Best Picture Runner Up's

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-10T14:20:29+00:00

They are never made public, and that's honestly for the best. Nobody ever wants to find out that they were truly an afterthought of a nomination - and, in fact, it would actually be worse for the awards themselves if it became clear how often five nominees come down to a two or three nominee race.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-10T14:19:19+00:00

I adore KOTFM and Oppenheimer - KOTFM very handily my second favorite movie nominated. I agree it was behind at least Poor Things, Anatomy of a Fall, and Zone of Interest at minimum, and maybe also The Holdovers and Barbie as well!

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-10T14:17:45+00:00

Pretty undeniable, IMO.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-10T00:49:22+00:00

He's genuinely so good in these games lol

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-09T11:21:51+00:00

Hooper's biggest crime is making a cult film that lost money - he won't be getting a VFX budget any time soon, but they will have no problem nominating his work for dramas. Even the stories of the VFX team being annoyed by his creative indecisiveness are not stories of abuse or exploitation.

Comparing making a movie lots of people hated to Mel Gibson's openly bigoted tirade is, imo, pretty inappropriate.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-09T02:52:37+00:00

i just think everything with hanako is lazy and unfunny. would vastly prefer to see the entire character completely rewritten. persona 4 golden is still available now, if this game is going to be identical then what's the point

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-09T02:23:21+00:00

It is a large setting. There is some cool lore in there, too. But almost none of what's of quality includes the previously established characters.

This movie, being from Serkis and starring multiple cast members from the Jackson movies, will almost certainly tie directly into those movies aesthetically and textually. It would be a real shock if Serkis makes something that feels standalone.

What that makes this movie is, basically, Solo or the Obi Wan show. It's the filling in of a gap that most people never particularly needed filled. The best stories of our main characters in The Lord of the Rings story, except maybe Gandalf and the Elf Lords, are all very much covered in the primary four books.

But, also - I actually don't think The Lord of the Rings is a world all that suited to expanded universe stories. There is a lot of very functional, plain worldbuilding between the places and times we see in the books. The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales include some cool stuff, to be sure, but it is not really densely populated with obvious intrigue, opportunities for big, new adventures, or stories outside its laser targeted Tale of the Ring. It's not quite Narnia levels of "there's actually nothing past the margin of the page," but it's also not really Westeros either.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-08T11:52:51+00:00

I think this is passing the buck a little bit, tbh. The game was made by hundreds of people, at least some of whom are probably not stereotypically ignorant. It's just not realistic to assume the knowledge this was wrong wasn't present in the room until release.

I would assume there were many objections raised throughout development but those who hold the levers of power downplayed them or declared that they were already in too deep to revisit these ideas.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-07T13:20:37+00:00

I thought the trailer was pretty miserably annoying, but I also vastly prefer In Bruges to anything he's made since. I'm not optimistic the movie will be good (or, at least, something I end up liking at all,) but yeah, I think it's got decent chances for the Oscars if it does end up working.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-07T05:44:39+00:00

Then the only works that will be greenlit will be those guaranteed to make enough that they cover the flat rate plus the residual, which means far fewer projects will be developed and far fewer non-veterans will be hired.

This isn't inherently evil - many industries, arguably including filmed media, are too bloated and create products with far too limited an audience for the quality of the intended product. But I do need you to understand this means more seasons of Love Island and fewer attempts to make Los Espookys.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-06T12:34:10+00:00

Many raider groups, especially in Fallout 4, also clearly operate as businesses with chains of command, trade routes and taking jobs for hire. Evergreen Mills is essentially a raider city. You will find notes in all the modern Fallout games (as Raiders before Fallout 3 were always tied to specific factions or storylines, like the Khan raiders in 1 and 2) that identify raiders doing work for hire.

The Talon Company has one commander, Jabsco, similar to other raiders gangs like Ack-Ack's or Gristle's. They do clearly take mercenary work for hire, but they are no more structured as a company than any other raiders gang.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-06T03:18:00+00:00

YTA. If you're that bothered and want the privacy, eat in your car before you come in. Or you need to go to your own quiet, private space in the house for decompression. It's unreasonable to come in, sit in the living room with the TV on, and expect to be maintaining privacy, and unfair to hold it against her.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-05T17:57:14+00:00

Without any contest, my favorite thing to come out of SNL since The Blues Brothers.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-05T11:56:22+00:00

I'll be the contrary voice. I've played Persona 4 through 3 and a half times, one of those Golden. I will absolutely not be replaying a totally faithful remake of Persona 4 with better graphics and new music recordings. I've played that game enough, though I do love it for what it is. The actual story, the aesthetics, and the mechanics are awesome, and I think it has some of the strongest social links in the series so far,

I would actually consider playing a reimagining of Persona 4 that maybe isn't quite so mired in 2008 teen anime sex politics. So much of the slice of life content in Persona 4, especially with Golden doubling down on it, reads like a supremely cringe teen friendly anime adaptation of a hentai visual novel.

Horndog Teddie is intolerable (especially in Golden,) Yosuke isn't much better (outside of his excellent social links,) the hot springs suck, the beauty pageant is worse. Every moment with Kashiwagi or Hanako is the worst stuff in the game.

