The 2025 Best Picture Oscar Should Go To The Beekeeper

lots of buzz around this one

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: A reasonable suggestion

It is my position that the Oscar for Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards should go to The Beekeeper, the movie where Jason Statham plays a retired member of a clandestine group of operatives known as Beekeepers who is living a quiet life as an actual beekeeper until tragedy strikes and sends him on a murderous rampage. I will admit that this is a controversial position, mostly because The Beekeeper is not actually nominated. I do stand by it, though.

I could go and give you all my reasoning but I think my position can be best explained by comparing it to the films that the Academy did choose to nominate this year. So let’s do that. In no particular order…

Conclave

A beautifully shot movie full of wonderful performances that could have benefitted substantially from having Jason Statham show up and root out corruption in the Catholic Church by blowing things up every 10-15 minutes.

A Complete Unknown

You know who else was a complete unknown? Adam Clay, the quiet man who tended to his honeybees in Phylicia Rashad’s shed until a group of dipshits scammed her out of her savings and caused her to commit suicide, at which point he was revealed to be a recently retired member of a top-secret military program that operated above the law to protect society by any means necessary.

The Substance

I’ll tell you what’s an interesting substance: honey. Bees make it themselves by collecting nectar and storing it in their hives and they use it as a sugar-rich source of energy that replenishes their tiny bodies after they’ve buzzed around pollinating plants in a way that allows flowers to grow in the park every spring. Honey is also flammable, which we learned from the scene in The Beekeeper where Jason Statham lights a jar on fire and whips it at an approaching goon.

Anora

Does a lady with a Mohawk show up with a machine gun mounted to her pickup truck and spray bullets into a gas station for no apparent reason? Didn’t think so.

The Brutalist

More like the brutalest. I’m talking about The Beekeeper.

Emilia Pérez

Lots of controversy around this one. Probably not as much controversy as there would be if we discovered that a ring of fraudulent call centers that were bankrupting American citizens was actually being run by the sitting President’s son, who was using government-created anti-terrorism technology to make them work and had been secretly funding his mother’s campaign with the illicitly obtained proceeds.

Wicked

I’m supposed to be impressed by Defying Gravity? Bees defy gravity every day. It’s called flying. Next.

I’m Still Here

Miramax just announced a sequel so The Beekeeper is still here, too.

Nickel Boys

Does not contain a scene where Jeremy Irons explains decades of backstory about clandestine government operations in a single monologue.

Dune: Part Two

Statham could ride a sandworm. I have no doubt in my mind.

Case closed.

FOUR: The list of guest stars in season two of Poker Face creates an almost limitless set of possibilities