Doug Orleans's Journal

Every year since 2021, I've managed to see every single Oscar-nominated film before the Academy Awards ceremony. Last year, I was introduced to the Oscars Death Race, which is both a useful site to keep track of what you need to watch and also a leaderboard for some friendly competition; I finished in 137th place. A couple weeks ago, I saw the 50th film nominated for an Oscar this year, which put me in 36th place! (I had some help from a fellow Death Racer, who slipped me some short films that were otherwise unavailable before the Oscar Shorts packages hit local theaters, but she had already finished in 13th place so I'll take the assist.)

Below is my ranking within each category; note that these are my personal preferences, i.e. the way I would have filled out the ballot were I a member of the voting Academy. The number in parentheses is my rating for that movie (out of 10). I also made predictions for who will win but that's less interesting. (I think those aren't visible until the ceremony starts, for some reason. Sorry about that, for those of you reading this in the next hour...)

Best Picture

1. Dune: Part Two (8)
2. Conclave (8)
3. Nickel Boys (8)
4. Anora (7)
5. A Complete Unknown (7)
6. I’m Still Here (7)
7. Wicked (6)
8. The Substance (5)
9. The Brutalist (4)
10. Emilia Pérez (3)

See my thoughts in the previous post. It didn't feel like an especially great year for movies, but this is actually the best field in years, with six films that I'd be happy to see win. The last two years, my least favorite nominee ended up winning, and for a while it was looking like Emilia Pérez was the frontrunner, but hopefully that streak will end.

Best Director

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Back in 2022, I had fallen far behind on posting lists of my favorite music every year, so I made a plan to post a list every 6 months until I caught up. Well, that lasted about a year... but now it's been over a year since I posted my 2022 list. I sort of had an excuse; when I got to the midpoint of 2024, I realized that I would catch up by the end of 2024, and then I'd have a full 12 months to listen to the music of 2025. So I figured, why not knock a few months off of that and give myself a little more than 6 months each to listen to music from 2023 and 2024? Okay, great, but then October came and went, and I still felt like I wanted to listen to more stuff from 2023. And now here it is in February 2025, my queue is still over 100, and my 2024 queue is over 400 and still growing! So I'm going to finally call time, post my favorites from 2023, and move on to listening to music from 2024. As a bonus, I also made a YouTube playlist of tracks from my ten favorite releases! (Scroll down, there should be an embedded player.)

The usual caveat applies: for most of these, I've only listened to them once each, which is why I've stopped calling this post "best music" and switched to "music log". It's a record of what I listened to, roughly ordered from best to worst. I've grouped them into loose buckets, but instead of sorting each bucket alphabetically, this time I'm leaving the order the way I added them, because there is an appreciable difference between the tops and bottoms of each bucket. But beyond that, don't take this ordering too seriously, because my listens may have been separated by more than a year so it's even harder than usual to rank things against each other. I'm also not going to try to re-adjust the buckets, even though the top and bottom buckets are rather smaller than in previous years. That's just how things fell out! Shrug!

Great:

En Attendant Ana - Principia
The Smile - "Bending Hectic"
Orbital - Optical Delusion
Cory Hanson - Western Cum
Goat - Medicine
Dennis Kane - "The Lion and the Dove" / "A Grey Rose"
Queens of the Stone Age - In Times New Roman
Rahill - Flowers At Your Feet
Melenas - Ahora
Water Damage - Two Songs



Really good:
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And for the record, here's what's left in my queue. I'm sure there's some good-to-great stuff in here; maybe someday I'll get around to listening to them!
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I hate getting sucked into keeping a streak alive (daily, weekly, or whatever): it feels dumb to change my behavior solely to prevent breaking the streak, but it also just feels really bad to break an impressively long streak. I summoned up the willpower to quit Wordle cold-turkey a while back, but for over a year now I've been keeping my streak alive of seeing at least one movie per week, specifically at the AMC Boston Common 19. Alas, I was sick all week last week, and it didn't seem prudent to risk being a superspreader at the theater (or on the T) simply to keep this dumb streak alive, so I had to let it end at 79 weeks (69 at that theater). It was a good run, but it's a big relief to not have to think about it anymore. Down with streaks!

Here's my Swarm checkin for the final week of the streak. It's unfortunate that it wasn't a better movie to go out with. (I did see a few better movies later in the week, but nothing really worth mentioning.)

