My Favorite Ralph Bakshi Film

Fans of American animation all eventually have to reckon with the work of Ralph Bakshi.  As someone raised on the animated fantasy worlds of Disney and Hanna Barbera, I avoided Bakshi's work for a very long time.  The existence of his films, especially the early ones full of X-rated sexual imagery, plentiful vulgarity, and grotesque character designs, was something I initially wanted to write off as a fluke or deviation.  However, Bakshi proved that adult animation could be financially successful, and was massively influential on the state of modern animation as we know it.  He remains the most important example of an independent animator being able to make projects with a very personal, uncompromised artistic vision.  And that vision was daring, subversive, and often in direct opposition to the prevailing tastes and norms of the artistic establishment.  

One of the reasons I was so hesitant to explore Ralph Bakshi's work was the actual animation in his films.  With a much smaller operation and more limited funds than what the established studios were working with, the quality of the animation was always extremely haphazard.  You'd have incredible character designs, but in motion they were constantly off model.  Shortcuts were employed regularly, such as live action backgrounds and rotoscoped characters.  For a while, I latched on to the notion that rotoscoping - animation produced by tracing over live action footage - didn't count as real animation.  I got over this idea eventually, because I learned that all the major animation studios use reference footage to some extent, and the use of rotoscoping can create a very distinct, interesting aesthetic if it's done well.  And Ralph Bakshi understood how to do it well.    

One of the reasons that Bakshi survived in animation for as long as he did and got as many films produced as he did was that he evolved with the times.  He transitioned from his gritty "urban" films exploring city life to fantasy spectaculars like "Fire and Ice" and "The Lord of the Rings" in the 1980s, and helped kick off the television animation resurgence with "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures" in 1988.  One of the important early transitional titles was "American Pop," an almost entirely rotoscoped animated film that played as a straight drama, and contained very little of the X-rated material that characterized Bakshi's first few features.  Instead of garish, oversexed caricatures, the film is about very down-to-earth human beings.  The story is a series of vignettes about a Russian Jew named Zalmie who immigrates to America to escape the pogroms in 1905, and the four generations of descendants who follow him, all lovers of music in one way or another, with the last finally reaching pop stardom in the present day.

I suspect that "Heavy Traffic" is probably the best representation of Ralph Bakshi's artistic style and rebellious verve, and "Fritz the Cat" and "Coonskin" have the greatest historical importance for their boundary-breaking impact.  However, "American Pop" is the only Ralph Bakshi film I truly love because I find the characters - a series of troubled, flawed men trying to find their way through different eras of American life - to be truly touching and relatable.  There are episodes of tragedy, grief, humor, and triumph that are presented with a sympathy and humanism I don't see often in Bakshi's other work.  "American Pop" feels like a very personal film, though Bakshi has claimed that the stories were based on the experiences of musician friends instead of his own life.  And you simply cannot beat the soundtrack, which features Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas & the Papas, Peter Seger, Sam Cook, The Doors, and Pat Benatar.  

The rotoscoped animation is stiff at times, but the visual storytelling is excellent, and the performances shine through the layers of abstraction.  This style felt awkward for Bakshi's fantasy features like "The Lord of the Rings," but not in "American Pop," which is designed to be a family album of a kind, and incorporates mixed media and other artistic devices, like the prologue sequence in Russia being relayed in woodcuts.  Historical events like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and WWII combat footage are recreated along with clips of the Nicholas Brothers and Jimi Hendrix, all rendered in the same rotoscoped visual style as the lives of our heroes, making them feel like they're part of one, heightened, slightly surreal animated  continuity.  I've never seen another film achieve something quite like this.   

Watching every Ralph Bakshi film was difficult, because many of the films have significant shortcomings, or have not aged well, and even the best ones are rarely to my taste.  However, the fact that they exist at all feels miraculous.  That animated movies this uninhibited, this outrageous, and this iconoclastic found an audience is downright inspirational.  And I can't think of anyone aside from Walt Disney whose work changed our understanding of what animation could and should be to such an extent, and left its mark on the industry forever.

What I've Seen - Ralph Bakshi

Fritz the Cat (1972)

Heavy Traffic (1973)

Coonskin (1975)

Wizards (1977)

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

American Pop (1981)

Hey Good Lookin' (1982)

Fire and Ice (1983)

Cool World (1992)

Cool and the Crazy (1994)

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Your 2026 Oscar Nominations

There's been a lot of change in the air for the Academy Awards.  There's a new Casting category, with Stunts coming next year!  There are only three ABC telecasts left until the Oscars move to Youtube!  I may need to write a separate post on that in the future, but for now, the nominees!

