Oscar Chart Updates: Actor & Supp Actor

All sorts of things could yet throw the Best Supporting and Best Lead Actor races into confusion. In a  somewhat uncommon development the former is much more crowded than the latter. The shallow pool of viable Lead Actors is very good news for candidates like Timothée Chalamet (someone Oscar might normally resist due to his age) and Jake Gyllenhaal (someone Oscar has resisted for reasons inexplicable to us).

What do you make of the Supporting Actor race in particular? They way it looks now it could be made up almost entirely of character actors with worthy careers who have never won an Oscar and that's a very exciting thing. More exciting if you happen to be a fan of either Michael Stuhlbarg, Sam Rockwell, Richard Jenkins, or Willem Dafoe. I doubt that all four of them will make it all the way to the shortlist but the buzz is currently in their favor.

UPDATED CHARTS
Picture | Director | Lead Actress | Lead Actor | Supporting Actress | Supporting Actor | Animated Feature | Original and Adapted Screenplays

Tom Hanks To Be "A Man Called Ove"

by Ilich Mejía

In 2015, Sweden selected Hannes Holm's A Man Called Ove as their submission for the Academy's Foreign Language Film race. The selection payed off, as the country earned their 15th nomination in the category. Now, Tom Hanks and his production company Playtone have acquired the rights to develop an English version of the film.

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50th Anniversary: Two for the Road

Tim here. This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the tiny gems in the careers of Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, and director Stanley Donen: Two for the Road. It's a British film that picked up a handful of important awards nominations – writer Frederic Raphael at both the Oscars and BAFTAS, Hepburn at the Golden Globes, Donen with the DGA – and went on to be largely overlooked in the following five decades.

That's understandable; it's not a film primed to appeal to the fandom that it seems like it should have. Donen in the director's seat and Hepburn as the top-billed lead both suggest certain kinds of films, if not necessarily the same kind of film: bubbly comedies in his case, elegant Continental romances in hers (splitting the difference, four years earlier they collaborated on Charade, a bubbly Continental comedy). Two for the Road isn't devoid of humor, but it's not primarily a comedy. Instead, it's a serious depiction of a marriage of some ten years or more, long enough for comfortable familiarity to have settled into tetchy boredom.

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Some love mother! Some don't.

by Murtada

The studio behind mother! has pivoted their second week marketing towards the bad word of mouth that the film has been receiving from moviegoers. They stopped selling it as a home invasion horror thriller and instead decided to embrace how polarizing it is.

Some people love it......some people don’t

It’s a bold move and we like it. What they don’t do though, is mention the F cinemascore that the film recieved. CinemaScore is a company that exit polls moviegoers’ opinions on opening night. They have been storing data since 1986, and in that time only 11 other films received the infamous F. Those so honored include Steven Soderbergh's Solaris (2002) and Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly (2012). And make no mistake Darren Aronofsky thinks it's an honor, he told The Frame:

What's interesting about that is, like, how if you walk out of this movie are you not going to give it an F? It's a punch. It's a total punch. And I realize that we were excited by that. We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you.

Did you enjoy Aronofsky punk move? Where do you stand on the mother! conversation?

A Beautiful Trailer for "Isle of Dogs"

Chris here. I'm one of those oddball folks that considers Fantastic Mr. Fox as Wes Anderson's best film, so next year's Isle of Dogs has me very excited for the auteur to take another dive into the stop motion pool. And by the looks of the first trailer, Dogs will be very aligned to Fox's humor and visual aesthetic but with the added unexpected intrigue of its Japanese setting. The potential troublesome optics and use of language here gives me some pause, but we'll wait until the film arrives to access. Let's hope Anderson doesn't end up in the cinematic doghouse by delivering our worst fears here.

As you can tell from the poster, Anderson has assembled a massive cast even by his standards. Regular players like Edward Norton and Bill Murray are back, but can you believe this is his first collaboration with Scarlett Johansson and Greta Gerwig? Yoko Ono is also in the lineup if you aren't already fascinated enough.

But what a visual treat, even if it looks like it will be Anderson's most muted color palate. On the other hand: doesn't this trailer just remind you how thin this year's Best Animated Feature race is?