2024 was an odd year for the pic’tchas. It followed a stellar year for movies, but '23 was a rough time for film production due to the protracted strikes, first by the Writers Guild of America and then the Screen Actors Guild. I had assumed these necessary labor disputes would result in far fewer movies getting released in 2024, but there was still a solid crop of films of all budgets, genres, styles, and levels of quality. Still, I can't remember a year in which critical consensus seemed to zero in so quickly on ten or so films they deemed “awards worthy” and then commence elevating them to their best-of-the-year lists and awards categories. There are only 50 films nominated for Oscars this year, partly because the various branches of the Academy seemed to limit their nominations to the ten or twelve anointed films much more than they usually do.

The earliest front-runner, the Palme d'Or-winning Anora, unlike some early critics' darlings of many other years that gradually fall out of favor as the month wears on, now, a week before the Academy Awards, remains positioned as the front-runner. It didn't stay there all year like 2023's Oppenheimer. Acclaimed films like The Brutalist, with its epic, old school style and subject matter, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, a rare '24 example of the type of movie Oscar voters usually go for, and the French gender-bending, genre-blending Emilia Perez, which scored the largest number of nominations, often seemed more likely winners than a 138 minute comedy about a sex worker made by an outsider director who the Academy clearly respects but didn't, at least at first, seem ready to embrace whole-heartedly. But after winning the top prize at both the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild of America, as well as some Indie Spirits and a couple of BAFTAs, Sean Baker's sweet but hard-hitting screwball feels like it will be the big film of 2024.

Anora would be a fitting Best Picture for '24. For one thing, it actually is one of the year's best films (which always helps). But it is also indicative of this year in movies, especially award-winning feature films. 2024 saw dozens of good movies, but few great ones. And the word that, for me, most sums up nearly every nominated 2024 film has to be “overrated.” I don't say this to be snarky, but since awards bodies have to nominate and award movies every year, it goes without saying that in a year of mostly good, pretty good, and not so good movies, the good ones get elevated to lofty heights; joining the ranks of great films from past decades that are remembered for their excellence, as well as those pointedly subpar films from past decades that most sane people view as evidence that the Academy is full of crazy, out of touch elitists.

Anora is in my top ten films of 2024, but it barely even cracks my top 4 films of writer/director Sean Baker's eight movies. Similarly, the picture that currently sits at the top of my list of 2024, The Brutalist, is a film I would probably rank below James Grey's similarly themed The Immigrant, which was my twenty-fifth best film of 2013. Still, the lack of obvious choices means there are a few unusual nominees for the Academy. Notorious for dismissing genre movies, this year saw The Substance, a body horror picture with a spectacularly gross Grand Guignol finale, score five nominations, including four in the most prestigious categories. The Substance tracks the type of comeback narrative Oscar voters love, but the surprise Best International Feature nominee The Girl With The Needle, while not an out-and-out horror movie, is the type of film that would normally score at most a cinematography nod from these folks.

As is often the case, the films the Academy has selected as praiseworthy fall within the full range from my top film to my (almost) bottom film. So it's not an unusual year in that regard. I would say that this year's crop of nominated short films was more consistently strong than the nominated features. But another unusual aspect of 2024 is that few awards are all sewn up. Once The Substance turned out to be a surprise critical hit, Demi Moore emerged as the front-runner, and Kieran Culkin has remained a lock for Best Supporting Actor since the first screenings of A Real Pain. But other than these, this could be a difficult year to predict in terms of who will win most of the awards.

There were also very few “snubs”, dust-ups, or kerfuffles this year. The two most overlooked performances were Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, a performance most critics love in a film they like very much, and Angelina Jolie in Pablo Larraín's Maria, a performance most critics respect in a film they think is pretty bad. There were only two controversies, one minor and one major. The one that didn't make too much of a dent was the revelation that AI had been used to “augment” the performances of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist. This lit up social media right before voting started, and righteous fools started to call for the two stars to be disqualified. When it was vaguely clarified that the AI tool Respeecher was only used to “refine these actors’ dialect,” people were not placated. In reality, all that occurred was that the film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, a native Hungarian speaker, used Respeecher to alter certain vowel sounds in a few scenes where the actors, who each did a lot of work with a Hungarian dialect coach prior to shooting, speak in that language.