About a month ago, I remembered that I still hadn't posted my ranked list of favorite TV shows from 2023. I posted last year's list before the end of January, so I'm not sure why I didn't get around to it earlier than April this year. But then I thought of a few shows that I really wanted to check out before making my list, so I watched those... then I kept remembering more shows to watch... eventually I realized it might take me to the end of the year to watch everything from last year, so I had to draw a line somewhere! So here we are.

Not a lot to say about this list. Putting them in total ranked order is overly precise, because they're so hard to compare—not just because of the wide variety of genres, but where do you put a show like The Last of Us that has high highs and low lows, versus a uniformly mediocre show like The Walking Dead: Dead City? Well, scroll down to see (spoiler: right next to each other). Really, everything on this list has something to recommend it, it just becomes diminishing returns as you get toward the bottom.

1. Scavengers Reign
2. Succession S4
3. Barry S4
4. Full Circle
5. Beacon 23
6. Slow Horses S3
7. Reservation Dogs S3
8. Survivor S45
9. Star Trek: Lower Decks S4
10. Silo
11. The Gold
12. Foundation S2
13. The Devil's Plan
14. The Bear S2
15. Special Ops: Lioness
16. Mrs. Davis
17. Beef
18. Jury Duty
19. The Afterparty S2
20. Blindspotting S2
    ( 21-78 )

Here are just a few of the shows from 2023 that I wanted to watch but didn't get around to:
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Let me know if there's more I should put on the queue!

This past Thursday afternoon, I completed the Oscars Death Race, having seen all 53 of the movies nominated this year! (That put me in 137th place on the leaderboard.) Today is Oscar Sunday, so it's my last chance to continue my annual tradition of writing up my picks—that is, who I would vote for on my ballot if I were an Academy member. (I also made predictions for who would win but that's less interesting.)

I also have a tradition of writing up my thoughts for each of the Best Picture nominees. Last year I had seen 8 of the 10 nominees when they were announced; this year I had seen 9, and I had already planned to see the 10th that afternoon, so that worked out well for me! But I never got around to making that post, so I'm combining it here with my picks-for-all-categories post. As usual, I'll cover them in the order I saw them. Below that I'll rank them in order from most to least favorite, along with my rating (out of 10) for each.

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Here are my rankings for the other categories:

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Continuing on my plan from a year ago, I spent the last six months listening to music from 2022. Compared to the first half of the year when I listened to music from 2021, I got through way more releases: 262 compared to 193. Of course I still have lots that I didn't get to, but I don't feel too bad about that.

Because of this increase, I'm splitting off the top of the "Good" bucket into "Really good". But because these are still basically just first impressions (very few were multiple listens), I'll continue to just sort them alphabetically within each category.

Great:

Body Type - Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing's Surprising
Cave In - Heavy Pendulum
Flash Hits - Growths
Giraffes? Giraffes! - Death Breath
Goat - Oh Death
JB Dunckel - Carbon
Jack White - Fear of the Dawn
Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto - Quatermass Expansion
Loop - Sonancy
Neil Young with Crazy Horse - World Record
Nuclear Daisies - s/t
Rachika Nayar - Heaven Come Crashing
Rosalie Cunningham - Two Piece Puzzle
Širom – The Liquified Throne Of Simplicity
Straw Man Army - SOS
Suede - Autofiction
The Hologram People - Village Of The Snake God
The Mystery - The Mystery Sees the Burden
The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention
The Soundcarriers - Wilds

Really good:
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Overall, 2022 was a good year for music, plenty to revisit someday (if I ever catch up to new releases... maybe in 2025?), but subjectively it felt a bit less great than 2021. Happy to see the return of some old favorites, though. Looking forward to 2023... (Already in the queue: 275 releases. Yikes! And 7 from 2024 already!)

Here's what was left on my queue of 2022 releases to listen to, not including various other best-of lists that I was sometimes consulting:
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At the end of 2022, I posted about my favorite music of 2020, and laid out a plan to eventually catch up with current music. Well, today is July 2nd, the middle day of the year, so I'm calling time's-up on my 2021 listening and will move on to 2022. I didn't make it through my queue of all the music I wanted to listen to (not even close, really!) but I did manage to listen to 193 releases in six months, which is a definite improvement over my previous listening rate. (More than one a day!)

