Coming Soon: 2020 Movie Awards (Yes, 2020!)

One of the challenging aspects of doing an “End of Year Movie Awards” is time. For most, it’s difficult to keep up with all of the many releases to ensure that anything worthy of consideration is given its proper due. For those with lots of time on their hands and plenty of theater options providing great opportunities to see films, perhaps they’re caught up on everything and can provide their informed perspective. Most people don’t have those luxuries of opportunity despite their best efforts, especially with the pandemic the world has faced for nearly the past two years.

Because we place a high value on having a variety of perspectives, perhaps the very heart of Half Popped Reviews, our approach for an “End of Year Movie Awards” is to look at the calendar year prior to the one that just ended, focusing on movie releases from 2020.

Involvement

We want weighing-in on these awards to be as simple and straight-forward as possible. Simply providing (by email) a list of nominees (and indicating your top choice) for each category will be all you’ll need to do. If you would like to provide an argument for why a nominee should (or should not) be the winner for a given category, we would be interested in receiving that as part of your submission (though, please not TOO lengthy). We might use some of those responses in the presenting of the winners, even if the nominee from your write-up doesn’t win. Along with those write-ups, unless you ask to be anonymous, we’d include a link to your Twitter account (or an equivalent).

We want to include a variety of perspectives and opinions, but we do want to ensure that those who are involved have seen at least a certain amount of likely relevant movies from 2020. Although certainly not perfect, the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes identified a set of movies they felt were potentially praise-worthy with their nominations (and subsequent awards). There are certainly some good films from 2020 which didn’t garner nominations from those two award shows, however, we’re asking that the people who weigh-in on our awards have seen many of the films below to ensure that their opinions are informed and aren’t simply excluding the films below due to not having seen them. We’re asking that, at a minimum, those involved in voting have seen at least 10 of the following movies:

  • Another Round
  • Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
  • Da 5 Bloods
  • The Devil All The Time
  • Emma.
  • The Father
  • Hamilton
  • Hillbilly Elegy
  • The Invisible Man
  • Judas and the Black Messiah
  • Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
  • Mank
  • Minari
  • News of the World
  • Nomadland
  • One Night in Miami
  • Onward
  • Palm Springs
  • Pieces of a Woman
  • Promising Young Woman
  • Soul
  • Sound of Metal
  • TENET
  • The Trial of the Chicago 7
  • Wolfwalkers

If you think you meet that qualification and want to weigh-in on the movies of 2020, contact us through our Twitter (@ReviewPopper) and we’ll put you on the list!

Categories

Here are the categories for the Best of 2020 Movie Awards. We’ve chosen not to do an overall “Best Picture” because movies are made for a variety of purposes, and we’d like to judge them accordingly!

Best Picture – Comedy

Best Picture – Drama / Musical

Best Picture – Horror

Best Picture – Action

Best Picture – Sci-Fi

Best Picture – Thriller

Best Picture – Animation

Best Documentary Film

Best Actor

Best Actress

Best Supporting Actress

Best Supporting Actor

Best Director

Most Surprisingly Good Movie

Most Disappointing Movie

Best Visuals

Best Music

This list is based on the set of “initial” categories we knew we wanted to go with, plus a couple others that people asked to be included.

Eligible Movies

We’ve made it easy to find the movies which are eligible for these awards, and it’s through using a standard feature of our site. Our database has the release year information for every film, and when you go to the page corresponding to that year, such as the page for the films of 2020, it will show up. We get our information from a third-party data source, so if the year doesn’t seem correct, let us know and we can look into it. For some films, the release year is based on when it might have debuted at a film festival, which can often be significantly different than the theatrical release or its first release to the public at large through a streaming service. In some cases, we have updated the dates to reflect the year that seems most appropriate.

Note that below the list of ranked movies on that page is the list of unranked movies. The qualifying factor on whether a film is ranked or not is simply based on whether it has been given a score by at least 3 people on the site. Any film with less than three ratings isn’t ranked yet, and that shouldn’t speak to our view on its overall quality or worthiness of inclusion on these awards. If you’d like to provide a score for any of the films (ranked, unranked, 2020, or any other year), we welcome it! Just let me know if you don’t already have an account!

As for which movies qualify for the different “Best Picture” categories, we’re not going to be too strict on what classifies as “Comedy” or “Horror” (etc), so if you aren’t sure if something fits, we’ll likely allow it!

Awards “Ceremony” Presentation

Although it would be great to present the winners for each category through a video or podcast, we haven’t delved into those mediums yet, so as such, we’ll be doing a write-up to make the announcements. However, one of the goals of Half Popped is to promote the “voices” of movie reviewers, so we’d like to find a way to present those aforementioned impassioned arguments a person has as to why a nominee should (or shouldn’t) win in a particular category – regardless of whether that nominee is the eventual winner!

Next Steps

In the coming days, there will be more details released, so stay tuned to Half Popped Reviews and our Twitter (@ReviewPopper)!