The Superheroes Are Coming. After the Oscars.

Travel with me into spring 2016 - it will help you to appreciate the now of prestige season more! 2016 is arguably the year in which we see just how insatiable the public's appetite for spandex crime fighting is. Especially now that they can watch the same on TV regularly for free with Agents of SHIELD, Arrow, Supergirl, Flash, Agent Carter, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Legends of Tomorrow, Gotham all on the air now or by the end of 2016. I'm not an expert on the topic but this feels like the most based-on-comics material that movies/tv have ever seen in one calendar year (There was almost even one more but Channing Tatum's Gambit movie is now looking at 2017 since it hasn't started filming.)

2016's Superhero Schedule
Feb 4th   Deadpool (Fox)
Mar 25th Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (WB)
May 6th  Captain America: Civil War (Marvel/Disney)
May 26th X-Men: Apocalypse (Fox)
Jun 3rd   Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (Paramount)
Aug 6th   Suicide Squad (WB)
Nov 6th   Doctor Strange (Marvel/Disney)

So far awards bodies like Emmy and Oscar haven't much cared about the genre at all. Apart from two things...

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Links

Yahoo longtime TV star Holland Taylor (The Practice, Two and a Half Men, Bosom Buddies) and TFE stage/film/tv obsession Sarah Paulson are dating! Taylor, who is 72, said she never came out to the media before "because I live out"
Hateful Eight track listing for the soundtrack
Playbill two new Broadway musical productions are from all female teams. One is Waitress, based on the indie film
Variety Disney sees 2500 actors for Young Han Solo
Variety Sundance competition lineup announced
Youtube Scowl at the moon! It's the new Batman v Superman v Joy teaser
Awards Daily Listen up - Star Wars was never just "a boy's thing"
This is Not Porn Chris Pratt on the set of his very first movie. Thin body. Big hair.
Vulture Jane Fonda talks about her dance parties. Wait, what?
Pajiba Channing Tatum doesn't like Alex Pettyfer. Pettyfer says why
Screen Daily Michael Fassbender will play two roles in Alien: Covenant - makes sense that there would be multiple David8 androids.
New Yorker looks back at Patricia Highsmith  and the creation of her novel "The Price of Salt" aka the "Carol" we're obsessing over

Year End List Mania
DuJour does a 'hollywood issue' style 'performances of the year' gallery piece. Youth gets the best placement leading with the first three slides going to Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel and Rachel Weisz. But Steve Jobs, Carol, Son of Saul and other films also featured.
IW 20 Breakthrough Performances of the year
Rolling Stone top 50 albums of the year: Kendrick Lamar tops the list but the Hamilton Original Cast Recording, Adele's 25, Joanna Newsom's Divers and Madonna's Rebel Heart (yaaas) all make the list too

Bless Her
Annie Liebovitz shot a bunch of powerful women for Pirelli's 2016 calendar. Amy Schumer posted her photo with no retouching. Love the body you're in!

Beautiful, gross, strong, thin, fat, pretty, ugly, sexy, disgusting, flawless, woman. Thank you Annie Leibovitz!

A photo posted by @amyschumer on Nov 30, 2015 at 7:39am PST

HBO’s LGBT History: Big Love (2006-2011)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week (and perhaps you missed it seeing as it was on Thanksgiving Eve), we talked about Diane Lane and RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Willam Belli in Cinema Verite which chronicled the behind-the-scenes drama of the first reality TV show, PBS’s An American Family. This week we look a decidedly new American family, the Henrickson clan of Big Love.

Shows like Big Love are precisely what draws me into the HBO brand. Here is a drama about a polygamous Mormon family man, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) that tackled its subject matter with surprising candor and complexity. It at once aimed to present a deconstruction of the “traditional” American family while all the while rebuffing such an ideological construct in the first place. Bill lives with his three wives: Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Nicki (Chloë Sevigny) and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin). Those three names alone should you get you interested since, even as the show billed itself around well, Bill, it was the interactions and inner lives of Bill’s three wives which drove much of the show, with Tripplehorn, Sevigny and Goodwin doing great actressing. At its best, the show was a thrilling exploration of non-normative families, particularly insightful when it came to dealing with issues of sexuality within and outside the confines of marriage.

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Can "Creed" Go 12 Rounds With Oscar?

In the past 48 hours I've screened The Revenant, Joy, and Creed. Since the first two are still under embargo we're not allowed to speak of them yet. I will say these non spoilers that The Revenant continues the tradition of Inaritu's love of miserable arguably suicidal men, and Joy continues in the tradition of David O. Russell sandbox like playgrounds for actors eager to play with their new parts. But...embargo!

