In terms of choosing the best or most award-worthy films and performances of 2021, most film aficionados (including professional film critics) are fairly conventional thinkers — easily seduced and led along, committed to familiar and unexceptional viewpoints, etc. Then there are the free thinkers who occasionally (but not always) assess films from a perspective of an earth-orbiting spacecraft or one circling around the moon. And that’s fine. The third category could be described as beyond earth’s gravitational pull but still tethered to the critic’s understanding of cinematic value, based on a lifetime of neurotic filmgoing.
And then there is the fourth category — film lovers who have lifted off the planet so often and gone so far around the bend and outside of our solar system, caused for the most part by extra-passionate wokeness (which includes a rapt belief in the wondrous and transcendent benefit of watching any and all films about POC characters, POC history and starring POCs) or anti-woke views, and who seem oddly committed to contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake (i.e., the Armond White syndrome).
Due respect but after pondering A.O. Scott‘s recently posted list of the most award-deserving films of ’21, I have to acknowledge the possibility that even within his bizarre arena of N.Y. Times woke-itude, Scott may be even more of an eccentric than White, and that’s saying something.
