Dracula Presents: The Twelfth Annual Golden Stake Awards

I don't think that was deliberate, that just kind of seems like something they were a little too close to to notice.  

And I'm considering The Other Side of the Wind ineligible for all of this.

Best Villain
Best villain is a pretty self-explanatory concept but it’s always important to make the parameters clear. For one, characters are only eligible for this if they’re actual antagonists within a film. So anti-hero types will not be featured here. The character also needs to be more or less human or human-like. Aliens or ghosts with human sentience are eligible but wild animals and weather phenomena are not and neither are nebulous forces like war or poverty.

Thanos - Avengers: Infinity War: In simple terms of outcomes Thanos is clearly the greatest villain in the history of the MCU: unlike every other villain in this franchise he actually managed to win and kill a bunch of heroes, at least ostensibly. Driven by a dogmatic belief that the universe needs to be depopulated by 50%, Thanos spends much of the film seeking out infinity stones which act as a rather interesting set of powers that make him borderline invincible.

David Duke – BlacKkKlansman: I always feel a little weird nominating real people in this category, something about comparing them to super villains and the like always feels a bit apples and oranges like. To be clear I’m only looking at the David Duke character in the movie, and not the real guy’s lifelong track record of evil. In the movie Duke seems like a bit of a case study in the banality of evil. He doesn’t snarl or anything and his moustache is far to dorky looking to be twirled. Instead the guy kind of comes across like a racist Ned Flanders, a guy who would fit into a suburban enclave but who also runs a hate organization.

Killmonger – Black Panther: Killmonger fits well within one of the more common comic book villain archetype: the villain who has the same basic goal as the hero but takes it too far and becomes destructive because of it. Magneto would be the clearest example of this but there are shades of it in characters like Ras Al Ghul and The Punisher. Killmonger is a guy who views the Wakanda’s secluded nature is a waste and attempts to use their technology for the liberation of the African diaspora through violence, and this extremist streak makes him the enemy to our hero but one that he’s conflicted about fighting.

Steve Lift – Sorry to Bother You: Sorry to Bother You is not subtle in its condemnation of capitalism run amok and the character that most clearly symbolizes capitalism at its worst is not a cigar chomping old man but instead a young Zuckerberg-esque bro named Steve Lift, who is the entrepreneur behind a company called Worry Free, which essentially seeks to sell slave labor conditions to people. Armie Hammer plays the character with an incredible smugness and a certain obliviousness to just how awful he is and he really makes the jump to the memorable with a proposal he makes in the film’s second half.

David Strine – Unsane: Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane has two villains of sorts: the corrupt administrators of the psychiatric hospital that the protagonist has found herself stuck in is the first of these and the second is David Strine, who is a longtime stalker of the protagonist who has more or less masterminded her commitment to this facility and is now posing as a guard. There’s something inherently frightening about this scheme given that it basically takes advantage of this woman’s past trauma to trap her again but he also engages in more mundane and murderous forms of villainy.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

lol Racist Ned Flanders

Best Cameo
Cameos generally refer to surprise appearances by celebrities and this Best Cameo category does cover that but I’ve generally expanded the category out to pretty much any noteworthy performance by anyone who is only in a movie for a very limited amount of time and manages to do a lot with only a scene or two.

Mads Mikkelsen – At Eternity’s Gate: At Eternity’s Gate is a movie of ups and downs and one of the standout moments is a scene where Van Gogh is spending time at a sanitarium and finds himself sitting down to talk to a priest who’s in charge for something of a therapy session. This Priest, played by Mads Mikkelsen, certainly has no idea that Van Gogh would one day be considered a master painter and instead sees his paintings as a rather unpleasant manifestation of his mental problems. It’s a scene that could very easily could have made this guy out to be a total fool and used historical hindsight to make fun of him but Mikkelsen finds the humanity in the character and makes the scene interesting rather than snarky.

Brad Pitt – Deadpool 2: While Brad Pitt is only onscreen for something like two seconds in Deadpool 2 his cameo remains impactful through its general audaciousness. Playing a character named Vanisher who joins the X-Force, but he’s completely invisible during his recruitment and initial parachute jumping scene, to the point where it’s not entirely clear to the audience if he even exists at all, at least right up to the point where the winds blow him into a powerline while parachuting and for a split second while being electrocuted he becomes visible and it’s revealed that he’s been Brad Pitt the whole time. The cameo is apparently a nod to the fact that Pitt was once in the running to be cast as Cable and became a much talked about moment from the film.

