This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. This season has closed, but you can still sign up to make sure you’re on the list for updates about next season.
Another Oscars year is in the books — and just as we all predicted a year ago, Sean Baker won four Academy Awards in a single night, and a movie about a Brighton Beach sex worker, her son-of-an-oligarch husband, and the clown car of Russian stooges trying to stop them was deemed Best Picture. You can find more and better Anora analysis (Anoranalysis!) elsewhere on Vulture. Right here, all that matters is that the final points barrage of Oscars Night has settled season three of the Vulture Movies Fantasy League.
We have a winner! We have prizes! We have a Podcasters Division champ! We have some stats! Why are we wasting any more time with this intro??
The Greatest Points of Our Lives
When designing the game, we intentionally supercharged the point values for winning at the Academy Awards, both because it befits the Oscars’ stature and because it puts a lot of value up for grabs at the last possible moment. That’s exciting! In theory! This year, though, it mostly meant that anyone who picked Anora continued to reap the rewards.
Baker’s feisty dramedy won five of the six Oscars it was up for, pulling in a whopping 375 MFL points, the best single-day haul of the season. The next-closest film on Oscars Night was The Brutalist, whose wins for Best Actor (Adrien Brody, still talking), Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score added up to 175 points.
Poor, hated Emilia Pérez, whose triumphant songwriters seemed to revel in their own villainy in a way that was, frankly, thrilling, still finished third in MFL points with 125 — 50 for Best Original Song and 75 for Zoe Saldaña. It was a night for spreading the wealth as Wicked and Dune: Part 2 each won a pair of Oscars, good for 100 points apiece; A Real Pain, Conclave, I’m Still Here, Flow, and No Other Land all won one 75-point Oscar apiece; and The Substance picked up 50 points for winning Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
And the Winner Is…
After we added the points, then double-checked the points, then adjusted the points because we initially added up the points wrong, then triple-checked the points, we have arrived at a winner for MFL season three: Congratulations, Better Things Hive!
It feels only too appropriate that on the evening Mikey Madison ascended to the top echelons of the Hollywood firmament, an MFL roster named after the TV show she broke through on would best the nearly 15,000 (!) other entries to take top honors with 6,843 points. Bolstered by an all-killer, no-filler roster that included Anora, Wicked, The Brutalist, The Substance, A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, The Apprentice, and I Saw the TV Glow, Better Things Hive represented the Vervators mini-league with distinction and valor.
Since our top echelon of prizes includes the top-three finishers, congratulations also go out to PostmasterFlex, whose 6,818 points fell just short of ultimate glory, taking second place for the Blankies mini-league. And in third place is A Real Wicked Conclave with 6,764 points, representing my podcast’s mini-league, the Garyators. A Real Wicked Conclave, you have made the Garys so proud.
We’ll get into the rest of the prizes in a second, but here’s the final Top 10 leaderboard for the season.
And the Podcaster Division Prize Goes To…
The intrigue heading into Oscars Night was that points leader Richard Lawson of Little Gold Men held a lead of nearly 450 points over second-place David Canfield. But Richard didn’t have Anora, and David did, so the suspense was in wondering whether David would be able to surpass his podcast co-host with a big enough Anora haul. The answer? Almost! Helped along by A Real Pain picking up Best Supporting Actor, Richard held on by a margin of 5,758 to 5,591.
Fighting in the War Room’s Matt Patches leapfrogged into third place at the last minute with 5,438 points, Keep It’s Megan Patsel closed the season in fourth place, and Screen Drafts’ Clay Keller passed This Had Oscar Buzz’s Chris Feil and Blank Check’s David Sims for fifth place.
The grand prize for the Podcaster Division champion is a surprise that will be revealed on Vulture’s social platforms, all in good time. We also have prizes to give to the teams in the top-ranked mini-league within the Podcaster Division. For each podcaster-affiliated mini-league, we added up the sum of the scores of the top-ten players/teams within that mini-league. And the league with the highest score was [cue Julia Roberts’s “I love my life”] the Garyators! The league affiliated with my own This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. I’m so deeply proud.
A Real Wicked Conclave is the top team in the Garyators league and thus gets the 50-inch Westinghouse Roku TV 4K Ultra HD. And the following nine teams get a year of MoviePass:
➼ The Life of Chuck
➼ whatathrill
➼ Monstro Elisabeth Shue
➼ Lady Baby Jessica
➼ Anaura
➼ I Saw the Churro Glow
➼ Deedee Megadoodoo
➼ Yeah x10x10
➼ Elphaba is brat
Congrats to all, my Garys!
