Do you like watching movies? Do you like watching the Oscars? To both questions, my answer is yes!

Typically, I watch a few of the Best Picture nominations in January/February leading up to the Oscars and I like to make a ballot to predict who will win the gold statuette for all the major categories in February.

If you want to play along and follow you can go to the New York Times’ Oscars page and create and print out your own ballot here: 2019 Oscar Nominations Ballot.

I realize I run the risk of not “staying in my lane” on this, but hey, this is something I enjoy and if you too are into it, I’d love to hear your predictions, what you’ve seen this year, and what you want to win.

So far I have seen three of the eight nominations for Best Picture:

Black Panther, the Disney/Marvel Studios blockbuster about the fictional African nation, Wakanda, directed by Ryan Coogler, described by The New York Times as a “vivid re-imagination of something black Americans have cherished for centuries — Africa as a dream of our wholeness, greatness and self-realization.”

BlacKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee (nominated for Best Director), starring John David Washington, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace and Adam Driver (nominated for Best Supporting Actor), as Colorado Springs’ first African-American police officer inflitrates the local Ku Klux Klan. The film is described by The New York Times as Lee’s “best nondocumentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest.” The film’s power is in the crosscutting of the story with both the 1915 epic by D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, a racist retelling of Reconstruction in the South, saved by the Klan, and the Charlottesville riots, as a social commentary on how little has changed despite the long span of time that has passed.

Vice, written and directed by Adam McKay (nominated for Best Director), starring Christian Bale (nominated for Best Actor) as Dick Cheney, also with Amy Adams (nominated for Best Supporting Actress), Sam Rockwell (nominated for Best Supporting Actor), and Steve Carrell. Vulture describes the film as, “a rollicking comic style for what amounts to an anti-hagiography, a scabrous portrait of Dick Cheney the Unholy One, cursed be He.” The film was an uneven mess as a whole with odd sequences and rolling fake credits in the middle of it, but Bale’s performance as Cheney from Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant to de-facto President, as George W. Bush’s number two, was immersing.

What have you seen this year? Do you have any recommendations? Share below in the comments section.

– Jason