Dracula Presents: The Thirteenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

And it's not even his best performance this year.

Best Acting Ensemble
The acting ensemble category is meant to honor the acting accomplishments of a film’s entire cast, not just certain high profile individuals within it. I usually try to dig for some unusual outside the box choices here with really unique casting obstacles but this year my hands were sort of tied because a lot of the year’s biggest movies have big giant movie star filled ensembles that were impossible to ignore and as such some of these choices are a tad predictable. Whatchu gonna do?

The Irishman: The casting of De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci together in one film is an obvious coup and also serves as something of an instant commentary on Scorsese’s own career, but let’s look further down the cast list. Harvey Keitel is also here to connect even further back into Scorsese’s canon. Meanwhile there’s a younger generation of potential gangster actors like Bobby Cannavale, Stephen Graham, and Sebastian Maniscalco being represented her as well as some curveballs like Ray Romano and Jesse Plemons. Special mention should also be made of Anna Paquin who does a lot with limited screentime.

Little Women: After the success of Lady Bird Greta Gerwig had the clout to jam pack her follow-up with major actors in nearly every role but almost none of this feels like mere stunt casting. The core group of sisters is a who’s who of an upcoming generation of female Hollywood talent and they’re joined by up and coming male star Timothée Chalamet. Beyond them we get some serious heavy hitters from the older generation like Meryl Streep, Laura Dern, Chris Cooper, Tracy Letts, and Bob Odenkirk

Marriage Story: Marriage Story is ultimately a story about two people, but Noah Baumbach is more than happy to fill out the movie beyond them. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are the film’s foundation but Laura Dern, Alan Alda, and Ray Liotta also play important roles as their lawyers, each representing different approaches to the legal system and then there are the various actors playing their various friends and relatives. Julie Hagerty and Merritt Weaver are just casually slipped in as relatives of Johansson’s and Driver’s various theater friends led by Wallace Shawn are also important.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Putting Brad Pitt and Leonardo Di Caprio into the same movies as sort of buddy characters is kind of a crazy accomplishment in its own way given that both are more than able to command their own movies but what’s even wilder is that Tarantino still had space to jam the film full of eyebrow raising casting choices too numerous to name. The film doesn’t think twice about tossing people like Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, and Bruce Dern into tiny roles but doesn’t just put a famous person into every single part and also manages to discover new talent like Margaret Qualley, Mike Moh, and Damon Herriman.

Parasite: Parasite is a true ensemble film in which no one actor can really be said to be the lead but each and every performer has to play an important part. The actors playing the Parks need to walk this fine line between playing vapid assholes and playing believable characters who mostly mean well despite their blind spots. The actors playing the previous housekeeper and her husband need to make what could be some really nutty parts believable. But of course the real centerpiece are the actors playing the Kims, who each need to essentially play double roles since they need to portray their characters both when they’re being their ratchet selves and when they’re playing at respectability as part of their scam.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Nice choice. It's already instantly iconic so I feel like it'll stick around.


If any line gave it a run for its money this year, for me, it was from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, though not Cliff's clever zinger you nominated. Rather, Kurt Russell's narration about coming to the end of the line with a buddy "who is a little more than a brother and a little less than a wife" really got to me.

I have spoken

Best Original Screenplay
If adapted screenplay was on the weak side this year, original was jam packed. I had to make some hard cuts to get this one down to five (sorry Uncut Gems and Birds of Passage) and the five remaining choices are examples of writing at its finest.

Ash is Purest White: Jia Zhangke, more so than your average director, comes to film from a rather intellectual place and makes films that are meant to act as a sort of cultural and social critique. In some of his other films those societal messages would end up taking precedence over other matters like story and character but here he finds a pretty good balance. His screenplay creates a strong character at its center and finds a number of interesting adventures for her but in the background it still manages to tell another story about a swiftly modernizing China for which the filmmaker continues to express his profound ambivalence.