And the Vulture Staff Bragging Rights Go To…
Lest we forget to brag on our own, congratulations go out to Vulture senior writer and Oscars Night dance-floor king Nate Jones, who perhaps inevitably flexed his superior awards-season prowess over the rest of us with a commanding 450+ point margin of victory. In second place for the second consecutive year is the great Rebecca Alter, who appears to be shrewdly crafting an Amy Adams–like “When will she finally win one?” narrative for herself. I, on the other hand, finished one place ahead of my boss, Neil Janowitz, another showcase for my poor grasp of business savvy.
The top-ten Vulture staffers:
Prizes!
The top-three finishers in the overall MFL standings get to pick from what is frankly a super-rad prize box. Better Things Hive gets first dibs, followed by PostmasterFlex, and then A Real Wicked Conclave gets what’s left. “What’s left of what?,” you ask?
➼ A 65-inch Roku Plus Series 4K TV
➼ A Roku Streambar SE
➼ Bowers & Wilkins Pi8 Wireless Earbuds
Also! Our fourth- and fifth-place teams — Witty Team Name and DJ Sourpuss, respectively — will receive this rad Lego Jaws set. Try remaining a sourpuss while assembling a Spielberg-worthy tableau for Brody, Hooper, Quint, and, of course, Bruce the shark.
Our top-ten players — the above-named folks, plus FilmPharaoh, meadhbh, rachluvsdamovies, maya, and Anora Borealis II — get one-year subscriptions to the Criterion Channel, which currently boasts collections of Michael Mann, Douglas Sirk, Dogme ’95, and Best Supporting Actor and Actress Oscar winners, a lineup that includes Ghost, A Fish Called Wanda, and The Last Picture Show!
And finally, our top-20 finishers — everybody I’ve named above plus (deep breath) Deanna DB, Pumpkin Monkey, RHonig, LWLWLW, Magic Michael Jordan Venom in A Last Dance Mystery, AaronArc, SkylarShankman, AriesSoul329, Paths of Orange, and Day for Nightbitch — all get a one-year MoviePass subscription. Live like it’s 2015 again, through movies!
Some Stats
In past years, we’ve published a data deep dive on trends from the MFL season later in the week after the Oscars. This time around, we decided, why wait? As you celebrate your success or lament what could have been, you can nerd out a bit on these interesting slices of our game.
These were the game’s highest-scoring movies:
Just outside this range are, in order, Sing Sing, Nickel Boys, Sonic 3, Gladiator II, and Mufasa, an interesting mix of awards prowess and box-office power. Once again, it seems awards might has overpowered box-office strength. That all the top-finishing teams had Anora and The Brutalist but none had Moana 2 tells me I still have some tinkering to do for next season if I want box office to be a serious consideration for people when they draft their teams. And tinker I shall!
This next chart is for the Highest Value Movies of the season. We divided the total points each movie earned by the dollar amount they cost to have them on your team and arrived at a points-per-dollar figure that was pretty illuminating. Costing just one dollar, Irish rock band movie Kneecap ended up giving the most value (if only it had made the Oscar lineup!), while Oscar nominees The Substance, Flow, and I’m Still Here provided great bang for your buck. As always, documentaries prove themselves to be of great value here, as evidenced by the Oscar winner No Other Land and fellow nominees Black Box Diaries (another $1 buy) and Sugarcane.
We had a ton of fun with the mini-leagues this year, with 101 leagues of at least 10 players. We averaged the scores within each league to see which one performed best on balance, so congrats if you were one of the ten members of Poorly Designed Promotional Popcorn Bucket, you had the highest mini-league average score with 4,687 points! Second place? The twelve members of Goon With the Wind.
Shout outs also to the team from Focus Features (a good year for Focus in general, what with Conclave and Nosferatu), who finished 5th among all mini leagues.
The top-scoring league with at least 50 participants was the Wholigans (average of 3,995 points), while the top-scoring league with more than 100 participants was Vanity Flair (average of 3,881 points). And in the battle of the mini-leagues with 500 or more participants, my own Garyators bested the Blankies by an average score of 3,773 to 3,602.
Finally, in my favorite annual MFL chart, we have the hypothetical Dream-Team Roster: the eight-film collection that would have given you an unbeatable hand this season. For the third straight year, no one assembled the perfect squad, but the dream remains alive:
Thanks For a Great Season
A GIANT thanks to everyone who participated in the Movies Fantasy League this season. You came out in huge numbers, you stayed engaged, we heard back from so many of you along the way, and we hope you had as much fun playing as we had running the game. Check out the MFL hub to get a fuller look at the final standings, where your roster ended up, and more. Winners, keep an eye on your email — you’ll hear from us about claiming your prizes by the end of the week. And keep your eye on the horizon (… an American Saga, Part II) for news about next season.
Questions? Feedback? Drop us a line at [email protected].