The 2022 Paultacular Bruene Awards

Hello and welcome to the eleventh and now not quite annual Paultacular Bruene awards. So it’s been, uh, quite a two years since I last did this. I took 2021 off because there just weren’t enough movies released to make this exercise, which is already straining at having a point, worth it. But now we’re back and better than ever (?) and it’s time to get back into the swing of things with a double-sized Paultacular Bruene awards covering both of the past two years. Okay, it’s not quite double-sized because even with an extra year to watch I’ve still only seen twenty-eight films released in 2020, but something like 1.5x sized. Sesqui-sized?

Here’s the format, mostly unchanged. Normalcy and all. I’m going to run through a bunch of categories and give my top five for the period of 2020-2021 combined, which I’m calling the five “contenders,” and then I’ll give a winner. The categories are mostly the normal awards ones with a few extras of my creation to replace categories I don’t like or don’t see many of (hello, live-action shorts). One category, Best Line, is gone this year because there are just too many films I watched too long ago to remember individual lines of dialogue. It may or may not be back. As always I’ve seen many but far from all of the relevant films so if your favorite goes unmentioned here, maybe I just didn’t see it. Or maybe it sucks.

So without much further ado...the Pauls!