As movie buffs well know, the original Rocky was a smash hit when it premiered in December 1976, becoming the biggest box office hit of that year, making a star of Sly Stallone, charting a #1 single ("Gonna Fly Now"), and earning an incredible 10 Oscar nominations. It eventually won Picture, Director, and Editing on the big night. And against unreal competition too: Network, Taxi Driver, Bound for Glory, and All The President's Men. The Rocky series spawned a few popular sequels but eventually exhausted its welcome as film franchises do. Creed, smartly plays like both a straight sequel (VII) and a spinoff or rebirth with Rocky Balboa passing the franchise torch to Apollo Creed's son Adonis (Michael B Jordan).

So let's talk Creed and Oscar and the ways it could well factor into the Oscar race after the jump...

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NYFCC Winners

 The New York Film Critics Circle takes their sweet time each year debating their "bests" and shouldn't we all? Nevertheless it's agony for awards addicts like us, the excruciating wait times that commence between 9 AM EST and continue for hours. With lunch break. If you want to have a laugh at my expense I tried to predict the winners as part of the Gurus of Gold chart this week (update: This year they wrapped up by 1:00 PM though so all is well. The only thing i got right in my predictions was Carol for Film/Director)

A bit of Oscar adjacent history: In the past 20 years of their long long history (they're octogenarians now!) they've selected 4 films that went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars, 11 more that were nominated and 5 that were critical darlings and eventual Oscar players but were shut out of the big race (Leaving Las Vegas, Topsy-Turvy, Mulholland Drive, Far From Heaven, United 93). Which is a long way of saying they have refined if not quite populist taste but they're never too far afield of Oscar's wheelhouse. Do they influence the Oscars? It's tough to say. The Film Experience's position is, generally speaking, that no single critics group influence voters beyond pointing them at films... but the NYFCC and LAFCA are the ones the industry cares most about and are most likely to let in... at least to pique their interest in particular films and performances.

So here we go...

Best Film Carol
Best Director Todd Haynes, Carol

It's worth noting, as Sasha Stone did, that very few directors have ever won Best Director twice at the NYFF. The list includes Martin Scorsese and Kathryn Bigelow and now Haynes. Carol was the big winner of today's announcement taking home 4 prizes.

Best Actress Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn
Best Actor Michael Keaton, Spotlight
Best Supporting Actress Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria
Best Supporting Actor Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies

But not in acting. That said these are wonderful choices for the prizes, going out of their way to remember Kristen Stewart's amazingly naturalistic engaging work as Binoche's personal assistant in Sils Maria. That performance has already won her a Cesar Award in France but since she's not campaigning things will probably stop here. Saoirse Ronan and Mark Rylance will surely go the distance to a nomination in Best Actress and Supporting Actor and both could well compete for the win... though we'll have to see the whole field before we really get into that.

The strangest thing is to ignore the supporting campaign (a legitimate choice to make everyone supporting in such an ensemble film) for Keaton and give him the Best Actor prize. But he gives the best performance in a film filled with good work so hurrah!

Best Screenplay Carol, adapted by Phyllis Nagy from the Patricia Highsmith novel "The Price of Salt"
Best Cinematography Carol, Edward Lachman

A thousand times yes. The whole team on Carol was doing exquisite work. That's why we asked them all why they were such geniuses. NYFCC are Todd Haynes fans (as all truly outstanding people are) and they gave Far From Heaven 5 awards in 2002.

Best First Film Son of Saul d. László Nemes
Best Animated Film Inside Out (Pixar) d. Pete Docter & Ronnie del Carmen
Best Documentary In Jackson Heights d. Frederick Wiseman
Best Foreign Language Film Timbuktu (Mauritania) d. Abderrahmane Sissako
Special Award William Becker and Janus Films
Special Award Ennio Morricone, composer

Son of Saul looks fairly unstoppable for the Foreign Film Oscar this season so the race to watch is probably the nominations themselves. And whether Son of Saul can expand into other categories... which it wants to. As previously stated in the Documentary Finalist post it's odd that the Academy's documentary branch continues to pass on Frederick Wiseman's documentaries considering that they are routinely greeted with "masterpiece" level reviews; he's never been Oscar nominated.

That's it. On a scale of 1-10 how happy did today's announcement make you?

WE'LL LET CATE BLANCHETT HAVE THE FINAL WORD SINCE CAROL WAS THE BIG WINNER...