by Nathaniel R
For those of you who are wondering why the Oscar charts are still not updated, here's a simple fact. Every time I go to work on them, something huge changes and I have to start over. I'm fully aware that other pundits keep making breathless pronouncements of what will actually WIN the Oscars but I just can't do that. We STILL have no real sense of what will actually open since Hollywood keeps clearing and resetting the chess board. The latest upheaval is that West Side Story, Steven Spielberg's remake of the Oscar-winning classic that didn't need to be remade, has moved back an entire year to December 2021. So now both of the big latinx musicals that were originally intended for 2020 have just essentially scrawled a one over the final zero on their original calendars with The Heights in summer 2021 and West Side Story for Christmas 2021...
In awards season terms late September and early October are when we meet many of the crucial competitors with everything having to be open by New Years Eve to be eligible. That's not the case this year. All of the precursors have followed Oscar's new calendar so we will surely get new Oscar-hopefuls showing up as late as February 2021. In short, we're not really spiritually in late September / early October of a normal Oscar race with two months of releases still to show up. Instead we're spiritually still in the summer movie season of an abnormal Oscar race with five months of the film year (such as it is) left to go. Consider this late August at best like we're still sifting through the summer releases and wondering which ones people will still care about a half year from now when they start voting. Half of a year from now!!! Nevertheless, the Oscar charts are being worked on and we're aiming for full roll out next week.
LATEST RELEASE DATE SHIFTS
- The Empty Man (from Dec 4th, 2020 to Oct 23rd, 2020)
- Death on the Nile (from Oct 23rd to December 18th, 2020)
- Wonder Woman (from Oct 2nd to December 25th, 2020... a lot of people think this means Dune will move from its December 18th date to sometime in 2021 but no announcement has been made yet)
- The King's Man (from Feb 26th, 2021 to Feb 12th, 2021)
Oscar Eligibility Cut-Off. Now We're in a New Oscar Year... - Black Widow (from November 6th to May 7th, 2021... which naturally sets off a chain reaction with future Marvel movies all moving further away)
- Shang-Chi (from May 7th, 2021 to July 9th, 2021)
- Deep Water (from Nov 13th, 2020 to Aug 13th, 2021)
- The Eternals (from Feb 12th, 2021 to November 5th, 2021)
- West Side Story (from Dec 18th, 2020 to December 10th, 2021)
- Greenland (from Jul 29th, 2020 to TBA 2021)
- Candyman (from Oct 16th to TBA 2021
P.S. Now I'm (literally) off to watch Nomadland and Trial of the Chicago 7 so that I can get "caught up" even though it feels like movies are never coming back. *cries hysterically*