We made it, team: the end. With the Oscars now behind us, awards season 2024–25 is officially done and dusted, thus making this week’s edition of Best in Show our last—until we do it all again next time. It’s been an honor; thanks for tolerating my silly quips and tangential anecdotes.

Our crew was at the Oscars on Sunday (looking immaculate) to soak up the magic, with West Coast editor Mia Lee Vicino nabbing some golden moments from the red carpet and in the press room. That includes queening out with Rachel Sennott, crowning Denis Villeneuve with our Most Picture award for Dune: Part Two rewatches, getting its sound designers’ response to Adam’s 56 logs of the blockbuster, Sean Baker shouting out his favorite institutions ing indie cinema, and the Wallace & Gromit team sharing how starstruck King Charles was to meet the legends themselves. Our bestie Reece Feldman also dropped by, and Giancarlo Esposito and Joe Locke gave us their four favorites. Lots more good stuff to come.

For now, let’s jump into Anora’s big triumphs, the shared love for Dune: Part Two and Wicked across the craft categories, and the brilliant wins for No Other Land and Flow. We also have an appearance this week from The Substance’s Coralie Fargeat on how the iconic Monstro Elisasue—which led her hair and makeup team to Oscar glory—came to be, closing out all the things we’ve been obsessed with for the last few months.

On the Beat

Oscar night indisputably belonged to Anora, which took home five of the six awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture and a radical Actress in a Leading Role win for Mikey Madison. For a proudly independent film to begin its life by winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes (competing alongside heavyweight auteurs and festival veterans including David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola and more) and end with the top prize in Hollywood is magnificent.

It’s also only the fourth film to do so, after Parasite in 2019, Marty in 1955 and The Lost Weekend in 1945. To also have Anora director and Letterboxd member Sean Baker use his speeches to stress the importance of independent production and theaters marks a victorious moment for the entire industry. Championing grassroots releases, the theatrical experience and physical media is what we’re all about at Letterboxd; as Baker told us in the winners room, “We’re living in a golden age.”

Just twelve months later, in the closing weeks of awards season, Anora’s main competition seemed to be The Brutalist and Conclave—films made for ten and twenty million dollars, respectively. And, along with Anora, they were international box-office hits. Of course, each production was already well underway by the time Jefferson made his plea, but their success underscores his point: not only are those films far cheaper than a lot of studio tentpoles but their dedicated cinematic releases proved that audiences have a hunger for films like this. We want to go to the movies.

Before we dive into the other awards, let’s take a moment to shout out the studio pictures we really do love: Dune: Part Two and Wicked. Aside from winning the Letterboxd Oscars (more on those later), as well as Most Picture, Denis Villeneuve’s masterpiece won for Sound and Visual Effects on Sunday. At Letterboxd HQ, we loved hearing sound designer Richard King shouting out the New Zealand team who worked on Dune: Part Two’s colossal soundscape, including the Fremen language and Harkonnen voices.

Wicked’s craft wins, meanwhile, include Production Design for Nathan Crowley and Lee Sandales; Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo described to us last year how the immersive design “grounded us and made it really impossible for us to float away”. Meanwhile, Paul Tazewell made history as the first Black man to win the Oscar for Costume Design. Paul, I need to know how many hours went into the opulent embroidery on Jonathan Bailey’s coat, and then how I can do my own version cheaply next Hallowe’en.

As an aside, only two actresses have won the lead category for non-English-language performances: Sophia Loren for Italy’s Two Women and Marion Cotillard for ’s La Vie en Rose. South Korean icon Youn Yuh-jung, of course, won Actress in a ing Role for Minari in 2021.

On Letterboxd, all nominees are winners, trophy or not, but a lot of you have had your eyes on Madison from the very beginning: out of the Cannes premiere in May, countless called her “revela­tory”, “the future of cinema” and “immediately a contender for Best Actress”.

I’m Still Here won International Feature, with director Salles using his speech to pay tribute to the film’s real-life subject, Eunice Paiva, and the two women who played her, Torres and her mother, the afore­mentioned Montenegro. Paiva’s story captured hearts on Letterboxd, with the film enjoying a 4.3 average and in the top 150 of our all-time top-250 highest-rated films.

