O.J.: Made in America

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature was O.J.: Made in America, Ezra Edelman’s epic examination of O.J. Simpson’s life, career, and the murder trial that captivated the American imagination. It was a truly remarkable achievement in non-fiction filmmaking; not just the best doc of 2016 but the best film of any kind of 2016 (at least according to the schlub who runs this website). Its Academy Award was richly deserved.

When it comes to predicting future Oscar winners, few institutions are as prescient as the Directors Guild of America. Only once in the past decade has the DGA honored a filmmaker who did not go on to win the Academy Award for Best Director; that took place in 2012, when the DGA selected Ben Affleck for Argo while the AMPAS went with Ang Lee and Life of Pi. If the DGA selects you as the best director of the previous year, you might as well start working on that Oscar acceptance speech.

According to most people (on the internet, which is where most people live now), 2016 was horrific. It was a year in which we lost some of our best and brightest artists, a year in which we elected a president who will, according to Kate McKinnon’s Hilary Clinton, “kill us all,” and it was a year in which many blockbusters fulfilled the “bust” end of that promise. Despite all of this, 2016 delivered some truly remarkable films; because of all of this, we needed them.

The road to the Oscars is long and winding. Though everyone’s wrapping up their coverage of 2016, formulating lists and bestowing awards, we’ve still got a little under three months until the Academy Awards telecast actually airs on February 26. But some categories do get off and running in advance of the official nominations announcement on January 24, with larger slates of films placed on a shortlist from which five selections are then culled. The race for the Best Documentary Feature prize officially began yesterday, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released their fifteen picks for the cream of this year’s nonfiction crop.

What a difference six months makes. Back in the summer, the world of film was all gloom and doom. Television was great; the movies were terrible. One respected critic even speculated that someday the world would look back at 2016 as “the year that movies died.”

Is there a more stressful month for film fans than December? Not only are most of us trying to stay on top of our normal holiday stress  —  picking up gifts for our family and friends and dreading time spent in airports and train stations  —  we are also trying to fit in as many movies as possible before the end of the year. Whether you write about film, participate in an office Academy Award pool, or just like watching good movies, there’s nothing like cramming movies into every spare second of an already packed mo

There are four seasons to a year, but only two seasons to a movie year: Summer, which now starts around late February, and Awards.

I’m a freshman in high school. After months of legal proceedings, the jury finally reaches a verdict in the O.J. Simpson case. For the only time in my four years of secondary education, everything stops. Several classes worth of kids pile into the only room on the hall with a cable television. The room is packed. Kids are literally sitting on each other's laps because there’s nowhere else for them to go. It gets quiet.