Just the trhree movies in the OP:
What does "best" mean? Does it mean the best edited, written, directed and acted movie of the year? Then why is the best movie not selected by adding up the "obnjective" categories? It's because we can reward a movie with the "best" title for being or doing more than the sum of its parts. I'd push back like MAD on him demanding to know where the "enterrtainment" value in Roma is. It's in the beauty and the cadence and the sadness and the happiness as we spy on this family and the small inner lives that we otherwise never get to see presented on screen, and certainly not with such affection and empathy and realism - all wrapped up in an almost incandescent look through the laundry lines and old glass of an underfilmed place. I was thoroughly entertained.
I can't make a case for Black Panther personally, but I loved that movie and watched it twice with my daughter, and it not only proved that an african american cast and filmmakers can be more than juist Spike Lee - or art house, or exploitation, but it blew that idea out of the water financially. And this year Lee himself has a 100% defensible shot at the title himself - and I wouldn't mind if either was rewarded as a proxy of the other - and BP ironically created a much bigger conversation about black cinema and the black experience - it may be "merely" a comic book action film but you'd have to be insane to pretend it wasn't important.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a perfect alpha build of a movie that should be made again, maybe even with the same cast, but this time by a competent single director with more appetite for the truth, and less input by perfectly nice surviving band members who, nonetheless, skewed the movie to suit their own narratives. The use of aids as the "reason" for Live Aid could have been done just as meaningfully, perhaps more so, by showing a connection through art, irony, metaphor, anything rather than clumsily and dishonestly stuffing it in as a direct cause-effect. I will say that Bohemian Rhapsody is the MOST unexpected salvage of a trashfire for years - at the box office and the awards season. So props to whoever took it over at the burning point and fixed it up. Rami Malek deserves the spotlight, but his accent is a big dealbreaker fdor me that I can't get past - like the vinyl double glazed windows at the beginning of Dunkirk. A record-scratch whaaaaaaaaa moment.
AND ON NOT ENJOYING ROMA ON A TV!//?????
If you're voting in the Academy, then get your ass to a theater first, and Best Buy second. I can watch Roma in HDR at 4k with astonishing visual and audio fidelity on a proportionally massive screen with zero distractions. If I had to resolve that from scratch, I could do it for less than a grand, way less if I bought used or had the patience to tinker. And if I am voting on the academy and take it seriously, that's my responsibility.And further, I could watch it again, freeze frame, rewatch a scene to examine something I missed earlier. This guy.
As soon as I saw the word "indulgent"used to tar a small personal film about the inner lives of a maid and her family in Mexico City, I had an instant, near-fatal Jimmie-rustling. Like hearing a billionaire complain about "excess."