Author: Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley

You know what? There were a ton of really, really great films released in the last year. It didn’t really feel that way for a long time, what with cinemas opening and closing and opening and closing so much hardly anything had the chance to become a hit, not to mention the biggest non-starter of an Oscar season in decades. But as it came time to look back on the year that was, we found we had loads of movies to talk and enthuse about, far more than we had time to praise here.

Just like every year, we gave one award for each of the eight major Oscars: we care about most of the others (except for the fake awards like Best Original Song) but this post would be absurdly long if we picked those too. We each did out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only come from films that both of us have seen and nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each gave a Special Achievement Award for something that doesn’t fit our other categories, and our first ever Career Achievement Award to a group of cinematic artists long overlooked by an industry that doesn’t deserve them.

You can see each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of this post, which we strongly encourage you to check out if you’re looking for recommendations. This year really was rich with fantastic films, and we only got to award a small fraction of them.