More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,” Haimson said.
Administrators who support using surveillance technology said it gives schools a powerful tool to intervene and help students who are struggling in different ways, and particularly students who are struggling with self-harm and thoughts of suicide.
But some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing.
“I think it does have an effect on our brains that we’re constantly being surveilled, and there’s cameras where we are most of the day,” said Sara, the 16-year-old private school student from New York City. And not just in school: “A lot of kids have cameras in front of their house, on the subway, in stores.”
When students are not on school cameras or city cameras or store cameras, they’re on their own phone cameras.
“Anxiety and depression is the highest that it’s been,” she said. “I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.”
“It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”
There’s no validated evidence that there’s tangible benefits that have been demonstrated from having this type of surveillance