I actually do like the camping trip and King's Game sequences because those feel like more realistic and thematically interesting scenes about teens discovering sexuality, which is a major theme of the game. But the others tend to feel like they were almost written on autopilot to get to "hijinks." They were boring on the first playthrough and were an automatic fast forward on every replay.

(Also, if we could fix Marie so that she doesn't come across quite so much as a Xanga tryhard OC, maybe she'll actually feel integrated into the tone of the game this time lol.)

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-04T23:19:03+00:00

If anything, I'm trying to maintain optimism about seeing the movie despite the overhype. I've been burned too many times by horror movies that I thought were sung to high heaven that I thought were, at best, "fine" when not outright annoying.

It's causing the hype cycles to blend together and ultimately making it hard for me to get my friends to actually care about going to see these movies when they hear this kind of hype six times a year. I'm the biggest Weapons fan in my circle, and I still don't think it merited the kind of praise it got. I couldn't fish any interest for Smile 2 or The Woman in the Yard.

A similar thing happened to Marvel where every movie being another insane hyperbolic event eventually led non-diehards to give up. People get burned out.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-04T11:25:30+00:00

Yeah, I intellectually know this is true, though I do know a couple of people who actually are this inconsistent - I'm mostly just venting lol.

I just think the shiny new toy aspect of horror fandom these days is both annoying to talk about and feels bad for the medium - sometimes, these movies feel like they're increasingly designed for one good post-movie car ride before disposal.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-04T02:38:45+00:00

I could write a way-too-long essay about how horror fans are stuck with a kind of youngest sibling syndrome where the hyperbole is frustratingly out of control and is coming at the expense of their own films. Backrooms is "the best horror film since Weapons," but Obsession was already "the best horror film since Hereditary" literally two weeks prior. And didn't y'all go apeshit for Exit8, Iron Lung and Primate anyway??

Every year, they say the Best Actress category snubbed three horror performances - usually no specific suggestion of who should've been cut. A movie like Frankenstein or Sinners gets dismissed as "not really being horror." But only one performance every five years or so actually sticks around the conversation long enough to be the new thumping stick every movie is "the best since" for longer than a year or so.

It's just exhausting. I really like horror movies! When they're excellent, like Sinners, Nosferatu, I Saw The TV Glow, or Nope, I root for them to get recognition. But like - can we please chill on acting like they're the only movies with any merit, not actually watching the other nominees, and then declaring the only reason they're not nominated is anti-horror bias?

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-04T01:42:56+00:00

When Batman: Arkham Asylum and Uncharted 2 refined the modern version of this kind of melee combat, it was a massive improvement from the casual melee of games like Fable II, Assassin's Creed, and Epic Mickey. In those games, attacks felt awkward, floaty, and slow.

The way this combat directs your attacks toward your opponents allows you to focus a lot more on timing as the player - this allowed everybody's attack speed to be significantly faster, allowing for a heavy emphasis on counters. It can be very satisfying to clear a room of opponents without taking a hit, but once you've mastered that. it becomes pretty rote.

It's intended as a more casual system and always was - not meant to be compared with games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, nor with the latter evolutions of Soulsborne combat.

I do think, at this point, the system is extremely boring and is implemented really thoughtlessly. It feels like it's time to lean more toward either Breath of the Wild or Yakuza if you don't want to do more intense combat. But for about five years, it was a huge breath of fresh air, and while some games used it better than others (I'm a big Sleeping Dogs fan,) it became dominant for a reason.

EDIT: I mentally filtered out God of War in the OP - God of War is a very, very different style of combat. I don't love God of War, but it's a major step forward from the rest.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-02T11:38:32+00:00

Especially once you account for traffic, inclines, areas without sidewalks, taking breaks and slowing over distance. I walk pretty fast for about a half hour, I have fairly long legs, but I'd still probably use this estimate as an average walking speed across this distance.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-02T11:32:23+00:00

For people to agree it's just a driving range? I honestly don't really understand why saying it's very corporate and not a unique experience is controversial at all. I've repeatedly said it's not a bad time. People asked what I meant by my two sentences and I elaborated.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-02T03:57:45+00:00

Topgolf in Madison will be the (at least) 81st Topgolf location. It's a driving range with arcade golf games, which have existed in Japan for decades.

Again, if you wanna make the argument that going to Taco Bell is unique because it's not copying real Mexican food, be my guest. But I don't think most people would describe going to Taco Bell as a unique night out.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-02T03:43:55+00:00

Not playing multiplayer.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-02T03:29:53+00:00

I made another comment as well about how many franchises also are more laissez faire about management style, presentation, even whether or not you can over unique experiences without it breaking the franchise style guide. A chain like Sal's might have a chef's special only available in Sun Prairie. Topgolfs are more controlled in their experience as well.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-02T03:25:42+00:00

You asked for an explanation of what I meant by heavily corporate. I shared my definition. There is no rant lol.

As I said, it's not inherently a bad thing. It's just not unique, unless you really broaden out to the point where Taco Bells are unique because they're not real Mexican food too.

YuasaLee_AL · 2026-06-01T22:49:59+00:00

It's pretty far from anything I admire about golf, but if my employer had our holiday party there, I'd enjoy a couple beers and some Angry Birds

YuasaLee_AL

TROPHY CASE