Photos and fun from the Los Angeles Film Critics Dinner

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"1917" big in weekend three (and other box office stories)

The war drama 1917 moved into wide release in its third weekend, touting that big Globes victory, and scored with an amazing haul for a serious non-franchise film with no bankable stars. The civil rights drama Just Mercy also had a successful expansion to wide release in its third weekend but that one has three movie stars to help it (Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx in the main roles and Brie Larson in support) 

Weekend Box Office January 10th-12th (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE (800+ screens)	PLATFORM TITLES
1 🔺  1917  $36.5 (cum. $39.2) GLOBE VICTORIES, TEASER ★	1 🔺   PARASITE $966k on 345 screens (cum. $25.3) PODCAST, CLASS, BONG, SAG CAST ★

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The prizes literally never stop... NSFC, GLAAD, NAACP and more

As per usual we've fallen a bit behind in the awardage department so we're doing a massive post right now to catch up. Here are the latest critics groups to announce their awards as well as nominations from two civil rights organizations, GLAAD and the NAACP...

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Final Oscar Nomination Predictions

The 92nd annual Academy Awards are almost upon us. They're just 29 days away at this writing. We'll have the official Oscar charts back up for you as soon as is humanly possible once the potentially exciting event has occurred on Monday (they're coming down now to prep for Monday's unfurling). But until then, it's time to make final predictions.

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The sure things: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Parasite, The Irishman, Joker, Jojo Rabbit, 1917. That's six titles that we can't imagine missing on Monday morning given their success to date in precursor awards and with critics and the public. The extremely probable: Marriage Story. The only reason we've begun to worry is that there's been virtually no traction for Noah Baumbach in Best Director which suggests that people have reduced the movie to "an actor's showcase"... but then where was the SAG Outstanding Cast nomination? It's likely in but if there's a shock omission Monday morning...

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Animated Feature Contenders: "Primal"

By Tim

A record-setting 32 films were submitted in 2019 for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Of these, the biggest outlier is the clumsily-titled Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal: Tales of Savagery, which only barely deserves to be called a film at all. It's a feature-length repackaging of of the first five episodes of the television limited series Primal, which aired on Adult Swim in October (with another five coming sometime in 2020), and which was never at any point intended to be seen in any other form than as discrete 22-minute episodes. The condensed feature-length version existed solely to have something that could be put into theaters in Los Angeles for a week to qualify for the Oscars, and there are no plans for it to ever see the light of day again.

Ordinarily, that would be the kind of rule-bending chicanery that we disapprove of here at the Film Experience, but I'm content to overlook it in this case. First, because it's extremely unlikely to pay off in the form of a nomination on Monday morning. Second, if Adult Swim hadn't played this cheap trick, I'd have no excuse to talk to all of you about Primal, which in any medium is clearly one of the major works of animation from 2019...

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