I got a bit sidetracked when it came to the actual races, and was surprised by the contenders for Best Picture.  I didn't realize that "Bugonia" and "F1" were in this race at all.  Where is "No Other Choice"?  What happened to "The Testament of Ann Lee"?  Nothing for "Wake Up Dead Man?"  There is a list of other also-rans a mile long.  However, kudos to "Sinnners" for breaking the nomination record, and "One Battle After Another" getting pretty close.  These two films have dominated the season so far, and I expect this will continue.

I've been able to watch more of the nominees this year than usual, so I only have three of the big contenders left to track down at the time of writing - "Hamnet," "Sentimental Value," and "Marty Supreme."  It's been a very good year, so all the nominees are decent.  I'd maybe single out "F1" as the weakest out of the Best Picture field from an artistic standpoint, but it's pretty immaculate on a technical level, and noteworthy for its innovations.  I didn't connect with  "Train Dreams" or "The Secret Agent," but I absolutely understand why others did.   There's no "Emilia Perez" level "Oscar villain" for people to rage at, which is a relief.  I assumed that role was going to be filled by "Jay Kelly," but the Academy didn't bite.  No big blockbuster like "Wicked: For Good" or "Avatar: Fire and Ash" in the mix either.

In the acting categories, I think the only surprise is Delroy Lindo in Supporting Actor, which feels like both a make-up nomination for missing out on "Da 5 Bloods" and a tailcoat nomination for "Sinners."  I'd rather have Miles Caton in the race, but Lindo's been around long enough that he's overdue for the recognition.  I'm absolutely tickled that Amy Madigan made it in for "Weapons," and a little disappointed that Chase Infiniti didn't for "One Battle After Another."  Kate Hudson was great in "Song Sung Blue," but Chase Infiniti was better.  Then again, if I had my way, we'd be talking about Kathleen Chalfant and Tessa Thompson.  

The first ever Best Casting nominees didn't offer much new, pretty much mirroring the Best Picture nominees.  However, notice that four of the five nominees are female, which is a big clue as to why Casting hasn't been recognized as a category before now.  Of course, there are male casting professionals, but this has traditionally been a female-dominated role, and all of the casting directors that I know off the top of my head, like first-time nominee Nina Gold, are women.

On to some of the smaller races.  There are two French films in Best Animated film, and none of the big 2025 box office winners from Asian countries like "Ne Zha 2" and the most recent "Chainsaw Man" and "Demon Slayer" movies.  The last two weren't likely from the beginning due to narrative impenetrability, and it turns out that "Ne Zha 2" wasn't even submitted!  Documentary has a few notable omissions, but I'm very thankful that "The Alabama Solution" and "The Perfect Neighbor" made it in.

The Academy did a decent job of recognizing a good variety of titles.  So "Blue Moon," "It Was Just an Accident," "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," "Weapons," and "Sirat" may not have been big contenders, but at least that all got something.  I'm delighted  that a few smaller films got single nominations in some of the below-the-line categories.  "The Ugly Stepsister" and "Kokuho" are in Best Makeup and Hairstyling.  "The Lost Bus" is in Visual Effects.  Opera documentary "Viva Verdi!" swung a Best Song nomination. 

Still, as usual, there are a lot of films that I wish would have been recognized, including "Hedda," "Left-Handed Girl," "28 Years Later," "Nouvelle Vague," and all of the previously mentioned titles.

Conan O'Brien will be back for the ceremony in March, and I can take it easy knowing that I don't have to cram much this year, and might just skip "Wicked: For Good" entirely.

Kidding.  I could never resist a musical.

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"Relay" and "Swiped"

How about a Lily James double feature today?

"Relay" is a new thriller from British director David Mackenzie, which has a very good first two acts, before a rather generic and unwieldy third act deflates it.  However, those first two thirds are good enough that "Relay" really should be getting more attention.  It's set in the modern day, but has the sensibilities of a much older film, specifically the paranoid neo-noirs of the '70s like "Klute" and "Marathon Man."

