The 1st Annual Golden Poopsie Awards
by Zac Bentz
Award shows are nothing. They’re over.
Every year we tune in to see our favorite films, artists, albums, and performers recognized for their glittering achievements, and every year we leave frustrated, confused, and harboring bitter resentment against art that we might have liked at first, but ended up winning over what we thought was more deserving. It’s time to take action against this scourge of performative self-gratification masquerading as celebration of art and artistry.
What, you may ask, do I plan to do about it?
Obviously I’m gonna hold an award show of my own.
Welcome to the 1st Annual Poopsie Awards, an awards ceremony by me, for me, and also for you, Birdbath reader. What sets the Poopsies apart from other corporate award ceremonies is the fact that I’m not gonna claim to represent the artistic standards of an entire industry – I’m just gonna talk about things I like and think deserve to be recognized. Let’s jump right in!
Our first category…
BEST FAST FOOD CHAIN WHERE I ATE LUNCH EVERY DAY FROM FEBRUARY - MAY 2022
This one was a hard decision, but I eventually managed to narrow it down to one – it’s Bageterie Boulevard.
A Czech-based sandwich chain, Bageterie Boulevard served as the creative home base for at least half of my CIEE FAMU study abroad program – specifically the location at the corner of Národní and Spálená. Lots of folks who know me know that I literally never shut up about how fucking delicious BB is. At first glance it just looks like some Czech clone of, like, Subway or Panera, but a single bite makes literally every American fast food chain taste like an overstuffed kitchen garbage bag. The planning stages for my short film Waterlogged occurred pretty much entirely over Brussels baguettes, cappuccinos, and cardboard cartons of tartar-drenched potato wedges. Every day, as soon as our morning classes let out, we’d sprint down the street in a sandwich-starved daze, chanting our impassioned refrain: I walk this empty street, to the Boulevard Bageterie.
I’ll be accepting this award on behalf of Bageterie Boulevard. I’d like to thank Jon Powell, Victoria de Dios, Stewart Harrison, Maya Barlow, Bella Poscente, Emma Gallagher, Mena Salazar, Elaine Yang, Greta Peterson-Nafziger, Will Zimmerman, Will Horblit, Ander Echeverria, Logan de Raspide Ross, Janek and Honza (the Honest Guides), and the entire kitchen staff at the BB on Národní.
Onto the next category…
ALBUMS I ENJOYED THE MOST IN 2022
These aren’t necessarily my picks for the best albums per se, but here’s a list of every album I patiently counted down the days for and gave a proper, top-to-bottom first listen upon their release. I loved pretty much each and every one of them!
LAUREL HELL – Mitski
GIVE ME THE FUTURE – Bastille
THE DREAM – Alt-J
TERROR TWILIGHT: FAREWELL HORIZONTAL – Pavement
WET LEG – Wet Leg
(WATCH MY MOVES) – Kurt Vile
OMNIUM GATHERUM – King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
WITH PEOPLE – Diane Coffee
THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH – Kevin Morby
A LIGHT FOR ATTRACTING ATTENTION – The Smile
MR. MORALE AND THE BIG STEPPERS – Kendrick Lamar
NO RULES SANDY – Sylvan Esso
ALL OF US FLAMES – Ezra Furman
LA LUNA – Daniel Romano’s Outfit
RAPSCALLION – The Murlocs
ICE, DEATH, PLANETS, LUNGS, MUSHROOMS, AND LAVA – King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
LAMINATED DENIM – King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
CHANGES – King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
ALL BLUE – Julianna Riolino
AND IN THE DARKNESS, HEARTS AGLOW – Weyes Blood
CHASELAND – Chase Ceglie
I’ll be accepting this award on behalf of all the artists mentioned above. I’d like to thank each of them!
BEST PLAYLIST I MADE THIS YEAR
One brief self-congratulatory one to keep the music train rolling. I promise this awards ceremony isn’t just going to be me bragging about my study abroad experience like some kind of asshole, but it was the entire first third of my year – it’s my Prague playlist. It’s kind of cheating, since I just copy-pasted every playlist I made between January and mid-May into one central place, but it’s so varied in its content and has such a deep emotional tie to a distinctly memorable period of my life that it’s truly become a sort of relic. It’s become my go-to whenever I’m tired of whatever has been on rotation lately, and it spans the entire breadth of my music taste in 31 and a half hours. I’ll probably never revisit any of the individual lists that comprise it, because this list is so exhaustive it’ll follow me through the rest of my life before I start to get tired of it. Here it is!
I’ll be accepting this award on behalf of… myself! I’d like to thank Spotify’s auto-generated Discover Weekly list and the shitty pair of headphones I bought for the plane ride.