Like last time, I'm not going to sort my list in total order of preference, I'll just break it up into buckets of Great, Good, Pretty good, and Okay, and sort alphabetically within each.

Great:

Book of Wyrms - Occult New Age
Deerhoof - Actually, You Can
Dope Purple - Grateful End
Dummy - Mandatory Enjoyment
Film School - We Weren't Here
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
GLOK - Pattern Recognition
Jane Weaver - Flock
Julia Kent - The Gyres EP
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - L.W.
Kiwi Jr - Cooler Returns
Low - Hey What
MX-80 - Hougher House
Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime
Mogwai - As the Love Continues
Mono - Pilgrimage of the Soul
Møtrik - MØØN ∞ The Cosmic Electrics of MØTRIK
Mythic Sunship - Wildfire
Nicholas Britell - The Underground Railroad score
Pays P. - Ça v Aller
Shred Flintstone - Unlimited Power
Steven R. Smith - In the Spires
Tape Deck Mountain - True Deceiver
The Black Keys - Delta Kream
Tropical Geometry - Luck Mountain
Various Artists - Stars Rock Kill (Rock Stars)
Yasmin Williams - Urban Driftwood

Good:
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Over this past week, I made a point of spending nearly all day every day listening to music, which has been pretty fun; I've also used it as an opportunity to make a big dent in my giant reading backlog (mostly Feedly feeds and Substack newsletters). So I'm going to try to get into the habit of spending more time listening to music and reading, and maybe the 2022 list will be longer. We'll see!

For the record, here's what was left on my queue to listen to. There were several other lists that I was also working from, but this is all the stuff I ran across in other places and specifically kept a note of. Maybe someday I'll get a chance to come back and listen to these... someday....
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For the second year in a row, I managed to see every film nominated for an Academy Award: 39 features and 15 shorts. Here's my ranking within each category:

Best Picture

1. The Banshees of Inisherin, Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin and Martin McDonagh, Producers
2. Women Talking, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Frances McDormand, Producers
3. All Quiet on the Western Front, Malte Grunert, Producer
4. Tár, Todd Field, Alexandra Milchan and Scott Lambert, Producers
5. Avatar: The Way of Water, James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
6. Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison and Jerry Bruckheimer, Producers
7. Triangle of Sadness, Erik Hemmendorff and Philippe Bober, Producers
8. The Fabelmans, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, Producers
9. Elvis, Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick and Schuyler Weiss, Producers
10. Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert and Jonathan Wang, Producers

See my thoughts in the previous post.

Best Director

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As much as I feel like I saw a lot of movies last year, it turns out I spent far more time watching TV shows. 2022 was an absolute avalanche of good stuff on TV, and I doggedly tried to keep up with it as much as possible. Do I regret it? Maybe? So much of it was really good, though... I ended up seeing 89 shows that aired in 2022, including a couple standup specials (which maybe I should have put into the movie list instead?) but not including talk shows (shout-out to Wil Wheaton's The Ready Room).

Turns out it's pretty difficult to rank shows against each other, especially things as varied as reality game shows, documentary miniseries, and whatever The Rehearsal is, or even just comparing dramas and comedies. I'm not going to wimp out like the Golden Globes and split them up, though, so I put them all in order from best to worst. But even at the very top, I had a really hard time picking between Severance and Andor for my #1 show; they're both pretty awesome and special and I'm incredibly psyched for season 2 of them both. But I decided not to call it a tie, so I'm going with Severance. Congrats, Ben Stiller.

Anyway, take the relative rankings with a grain of salt, especially the five shows I haven't yet finished, marked with an asterisk in the list below (I was tempted to wait until I finished them all, but the year is fast receding into the rearview mirror and I wanted to stay somewhat fresh here). But to a first approximation, here's how much I liked these shows. And similar to my movie list, I do have good feelings about everything on here except for the bottom few, and even those I don't regret watching, I just... had higher hopes when I started them.

1. Severance
2. Star Wars: Andor
3. The Afterparty
4. House of the Dragon
5. Reservation Dogs S2
6. Barry S3
7. Irma Vep
8. Better Call Saul S6
9. Peacemaker
10. Russian Doll S2
11. Slow Horses S1
12. The Rehearsal
13. The English
14. Ms. Marvel
15. This is Going to Hurt
16. Star Trek: Lower Decks S3
17. The Sandman
18. Atlanta S4
19. The Peripheral
20. The Resort
    ( 21-89 )

For the curious, here's a few more 2022 stragglers still on my to-watch list:

• Slow Horses S2
• Minx
• Extraordinary Attorney Woo
• Outer Range
• Paper Girls
• Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
• Angelyne
• 1923
• Bad Sisters
• Black Bird
• Snake in the Grass
• Ozark, Euphoria, The Boys, The Crown - haven't started any of these yet, multiple seasons behind!