An anonymous fixer (Riz Ahmed) operating in New York City, helps out whistleblowers and other victims of corrupt corporations by acting as an intermediary.  He only communicates through the Tri-State area relay service for the deaf, meant to assist those with hearing disabilities communicate via telephone, because its ironclad privacy guarantees ensure he can never be traced.  A woman named Sarah Grant (Lily James) becomes his newest client, because she's being targeted by her former employers for taking incriminating documents.  A team led by a man named Dawson (Sam Worthington) is surveilling her.   

I don't want to get too much into the particulars of the plot, because "Relay" is the kind of film that reveals information slowly, and you don't learn certain things about the characters until you need to.  That willingness to maintain the ambiguity for so long is what helps give "Relay" an uncommon enigmatic atmosphere and persistent tension.  It's also a rare thriller that was shot almost entirely on location in New York and New Jersey, so it feels very grounded and genuine compared to similar films.  This also makes the fixer's carefully planned, impossibly perfect schemes, executed with lo-tech ingenuity, all the more impressive to see play out.    

Riz Ahmed and Lily James are both very good in this movie, credibly building a relationship through a series of tense phone calls conducted through intermediaries.  They both spend long stretches of screentime alone in the frame.  Many of the action and chase sequences featuring Ahmed are carried out in silence, and you can't take your eyes off him.  However, Lily James has no trouble carrying the film by herself, especially in the first half where she's the main driving force of the story.  "Relay" is a very no frills genre piece that's a refreshing break from the norm, and impresses with solid fundamentals and a few new twists on classic tropes.

Now, on to "Swiped," which is a middling tech entrepreneur biopic about  Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, and one of the co-founders of Tinder.  Lily James plays Wolfe, from naive nonprofit booster, to the Chief of Marketing at Tinder in its crucial early days, to harassment survivor determined to beat her former colleagues at their own game.  "Swiped" ends up being a mishmash of Silicon Valley tell-all tropes and female-centric melodrama.  But after several years of much juicier projects about the rise and fall of tech startups, Wolfe finding herself on the wrong side of tech bro culture feels rather ho-hum. The only thing remotely novel is a subplot with a Tinder Co-worker, Tisha (Myha'la), who gets Wolfe to recognize her own attractive white woman privilege over the course of the film.

Wolfe's story is rendered in the most unsurprising terms, and James is so much better than this material deserves.  She's able to give a certain level of believability to the haphazardly constructed story (large portions of which were invented because Wolfe didn't participate in the making of the film) by effortlessly conveying that Wolfe is intelligent, charismatic, and naive enough to ignore all the red flags thrown up by Tinder co-founders Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer) and Justin Mateen (Jackson White).  However, by the time Dan Stevens shows up, halfway through the film to play Wolfe's financial backer Andrey Andreev with the same wacky Russian accent he used in the Eurovision movie, it's pretty clear that "Swiped" has little interest in exploring its heroine in much depth.

Wolfe is framed as the youngest female self-made billionaire, and clearly the filmmakers were going to strive to stay on her good side and portray her in the best light possible.  However, reducing her to the heroine of a tepid girl-power Lifetime movie feels like such a disservice.  And Lily James should be getting far better roles than this.

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"Alien: Earth" Evolves

Noah Hawley has made the first season of an "Alien" television series, and it's bound to frustrate and disappoint some fans as much as it'll intrigue and delight others.  Set a few years before the original "Alien" movie takes place, it follows the fate of a research vessel, Maginot, that crashes on Earth after returning from deep space with alien specimens, including a few familiar critters from the "Alien" movies.  Immediately, a conflict arises over the retrieval and ownership of the specimens.  Weyland Yutani, one of the five giant conglomerates that rule Earth, owns the Maginot.  Unfortunately, it crashes on the property of a different corporation, Prodigy.

As all "Alien" fans know, "Alien" may feature Xenomorphs and Facehuggers as major antagonists, but the series has always really been about the dystopian vision of the future that is populated not only with humans, but with artificial "synths," cybernetically enhanced cyborgs, and a new kind of lifeform being introduced in "Alien: Earth."  Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the head of the Prodigy Corporation, has created a group of "hybrids" - the conscious minds of terminally ill children transferred into artificial, immortal bodies with major enhancements.  The first to undergo the process is Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who is grateful for the chance at a new life, but misses her family, especially her brother Joe (Alex Lawther), who thinks that she died.  

