Oscar Volleys: Best Actress or Jessie Buckley vs. the World

The Oscar Volleys are back! Tonight, it's time for Nathaniel Rogers, Cláudio Alves and Eric Blume to discuss the Best Actress race...

Nathaniel's last Best Actress predictions, from November 11.

NATHANIEL: Hello, my fellow lovers of all things actressing! I have been tearing through screeners and at the movie theater a lot this past week  (missing festivals is deadly when it comes to keeping up). So, I want to start this Best Actress volley by saying that I'm just now coming back down to earth after watching two movies, nearly back-to-back, that are about "performance," even when they're not directly about Acting. They were Sentimental Value (in a packed theater) and Hedda (at home, streaming). Renate Reinsve and Tessa Thompson are both gifted with the kind of "bring everything you got" roles that I'm sure a lot of actors would kill for…

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Golden Horse Awards 2025

by Nathaniel R

Oscar winner Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) with Golden Horse Best Director Jun Li (Queerpanorama). They both won Best Director prizes for gay dramas!

I don't know why I torture myself covering the Golden Horse Awards each year as there are so many films I'm never able to see (or forget about by the time they do become available stateside). Neverthless the Taiwanese awards are among my favourite races to follow in international cinema. I hope to catch up with four of the winners in particular: A Foggy Tale, Queerpanorama, Mother Bhumi, and Lucky Lu. The ceremony was held on November 22nd. Here are the nominations and wins for their 62nd annual edition with some commentary and some random trivia including a Chappel Roan connection (How very random!)...

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Pt 2: International Feature Race - Auteur Spotlight

by Nathaniel R

SOUTH KOREA's Park Chan Wook & Lee Byung Hun [image via Lee Byung hun's Instagram]

To broaden your appreciation of this year's Best International Feature Film Oscar race we already looked at some overall trivia. Before we get to the movie stars (the finale of this three-parter), let's look at some stats involving the artists behind the camera. It's auteur season! We're highlighting 8 directors due to their critical reputation, being a cinephile fetish object, or having previous Oscar history... or in some cases all three! We'll start with...

3 ICONS

• Park Chan-wook (South Korea's No Other Choice) 
Remarkably this 62 year-old auteur and Academy member has only been submitted twice by South Korea  despite a rich filmography...

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Screening Season in Los Angeles - Round 2

by Eurocheese

can we have father and son Skarsgård nominations, please?

In Round One (in case you missed it) I shared thoughts on One Battle After Another, Train Dreams, Blue Moon, Hedda and more. Here are a few thoughts on ten more films, ranked by personal preference...

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Pt 1 International Feature Oscar Race: Stats, Trivia, Genres

by Nathaniel R

You can watch THE LAST DANCE (Hong Kong's Oscar Submission) right now!

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED (11/21) WITH NEW RELEASE DATES.

Aside from the actress categories and eye candy crafts, longtime readers know that the awards season race I obsess over most is Best International Feature Film. This desire to jump around the Globe, sampling cinematic cuisines, was born early in me, thanks to arthouse theaters in Detroit Michigan where I grew up and a French teacher in High School who dragged the class to French movies downtown. Later international cinema programs in university and the Oscars themselves kept building the interest in what happens outside of Hollywood. The amount of subtitled features I manage to catch varies wildly from year to year but the desire to follow it all, has always been there.

We're just a few weeks away from the moment when Oscar voters narrow this race way down to 15 films so herewith 3 trivia laden posts on stats, trivia, genre, directors, and movie stars that you'll find this season in the Best International Feature Film Submission List. Let's start the trivia, stats, and anedcotes with the films that you can see right now followed by notes about genre, running time, and linguistics... 

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