Column: In the blur of awards season, let those strange and unfamiliar movie titles be an invitation

You hear it a lot this time of year: the jokes and audible eye rolls about some strange, obscure little nothing of an arthouse movie winning best this or best that.

Some said that in early 2020 when a film from South Korea triumphed at the Oscars. That was “Parasite” and it was, in fact, a big hit all over the world. But there are facts and there are feelings, and when some folks feel out of the loop when it comes to films they haven’t heard about and may never want to get to know, there’s nothing to be done.

I’m here to argue: There is something to be done. Take the chance. Screen first. Ask questions and sling your opinions later.

Right now, we’re at the midpoint between the annual December best-of-the-year lists and the Academy Awards ceremony, held this year on March 2. Let’s take stock.

Last week’s Golden Globes, no longer mobbed up with the merry, compromised band of brothers and sisters known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, recognized the narco-trans-musical-melodrama-bag-of-Mexican-stereotypes-directed-by-a-Frenchman “Emilia Pérez” as best film of 2024, in its musical or comedy category.

In the drama category, the Globes chose “The Brutalist,” director Brady Corbet’s grand, erratic, touching smackdown between the forces of art and the brutalities of commerce. The film opens Jan. 10 in Chicago  in several venues, with a 70mm presentation exclusively at the Music Box Theatre.

Following last year’s introduction of a populist Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category, an addition designed to ensure big stars on the red carpet, the Globes singled out “Wicked” for its big-money winner. In the parlance of Dick Clark Productions, now in charge of the Globes telecast, the two-year-old award honors one of “the year’s most acclaimed, highest-earning and/or most viewed films that have garnered extensive global audience support and attained cinematic excellence.”

I understand the reasoning here, especially from the POV of theater owners, who by now must belong to a secret national association of teeth-gritters. Just as the hugely successful theatrical run of “Wicked” was midway through its fifth week, a point at which the theater operators traditionally garner a higher percentage of badly needed box office revenue, boom: The most successful Broadway-to-screen adaptation ever made its streaming premiere on New Year’s Eve, actively dissuading folks from seeing it in theaters, or re-seeing it.

Some years more than others, the films dominating the national and regional critics circles awards are not the “Wicked” type. The awards dominators, most years, are not the big hits. They often open in a limited, Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles or New York in December, and then get around more widely early in the new year.

This is the case of “The Brutalist.” It’s also the case with “Nickel Boys,” winner of the National Society of Film Critics’ citation for best film of 2024. (I’m a member, for the record.)

What else has emerged from the critics organizations’ awards? Among them: the raucous, touching comedy-drama “Anora,” which I love nearly as much as “Nickel Boys” for wholly separate reasons. “Anora” hit the No. 1 spot at the LA, Boston and San Francisco film critics’ groups. It’s so alive, this movie.

It’s also writer-director Sean Baker’s most commercially successful venture to date, grossing $31 million worldwide on a $6 million production budget. I mention those figures because hits come in so many varieties. Look at “Moonlight,” the film that, in early 2017, won the best picture Oscar for 2016. Production budget: $1.5 million. Worldwide box office: $65 million. That’s very, very profitable.

Maybe you’ve seen “Moonlight” once or twice, and maybe you haven’t. (It’s great.) Like any number of other awards favorites, that one was written off by many who hadn’t seen it, or heard of it, or who decided in advance it wasn’t for them because it looked “arty,” or whatever.

“Moonlight” has been on my mind lately, because I wonder: Have audience habits changed so intractably since COVID that the same film, in 2024, would’ve had to settle for a tiny box office fraction of that $65 million?

And yet 2024 was pretty terrific.

True, global franchise favorites such as “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” may have made for a year of dispiriting blockbusters (the numbers, of course, disagree with me), coming off a much more interesting blockbuster year of 2023, which yielded “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” A year like that will happen once a decade, if we’re lucky.

But in 2024, and right now, in early 2025, the riches are everywhere.

Compressing my Top 10 of 2024 down to a Top 5, now with the benefit of second or third viewings, it’s a glorious toss-up between “Nickel Boys,” “Anora,” the Mumbai rhapsody “All We Imagine As Light,” “The Brutalist” and the pitch-black, clear-eyed Romanian black comedy “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.”

Every year I make my best-of lists, and I vote as a member of the National Society of Film Critics, with a ridiculously simple motive and a series of questions. What were the films, the images, the feelings, that lingered like a fragrance, or a newly acquired memory destined to last a little while? Or a lifetime?

What astonished me? Amazed me? Really made me laugh, hard? Made me laugh and cry in the same second?

Maybe “The Brutalist” or “Anora” or “Nickel Boys” or “All We Imagine As Light” or even “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” will hold nothing for you. But maybe, one or two or more of those titles will. If the titles are new to you, take them as an invitation.

And now, they’re on your radar.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.