April Foolish Predictions #4: Best Supporting Actor

Previously: Animated Features, Foreign Films, Sound & Music, Prediction Index

What will the Supporting Actor race look like this year? Will it be awash in "comebacks" (Al Pacino, John Lithgow, Tim Robbins, David Straithairn)? Perhaps it'll lean into fresh cinematic faces (Aldis Hodge, Jonathan Majors, Kristoffer Hivju, Taika Waititi)? Maybe it'll be a year of long-awaited first nominations for thespians who've had rich careers (Ben Mendelsohn, Bruce Willis, Jonathan Pryce, Antonio Banderas, Tracy Letts)? Most likely, as with each Oscar year before it, it'll be some random combo of all three but determining who the five men will be this early is nigh impossible. Why is that? Well, there are a few reasons...

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April Foolish Predictions #3: Foreign Language Film

And now we move to (nearly) the silliest category to try to predict a year in advance, Best Foreign Film. Individual countries don't begin announcing which films they're submitting until the summer (and usually wait until the end-of-September deadline) so it's a bit like blindfolding yourself and pointing at a spinning globe. Nevertheless we just like to have predicted the five countries so we have stats later on about how well we did while blindfolded (it's a sickness, this punditry calling).

Previous famous nominees or winners of the Foreign Film Oscar

But mostly we threw up this early chart because we wanted to freshen up the foreign stats & Oscar history portion of that traditional annual page. Take a look won't you? Tell us if you learned anything new! We've been brainstorming behind the scenes at TFE at a way to deep dive into this category's history but we keep hitting the roadblock of films being unavailable (a far worse roadblock in this category than in others) due to... well, you know, the films being from other countries and distribution sometimes not extending much beyond their initial theatrical runs decades ago.

April Foolish Predictions #2: Music and Sound Categories

[drumroll] It's Time! Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions have begun.

Ad Astra was supposed to be out next month but rumors are that it's not finished yet

First we looked at Animated Features and now we turn our attention to the Sound categories. It's rather perverse to do them second and here's why: Original Songs and Original Scores are among the last things we have confirmed each year. Technically speaking you can wait until your whole film is nearly complete before adding a score or commissioning an original song. It's not always wise to wait of course since songs, especially, can be more effective if they're woven in and some directors prefer to work with some idea of what the score will be like while they're editing. Nevertheless there is much that's completely unknown about this film year in terms of its music...

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Review: The Wind

by Chris Feil

Capturing the emotional and topographical emptiness of the American West, director Emma Tammi’s The Wind is a horror film that succeeds through its sparseness. The desert landscape that surrounds first settler Lizzy Macklin and her husband Isaac becomes a horrifying abyss of the unknown. As Lizzy stares out at her uninhabited surroundings, waiting patiently for more enterprising souls to arrive, that abyss stares right back into her.

What unfolds in this slim and mighty pickax of horror is a terrifying case of the plains. It sure proves psychologically claustrophobic looking out on the unending expanse of a home on the range, where yesterday and today, real and imagined all blur together in isolate malaise. Don't confuse the film's modesty for a lack of depth, for this creaky well runs deep.

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Open Thread & Random Buzz

What movies are you thinking about right this very second?

I've got four movies playing in my head at the moment, two still imaginary and two just screened. The still-imaginary ones are, first, the Bill Condon / Sir Ian McKellen / Dame Helen Mirren thriller The Good Liar which got strong buzz out of the industry promo event CinemaCon. The second is the film adaptation of Cats which sounds Titanic-like (the boat not the movie) in its possibly epic high profile sinkability. Apparently the cats are not fully mocapped creatures but still look like the actors with fur digitally added but they're cat-sized (but why would they mention the cat-sized bit unless they shared scenes with humans which Nooooo).

As for the real movies that already exist in competed form, Laika has another winner with Missing Link (they've yet to make a stinker!) which we currently have in the 'most likely to be nominated' spot in the Best Animated Feature race. It opens in just one week so more on that one real soon. The other is Sebastian Schipper's Roads which we can't talk about yet because it doesn't premiere until later this month at Tribeca but let it be known that we love it. Oops. We weren't supposed to talk about it! But it's from the German director who made that exciting 'how'd he do that?' entirely continuous shot movie Victoria a couple of years back. This new film Roads could, like Victoria, be categoried in the subgenre of "Protagonist having dangerous and unexpected soul-shaking adventure whilst travelling abroad" movie but its much different so Schipper is no one-hit wonder or one-trick pony. The leads Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) and Stéphane Bak (Elle, Farewell to the Night) have terrific chemistry. If you're planning to hit Tribeca, schedule it.

What's on your cinematic mind?