This was the year of Scorsese, even if only two people say so — the three-Oscar-winning writer-director-producer of the four-Oscar-winning Parasite, Bong Joon-ho — and me. Tarantino should have swept the Awards, but the Academy still desperately hopes that a sufficient number of sufficiently clever and sentimental auteurs will save cinema from the twin evils of Disney, perpetually snubbed, and Netflix, perpetually snubbed despite throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at winning a Best Picture Oscar.

Recent victorious auteurs include the insightful, but irresponsible enemy of liberalism Jordan Peele, the uninspired, sentimental Guillermo del Toro, his more insightful friend who’s absolutely clueless about the world we live in, Alejandro Inarritu — to say nothing of the other moralistic winners based on the hope that finally Hollywood will fix America’s race problems: Green Book, Moonlight, 12 years of slave…