Algee Smith – The Hate U Give: Algee Smith certainly doesn’t feel like he’s going to be giving a cameo length performance in The Hate U Give as his character Khalil Harris feels like he’ll play a pretty big part in the film… until he’s murdered in his second scene by a trigger happy police officer. Khalil needs to sort of live on in spirit through the movie and his loss really needs to be felt, so Smith has to really put in a lot of work to get the audience to like and be interested in his character within a very short amount of screen time and he does in fact leave a pretty big impact.

Brian Tyree Henry – If Beale Street Could Talk: This scene comes about midway through If Beale Street Could Talk and while it doesn’t advance the plot exactly it’s very important to the film just the same. The scene, which is something of a flashback, shows Fonny having an extended conversation with a friend played by Brian Tyree Henry who has just gotten out of a multi-year jail for a minor drug charge. The friend gives a lengthy heartfelt monologue about the hell that jail is and the unfairness of life in America for African Americans. The scene serves two purposes: to show what Fonny will have to face if he gets stuck in jail for the charge he’ll later be falsely accused of and also to show that this is a bigger problem than the circumstances of one unlucky person.

Wolf Blitzer – Mission Impossible: Fallout: Cameos by real life newscasters are something of a staple in movies and especially in action movies and disaster movies. They get seen on TV screens reporting on whatever crazy happenings are going on in the plot and give the film a tie to the real world as a result. At first that seems like what’s happening with Wolf Blitzer’s appearance in Mission Impossible: Fallout as he reports on a series of nuclear attacks around the world in the background while a terrorist is being questioned. Then after a little while it’s revealed that this is actually one of the more elaborate media personality cameos since Daniel Schorr started talking back to Michael Douglas in The Game. Blitzer’s general ubiquity in “breaking news” reporting made the appearance all the more noteworthy.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

I'm guessing Drac's argument was that there wasn't much to the performance but I do agree that moment was pretty great.

If there's a real snub here its Harry Belafonte in BlacKkKlansman.

The cameo loses points because it's not Hugo Weaving.

But still, that was probably the biggest nerd out moment I've had in a while.

I have a feeling she'll win the Oscar too.

I have a feeling he'll win the Oscar too.

Great, great choice

Damn right, Toni Collette.

Oooh, excellent choice.

Best Ensemble

The best ensemble category seeks to award films that have a large number of actors working in unison and who’s efforts are perhaps a greater whole than the sum of their parts. It’s meant to reward casts that are on the larger side, so movies like The Favourite whose most impressive acting is confined to a smaller core of actors are better served elsewhere.

The Death of Stalin: The Death of Stalin is a movie that casts British and American actors as Russian historical figures and intentionally has them keep their native accents to maintain a very English language comedic sensibility and give everything a slight aura of the surreal. The film actually has a very large cast as a lot of historical figures are involved but some of the highlights include Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov, and Simon Russell Beale as Lavrentiy Beria, but the list goes on way longer than that.

Eighth Grade: A Best Ensemble award is in part an award for the best casting of a movie and for movies that are able to overcome some of the special challenges that come in putting together a roster of actors. Looked at that way, something like Eighth Grade is very impressive. The film manages to collect a lot of very young and unknown actors and make sure all of them come off like authentic teens rather than actors and the movie manages to do that pretty much across the board. Elsie Fisher and Josh Hamilton are of course great in the film but almost all of the young side characters really work in the film.

If Beale Street Could Talk: After his Oscar winning work in Moonlight Barry Jenkins probably could have worked with anyone but rather than fill his next film with huge stars he primarily found newcomers and undervalued actors who fit within the story he was telling. At the center of the film is first time actress KiKi Layne who clearly has star power and she has great chemistry with her co-star and onscreen lover Stephan James. Supporting them is of course Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry but there are other unsung performers here like Emily Rios and Colman Domingo who also manage to stand out in certain scenes.

Shoplifters: Shoplifters is a movie about a sort of assembled family and as such it needs to put together a cast which will make each member of that family stand out in its own way. At the head of the family is an actor who goes by the name Lily Franky, who manages to seem both sleazy and loving and then you have other colorful characters played by actresses like Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka, Kirin Kiki. Finally you have another pair of great child actors played by Kairi Jō and Miyu Sasaki.

Widows: Widows is a movie with so many characters and was made by people who famous actors are so interested in working with that it would be hard for it to not have an amazing cast. The core group of widows gives us Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, and Carrie Coon as well as the honorary widow Cynthia Erivo. Then there’s the political/gangland side which gives us Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, and Robert Duvall. There are also flashbacks with Liam Neeson and even tiny parts in the film are played by people like Jacki Weaver.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…