The 2016 Summer Blockbuster Awards: Find Out Who Won This Summer

The summer movie season is over and you know what that means – it's time to hand out pointless imaginary awards to the best, worst, and weirdest films of the past four months!

Welcome to the 2016 Summer Blockbuster Awards, which is like the Oscars if the Oscars only covered a specific release window, were decided by one person, and were also really dumb. Here's how this works: I have created 24 categories, from "Best Performance" to "Movie Most in Need of a Hug" and have awarded one winner and one runner-up. At the name of these awards imply, the focus here is on wide releases that arrived between May and August of this year. So while you really should go out of your way to see indie gems like Swiss Army Man and Don't Think Twice, they won't be the focus here. Got it? Good. Let's just dive right in.

Be warned there are spoilers ahead for some of this summer's films.

Winner: Oakes Fegley in Pete's Dragon

Too many child actors feel overly rehearsed, feeling like they've been trained to hit their marks and smile for the commercial director. It's a testament to Oakes Fegley (and his director, David Lowery) that Pete isn't a smiling, singing Disney orphan – he's a child dealing with trauma, whose life was torn asunder by tragedy and has never had to confront the impact of losing his family. His relationship with Elliot the dragon is tender and sweet when it could have easily been loud and obnoxious. The dynamic between him and the human family that grows around him is gentle when it could have been cloying. All of this rests on Fegley's shoulders and he delivers a character who earns having his name in the title.

Runner-Up: Ruby Barnhill in The BFG

Steven Spielberg has always had a strong eye for young performers and he's always brought out the best in them. In Ruby Barnhill, he has discovered an actress who radiates intelligence, a kid who can do the Spielbergian look of awe and wonder with the best of them. She matches wits with the great Mark Rylance, which is no easy feat.

Winner: Oscar Isaac in X-Men: Apocalypse

So you cast Oscar Isaac, one of the most exciting and talented young actors on the scene, as the villain in your superhero movie. That's cool. That's great. That's taking advantage of his rising stardom and giving him a new platform. Then you coat him in thick, rubbery makeup until he is unrecognizable. That's fine. A lot of actors, like the great Ron Perlman, work well under intense makeup. But then you run his voice through a filter, so he no longer sounds like himself. And then you don't give him a single interesting line of dialogue or a single interesting action beat. You cast Oscar Isaac as a one-note cartoon villain, a guy who would inspire yawns in an episode of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. What a crime.

Runner-Up: Jack Huston in Ben-Hur

If you've seen Jack Huston in HBO's late, great Boardwalk Empire, you know this guy is a powerhouse just waiting for the right film to put him on everyone's radar. Ben-Hur, one of the summer's biggest bombs, was not that film. Ouch.

Winner: Rowan North in Ghostbusters

In a movie where the central four heroines are so funny and fresh and fun to watch, their chief antagonist gets the short end of the stick. Neil Casey does what he can with the loathsome sad sack Rowan North, but he feels half-baked at best. It's likely that his most defining characteristics, the stuff that may have made him a compelling villain, was left on the cutting room floor. While it's interesting to watch these proudly feminist Ghostbusters go up against a guy who looks and acts like he complains about "SJWs" on Reddit, the character is a total dud.

Runner-Up: Krall in Star Trek Beyond

Idris Elba is a strong enough screen presence to help distract from the fact that Krall is a great idea for a villain who never quite gels on screen and who never makes too much sense. Like with Rowan, there's probably a version of Star Trek Beyond that fleshes him out and makes him as fascinating as he should be.

Winner: The Blind Man in Don't Breathe

There is a lot of good stuff to treasure in Don't Breathe. It's tense and gnarly and brutal and scary, a horror movie that wants to wallop you over the head and draw a little blood. However, it all works because Stephen Lang delivers one of the most unnerving baddies the genre has seen in some time. The Blind Man (he is never given a name) is initially sympathetic, a war veteran who slowly realizes that his home has been invaded by a trio of petty thieves. And then the gloves come off, the truth about his living situation comes out, and he reveals himself to be a monster and a half, a hunter on his home turf who isn't about to let a bunch of kids steal from him. Lang doesn't have much dialogue, but the raw power in every stride and every stance tells you everything you need to know about this guy. It's a performance of extraordinary physical presence. To look upon him is to fear him.