While this tempest in a teapot illustrates how freaked out about AI people are (and should be), it also betrays how ignorant most folks still are about filmmaking, despite most of cinema magic having been completely deconstructed for even the most casual fan. After all, the vast majority of words we hear actors speak in a huge percentage of movies were not recorded at the same time their images were. And film editors have been cutting and pasting lines from different takes and fitting them into actors' mouths since the dawn of sound. Plus, nearly every film requires the actors to come back and revoice many of their lines for both production and performance reasons. Are the people calling for these actors to be disqualified because a computer was used to change the sound of a few E's and O's in less than 15% of The Brutalist aware that Tom Hanks's brother has done most of the multi-Oscar nominee's dialogue replacement for the past four decades? This is to say nothing of the ways computers have been used for the past thirty years to make actors look younger, slimmer, smoother, firmer, or grotesque, but people don't seem to take issue with any of that.

Another actor to benefit from Respeecher this year was Karla Sofía Gascón, but that issue was too insignificant to be noticed in the face of the larger controversy surrounding several social media posts the star of Emilia Pérez made between 2016 and 2019 that contained racist language and offensive jokes about a range of marginalized communities. In some of these comments, Gascón also aggressively disparaged the “woke” Academy membership for several of their decisions concerning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These posts surfaced after the announcement of the Golden Globe nominations, of which Emilia Pérez received eight, including a Best Actress nom for Gascón. The actress's response to the coverage was to launch into an aggressively defensive stance, sabotaging her chance at getting back into the Academy's good graces and torpedoing her opportunity to make history as the first transgender woman to win Best Actress far more than the resurfaced tweets did in the first place. I ain't gonna lose any sleep over the fact that Gascón's personality and off-putting views seem to have tarnished the film she leads because Emilia Pérez is terrible by just about every measurement. (How do you say schadenfreude in Spanish? Or is it French? Who can tell with a movie as lost in space and time as Emilia Pérez?)

The run-up to the awards also unfolded when massive wildfires were devastating and destroying great swaths of Los Angeles County. These fires delayed the announcement of the nominees twice, and soon, many called for the Oscars to be canceled out of respect. But, again, like most social media-fueled reactions, the idea of canceling an event that employs thousands of LA residents when they are most in need of income makes little sense. Many who live in the city count on the lucrative awards season in much the way retailers rely on Christmas shopping to make their annual nut. But logic nearly always gives way to passion when it comes to high profile, celebrity-driven culture.

Similarly, my own passions and opinions, though I try to think them through far more than the average troll or cretin on the platform formerly known as Twitter, can get a bit heated every year that I sit down to make a ranked list of all the films the Academy has chosen to bless with their Oscar nominations. If I disparage one of your favorites, I hope you won't take it too hard. Film is the most subjective of all the art forms (at least, that's my opinion!).

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#50: ALIEN: ROMULUS - 1 nomination, zero stars
Undoubtedly the worst of the year's nominated films, this inexcusably shallow, hollow, and unfaithful work of sub-par fan-fiction would rank as my least favorite film of the entire year if not for an amateur werewolf flick called The Forest Hills, which I watched only because it was Shelley Duvall's last movie. At least The Forest Hills felt genuinely created by human beings. If you told me that Alien: Romulus was penned and produced entirely by AI instead of by the talented director Fede Alvarez (Don't Breathe) and his regular co-writer Rodo Sayagues, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Alien: Romulus embodies what you might get if you had ChatGPT absorb the first four Alien movies and then attempt to create a hybrid— a film with all the memorable moments, character types, and concepts from the earlier pictures but devoid of any understanding of what made those elements so effectively scary, thrilling, and human. As for its nominated Visual Effects, everything is recycled from those first four movies, so I struggle to understand how it merits a nomination in any craft category. The film's sole original visual effects sequence, a zero-gravity escape where the acid blood of numerous aliens hang in the air like floating land mines the characters must navigate, doesn't even look good. Nothing about this year in film made me more despondent about the future of cinema than the general acceptance of this movie by critics and audiences as "perfectly good entertainment." How far we've sunk into accepting the absolute shit some studios served us as if it were acceptable entertainment.





