33 Titles Will Compete for Animated Feature but how many of them really have a shot?

by Nathaniel R

ELEMENTAL is a likely nominee

Long gone are the days when we had to wonder if we were getting only 3 nominees in the Animated Feature Category. This year 33 films are competing (provided a few of them make their one week qualifying runs in the next few weeks) so we'll easily have 5 nominees as we've come to expect. But which titles will it be? After the jump the contenders divvied up into six rough categories... 

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"Barbie" leads the Golden Globe Nominations

by Nathaniel R

After a tumultuous few years for the Golden Globes, will we back on track this year? Or, rather, what kind of track will it be? The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is no more, really, at least not in the previous sense. The organization has been restructured and bought up by Penske Media (which also owns the big trade journals like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter) and the voter pool significantly expanded. But the big question is will it matter for viewers and celebrities after the past few years – the Globes were once a habitual must-attend/must-watch tradition but once you stop a tradition cold turkey can it return? 

The nominations (the Barbenheimer phenomenon leads in the movie categories with 9 and 8 nods respectively) and more commentary are after the jump…

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Boston loves "The Holdovers" but "American Fiction" takes Washington DC

by Cláudio Alves

Are we underestimating Dominic Sessa in Best Supporting Actor?

With some big wins right off the gate, Killers of the Flower Moon seemed to emerge as the consensus pick for Best Picture among critics. As much as I love Scorsese's latest, watching it sweep would have been boring beyond belief and a discredit to the tremendous cinematic year. Thankfully, an onslaught of awards this weekend changed the tide. No single title is rising above the rest as an absolute favorite, with multiple pictures nabbing top honors. Indeed, while the LAFCA voted for The Zone of Interest, other organizations announced their winners. The BSFC fell head over heels for The Holdovers, while WAFCA went for American Fiction. Apart from some categories, it seems "spreading the wealth" is the season's unofficial motto…

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For the LAFCA, the Future is Female

by Cláudio Alves

The Los Angeles Critics LOVE actresses, and Sandra Hüller most of all.

Many bristled (and still do) when some awards bodies started changing their acting awards to genderless categories. One of the principal complaints was that this would mean fewer artists awarded and that men would dominate. Or, in the LAFCA's case, a new name on the same system since having two winners each for Lead and Supporting meant they could go on giving prizes equivalent to the gendered divide of yore. That happened last year when Blanchett and Nighy took the Lead, Quan and de Leon Supporting. This year, however, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association decided to forego tradition altogether. Their four acting prizes went to women, making this their first edition without a single male actor among the honorees. 

Come discover the complete set of winners and a lot of statistics, after the jump…

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168 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long (long, very long) list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny. 

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States (Laura Tomaselli, Jesse Short Bull), Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission (Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine), Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim), To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) and 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov). But the whims of this branch can change on a dime, so we won’t know until the shortlists announcements later this month.

You can scroll through the entire list below beginning with After Sherman through to Your Fat Friend. I have linked to reviews of titles where we have them, but also included ten short capsules for other titles that I have seen and been unfortunately lax in actually writing about.

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