Speaking to our corres­pondent Rafa Sales Ross after the Venice premiere, Torres told us that while playing Eunice, “There was more than one time when I had to leave after a scene and cry because it was so heavy to carry that burden with self-control, with a smile.” (We also nabbed a thank you from Salles to our community, for embracing the film so warmly.)

Elsewhere, the Oscars spread the love widely. The Brutalist took Cinematography for Lol Crawley and Original Score for Daniel Blumberg, who charmingly thanked his fellow artists at London’s Cafe Oto to the tune of that fear-inducing play-out music. (Cafe Oto thanked him back.) The extraordinary No Other Land won Documentary Feature—and is currently one of Letterboxd’s ten highest-rated documentaries of all time—with co-directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham eloquently and ionately calling for “a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people”.

Letterboxd is Obsessed With…

Our favorite horror from 2024, The Substance, triumphed on Oscars night in Makeup and Hairstyling—a surprise to no one who saw (through fingers, if you’re me) the astounding creation that was Monstro Elisasue, courtesy of makeup artists Pierre-Olivier Persin, Stéphanie Guillon and Marilyne Scarselli.

Spoilers for The Substance follow…

A quick reminder: after decidedly not respecting the balance for several months, Sue (Margaret Qualley), set to perform at her network’s prestigious New Year’s Eve show, finds herself out of stabilizer fluid and rapidly deteriorating. After a fight with Elisabeth (herself?), she self-injects the activator serum that created her in the first place, which, of course, goes monstrously wrong. A mutated, grotesque combination of her and Elisabeth is created, with excess skin, broken teeth and Elisabeth’s face stuck staring out of Sue’s back. It’s one of the most unforgettable images from The Substance’s totally insane, wholly original ride.

At the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January, Oscar-nominated director Coralie Fargeat told us that Monstro Elisasue began as a miniature sculpture. “It was a very tough and long process getting to the right design for the monster,” she says. “To me, [it] had to be playing with all these body parts that represent the obsessions and the gaze of our boobs, our ass, with everything, [but] to put them in a Picasso way.”

But for the audience to connect to The Substance’s themes of self-loathing and criticism, we needed to relate to Monstro Elisasue, as well as fear her. “I wanted the monster to be very moving, have this tenderness and sweetness to her,” continues Fargeat. “It was a long, long way to get to this little model. The first time I showed it to Demi and Margaret, it was a gray clay thing, and they instantly loved her. It was very moving to see that. After, when you have to do all the prosthetic work for real, it’s another story… but the connection started with the very, very beginning of it.”

Introducing Monstro Elisasue on New Year’s Eve was also crucial for Fargeat. “When I write, I always look for the strongest symbolism of something,” she explains. “When I wanted to create chaos on a stage, I thought, ‘What could be the nicest, prettiest, happiest moment, where you least expect to have a bloodbath?’ Where you expect to wear a dress, and look like a pretty girl who should always smile, and stuff like that.”

It was the perfect place to take “beauty and happiness” and “trash it with tons of blood”, Fargeat summarizes. “That’s always my quest, [to find] the strongest and simplest symbol at the same time that can convey my idea. In that case, it was the thing that should be great and perfect, and it’s going to be chaos. Total chaos.” I’d add to that: beautiful, slightly disgusting, Oscar-winning chaos.

We played a fun new game at the Governors Awards, asking Kerry Washington, Harris Dickinson, Jesse Eisenberg and more to guess their most four-favorited films. And of course, we got more and more and more four favorites: A Complete Unknown’s Elle Fanning, the masterminds behind The Brutalist, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross at the NYC Queer premiere, the Wicked cast and crew in Sydney, A Real Pain’s cast at BFI London, Monica Barbaro at the BAFTAs, and many, many more.

Adam on The Brutalist:

“Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is not merely a film; it is an edifice of thought, a structure built from silence and sorrow, ambition and ruin. It stands tall like the very architectural philosophy from which it takes its name—uncompromising, stark and deeply human beneath its rigid exterior.”