Exactly two years ago, at the end of 2020, I posted about my favorite music of 2019. In that post, I apologetically explained why it took me a whole year to put together that list of 111 releases. Well, here I am with an explanation of why it took me two years to listen to and sort a list of 211 releases...

For the 2019 list, I kept track of what I listened to up until the end of 2019, and then I went through and re-listened to everything. I snuck a few more things onto the list that I hadn't heard until 2020, but mostly I kept the list about what I heard in 2019. As I was spending 2020 re-listening to 2019 stuff, I kept a list of stuff released in 2020 that I was putting off listening to; once I finished with 2019, I started listening to the 2020 list, but I kept adding new 2020 releases as I came across things that sounded up my alley. (Special shoutout to my friend Brian Eck, because I pretty much dumped his entire list of favorites onto my to-listen-to list.)

As I explained in my 2019 post, I don't actually spend a lot of time listening to music these days (compared to when I had a job and listened to music in headphones most of the workday). So the end of 2021 came and went and I had barely made a dent in my 2020 list, and the list continued to get longer! As the end of 2022 approached, I made a point to buckle down and make it to the bottom of the list—and a few days ago, I finally made it! Whew.

So, great, now I had a list of things that I'd listened to basically once each, roughly sorted from most to least favorite. I decided to give another listen to the ones at the top to make sure I still felt like they were my favorites... and, uh-oh, some of them kinda hit different. Obviously I'm not going to go back and re-sort the entire list, but I went through the top dozen or two, and none of them really stood out as things I'd want to call my #1 favorite album of the year. So I'm going to chicken out and not try to rank them other than in general buckets of Great, Good, Pretty Good, and Okay. (I'm not going to call anything outright Bad, because when I did happen across something that was clearly not my thing, I just took it off the list altogether.)

These are alphabetically sorted within the groups:

Great:

Ancient River - The House of Stone
Becca Mancari - The Greatest Part
Bhajan Bhoy - That Summer Oh Creator! EP
Causa Sui - Szabodelico
Deradoorian - Find the Sun
Dummy - Dummy EP, EP2
Elder - Omens
Electric Moon - Live at Freak Valley Festival 2019
En Attendant Ana - Juillet
Fontanarosa - s/t EP
Girl Friday - Androgynous Mary
Gwenifer Raymond - Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain
Jungle Fire - Jungle Fire
Kairon; IRSE! - Polysomn
Korb - Korb II
Lera Lynn - On My Own
Lifeguard - Dive
Los Estanques - IV
Lowrider - Refractions
Mount Hush - Mount Hush
Peel Dream Magazine - Agitprop Alterna
Postcards - The Good Soldier
Shadow Show - Silhouettes
Shipping News - "Claws"
Slift - Ummon
Steffen Basho-Junghans - The Dancer on the Hill
Tesa - Control
The Asteroid No. 4 - Northern Songs
The Home Current - Devotional Syndrome
Thurston Moore - By the Fire
Tom Vek - New Symbols
Ulaan Janthina - Ulaan Janthina (Parts I/II)

Good:
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Pretty Good:
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Okay:
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So yeah, as you might guess, I've also been keeping to-listen-to lists of releases from 2021 and 2022 (and even 2023). And they're already longer than the 2020 list! My current plan is to actually listen to music more often than I have been (because hey, turns out, music is great!) but even so, if I keep trying to be completist about it, I'm going to just fall further behind. So instead I'm going to try to time-box it, and aim to post a 2021 list on July 1st, with whatever I've listened to by then (and hopefully even get a chance to listen to my favorites multiple times). Then the 2022 list would happen at the end of 2023, and by the end of 2024, I'll be caught up and actually posting a timely end-of-year favorites list!

But don't hold me to it. We'll see how it goes...

P.S. Sorry for not including links, but everything here is streamable, and you can probably figure out where to find it. But, as always, if you're curious about anything listed and would like me to say a few more words, please comment!