#49: EMILIA PERZ - 13 nominations ★
This year, Netflix's big awards push picture points out how out of touch the company is with audiences, if not with the Academy. The most successful streamer has always been a bridesmaid and never a bride when it comes to the Best Picture candidates it campaigns for. When Netflix bought this crime-thriller musical with a transgender protagonist made by the acclaimed French director Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Rust and Bone, A Prophet), they thought they were getting the next Parasite, but it turned out to be the next Green Book. Emilia Perez became one of the year's most divisive movies the second it hit American screens, long before any extra-textual controversy came its way. With Academy membership now far more international than it used to be, it's not all that surprising that a movie like this would be nominated for Best Picture. And since both the old guard and newer, younger membership are always overeager to award a “first ever,” it's not surprising that star Karla Sofía Gascón would score a Best Actress nomination, making her the first ever openly transgender actor to be nominated for Best Actress.

These days, when the Academy nominates a film for Best Picture, Best International Film, and Best Actress, the specific member branches almost seem obligated to nominate its co-stars, director, and writer, too. This accounts for Audiard's triple nominations for Adapted Screenplay, Director, and Best Picture (along with one of his four fellow producers, Pascal Caucheteux). Neither Gascón nor Zoe Saldaña gives a bad performance in this movie. However, I'd believe you if you told me they and their other co-star Selena Gomez never met while shooting this movie. 2024 was plagued by some of the most artificial-looking pictures released in a single calendar year. Emilia Perez takes place in Mexico City, Bangkok, London, and other iconic locations, yet it all looks like it was shot in front of green screens in small, poorly lit studios. That doesn't mean all the actors were shot at different times and then composited into the same frames, but that would help explain why each of these leads feels like they're giving a decent performance but in an entirely different film from each other.

Thus, the plethora of craft nominations is all the more surprising. Best Editing, Best Sound, and even Best Make-Up/Hair are baffling enough, but Best Cinematography? This is one of the ugliest, most faux-looking movies of the year. Not only do the sets and computer-assisted environments look terrible, but Director of Photography Paul Guilhaume's lighting does these actresses no favors. The film attempts to blend genres boldly, and there are several interesting narrative and thematic ideas here, but the result is a tonally inept hodgepodge of elements that don't fit together. This is especialy true of the musical sequences, some of which are shot in that pseudo-gritty, street-level, handheld fake documentary style that seems to be trying to downplay both the fact that this is a musical and the fact that this is not shot in real locations, while others are done in the full-blown modern Hollywood musical style. But if a musical lives and dies by the quality of its songs, this movie is dead on arrival. I challenge anyone who's seen this movie, even two or three times, to hum one of its tunes. The songs are loud, flashy, and riddled with on-the-nose lyrics, but what most distinguishes them is their utter forgettablity. Of the two that have been nominated, "El Mal" and "Mi Camino," Saldaña's whisper-spoken-word "El Mal" is probably the music number that resonates the most. But these disposable tunes feel like the CGI equivalent of melody composition, and they all seem like they last less than 90 seconds, yet they wear out their welcome before they're halfway through. Like the synthetic, hollow shell of a movie that contains them, these are hardly Oscar-worthy.




#48: WICKED - 10 nominations ★
If Emilia Perez illustrates how out of step with the zeitgeist Netflix is, Wicked reveals the same thing about me. Though it didn't crack the top ten highest-grossing films of the year, this movie exceeded all expectations about how it would fare at the box office. But it left me in a state of... unadulterated loathing. How anyone can take pleasure in this assaultive and insulting movie is beyond me. I get that people love the show, but I would think that loving the show would make the frantic and hurried yet labored, repetitive, and protracted approach to this film all the more annoying. Almost every craft nomination is baffling because the work that correctly went unnominated—directing, screenplay adaptation, and cinematography—undermined the interesting costumes, makeup and hair, and production design.