Runner-Up: Organized Religion in Sausage PartySausage Party lures you in by acting like a lewd, stupid, and deeply offensive parody of animated movies about inanimate objects coming to life. And it is that! And it's very good at being that! Then it reveals its actual hand of cards and its real target: organized religion, which generates bloody conflicts, fuels ongoing feuds, and prevents people from being happy together and accepting of their neighbors. This stupid talking food movie is actually a scathing critique of blindly believing in what you're told. Sausage Party is the ballsiest movie of the summer, both literally and figuratively.

Winner: The Bees in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

It's difficult to single out one scene from the consistently hilarious Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Virtually any musical number performed by Andy Samberg's brilliantly idiotic Connor would suffice. And yet, I can't stop thinking about the bees. Early in this faux documentary, the cameras go dark, leaving us with only the sound of a private conversation between two characters (and with helpful subtitles on screen, because this is a "documentary"). And then the bees arrive, resulting in an audio play that brought me to literal tears of laughter. I'm giggling right now as I type these very words.

Runner-Up: The Food Orgy in Sausage Party

If you've seen Sausage Party, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's one of the most audacious scenes in any movie released this year and my jaw dropped early and stayed dropped for this shockingly long, constantly escalating sequence of total madness. It's not as funny as the bee scene from Popstar (hence its runner-up status), but hot damn, I still can't believe this scene exists.

Winner: Pete's Dragon

You know the kind of movie you devoured as a kid, watching it over and over again until it felt like a member of your family, only to grow up and learn that no one saw it in theaters and that it wasn't fully appreciated until years after the fact? That's Pete's Dragon. Seriously. Just wait a decade or two and watch every young filmmaker start to cite this as the movie that defined their childhood. It's that good, that powerful, and that in tune with its audience. It doesn't have the flash to be a huge hit, but it has the heart to stick around for a long, long time.

Runner-Up: The Nice Guys and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (TIE)

Honestly, both of these movies deserve this accolade. Popstar was the more dismal financial failure of the two, but it is too funny and too clever to vanish from sight. Like Hot Rod before it, this movie will find a passionate audience. The Nice Guys made a slightly bigger splash, but it's going to be the movie that engenders the most "Why didn't I see this in theaters?" reactions from your friends and family members as they slowly discover it over the next year.

Winner: Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring 2

The family that conducts exorcisms together stays together! It would have been easy for The Conjuring and its excellent sequel to depict the marriage between demonologist Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) and psychic Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) as damaged and fraught, always on the ropes as they endure on supernatural trial after another. Instead, The Conjuring 2 doubles down on what makes the first movie rise above being just another very scary horror movie – the love between Ed and Lorraine feels real, their relationship is built upon trust, and the movie often pauses to reaffirm just how much these two still dig each other. It's practically a model marriage, with husband and wife always being there for on another, knowing when to pipe up, knowing when to shut up, and taking a well-deserved Elvis break every so often. This may be the best married couple in horror movie history. Hell, they're probably the most well-adjusted couple in any 2016 movie.

Runner-Up: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in Star Trek Beyond

What worked in 1966 still works today. The triumvirate of Captain James T. Kirk, First Officer Spock, and Dr. Leonard McCoy is still the great science fiction friendship, with each member of the team complementing the strengths and weaknesses of the other. More than Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, Star Trek Beyond digs into the friendship of the Enterprise crew, exploring how friends and colleagues can get along and get a difficult job done.

Winner: The Demonic Painting in The Conjuring 2

No one builds a better haunted roller coaster than director James Wan and The Conjuring 2 is filled with chilling, thrilling set pieces that shoot enough adrenaline through your body to make your heart explode. The most clever of the bunch finds Vera Farmiga's Lorraine alone in her husband's office with a painting of the demon he has been dreaming about. Except that she's not alone. And it's very dark. And that demon is there and it plans to use that painting to its advantage to torment Lorraine. It's classic Wan: slow-burning tension builds to a perfectly executed jump scare. You scream and then you laugh because you screamed and then you reorient yourself because holy moly, it's not over yet.