The hybrids eventually cross paths with the alien specimens, but more importantly they encounter the dark realities of the world outside the control of Boy Kavalier and his minions, which encourages an unstable situation to spin out of control.  The show offers a whole slew of fascinating characters, like the sinister Weyland Yutani cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay), human Prodigy scientists Dame and Arthur Sylvia (Essie Davis, David Rysdahl), and starkly inhuman Prodigy Synths Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) and Atom (Adrian Edmondson).  Boy Kavalier names all the hybrids after "Peter Pan" characters, so precocious Wendy is joined by Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), Curly (Erana James), Nibs (Lily Newmark), and Tootles (Kit Young).  Lots of good performances here, with Babou Ceesay delivering some particularly good menace.

I expect how viewers react to the hybrid storyline will determine how receptive they are to "Alien: Earth," because Noah Hawley is far more interested in them than he is in the aliens.  There are some very impressive creature and action sequences, and I especially appreciate the introduction of some new extraterrestrial menaces to terrify us.  There's a freaky little eyeball parasite that's a standout.  However, the vast majority of the time is spent watching the hybrids grapple with being kids in synthetic adult bodies, the adults nervously trying to keep them in line, and so much being determined by the hubris of one selfish techbro with way too much power.   The aliens are potent chaos agents, but often feel like a secondary concern.

And that's fine with me.  What worried me the most about the prospect of "Alien: Earth" was getting something like "Dune: Prophecy," a piece of media too focused on callbacks and evocations of its source material to tell its own story.  Whatever "Alien: Earth" is, it doesn't have that problem.  Hawley isn't afraid of expanding the "Alien" universe, specifically looking at how Earth functions under the control of a handful of runamok corporations and immoral individuals who like playing God.  The themes are similar to the Ridley Scott-directed prequels, starting with "Prometheus," but taken in an entirely different direction.  I find the characters here much more compelling, especially the kids rushing to grow up in a hurry, but finding that all their mentor figures - both human and non-human - are terrible.  

I enjoyed "Alien: Earth" very much, but there's no getting away from the fact that it feels very truncated, with an ending that is a lot of setup without much payoff.  Still, the setup is good enough that I had no issue with the lack of resolution.  Either that, or Noah Hawly has pulled this kind of thing  so often that I've just come to expect it of his shows.  I predict that "Alien" fans who wanted a more straightforward horror or adventure program will be disappointed.  Yet, there is a whole episode designed as a homage to the original 1979 "Alien" film, which was clearly made just for them.  

And finally, kudos on the Xenomorphs still being guys in suits.  Occasionally it looks kinda silly, but it also looks very "Alien."   

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Finagling "The Fantastic Four"

"The Fantastic Four: First Steps" is the third big budget attempt to launch a movie franchise with the Fantastic Four superhero team.  These have been tough characters to crack for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the heyday of the Fantastic Four comics was back in the 1960s.  Instead of trying to modernize them the way that the previous films did, "First Steps" chooses to lean into the retro vibe, taking place in an alternate universe that looks an awful lot like 1964.  Our main characters also feel like superheroes of another era - larger than life celebrity do-gooders with a long list of powers and accomplishments.

Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) is a brilliant scientist whose body stretches like rubber.  His wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) controls light, can make things invisible, and creates energy shields.  Sue's brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) can become a flying, flaming Human Torch.  Finally there's Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss Bachrach), The Thing, a strongman who appears to be literally made of stone.    All four got their powers from "cosmic rays" during a space flight a few years ago, and have since then kept busy fighting villains and bringing peace to the world.  However, this is all prologue.  Our story starts when two things happen - Reed and Sue discover that they're expecting their first child, and a Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) comes to Earth, heralding the imminent arrival of Galactus (Ralph Ineson), an implacable cosmic being who goes around literally eating planets.

The production design is the best thing about the film.  We don't just get a 1960s themed Marvel movie, but the kind of comic-book retrofuturist world where the Fantastic Four have a robot assistant named H.E.R.B.I.E. (Matthew Wood), get around in a flying "Fantasticar," and it turns out there's a hidden subterranean civilization led by a cranky Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser), who Sue Storm brokered a peace deal with before the events of the film.  I was a little taken aback at how broad and cartoonish some of these elements were at first, but I got used to it quickly.  By the end, I was reminded that it's been an awfully long time since we've had a superhero film that's properly family friendly, and we could use more of them.  And with the big focus on family the film keeps emphasizing, it feels appropriate that "The Fantastic Four" is very all-ages.