The Lighthouse: The Lighthouse boasts a creative setup and Robert and Max Eggers’ screenplay likely deserves some credit for the film’s visual ideas and nightmareish tone but what really makes it stand out in the screenplay space is the film’s dialogue. Eggers used various historical documents and oral histories in order to construct the distinct brogues for his two characters but most notably for Dafoe’s character, who speaks with this pirate-like pattern that would sound ridiculous if not for how committed the screenplay is to it and Dafoe is provided with these elaborate speeches which really feel like something you’d expect from some kind of classic play or something.

Marriage Story: Noah Baumbach has always been something of a “screenplay first” filmmaker and has specialized in making very human stories about the kind of people who inhabit a very specific social strata. They haven’t always worked for me, but here he’s working in a very different pitch and is dealing with issues that are a little too close to the bone for him to get distracted by some of his usual quirks. There’s still comedy to be found in the movie and that is a welcome relief, but what really stands out about the film is how fully formed its characters are and how specific their divisions are and how much of a clear eyed this screenplay is about the divorce process.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: The thought of Quentin Tarantino directing a movie that someone else wrote is close to unthinkable and a movie like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood being written by anyone other than Tarantino is also unthinkable. The film is so clearly a manifestation of all of the auteur’s themes and interests from classic television to westerns to rock and roll but his screenplay also shows evidence of a certain degree of soul searching as it’s very much a movie about entertainers wondering if there’s still a place in pop culture for them as they grow older.

Parasite: One of the harder types of movie to write are movies in the “conman” genre, which is essentially what Parasite is but to think about it in genre terms like that seems pretty limiting. For the screenplay Bong Joon-Ho needed to create no fewer than nine different fairly well defined characters in a fairly short amount of screen time and needs to make their various machinations clear to the audience and move the pieces around the board in just the right ways to keep people engaged the whole time.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Tough field, indeed. I might have given the edge to QT but I get it.

Best Trailer
The award for best trailer is given to a trailer for one of the year’s films that I consider to be cut in a special way that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Eligibility is based on the year the movie came out, not the year the trailer came out. Additionally I will only be considering trailers for movies that I have myself seen so I can verify if they accurately portray the film and don’t give away unnecessary spoilers.

Avengers: Endgame (Teaser):

Marvel really played audiences like a fiddle with this Avengers: Endgame teaser that knew exactly what effect the Avengers: Infinity War cliffhanger had on audiences and gives us exactly enough to promise that the film would address the fallout of this and nothing more. There’s not a shred of footage from the big expensive battle at the end of the movie, no mention of the time heists, no fat Thor, and no half transformed Bruce Banner. It’s a perfect example of how to promote a movie people are excited about without giving much of anything away. The Ant-Man stinger at the end is also nice.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Trailer 1):

This early trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a masterclass in how a trailer can highlight a film’s strengths and downplay its weaknesses. The trailer features no more than one line spoken by the film’s human protagonist played by Kyle Chandler and is instead to a rendition of “Clair de Lune” and the audio from a scene where Vera Farmiga sort of lays out the film’s environmental thesis statement. We are given only the briefest glimpses of the new monsters like Rodan, Mothra and Ghidorah right when they’re at their most iconic and it ends on the perfect little pump up line of “Long live the king” spoken by Tywin Lannister himself.

It: Chapter 2 (Teaser): 

Someone in Warner Brothers’ marketing department seems to really be in love with this trailer format where a scene from a movie is edited down to plays almost the whole way through before other footage is finally cut in. They’ve done that with a couple of Clint Eastwood films and they’ve also done it with the Mrs. Kersh scene from It: Chapter 2. That scene was a smart choice to highlight as it slowly reintroduces audiences to Pennywise without just shoving a whole lot of Bill Skarsgård footage in your face and when the big montage of other footage starts at the end it promises a lot of excitement while still very much being only a tease.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco: 

It’s one thing to make a trailer out of footage from a hundred million dollar movie and make it impressive but there’s also much to be said for the art of putting together a trailer for an unconventional indie. This trailer does a great job of focusing in on The Last Black Man in San Francisco’s most visually striking and elegiac images and in many ways makes them more striking simply by cutting to them in isolation and cutting them together with Mike Marshall’s mournful cover of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).”

