Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 5:00PM 
With one day to Oscar, let’s salute 2019’s class of first time nominees in the four acting categories. So many great actors never get nominated, and many just get that one nomination. So it must be so exciting for these lucky 5: Antonio Banderas, Cynthia Erivo, Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Pryce and Florence Pugh...
Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 3:00PM by Chris Feil
Cathy Yan returns Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn to the screen after the regrettable Suicide Squad, and it’s somewhat of a rebirth in more was than one. Now single but not fully exorcized from her sublimating relationship with the Joker, Harley is looking to stand on her own two feet. Yet Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) again aligns her with a newly birthed group of crimefighters, this time in an all-female set of not-so-anti heroes.
Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 11:44AM Hello beloved readers and fellow cinephiles. Sorry for this ultra-last-minute prediction post (which is cross-posted at Towleroad) but let it serve a dual purpose. It's to be read now and/or laughed at after the Oscars once I've shown that my crystal ball is totally defective.
If you've been living under a rock the Best Picture field looks like so...
Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 11:00AM In advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis has been looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.
After that trip back to the Documentary race, we're ending the week by spotlighting the other category that's taken the hugest strides to adjust its nominating process and champion better work. It’s also no accident that I’m ending with a category that Nathaniel has tracked with unusual care and detail since Oscar-focused websites have existed—indeed, long before many of his peers paid more than cursory attention. The 72nd Academy Awards took place eight years before the transformative addition of an Executive Committee to the vetting process that produces the annual roster for "Best Foreign Language Film," which of course this year got rebranded as "Best International Film". This category used to be heavy with inoffensive mediocrities, or sometimes offensive ones. Tracking down the contenders, which was often difficult to do, rarely felt like making contact with the best of world cinema in any given year, and with very few exceptions the winners across the 1990s were an undistinguished lot. (Or maybe you’re a major devotée of Mediterraneo or Kolya?)
By that standard, 1999 was a pretty good year, since I imagine that Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother would be most people's choice as the best film to cop this prize during the whole decade. This critical and popular favorite needed no help from any Executive Committee to stay alive during the balloting. In fact, the only mystery is why the movie couldn't make more inroads into admittedly competitive races like Actress, Supporting Actress, Director, Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing, or Picture...
Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 7:52AM 
Tomorrow we might witness Oscar history being made with the crowning of the very first non-English Best Picture winner. Of course, it is just as likely that we'll see history repeating itself. If Parasite falters and 1917 claims the top prize, that's another muscular war film joining the ranks of the Best Picture pantheon. More specifically, a World War I epic of great technical ingenuity and daring, a project not too unlike the original Best Picture winner, Wings. From 1927 to 2019, movies with similar historical settings have found great success with the Academy, though World War I stories were more regularly found on the big screen when that conflict was still an actual memory for the living.
For the Oscars' first decade, many war pictures won plaudits. For a time Hollywood let go of the heroic romantics of Wings and adopted a more melancholy view of recent History, with antiwar sentiment as well as complicated class studies that saw a broken society through the prism of war. All that would change with the arrival of World War II. The newer global nightmare readily took the place of the old war in the Academy's eyes, first as propaganda and then as more ponderous retrospective. To this day, people still joke that a sure way to win an Oscar is to do a World War II drama.
But back to the first World War. Here are the 12 Best Picture nominees that have told stories from that global conflict...