The most puzzling nomination is for editing since this is an atrociously cut film both in terms of narrative storytelling and the assembly of visual images. I didn't know the show going in, other than being somewhat familiar with a few of the major songs, but even these numbers, like “ Popular” and "Defying Gravity," are chopped up and truncated, with various bits of physical business, dialogue, and action constantly interrupting the songs. How does this serve those who are devoted to the stage show? When you watch your favorite musical, you want to revel in its production numbers, not have them consistently interrupted by a director showing you some flashy effect or having the performers engage in behaviors we've already seen their characters perform a dozen times. What shocked me the most about Wicked is that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande managed to deliver solid, engaging performances despite being bogged down in such an inept production while portraying woefully underdeveloped one-dimensional caricatures. That they make these characters enjoyable at all makes their acting nominations well-deserved.




#47: ANUJA - 1 nomination ★★
This year's crop of Oscar-nominated live-action shorts was the best of the three 2024 short film collections, even though many of them felt like vignettes rather than complete stories with full beginnings, middles, and ends. This little movie from India certainly plays more like a narrative snippet than a full story, yet it doesn't seem like one of those shorts that's made as a demo for a larger feature. The story follows two young sisters who work as seamstresses in a sweatshop. The younger sister has the opportunity to attend a boarding school, but her cruel boss wants to keep her under his control so she can use her amazing math skills to do complex calculations, I guess because he previously needed to use a calculator? The film places its pre-teen protagonist in an impossible dilemma, but writer/director Adam J. Graves seems to use this as an excuse to avoid resolving his story. The film simply ends, leaving us to do much of the storyteller's work ourselves. The two sisters share a lovely relationship and genuine chemistry, but this screenplay feels very underdeveloped.





#46: A DIFFERENT MAN - 1 nomination ★★
Sometimes I feel like there are only two kinds of narrative features: movies that seem like the filmmakers have a story to tell in which rich themes emerge from the writing, shooting, and editing process, and movies that feel like the filmmakers start with a theme or statement they want to convey, leading them to craft a rigid, forced, artificial narrative to serve that initial idea. A Different Man exemplifies the latter. Aaron Schimberg clearly has points to make about self-loathing and contemporary American obsessions with physical appearance, identity, and trauma. However, the story he concocts to convey these points— about a facially disfigured wannabe actor who undergoes a magical treatment that transforms him into a handsome man, only to lose the opportunity to play a role based on his old self— is so contrived in its execution that the themes fail to resonate with any real power.

Schimberg's prior film, Chained for Life, is set in the world of low-budget filmmaking, and the reality depicted in that movie feels entirely credible. In this picture, however, the portrayals of the way medical procedures are performed and the manner in which off-off-Broadway theater is produced both feel like a fantasy construct. It's not that the events of this movie couldn't have unfolded plausibly or been told in a more allegorical way, but the writing here feels like it was translated from another language by someone who doesn't fully grasp the original text's dialect. While watching A Different Man, it's not hard to envision how this script could have unfolded in a way that would tell the same story in a more tenable or fantastical manner, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions about its meaning.

However, the nomination here is for Make-Up and Hair, which I assume is specifically for the facial prosthetics Sebastian Stan wears until his character, Edward, undergoes his magical transformation. The look seems to be directly inspired by his co-star Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, so that when Edward meets Pearson's well-adjusted and well-liked Oswald, he sees the person he could have been in his genial rival for the lead int he play. This aspect of the film works well, making it a worthy nomination.




#45: BETTER MAN - 1 nomination ★★
As with Wicked and A Different Man, I seem to be out of step with the vast majority of folks I've read and spoken to who love this musical biopic about English pop singer Robbie Williams. However, this is an utterly generic rock 'n' roll docudrama that is only made unique because Williams is portrayed as a CGI monkey. This fantasy element goes uncommented on by everyone in the film. While I will admit that it's more entertaining to watch a CGI monkey singing, dancing, and doing drugs (what, no sex scene???) than it is watching some actor made up to look like a known celebrity, the novelty wears off real fuckin' fast. As for the nominated VFX, I will concede that among the dozens and dozens of anthropomorphized monkeys rendered through motion-capture performance technology that have littered the screen in the past two decades, this is one of the best.