Pet Semetary (Teaser): 

Making another version of Pet Semetary was not a good idea, that should have been obvious from the beginning but this teaser trailer sure made it seem like this was a remake every bit as needed as the highly successful It reboot. I should note that I’m talking strictly about the film’s teaser trailer and not the spoilerific disaster that was the full trailer. This is the one which used the drumming to the children’s funeral procession as a repeating metronome in the background while a lot of very well shot footage of creepy moments cut in and out at an almost perfect rate.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Eh, personally I would've gone with either Endgame or Pet Sematary from this list.  Honestly, the Godzilla marketing did very little for me.

Yeah, that poster's pretty amazing.

I think I'm going to retire this category next year.


Most Under-Appreciated
More than anything this “most under-appreciated” category has kind of become my place to vent about movies that I generally think got a raw deal by either the culture or the entertainment media. They don’t need to have been financial failures (in fact two of the nominees made quite a bit of money) though that can be part of it, and they don’t need to be critical failures, though they are likely to be movies that critics didn’t champion like they should have.

Birds of Passage: Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s Birds of Passage is a movie that is certainly respected by those who saw it but it’s never gotten quite what it deserved. It played at Cannes in the Director’s Fortnight instead of the competition, it got released by The Orchard right as that company was going out of business, and it barely made five hundred thousand in theaters. That’s crazy when you consider that it was made by Ciro Guerra, maker of the world cinema hit Embrace of the Serpent and had an accessible crime movie undercurrent beneath the surface.

The Fall of the American Empire: I kind of get why this movie fell by the wayside when it came out. Denys Arcand has never been a terribly reliable auteur and the movie also isn’t very impressive visually and has a bit of a television feel. However, I do think there was some good stuff in it that made it worth a look. The film firstly works as a pleasant little crime comedy about an intellectual that stumbles upon millions of dollars in drug money and tries to find a way to launder it and this leads to a sly look at the ways that the rich and powerful are able to live life by different rules than everyone else.

Long Shot: It really wasn’t that long ago that Seth Rogen was able to pretty regularly get people out to the theater but his 2019 comedy Long Shot really seemed to die a death at the box office. This was particularly surprising given that it had a fairly accessible romantic comedy high concept and the talents of co-star Charlize Theron. Rogen was able to get people to the theaters for Good Boys, which he executive produced and appeared in the trailers for but not this. Given that the movie is such an audience pleaser you’d think it would do better.

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker: Even bringing this movie up is to elicit arguments but count me among the people who thought there was a lot to like about the movie despite a couple of flaws. Today the film is largely being received in relation to a seemingly endless online argument about the relative merits of the previous film but I think in time the film is going to be viewed more on its own merits. When people start watching these movies back to back the things it changes from The Last Jedi are going to seem less like walkbacks and more like inevitable reversals from obvious fake-outs in the last movie. Beyond that I think the movie works pretty good simply as a fun Star Wars ride and that’s going unappreciated.

Toy Story 4: Despite having spent a lot of time talking shit about Pixar in the 2000s I have emerged as something of an unexpected defender of their various sequels in the 2010s. Toy Story 4 would seem like one of these sequels that doesn’t need defending as it did get pretty strong reviews in terms of “fresh” ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and it made a lot of money, but what I’m really reacting to is an attitude going around that this movie was redundant because the ending of Toy Story 3 was “perfect.” I disagree with this for reasons to elaborate to go into here but not only do I think this sequel was needed, I think it’s plainly the best of the series.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

I liked Long Shot. Good choice.