Happy 2026, Vintage Sand fans! Thank you for taking time away from looking for real estate opportunities in Greenland to join us for Episodes 65 and 66, our first of 2026. Herein, Team Vintage Sand returns one last time to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternate Oscars". In the past, we have used Peary’s model to approach the Best Picture Academy Awards from every decade going back to the 1930’s. Collect them all! For this episode, we wrap up this series with the most recent complete decade, the 2010’s. First, a caveat: we began this podcast eight years ago, in the spring of 2018, which means that we have already discussed many of today’s films in a number of different contexts already. We did our Best of the Teens in early 2020, and recently did our Top 10 of the Century so far, wherein many of the films we’re talking about today are contained. Add in that we did episodes on the best of 2018 and 2019, respectively, in those years, and you get the sense that we have already covered this ground several times. But like all good film fans, we’re completists, so we conclude this series of episodes with these two, which will focus on 2010 to 2014 and 2015 to 2019 respectively. Mercifully, perhaps, these episodes are shorter than most others we’ve done, simply because, as mentioned, this is terrain we have covered several times already. The teens were clearly a transitional time for film, especially in Hollywood. The foreign market came to dominate, as did the teen market, which led to a kind of lowest common denominator for American film in these years. Throw in the uncertainties created by the rise of streaming and the changes in where and how people watch film, and you have…well, it’s still a little too early to tell what the 2010’s will look like to film historians, if there are indeed any film historians left. That being said, it’s clear that the decade featured some of the greatest films ever made, ones that will stand the test of time and will continue to be watched long into the future. In many ways, the Mexican New Wavers dominated the decade, winning half of the Best Director Oscars for the whole decade: Del Toro for "Shape of Water", Cuarón for "Gravity" and "Roma", and Iñárritu for "Birdman" and "The Revenant". And of course, the stunning triumph of "Parasite" ended a decade in film that many were ready to write off (and got rid of the bad taste left behind by "Green Book" the previous year). It was also a decade that saw the arrival of some wildly innovative and talented filmmakers, among them Chloe Zhao, Ryan Coogler, Ava Duvernay, Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, Steve McQueen, and Damien Chazelle, plus amazing directors who transcended often marginalized genres like Ari Aster, Alex Garland, Robert Eggers and Denis Villeneuve. We also saw some great works from directors who came of age in the 90’s and early 00’s like David Fincher, the Coens, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Todd Haynes and the Andersons, both Wes and PTA divisions. And for the icing on the cake, we got some brilliant work from the old guard Hollywood New Wavers like Martin Scorsese (who just seemed to pick up steam as the decade went on), Steven Spielberg, (at least with "Lincoln"), Terrence Malick and, most surprisingly, Paul Schrader. So make yourselves comfortable, have yourselves one of those lovely pastries from Mendl’s, and join us for our final foray into the world of Best Picture Alternate Oscars!