#44: MEMOIR OF A SNAIL - 1 nomination ★★
2024 was a terrible year for animated features, but the Academy still managed to nominate a few unusual and interesting films in this category. While the majority of what got cranked out were sequels and other IP, like Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, Kung Fu Panda 4, Mufasa: The Lion King, The Garfield Movie, and Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Parts 1, 2, and 3, the Academy mostly went for more quirky, original films. You can't get much more quirky or original than Adam Elliot's semi-autobiographical story of a dejected Australian misfit girl forcibly separated from her beloved twin brother after they're orphaned. While the movie has charming, inventive character design, a solid voice cast, and a delightful handmade quality that I really appreciated, this is an almost comically miserablist work of trauma-fetishization that plays like an animated adaptation of a Hannah Gadsby stand-up special, or maybe Debbie Downer the Movie.




#43: THE SIX TRIPLE EIGHT - 1 nomination ★★
Tyler Perry's barely competent TV-movie-style portrayal of the only all-Black, all-female battalion that entered the European theater near the end of World War II is the kind of movie that will either make you glad this story got told or infuriate you because this story got told so poorly. The movie is based on a WWII History magazine article by Kevin M. Hymel called "Fighting a Two-Front War." It chronicles the efforts of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, which was tasked with sorting through a backlog of 17 million pieces of undelivered mail to boost morale during a critical period in the conflict. These ladies deserved better than this lazy, schmaltzy, amateurish production, but they do get a reasonably decent song out of it.

The Best Original Song nominee "The Journey," performed by H.E.R., is this year's seemingly obligatory Diane Warren belter, marking the composer and lyricist's fourteenth nomination. Two years ago, Warren was awarded an honorary Oscar for her many musical contributions to films—Starship’s "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" from Mannequin in 1987, Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" from Armageddon, Lady Gaga's "Til It Happens to You" from The Hunting Ground, and many more. However, her last seven song nominations have felt less like deserving work being recognized and more like the music branch is determined to get this talented woman a competitive Oscar. So it's nice that this song, although it's no "If I Could Turn Back Time" (also by Warren), feels Oscar-worthy, especially in a year filled with so many terrible musicals.

Warren writes songs for people who love to SING— Cher, Celine Dion, Belinda Carlisle, Taylor Dayne, Michael Bolton, LeAnn Rimes, Taylor Swift— not for auto-tuned actors faking their way through production numbers in films that seem to do everything possible to conceal the fact that they're musicals at all. How much would I love to see this year be Warren's year? If she wins over the favored, almost anti-musical songs of Emilia Pérez, it could be the highlight of the broadcast!




#42: NOSFERATU - 4 nominations ★★
I didn't feel as alone this time regarding my disappointment in Robert Eggers' fourth work of historical fiction. Though it was a substantial hit, many I know were almost as underwhelmed by the film as I was. As mentioned in my review, I don't particularly enjoy any adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula, a book I find deceptively uncinematic. However, my critique of this version of Stoker's story—which is equally based on F. W. Murnau and Henrik Galeen's 1922 silent German Expressionist unofficial adaptation of the book—extends to all the various crafts for which it has been nominated. The cinematography, costumes, production design, and make-up and hair are striking but not in a way that enhances the story; they almost serve as a distraction. This isn't the only movie this year where I felt the visual aesthetic overwhelmed the narrative. It's a curious feeling, as I love film noir, German expressionism, gothic horror, and movies shot on 35mm film. Still, while I appreciate the level of work that went into this Nosferatu, none of it engaged or moved me.




#41: THE SUBSTANCE - 5 nominations ★★
This is one of those movies that, as soon as it proved a hit, seemed like a lock for several awards, despite it being an unusual type of movie for the Oscar crowd. Not only do its themes of contemporary society's unhealthy obsession with youth and physical perfection resonate strongly with actors, who make up the Academy's main voting body, but the comeback story of sixty-one-year-old star Demi Moore is an awards narrative few can ignore. I strongly dislike this movie, yet you can bet I'm rooting for Moore to win, and she's one of the year's few shoo-ins. She's always been undervalued as an actress, but I’ve loved her work ever since No Small Affair and About Last Night... (two '80s comedy/dramas as underrated as she is). I'd have loved to see her nominated for Ghost, the role that made her a superstar in 1990.

Moore's savvy and commendable publicizing of her own career struggles, organic bodily changes, and physical regenerations over the decades, alongside her public struggles with being an aging female movie star, add extra-textual depth to the picture that I think many have confused with good screenwriting. While I can't fault writer/director Coralie Fargeat's nomination for director. I consider the film the directorial equivalent of a sledgehammer, but I know many love this kind of over-the-top style rich in winking homages to iconic (and vastly superior) films, delivered with that bewildered, what-the-fuck-did-I-just-watch tone. However, a Best Original Screenplay nomination for a script that is demonstrably terrible on every level is really infuriating.