And ultimately, I think that's why "First Steps" works.  Yes, it's goofy a lot of the time.  Yes, the CGI baby isn't always convincing.  Yes, they tried to stuff too much into one film, so it doesn't feel like some storylines and character arcs quite came together.  Apparently John Malkovitch got left on the cutting room floor somewhere.  However, it commits to telling one story from start to finish, gives us crystal clear stakes and motivations for everyone involved, and delivers plenty of excellent spectacle along the way.  It's an old fashioned, earnest superhero story in the best way, with the fate of the world in the balance, and the heroes being faced with tough moral decisions - but we know that they'll choose right in the end.  I'm not really a fan of Galactus, because he's a very one-note villain, but he sure does deliver on scope, and ultimately he feels like the right kind of threat for this kind of superhero story. 

Compared to the previous iterations of these characters, these versions of the Fantastic Four feel more idealized, and more functional as a team and family unit.  This is great for the superheroics, but also makes them less interesting to follow as characters.  Ben Grimm is lonely, but doesn't deal with any self-hatred.  Johnny expresses some frustrations, but is not the hothead loose cannon in any sense.  We learn plenty about them through their interactions with each other and with other characters, but no one on the team gets the spotlight individually for long enough for any real character development.  Reed and Sue experiencing new parent anxieties and trying to protect their kid are probably the biggest real arcs.  

I don't know if a sequel is in the cards, but we'll be seeing more of these characters very soon in the upcoming "Avengers" movies.  Hopefully they'll get a little more fleshed out there, even with the limited time.  I'm not sure if these are the best screen versions of the Fantastic Four, but they're certainly strong enough to warrant a few more appearances in the MCU.  

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State of the Superhero, 2026

2026 is going to be a big year for superhero franchises, but let's recap 2025 first.  The big winner was the newly rebooted "Superman," which cleaned up at the summer box office, but also signals that James Gunn isn't too keen on embracing family audiences.  The heightened level of violence and the tie-ins to the very adult second season of the "Peacemaker" series mean a more limited audience.  Over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (hereafter the "MCU"), none of their three theatrical releases did as well as Disney hoping, with "*Thunderbolts"/"The New Avengers"  putting in especially concerning numbers for a summer release with good reviews.  Disney is also scaling back their Disney+ shows, having finally released the long-delayed "Ironheart," "Wonder Man," and "Daredevil" series.

So, what's coming up in 2026?  The Sony Spider-verse is extinct at this point, with the very limited exception of the third "Spider-verse" movie tentatively scheduled for 2027.  However, Tom Holland's Spidey will return in "Spider-man: Brand New Day," the big MCU release for the summer.  The hope is that this will be the start of a new trilogy for the character.  However, the real test for the continued viability of the MCU will be "Avengers: Doomsday," which has announced a massive cast and has already had its release date moved back once, to December.  This will be the first "Avengers" film in seven years, and attempt to provide some kind of climax to Phases Four, Five and Six of the MCU.  I expect that both films will make a lot of money, and solve none of the franchise's problems.

Currently, the only MCU live action series scheduled to premiere on Disney+ in 2026 are the second season of "Daredevil: Born Again," and "Vision Quest," which is the sequel series to "WandaVision" featuring Paul Bettany's Vision.  After crossover attempts with some of the features, the MCU is no longer going to try and tie in their streaming series into the feature continuity so heavily.  We'll still get some cameos, like characters from "Davedevil" reportedly showing up in the next "Spider-man" movie, but probably not more situations like "The Marvels" or "Thunderbolts" where major characters who were introduced in one of the streaming series go on to headline a film.  This should reduce the concerns about too much "homework" to keep up with the current releases.  It is not looking good for "She-Hulk" on the big screen.    

Over at DC, James Gunn is taking his time.  He's not sticking to a wider roadmap, but claims he's greenlighting films based on whatever finished scripts are ready to go.  So "Supergirl" with Milly Alcock is coming in June, which has an uphill battle as a female-led superhero movie, but does have the benefit of a good director in Craig Gillespie and good source material behind it.  The other DC release is a much smaller horror film, "Clayface," featuring a Batman villain who can change his appearance at will.  The only live action DC series in the works for 2026 is "Lanterns," which will feature not one, but three Green Lanterns in the DC equivalent of "Training Day."  They have the right cast, with Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre playing Hal Jordan and John Stewart, but I'm curious whether the tone is going to be closer to the feature films or the more adult series like "Peacemaker" and "The Penguin."  

