Thankfully this year I spared myself the stress of forgetting that Special Jury Awards were an option until it was too late and I thought of two worthy recipients for very specific reasons which don’t fit into existing award pigeonholes.

Tom Cruise

While the most recent installment of the Mission Impossible franchise didn’t bring people to movie theaters in droves as Top Gun: Maverick did, it was key in illustrating Tom Hanks’ insistence on constantly topping himself in terms of his over-the-top stunt work and it’s precisely this kind of unique achievement these awards are designed for.

Wish and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

One thing I wanted to give these films very specialized kudos for was for being mainstream animated films that took unique visual approaches. Both Wish and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse exploited the medium of animation brilliantly to create worlds that were simultaneously outré yet also like book pages in many forms. In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse many disparate universes are accompanied by disparate visual styles that share the same DNA, a textured look that both emulates old-school comic book pages but feels alive and kinetic, especially in 3-D. In Wish’s case animators took an old-school Disney trope of opening on a literal story book and turned that into the visual signature of the whole film.