Review: Guatemala's Oscar submission "La Llorona"

by Nick Taylor

Three cheers for the Boston Society of Film Critics, who kicked off this year’s wave of critics prizes with an amazingly idiosyncratic list of winners and runners-up. Capping their day off with their Foreign Language Film category, they honored Jayro Bustamente’s political ghost story La Llorona, with The Painted Bird in second place. La Llorona has been selected as Guatemala’s submission for International Film at the Oscars, making this the second of Bustamente’s films to be submitted after his astonishing debut Ixcanul in 2015. Three more cheers for Cláudio Alves, whose heroically long FYC thread on Twitter has informed a lot of my recent choices for which 2020 films to catch up with.

La Llorona’s opening credits are delivered over a black background with white text, while a woman’s quiet, hurried, forceful prayers can be heard. Our first real image of the film is a close-up on the speaker’s face, revealed to be an older white woman (Margarita Kenéfic), back straight and eyes unwavering as she stares directly into the lens and asks for protection for herself and her family against those who seek them harm...

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Barack Obama's Top 10 Lists

Okay top 14 and top 10. President Barack Obama, who has gifted us with his favourites lists in previous years and revealed the taste (no surprise), and is now involved in the movies as a producer has released his favourites list for this accursed year, writing:

Obama visiting with a "Crip Camp" activist

Like everyone else, we were stuck inside a lot this year, and with streaming further blurring the lines between theatrical movies and television features, I’ve expanded the list to include visual storytelling that I’ve enjoyed this year, regardless of format.

His top 10 (sorry, 14) movies and top 10 tv shows after the jump...

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Showbiz History: An epic Oscar battle + Brad Pitt

6 random things that happened on this day, December 18th, in showbiz history

1941 Thirteen year-old Shirley Temple, her contract bought out from Twentieth Century Fox after two 1940 flops, attempts her first "comeback" (though she'd only been gone from screens for a single year) with MGM in a film called Kathleen about a poor little rich girl. It also flopped. A few more hits were in her future but the writing was on the wall (she'd retire, for good, from movies by the age of 21)...

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Oscar Chart Updates: Visual Effects and Makeup

by Nathaniel R

Oscar chart overhaul is upon us. Let's talk two categories that are exceptionally difficult to read without the usual supply of blockbuster style filmmaking to dominate them.

VISUAL EFFECTS
Given that most of the blockbuster style films moved out of 2020 (without those theatrical billions to win), this might be the weirdest Oscar race of the year or the dullest if they don't nominate well...

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Oscar Chart Updates: Animated & Documentary Feature

by Nathaniel R

The Oscar charts overhaul is upon us. Let's discuss each category. First up a two-fer, Animated Feature and Documentary Feature. In both instances we don't have full eligibility lists yet but we know some of the titles that have qualified or will qualify.

ANIMATED FEATURE
We currently know of 15 features that are eligible or that plan to be. Since the threshold is only 16 films to create a full five-wide nominee field, we've decided to change our previous three-only prediction. (We'd love those odds if we were animated producers. It's so crazy easy to get nominated, statistically speaking, unlike other categories where hundreds of competitors vie for 5 slots. As we've said multiple times if the same percentage rules applied to Best Picture each year we'd have like 80-90 Best Picture nominees each year. Teehee.)

The contest is shaping up to be a battle royale between Pixar's Christmas entry Soul and the wondrously individualistic Cartoon Saloon's Wolfwalkers...

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