Runner-Up: The Blackout in Don't BreatheDon't Breathe continuously finds ways to experiment with its cat-and-mouse premise, but this sequence in particular stands out above the rest. When the two surviving heroes attempt to hide in the basement of the incredibly dangerous blind man they've attempted to rob, he evens the odds the by cutting the lights. Now, he has the edge since he knows his own home and the intruders are literally stumbling around in the dark. What makes the sequence really special is that director Fede Alvarez films it in a unique riff on night vision, which allows us to follow the action clearly without cheating us out of total darkness.

Winner: The Death of the Juice Box in Sausage Party

Our own Ethan Anderton suggested that this award go to just about anything that the character of Douche (Nick Kroll) does in Sausage Party and it's hard to argue with that. Still, if only one moment must be selected, it will be the moment where Douche, having learned that consuming food products increases his strength, murders a juice box and proceeds to literally suck the life out of him in the most sexually graphic manner imaginable. There are many "Did I Actually Just See That Happen For Real?" moments in this movie, but that's a WTF moment if there every was one.

Runner-Up: The Desert Chase in Independence Day: Resurgence

I remain one of the only defenders of this hopelessly stupid and goofy movie, and everything I love about it can be found in the third act, where Jeff Goldblum drives a school bus full of presumably orphaned children across the Nevada desert while a very angry Godzilla-sized alien chases him following a failed suicide bombing courtesy of the former President of the United States. Independence Day: Resurgence is one seriously insane movie.

Winner: Suicide Squad

After the disappointment of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in March, all eyes drifted to Suicide Squad, the quirky, weird follow-up about grungy supervillains forced to be heroes by a shadowy government agency. Surely this movie would be the antidote for the bloated, messy, and very confused Batman v Superman! Unfortunately, Suicide Squad has the exact same problems as its DCEU predecessor. It's too long, too unsure of what it wants to be, and so focused on introducing one character after another that no one in the ensemble ever gets a chance to breathe or have a genuinely satisfying moment. This film is a lumbering mess, albeit one that had the good taste to cast Margot Robbie and utilize practical Killer Croc make-up.

Runner-Up: Jason Bourne

Matt Damon's return to his most popular character is mediocre at best, a case of diminishing returns. While Damon and director Paul Greengrass had a decade between movies to freshen up, Jason Bourne feels like the work of a team that is simply too tired to try anything new and the result is a "Greatest Hits" album assembled by an aging rockstar. You'll recognize the stuff you love, but you'll wish it was doing something different.

Winner: The Death of Slipknot in Suicide Squad

Adam Beach's Slipknot is introduced very late in Suicide Squad via dialogue that has been seemingly ADR'd over B-roll. He then spends about ten minutes with the team, spouts about six lines of dialogue, and then has his head blown up when he tries to escape. Slipknot is indicative of this film's larger structural problems. It's supposed to be a big deal that a member of the team has died, but why should we care that this nobody we literally just met bit the dust? Why even introduce a character, played by a strong and recognizable actor, if he is literally only going to exist for a few minutes before he exits the stage? It's messy and it's insulting and it completely fails to land with any dramatic weight.

Runner-Up: "Leeeeeaaaarning" in X-Men: Apocalypse

So you cast Oscar Isaac, cover him in lousy prosthetics, put a filter over his voice, and then ask him to perform a scene where he places his hand on a television, declares that he is "Leeeeeaaaarning" and proceeds to decide that the human race needs to be wiped out. Why are you trying to sabotage the career of Oscar Isaac?

Winner: Pete's DragonPete's Dragon is a strong argument that Disney should open its catalog and allow all kinds of interesting filmmakers to remake their bad movies. Director David Lowery has taken the basic premise of the original film and stripped it down to its naked core, giving heart to a silly premise. This is a movie about an orphaned boy living in the woods with his dragon companion, but it has gentle soul to spare. In a landscape where family movies are always pitched at a shrill, Pete's Dragon is quiet and thoughtful, favoring scenes of beauty and joy to action and chaos. Even the third act's big car chase is built around sweeping emotions instead wacky action beats. Pete's Dragon is in no hurry. It wants you to slow down, to take in the majesty of the woods and the even greater majesty of that furry green dragon. In this movie, trauma is shrugged off, but neither is the power of emotional and physical healing. This is just a lovely movie.Runner-Up: The Nice Guys

Shane Black's dark, mean, violent, and hysterical noir comedy is just about as good as Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang...which is one of the best movies of the century so far. That says it all, really.