2019 Calvin Awards: Best Scene

By David Mumpower

February 21, 2019

What could go wrong on the beach?

All of the members of BOP’s staff have favorite categories in The Calvins. You’re reading mine. Since my first film class, I’ve loved the concept of mise-en-scène. I’m passionate about the segmentation of movies into easily palatable blocks, ones that meld together to paint a story but work as standalone pieces, too.

As much as I love Best Scene, I have to say that the past year has featured some of the finest candidates ever. I had one voter relay to me their frustration that they could only list 10 scenes on their ballot. I sympathized. My final two cuts in the category this year both would have finished in my top five either of the last two years. Overall, I believe that this is the strongest year in the history of the category, as demonstrated by the fact that our tenth place finisher currently has 300 million views on YouTube.

What won Best Scene in its most competitive year ever? Our champion is Roma, which actually has two entrants in the top five. I'll go ahead and discuss both since they have a certain amount of symmetry. By now, you know that Roma's protagonist is Cleo, a live-in maid who is the de facto second wife in a failing marriage, only her loyalties lie with the real wife. The husband is mostly an absentee father, leaving Cleo to raise the children.

Over the course of the film, Cleo falls in love and gets pregnant. Her baby daddy proves…unreliable. He threatens to beat her once and later almost does something worse. Left with no other recourse, Cleo embraces potential motherhood on her own, although her employer and that woman’s mother provide a marvelous support system.

I’m reticent to give away spoilers here, as the experience of Roma is something that I’d hate to ruin. What I’ll say is that our fifth favorite scene sees Cleo go to the hospital and have her baby. The final scene dovetails with it, as Cleo takes her friend’s children to the beach. Both events come with the inherent risk of ending in tragedy. The baby’s birth isn’t smooth, and the children come dangerously close to drowning at the beach.

Both scenes are harrowing, challenging our notions about the nature and significance of life. The beach scene is our choice as THE Best Scene of the year. However, it wouldn’t prove as impactful without the accompanying hospital sequence. In tandem, they demonstrate director Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning ability to register and exhibit human emotion through everyday struggles. He’s the best at his craft in the world, and he’s at the top of his game with Roma.

Another movie has multiple entries on this list. In fact, Ready Player One finished just an eyelash away from having three. We didn’t nominate the opening racing scene, the one that features King Kong wrecking the track. It missed by only a couple of points. We did demonstrate yet again BOP’s passion for all things Iron Giant.

Our standing choice as Best Overlooked Film of the 1990s appears in Ready Player One. That fact alone is enough for us to love the movie. The way that he battles Mechagodzilla feels like fan fiction, only it’s a real thing that happened in this wonderful movie. Oh, and it wasn’t even our favorite scene from the film. We voted the climactic battle as the ninth best of the year.

The SECOND best scene of the year is what I call Ready Player One Goes to the Movies. It’s when the characters decipher a clue and realize that they must recreate the events from a certain horror flick. Sadly for one person, they haven’t seen the movie, and so their recreation is a bit more lifelike than they’d prefer.




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Ready Player One is brimming with vitality and imagination, and that’s on full display in this scene. My audience laughed as hard and long as I’ve seen in ten years as poor Aech encountered a beautiful lady harboring a dark secret. For the character, it’s a terrifying scene. For those of us watching it, the virtual reality simulation is high comedy. I’m honestly surprised that it didn’t win Best Scene, ultimately finishing second.

Disney Princesses are a multi-billion dollar industry. Their backstories are kind of alarming, though. When Vanellope von Schweetz stumbles across a room full of them in Ralph Breaks the Internet, it becomes abundantly clear that they’re a jaded, mistrustful bunch. And they have good reason. They have been kidnapped, poisoned, imprisoned, and forced to live in a phallocentric world.

This scene somehow champions the magic of Disney storytelling while simultaneously lampooning the absurdity of it all. Plus, it ends with a brilliant capper joke about Pixar that's entirely out of nowhere but subversive perfection. In a lot of years, the Disney Princesses scene would be the best of the year. Against such sturdy competition, it only manages third.

Our final top five selection comes from BlacKkKlansman. It’s the moment when Ron Stallworth musters up the courage to contact the local KKK. In other words, it’s the scene that sends the story in motion. Director Spike Lee understands the seminal nature of this conversation and pushes forward at maximum velocity. He emboldens Stallworth to say the things that he’d expect bigots to want to hear. It’s a daring bit of dialogue that’s played for laughs, although the disgust of it lurks around the edges, too. No one buys into BlackKKlansman without this sublime scene that somehow encapsulates the purpose of Lee’s entire career in just a couple of minutes.

Our sixth and seventh nominees both come from Disney films. In an unspoilery way, we've politely named a scene from Avengers: Infinity War as Snap. Those who have seen the movie know why. It's the critical moment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when the Avengers make their final stand against Thanos. It ends with a hero being saved by being killed, time being reversed, and…well, you know.

The seventh choice is from The Incredibles 2. It’s a battle between Jack-Jack, the youngest Parr, and a persistent raccoon. Played for optimal cartoon violence laughs, this scene is uproarious yet informative. It displays some of Jack-Jack’s most dangerous powers, none of which a baby should possess. The raccoon’s combination of fear and rage is delightful, particularly in the moment when it realizes that it’s battling a fire baby. And then 15 babies. Disney had a great year in terms of box office AND movie quality.

The final two entries in Best Scene are from a pair of box office blockbusters. Who doesn’t love a good game of mahjong? In Crazy Rich Asians, Rachel Chu puts her entire future on the line when she battles the mother of her impossibly perfect boyfriend, Nick. It’s the climactic scene that drives home the class war between the women, and its resolution is remarkably unexpected. The other choice is Shallow from A Star Is Born. I could describe it in detail, but I’ll just let you watch the video instead. All together now: I'm off the deep end! Watch as I dive in. I'll never leave the grooooooound.

Look, Best Scene was a monster category this year. It’s crazy how many great ones couldn’t earn a spot on the list. I’ve already mentioned one from Ready Player One. Mission: Impossible – Fallout didn’t win a nomination, but that’s because it ran into a numbers crunch PLUS internal competition. Three different scenes from the film nearly earned a spot, with the Halo jump missing by a single point. We loved the bathroom brawl and the helicopter chase, too.

Game Night was similarly popular. The bullet removal and the bar hold-up scenes both finished in the top 15 in our voting. Our staff also loved Neil Armstrong’s seminal walk in First Man, the stair nail in A Quiet Place, and the mutant bear in Annihilation. Oh, and a lot of Marvel stuff from Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War garnered strong support, too. It was a grrrrrrreat year for scenes.

2019 Calvin Awards
Calvins Intro
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Cast
Best Character
Best Director
Best Overlooked Film
Best Picture
Best Scene
Best Screenplay
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best TV Show
Best Use of Music
Breakthrough Performance
Worst Performance
Worst Picture



Top 10
Position Scene Film Total Points
1 Cleo goes to the beach Roma 96
2 The Shining Ready Player One 84
3 Disney Princesses Ralph Wrecks the Internet 72
4 Ron Stallworth makes the first contact with the KKK BlacKkKlansman 66
5 Cleo goes to the hospital Roma 62
6 Snap Avengers: Infinity War 58
7 Jack-Jack vs Raccoon Incredibles 2 52
8 Mahjong Showdown Crazy Rich Asians 48
9 Iron Giant & Gundam vs Mechagodzilla Ready Player One 46
10 Shallow A Star is Born 44




     


 
 

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