Oscar Contenders Sweep Through the 11th Asia Pacific Screen Awards

By Glenn Dunks

Rajkummar Rao wins BEST ACTOR for India's Oscar submission "Newton"

This past Thursday, the 11th Asia Pacific Screen Awards were held in Brisbane, Australia. The awards cover 70 countries and areas, which makes their scope even bigger than APSA's cousin the European Film Awards. Now, fair admission, working for APSA is my day job for four months of the year, but when I say what they do is so incredible and important you should know I'm not saying so out of obligation. How many award shows do you know that can honour an Australian 1920s-set western, a contemporary Georgian drama for actressexuals, and Syrian documentaries about life-saving humanitarians?

More than half of the 13 categories this year were won by films on various Oscar eligibility longlists and therefore in serious contention of nominations. While the big winner of the night for Best Feature Film was ultimately Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country of Australia, it won't be released locally until January next year so it could potentially be eligible for 2018 (his 2009 debut, which also won the Best Feature Film APSA made the foreign language shortlist). But the big country winners of the night were Georgia and Russia with three wins.

The winners are after the jump...

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Will this year's Best Director Oscar race be the most diverse ever?

by Nathaniel R

from left to right: del Toro, Guadagnino, Wright, Peele, Jenkins, Rees, Nolan, McDonagh, Aronofsky, Baker, Spielberg, Gerwig, Scott, Bigelow, Coppola, Villeneuve

While I was updating the Oscar charts for Picture and Director it occurred to me that the Academy's directing branch could well come up with their most diverse shortlist ever. Generally speaking when the Best Director lineup has had some variations from its usual five middle aged white American directors it's been with older white European auteurs. But in the past twelve years things have been shifting for that category quite a lot despite frequent complaints that they aren't changing at all. Or at least that they're not changing fast enough.

Consider that the following things have all happened in the past twelve Oscar races:

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The 2017 Animated Contenders: "The Girl Without Hands"

by Tim Brayton

Last week, we took a look at Loving Vincent, a stunningly gorgeous animated feature taking its aesthetic cues from traditional fine arts; and this week, we're doing the same thing. Though the style in the French The Girl Without Hands is quite a long way from the rich oil portraits of Loving Vincent. Now, the inspiration is (or anyway, appears to be) Chinese ink wash painting, the art of sketching out characters and settings in a few swift, bold brush strokes with strongly-colored ink. The results deserve the same praise: this is, visually, one of the most distinctive, special, and unusual piece of cinema released this year.

This time around, the film has a narrative that can stand up to its style. The Girl Without Hands is a fairly straightforward adaptation of the Grimm fairy tale, about a young woman (voiced by Anaïs Demoustier) whose miller father (Olivier Broche) unwittingly promises her to the Devil (Philippe Laudenbach) in exchange for a river of endless gold...

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Linkovers

• New York Times "The artists have been rebuked. Now what about their art?"
• Gr8ter Days which years were the worst for celebrity deaths? A morbid obsessive list that's kind of eye opening. I mean 1977... ouch.
• Los Angeles Times Carol Burnett on the 50th anniversary of her classic show
• The Guardian Guy Lodge wonders about the relative sexlessness of Call Me By Your Name and Moonlight before it and whether that timidity is what it takes for an LGBT film to become a big Oscar player?

Much more after the jump including Justice League credits, Daniel Dae Kim, Michael Apted, Aquaman, an honor for Detroit and the first round of PGA nominations...

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100 Days until Oscar. Let's Talk Oscar's (Future) Centennial...

It's 100 days until Hollywood's High Holy Night but it's zero days until the HFPA, their bastard younger cousin starts voting. Balloting begins today for the 75th annual Golden Globe nominations. But today's magic number is 100.... so never mind about the HFPA. Let's talk about the future when we're all ten years older.

Meryl in old age makeup

Since this season is Oscar's 90th, we're ten years away from Oscar's centennial. Meryl Streep will be 78 years old by then but she seems like the only lock so far for the 2027 Oscar nominations. Tee hee! Out of curiosity how old is 78 for Oscar love? Quite old...

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