Does Box Office Matter to Best Actress Hopefuls?

by Nathaniel R

Helen Mirren's The Queen was in many ways a completely standard win... a solid success before the nomination and an even bigger hit afterwardsDoes Box Office matter to Oscars? It does and it doesn't. And how much it matters varies from year to year and from category to category. It obviously matters, regardless, if you're either a flop or a big hit but anything inbetween (where most movies fall) is up for speculative debate.

For instance, just this year people have debated whether The Wife's box office take is strong enough for a Best Actress nomination for Glenn Glose (hint: it totally is... though winning will be harder) and whether it will matter that Roma won't really have that much of a theatrical presence (it might. it might not. The streaming only/mostly thing is relatively uncharted territory) or if the major success of A Star is Born will make a win possible for Lady Gaga (it won't hurt!)

For fun let's look at how much the Best Actress nominees films made before they were nominated for the past fifteen years and see what patterns emerge. The films in red won Best Actress Oscars.

BOX OFFICE RANK OF BEST ACTRESS FILMS
BEFORE THE NOMINATIONS (2003-2017)
AND WHERE THIS YEAR'S LEADING ACTRESSES CURRENTLY FIT...

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Review: Bohemian Rhapsody

The review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

‘C’mon Gay Shame!’ That’s what we imagine the movies are shouting at us right now, spirits ablaze and fingers snapping. Though it’s surely a coincidence, the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (‘yaaas, Queen’?) and the gay conversion therapy drama Boy Erased have arrived simultaneously. This accidental double feature is a double closeted whammy. 

It’d be wonderful to report that they’re both worth seeing, but only one might rock you. And it isn’t the one with the famous “we will we will rock you” chorus. But more on Boy Erased later since it’s just beginning a platform run on 5 screens and will be expanding as awards season heats up. Bohemian Rhapsody, on the other hand, is opening wide on 4,000 screens and hoping to fill them like Queen filled stadiums…

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Would you rather?

We stopped playing our silly Instagram game because Squarespace no longer works with Instagram embeds (I have no idea why) but we miss eavesdropping / spying on celebrities. So let's play again without embeds (more work for me, argh).

Would you rather...
...have a get together with Liza Minnelli, George Hamilton and Michael Feinstein?
...do your civic duty with Kerry Washington?
...pick blueberries with Kiernan Shipka?
... attend Gwyneth Paltrows wedding?
... take a mineral clay treatment with Daryl Hannah?
...enjoy Royal Tenenbaums cosplay with Sarah Michelle Gellar?
...nap with Paul Bettany and his cat?
... get your nails did with The Rock?
... eat cake with Reese Witherspoon?

The images are after the jump to help you decide

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Doc Corner: Frederick Wiseman's 'Monrovia, Indiana'

By Glenn Dunks

Depending on your point of few, Frederick Wiseman films exist in a realm of apoliticicm or are stealth political missiles. I believe it’s a little bit somewhere in between. It is easy of course to see the markings of a political filmmaker in his works if you know where to look, and can be done so in essentially all of his works from his debut with Titicut Follies in 1967 right up to his most recent works In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

And yet he’s obviously no Michael Moore or Alex Gibney, and the way his camera silent observes with little regard for constructed narrative (at least in any traditional sense, although his films all tell a story) means that it is easy for his films to feel as if any political ideology that rises to the form of text is purely accidental.

With a film such as Wiseman’s latest – his 42^nd and his seventh this decade – it is once again a little from column a and a little from column b. How much you’re willing to indulge, however, may vary considering the topic of his patiently attentive eye is the town of Monrovia, Indiana, a god-fearing, gun-loving town in America’s rust belt that it’s all too easy to assign the moniker of “T***p Country”.

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Blueprints: "Coco"

Feliz Día de los Muertos! To celebrate, Jorge looks at how the script for Disney’s “Coco” mixes two languages the same way the movie interconnects cultures.

I’ve written a couple of pieces in this site before about Coco. It was an extremely intimate and touching experience to be able to see my native culture represented to accurately and lovingly. It is a movie that perfectly captures the spirit of Mexicanism, of our fragile and ever-present relationship with death, family, and tradition. 

I saw the movie twice in theaters: once in its original English, and once in its Spanish dub. While I consider the dub to be a better version (but that perhaps has to do with the way I’ve always experienced animated films), the English one made me consider a new aspect of the film: the way it handled Spanish. It’s a movie explicitly set in a different country; one where a different language is spoken (unlike say, Brave). How can the script incorporate this essential cultural element without making it seem unauthentic? It turns out, they do it muy bien.

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