Who really had the best picture? The 2024 Freedoms and Fails are here!

The third annual Conservative Critic Awards, the Freedoms and Fails are here! The Academy gave out their awards on Sunday but now The Conservative Critic will award the films and performances that were the most conservative and the most ridiculously liberal. 

Without further ado, the 2024 Conservative Critic Awards go to….

2024 Freedom Award for Performance in a Television Series: Ebon-Moss Bachrach for The Bear

Fan favorite, The Bear, has enjoyed it’s fair share of Hollywood accolades as has Bachrach who earned both a Critics Choice and an Emmy for his portrayal of Richie Jerimovich. The praise is not only justified but perhaps slightly under-appreciative of the stunning performance given by Bachrach in The Bear season 2 episode 7, Forks. The episode lives on its own as a vignette which could have been submitted as a short film instead of a piece of a larger series. Bachrach drives the episode and along with the writing, editing and directing produces perhaps one of the finest pieces of television in history. And he didn’t even have to win the Battle of the Bastards to do it. Bachrach is by far the best performance on television this year if not for the last five years. 

2024 Fail Award for Performance in a Television Series: Jimmy Kimmel for the 2024 Academy Awards

Coming in right under the wire, Jimmy Kimmel delivered a supremely unfunny and unoriginal monologue for a clunky award ceremony somehow defeating Jo Koi’s disastrous Golden Globes performance for worst of the year. The media is fixated on Kimmel’s boring and tired “Trump is a criminal meh” political commentary disguised as a joke but actually Kimmel’s disastrous performance was not limited to his eye rolling partisanship regarding President Trump. For example, Kimmel spent minutes of monologue making fun of Robert Downey Jr.’s (RDJ) old addiction. RDJ at first had a really good sense of humor about it all. Being sober 20 years, RDJ is a consummate professional and good humored person (if the stories are true). But then Kimmel would not let it go and he kept on making fun of him to the point that he was insulting former projects which is not only rude to RDJ but also to the others which created the project. He even brought up his genitals. It was really weird. Even the mainstream media is calling his performance as host a ‘bomb.’ 

2024 Freedom Award for Best Television Show: Succession Season 4

Succession has long been a critical and ratings success but their finale season was truly the strongest (competing perhaps only with its inaugural season). Not only was the finale season dramatically compelling, it remained satirically mirthful taking itself the exact right amount of seriously to be both funny and dramatic. In the final episodes, Matthew McFayden (Tom Wambsgans), comes into a new and surprising stride as does his opposite Sarah Snook (Shiv Roy). There are iconic one-liners, parodies of powerful men we know and love and a conclusion that satisfies not only the story but the American dream (in a confounding, ugly, funny kind of way). 

2024 Fail Award for Worst Television Show: And Just Like That Season 2

The sequel to Sex and the City built off its disastrous first season by producing an even more ludacris and hideous second season. The show would actually be funny if it was a parody and called “inside the mind of a liberal rich white lady in America.” The adult trans character in the story is so written as such a terrible person (not the intention of the writing) that even the trans community hates this show. The show also features a trans child and defends the notion of a school dictating pronouns and lifestyle instead of parents. It’s got sex and drug use with teens and genuinely terrible parenting all around. The show is so desperate to be ‘woke’ that it actually isn’t woke and even progressives completely hate it. It’s truly a shadow box of liberal elite delusion. Fail Season 2.

2024 Freedom Award for Performance in a Motion Picture: Jim Caviezel, Sound of Freedom 

Caviezel bravely took on the role of the leading man, Tim Ballard in the summer blockbuster (against all odds) Sound of Freedom. Caviezel turned in a quiet, thoughtful, respectful interpretation of a fictionalized hero based on a real life champion for child safety. He did so knowing that the Hollywood press would do everything they could to take him down. The best they could muster was to say the movie was not based on much truth and that it was boring (which by mine and any theater goers watch is intellectually dishonest). Caviezel is the anchor of the film and his performance gave it credibility where with a lesser performer it might instead have descended into something  ‘made for TV after school program.’ The Conservative Critic hopes to see more actors of Caviezel’s caliber taking on Hollywood with independently distributed films of the quality of Sound of Freedom. 

2024 Fail Award for Performance in a Motion Picture: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 

Phoebe Waller-Bridge had the great misfortune of being the face of what was more likely very poor writing than a very poor performance. But alas, heavy is the head. Waller-Bridge plays Helena Shaw in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Indy 5) and she simply does not stop talking from the start of the movie to the finish. Every possible moment of tension or power or even comedy is stolen from audiences by Waller-Bridge with some out of place trying-to-hard line that is completely unnecessary and entirely annoying. Strong, loud, outspoken leading ladies are a wonderful thing and something the Indiana Jones franchise has always had. But with Waller-Bridge’s Helena, it’s plot ruining. Helena is the least likable character in the entire movie and there are Nazis in it. Waller-Bridge, not entirely by her own fault, is the worst performance this year. Fail.

2023 Fail Award for Worst Picture: Killers of the Flower Moon

Despite the award circuit accolades including an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Killers of the Flower Moon is a way-too-long nothing burger or a movie which robs the audience of any suspense or intrigue sacrificing it at the altar of self-flagellation. The white man who made the movie (Martin Sorcese) is clearly so paranoid about making sure to depict all the white people as the bad guys that he doesn’t allow the story to be told in an interesting, surprising, nuanced or thrilling way that would have made the phenomenal underlying story a perfect movie. On top of the maddening audience omnipotence which makes the movie criminally dull, the acting by the two leads (Robert DiNero and Leonard DiCaprio) holds water as much as a ham sandwich. The two hand in an absolutely cartoonish depiction of their characters which makes a stark and nauseating contrast to the brilliant performance by Lily Gladstone which is the only redeeming quality of the otherwise insufferable piece of cinema. Worst picture by a landslide. Fail.

2023 Freedom Award Best Picture: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 (MI7) is not only wildly entertaining from start to finish, but it is consistent with the franchise in casting government agencies as villains. The film focuses on Artificial Intelligence which makes it topical and fresh while somehow maintaining older school elegance including fighting with swords and traveling by train. Despite all odds, MI7 manages a breathtaking Christ metaphor and powerful message of grace which makes the perfect foil for the cold and clinical world of AI where technology is believed to be God. By far the most underrated movie of the year by box office performance and critical reception, MI7, is definitely The Conservative Critic’s Best Picture and a must see.