What's concerning are the titles that aren't anywhere on the schedules for 2026 or 2027.  Aside from "Spider-man," the MCU hasn't made a sequel to any of its films released since 2020, and has fumbled several already announced titles, including "Blade" and "Armor Wars."  We still get announcements for projects in development, but not much concrete.  I don't see another three-movie year for the MCU for the foreseeable future.  DC is in better shape, and 2027 should see sequels to both the 2025 "Superman" and "The Batman" if everything works out.  However, it also quashed some projects, including the "Sgt. Rock" movie that was potentially going to be directed by Luca Guadagnino.  

As superhero films continue to recede at the box office, we'll likely see the MCU and DC offerings continue to shrink.  They won't be totally gone anytime soon, but it's clear to me that their dominance of the box office is quickly fading, and we're likely to see a transition away from interconnected universes back to individual character franchises.  Batman, Superman, and Spider-man will all be okay, but everyone else will need to watch their step.

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Honoring "The Las Culturistas Culture Awards"

Award shows haven't been doing well over the past few years.  Their ratings have been sinking and their cultural cachet has plummeted.  Therefore, it's the perfect time for  a satirical awards show to rear its head.  It's time for the "Las Culturistas Culture Awards 2025," honoring the best of pop culture.

Hosted by the "Las Culturistas" podcast hosts, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, the ceremony runs an efficient ninety minutes, the winners have all been notified in advance, and all the boring parts of the ceremony have been effectively curtailed, leaving all the bits of an award show that the majority of people care about - spotting celebrities, fun musical numbers, well-edited clip packages, and zippy presenter banter.  It helps that Rogers and Yang are comedians, and able to both land a joke and pull off a song-and-dance number with enthusiasm and flair.  Everyone involved is aware that the awards are totally arbitrary, and the point is just to enjoy themselves and the spectacle of it all.  Will the award for "Most Amazing Impact in Film" be awarded to shirtless Jeff Goldblum in the thirty year-old "Jurassic Park" just to get him to come to the ceremony?  Yes it will.  Will the obvious product placement (Dunkin, Volkswagen) and promotional appearances (Jamie Lee Curtis for "Freakier Friday," in theaters August 8th) be delivered with a knowing wink at the audience?  Yes, it will.  

I haven't listened to "Las Culturistas" much beyond clips of a few random interviews, as I figured out quickly that the show is not for me.  It's obsessed with the pop part of pop culture to a degree that I will never be, and is especially focused on all the drama and gossip that I try my best to avoid.  However, I appreciate that it's so unapologetic about serving its audience of women and members of the LGBT community.  The "Culture Awards" came about from a bit on the show, where the hosts would randomly announce nominees for silly categories like "The Creatine Award for Straight Male Excellence" or "Tiny Woman, Huge Impact."  Whoever decided to let them take over the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles and do the same thing with all the pageantry and glitz of a real awards show is a genius.  The best thing about the "Culture Awards" is that it makes no attempt to appeal to everybody, the way too many other awards shows have.  There were a couple of geek-adjacent categories for me, like "Best Batman Woman," where the winner was a fake Riddler henchgirl, but most of the focus was on fashion, music, and lots of celebrities I had never heard of.  And I didn't mind at all, because the show was so entertaining.  

And this is a valuable thing.  The woman-centric parts of pop culture have too often been framed as existing in opposition to the male-centric parts of pop culture, and the played up rivalry is simply tiresome and not necessary.  Aside from a vague mention of terrible things happening in the country right now, the "Culture Awards" sidesteps all politics, and leans into the celebration of all that is fabulous and iconic.  Lisa Rinna is called on to model all the Outfit of the Year categories, and walks away with the trophy (a spray painted West Elm doorstop).  Matt and Bowen dancing to Lady Gaga's "Abracadabra" and substituting the "In Memoriam" montage with an "In Absentia" montage of all the celebrities who passed on participating is fabulous stuff.  The point of view provided by "Las Culturistas" exists in reaction to nothing else except the pop culture that it adores, and the awards show stands on its own without bothering to justify itself or explain itself.  

The "Culture Awards" ceremony aired on Bravo in August, and may be the most interesting thing they've produced in years.  It's currently available on Peacock.    

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