The Substance has a lot to say, and its themes are significant, but the script undercuts those themes at every turn with every choice. The premise itself makes no sense. The story follows a female TV star well past the point where the industry usually replaces women her age with someone much younger. When she sees the writing on the wall, she opts for a drastic solution upon discovering an underground product called The Substance, which allows the user to grow a second, younger body that will live their life on alternate weeks. However, this is not a case of a shared consciousness between two bodies; what The Substance offers is a chance to cut your life in half and give it to a shallow, selfish alter ego over whom you have no control. This isn't a Jekyll and Hyde story; it's a Dorian Gray story, but one that expects us to believe someone would voluntarily choose to become the portrait of Dorian Gray hanging alone in a dark attic rather than the eternally youthful Dorian Gray himself. Even if Fargeat's protagonist doesn't fully grasp what she's getting into, why would anyone who has used The Substance ever recommend it to anyone else unless they were motivated by spite or revenge?

This central story problem is never addressed. In fact, Fargeat doubles down on the flawed logic with two of the other characters she introduces—and this is a film with fewer than seven people in it, all of whom are shallow representations of negative personality traits rather than full-blooded, multi-dimensional characters. This lack of human representation undermines the film’s themes and reduces what should be sharp feminist subtext to simplistic and overt messaging. Still, with Demi Moore at its core, the film can make an almost unlimited number of poor narrative choices, and it doesn't really matter. In fact, the bigger and more outrageous the movie becomes, the less it needs to worry about crafting its message in a clever way. This is a film that wants to make you feel things on a gut level. Each sequence feels like a punch to the stomach that doubles you over, and when you look back up, dazed and a little confused, all you can see is the filmmaker's message plastered across every frame.




#40: ELTON JOHN: NEVER TOO LATE
The latest fawning, for-fans-only documentary/concert film about a music star reflecting on his life is this year's American Symphony. What? You don't remember American Symphony from last year's Oscars? That's OK; you won't remember this film in a year, either. Most of the content covered in this Disney+ documentary, co-directed by Elton John's husband, David Furnish, is already explored in the horrendous 2019 musical biopic Rocketman, which Furnish produced. I like Elton John, and I enjoy his music, which makes it all the more disappointing that such a unique performer would end up with such bland and generic movies as his cinematic legacy. Fortunately, the albums and the great songs that he and Bernie Taupin wrote will always be available, and many of them are featured in this film. We also get to hear the obligatory original song written for the end credits expressly to get an Oscar nomination. It will come as no surprise that, while "Never Too Late," co-written by John, Taupin, Brandi Carlile, and Andrew Watt, is not a terrible song, it's just unexceptional, unmemorable, and pales in comparison to the great tunes that populate this documentary.




#39: INSIDE OUT 2 - 1 nomination ★★
While not the only sequel in the 2024 class of animated features, this follow-up to the wonderful Disney/Pixar movie from 2015 feels like the most crassly commercial and unnecessary. Still, Pixar has a decent track record of making sequels to their beloved original movies that seem like they're going to be awful, cynical cash-grabs but turn out to be worthy of the characters and narratives that came before (how shocked was I that Toy Story 4 turned out to be so good?) But Inside/Out was such a delicately crafted screenplay that it was kind of a miracle it worked so well. It took a gimmicky high-concept premise that had been done several times before—the idea that the human brain is an industrial system manned by a staff of anthropomorphized emotions—and transformed it into a movie with simple yet profound ideas about childhood development.

Everything in Inside Out grew out of a solid foundational narrative choice that was as brilliantly thought out as the faulty foundational choices in The Substance are underdeveloped. Unfortunately, the only real way to make a sequel to Inside Out that doesn't just feel like a rehash is to spoil that brilliant foundational choice and introduce additional anthropomorphized emotion characters. That's what happens in this nominated animated feature, and the results range from bland to tedious. Inside Out 2 is a prime example of an ill-advised sequel, and those should never be rewarded.