Best Actress / Supporting Actress - Chart Updates!

We fully expect Marriage Story to be nominated in all four acting categoriesBEST ACTRESS and BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS charts are now up. Strangely, this year doesn't feel as competitive as usual when it comes to these two categories. That said, given the lack of a wide field of wildly loved work, we're expecting some unexpected volatility to occur. If one of the early precursors throws a major curveball expect everyone else to follow suit if the field isn't inspiring them. 

We are starting to wonder if Lupita Nyong'o is closer to a nomination for Best Actress than we thought she'd be at this point. (She's great in Us but we assumed the genre trappings would hinder her... but is enthusiasm there for other performances the way it was earlier in the year for hers? That's a campaign strength right there if Universal goes for it.)

Best Actor / Supporting Actor - Chart Updates!

by Nathaniel R

Netflix would like to have 80% of the BEST ACTOR field (Driver, Murphy, Pryce, DeNiro) but that will prove impossible.

The new predictions are in. Best Actor is more exciting and competitive than Best Actress this year which is a strange and unusual development... and we don't like it! We kid. The male actors deserve their moment in the sun occassionally, even if they're not as fun to shine light on. The strangest thing about the leading actor competition is, at least at the moment, Netflix literally appears to have about 1/3rd of the entire competitive field. But since their can be only 5, we think that this shotgun approach will only result in two nominees at best. Right now we're going with Adam Driver (who feels like the ultimate winner... though let's not pretend anything's locked up yet in late September) and Eddie Murphy (who could easily not happen given Netflix's other horses in the race).

As for Supporting Actor. It isn't that much different than Best Actor this year. This year has been fairly heavy with duet films for men (The Lighthouse, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Ford v Ferrari, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Two Popes) so naturally a few of the co-leads will definitely block out supporting players for the coveted nominations. We're mostly giving the side-eye to Willem Dafoe. He's the most egregious category frauder this year since you can't be a supporting actor in a cast of two! (There are technically a few other actors that appear in The Lighthouse but they're non-speaking cameos. It's a duet film from start to finish). It's a shame that Dafoe is competing supporting because we think he'd still be competitive for a nomination in lead despite the strong year. The only traditional-sized supporting role that we think won't be hurt by the co-leads muscling in is Alan Alda's divorce attorney in Marriage Story. In some ways he's the film's most loveable character, and Alda has been nominated for less (The Aviator). At 83 he'll have sentiment on his side, too.

UPDATED CHARTS
PICTURE | DIRECTOR | ACTOR | SUPPORTING ACTOR | INTERNATIONAL FEATURE | ALL INTERNATIONAL FEATURE SUBMISSIONS 

'On the Floor'

...Or, floored, rather. But we wanted to use a JLo song title. 

JLo walking the Versace fashion show to celebrate 20 years of THE DRESS that launched Google Images (no really) has to be among the most exciting Oscar campaign moments of recent years alongside events like David Lynch with that cow on the side of the road stumping for Laura Dern. 

Not that this is a literal Oscar campaign move but it might as well be, right? 

same energy? pic.twitter.com/AGWw8kWm4J

— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) September 20, 2019

News & Tidbits: France, Brad Pitt, Julie Andrews and more...

Deadline France will send contemporary police/citizens/gang tensions drama Les Miserables to the Oscars (sorry, Portrait of a Lady on Fire fans)
Latino Entertainment Journalists Association - In their first ever TV awards, Barry, When They See Us, Chernobyl, and Euphoria lead the nominations. Jimmy Smit (Lifetime Achievement) and Isabella Gomez (Breakout) will also be honored.
Indie Wire - Have you heard that Brad Pitt is “abstaining” from Oscar campaigning. In our long years of following the Oscar race this only works for mega-stars and those who have just given undeniable performances (like Mo’Nique in Precious). Everyone else has to play the game. 

After the jump Julie Andrews, Maggie Cheung, Downton Abbey, Kevin Spacey and more…

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Posterized: Promotions to Film for TV Casts

With Downton Abbey (2019) in theaters today and already threatening a sequel let's talk movie spin-offs of TV shows. TV shows have been adapted into feature films for as long as we can recall, but up until the 21st century it was more common for feature films to be adapted into TV shows.

Examples of TV series getting their own theatrical film outing with the original cast intact dates back to, we think, Dragnet (1954) and Batman The Movie (1966), both of which had one theatrical release during their TV runs. But it was fairly rare until recently and it has usually only happened after a television series has wrapped. A large part of this becoming more common obviously has to do with the narrowing gap between how audiences experience TV and film. On a less obvious and more theoretical level we suspect its due to the even newer cultural trend of immediate / perpetual nostalgia. It used to be that there had to be a bit of distance before the populace got collectively teary-eyed with longing but... no longer! 

Batman got a movie in the summer of 1966, even though it has just premiered on television in January of that same year.

You can now be wistful for things you experienced just the year or even a few months before and demand that they come back to you in the closest approximation possible. 

Let's look at some examples of this increasingly popular trend leading up to Downton Abbey (2019). How many of these spinoffs have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

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