What did you see this week... or are you waiting for Thanksgiving like Hollywood?

By Nathaniel R

It was a strange weekend for moviegoers. Hollywood wanted to give Black Panther 2 ample room and it's not quite thanksgiving so only two new wide releases risked opening: The Menu and She Said. The former did okay and the latter struggled. In limited release a slightly similar story but just remove a few 0s as Bones and All and The Inspection both opened on a handful of screens. In both box office skirmishes, moviegoers tended to chose the violent option. Violent thrills are really what sells movie tickets these days, with or without vfx budgets. We wish the general moviegoer had wider taste, but it is what it is...

Weekend Box Office (actuals) November 18th-20th 🔺 = new or expanding /  ★ = Recommended
WIDE (OVER 800 SCREENS)	LIMITED / PLATFORM
BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER	BONES AND ALL
1 BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER $66.4 (cum. $287.1)	1 TILL $228k (cum. $8.5) 656 screens

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'Everything Everywhere' and all over the Spirit Award Nominations

by Nathaniel R

A24's restless inventive sleeper hit Everything Everywhere All At Once continues to win. It's now the leader at the 38th annuel Independent Spirit Awards with 8 nominations and all four of its principal actors were nominated. In second place is Tár with seven nominations. Aftersun missed a couple categories we thought it might hit but it still did very well with five nominations overall.  Love for the rest of the eligible movies was more measured but Bones and All, The Inspection, The Cathedral, and Women Talking also showed up in a few places. 

Since the Spirit Awards have a budget cap ($30 million now) many key potential Oscar players weren't eligible including most Netflix titles as well as presumed Oscar players like The Fabelmans, Banshees of Inisherin, Empire of Light   and naturally all of the spectacle blockbusters. The Spirit Awards rule also deny international cinema the chance to compete in major categories, relegating them to a single "international" category... 

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Almost There: Paul Dano in "Love & Mercy"

by Cláudio Alves

Paul Dano's film career has been awards-adjacent since the very beginning. At seventeen, he won the Best Debut Performance Spirit Award for his work in L.I.E. Five years later, he was one of the stars of Little Miss Sunshine, the first of three Best Picture Oscar nominees in the actor's filmography. Still, though the Academy regularly loves Dano's movies, they have never shown any affection for Dano himself. That might change this year with The Fabelmans, where the actor portrays a fictionalized version of Steven Spielberg's dad in what's bound to be one of the season's biggest award magnets.

To celebrate the actor's achievements and potential first Oscar nomination, let's look back to the last time Dano was on the Academy's radar. In 2015, he almost category frauded his way to a Supporting Actor nomination for his work as Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad's Love & Mercy…

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International Feature Race - Part 1. The Numbers, Genres, and Trivia

by Nathaniel R

Can "Decision to Leave" become the second nominee from South Korea?

We can no longer wait around twiddling our thumbs for the Academy's official press releases. AMPAS used to be so prompt with the Best International Feature Film category. In the past few years they've dropped the ball. The deadline for submission was six weeks ago and though Academy members have already been screening the films for a month there's still no press release from AMPAS about the "official list". If they continue this unfortunate new habit that means that nearly a hundred films each year will fail to get two months of media attention that they fully deserve before most of them are eliminated. The Academy will narrow down this year's 92 accepted submissions to just 15 on December 21st (barely a month away). And from those 15 they'll announce the 5 nominees on January 24th. You can see the current predictions here and the full charts detailing all 92 contenders. We assume that Malta's entry, Carmen, was not accepted due to too much English language since it's the only submission from our research that's not on their screening list. 

Anyway, if you smoosh all 92 films together into one imaginary film you'd get something like the following:

A family drama, with a political angle (and probably involving immigration of some kind), which comes from a early to mid-career director who is still rising. The film will be trilingual with dialogue in Arabic, French, and Spanish. It will be 107 minutes long. 

We'll adjust the following stats and trivia IF Oscar's official press release begs to differ by a film or two (which sometimes happens) whenever it arrives. Or maybe they just won't release it this year? So Let's talk stats, trivia, genres, and themes...

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Review: "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"

by Nathaniel R

Presenting a task as impossible as hiding a futuristic country for centuries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Imagine having to follow up the phenomenon of Marvel's Black Panther (2018) which, like most explosive zeitgeist events, had ultra precise perfectly timed ingredients and arrived at the exact moment in culture when all of them would be most appreciated. Now imagine having to follow that up without its charismatic leading man, lost to cancer at the young peak of an already impressive career. Director Ryan Coogler was in an unenviable position. It's no surprise, then, that the sequel to Marvel's most popular solo adventure is a bit wobbly on arrival. Never mind that the sequel must bear the weight of all the absurd expectations and make sense of T'Challa's absence while trying to find new legs on both land AND at sea. Thank god for the latter. Whatever the movie's faults, it's not from attempting a simplistic retread...

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