BEST PERFORMANCE
I think this is the only film-related Poopsie-winner that’s actually up for an Academy Award this year… it’s Cate Blanchett in TÁR. I’ve found all the discourse around both Cate’s performance and the politics of the film itself to be more or less exclusively obnoxious and a bit misguided and I don’t want to swim around in that pool for too long, so alll I’ll say is that Lydia Tár is by far one of the most well-written, nuanced, and profoundly ALIVE characters I’ve quite literally ever seen in a film, and that’s in no small part due to how otherworldly talented Cate Blanchett is. Sure, nuanced-meditation-on-cancel-culture this, ending-might-be-a-dream that, blah blah blah. I was scrolling through Twitter the other day and I saw an account under Lydia Tár’s name tweeting totally in-character, and I didn’t bat a single fucking eye. That’s how good she is.
BEST SHORT FILM
Chloé Farr, Gabrielle Selnet, and Adam Sillard of underground French production house GOBELINS made maybe one of my favorite things my silly little brain has ever smelled, tasted, felt, or seen with Au revoir Jérôme! It’s a hyper-stylized, deliciously psychedelic, Yellow Submarine-inspired fable about a little guy who goes on an odd little journey through the afterlife only to be rejected by the long-lost love he killed himself to be reunited with. It’s, like, the most depressing premise, but I PROMISE it’s so heart-warming and beautiful and the animation and sound design are unlike anything I’ve ever seen, said completely unoxymoronically. I’ve watched it 6 times in the past 3 months.
BEST TV SHOW
I’m infamously horrible at keeping up with TV. I watch maybe one current show per year, and it’s usually Succession. But I’d be remiss if I claimed to be honoring the best of 2022 without mentioning The Rehearsal. It’s been at least 7 months since this show ended, and I still turn it over in my head nearly every day, trying to make heads or tails of the entirely new feelings it awoke in me. There’s never been anything like this before, and there probably never will be again. Honestly, it posed questions about parenthood, perception, connection, performance, delusion, and safety that I don’t think we’ve ever been brave enough to ask ourselves before. We’ve all been saying “No one does it like Nathan Fielder” for years, but I don’t think we’ve ever meant it quite like this.
I’ll be accepting this award on behalf of Nathan Fielder. I’d like to thank the Chinese for inventing gunpowder, and all my friends with master’s degrees.
On to the big one!
If you, like me, have spent the past 6 years burying yourself ever-deeper in the deeply toxic, over-pretentious echo chamber that is film video essay YouTube, chances are you’ve at the very least seen a thumbnail for a Patrick H. Willems video. Now, what I’ve selected for this category isn’t by any stretch of the imagination my favorite film of the year, let alone what I think was the best of the bunch (that would be Nope, if anyone’s curious). But I think what Patrick and his little group of friends accomplished this year deserves a massive amount of recognition.
For years, Patrick and Co. have been known for their intricately researched, impeccably produced, and wildly entertaining video essays about topics ranging from comic books to the works of famed directors (Francis Ford Coppola!! Michael Bay!!) to the cultural reverberations of the Simpsons and the Looney Tunes.
What’s made his work so unique in the past couple years, though, is the inclusion of scripted narrative elements that bind the essays together and allow them to function as a sort of serialized, longform filmmaking project for Patrick and his friends. Eventually Patrick started operating his channel like a TV show, putting out videos in “seasons” and offering recaps of the narrative as each season comes and goes. It gets super weird and silly – there’s a conspiracy involving an evil coconut, parallel timelines and doppelgangers, Patrick’s parents are recurring characters, and at one point the entire format changes and Patrick becomes a talk show host and grows his beard really long and that turns into a whole thing, etc. etc. It’s silly and more than a little cringy, but it’s cool to see how creative he’s willing to get with the overplayed YouTube video essay format.
And this year, Patrick and his team did the unthinkable – they concluded the narrative they spent almost 4 years cobbling together with an independently produced feature film???? that wrapped up all the outstanding plot threads AND had a shockingly well-written self-contained story. Night of the Coconut was a truly magical experience. I planned a whole night around watching it, and the smile that overtook my face from the moment I pressed play never disappeared once. Yeah, it’s stupid and silly, but they put so much thought and heart and creativity and energy into making this weird little movie that you can’t help but fall head-over-heels in love with the end result.
I love this movie, and I want to recognize the incredible amount of effort that went into pulling off this years-long vision. Patrick and his friends knew how this story was going to end from day one, and this epic culmination was originally supposed to only be, like, 30 minutes long, but there was just so much more to explore in the little world he created, and the reception to the serialized scripted segments had been so overwhelmingly positive that, come 2022, he was hosting a feature premiere at the IFC Center in New York City and pressing vinyl records of Brian Metolius’s phenomenal original score.
Congratulations, Patrick. You’ve accomplished something really special, and you deserve all the love and recognition you’ve received. With oh so much adoration, please accept the Golden Poopsie award for Best Picture.
I’ll be accepting this award on behalf of Patrick H. Willems. I’d like to thank Charl, the titular coconut.
The Rehearsal is an incredible show. I wish Nathan Fielder was my wife
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