Gotham Awards Revue: Schoenbrun's "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" is a queer dream cum nightmare

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

Jane Schoenbrun’s latest feature was, in my mind, one of the seminal hits of the summer. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma's warm critical reception following its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it opened the Un Certain Regard section, was a joy, especially since reviews maintained roughly the same level of enthusiasm once it hit theaters in August. Indeed, winning the Queer Palm over buzzier, Oscar-hungry titles like Club Kid, Coward, and La Bola Negra feels even more impressive now than it must have back in May. Its three Gotham nominations feel similarly miraculous, and I couldn’t be happier for Schoenbrun and her team getting their flowers for this film I adore.

Truth be told, I'm not expecting it to win any of these categories - Feature, Director, and Lead Performance for Gillian Anderson - but any recognition of great cinema is worth celebrating. If nothing else, it has one of the best titles of any movie this year. Thankfully, of course, it has so much more...

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"Fatherland" and "La Bola Negra" dominate the European Film Award nominations

by Nathaniel R

Poland's Oscar submission Fatherland (from Pawel Pawlikowski of Ida and Cold War fame) and Spain's Oscar submission La Bola Negra (which took Best Director at Cannes for Los Javis) are in a presumedly tight battle at the European Film Awards. The dramas, one intimate and brief the other epic and expansive, received 11 and 10 nominations respectively. The Palme d'Or winner Fjord is a quite distant third with five nominations. January's European Film Awards will be held in Athens, Greece. Though the ceremony moves countries each year, it's never been to Southeastern Europe before.

The nominees and some stats after the jump...

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Best Actress goes international: An Alternative Oscar History

by Cláudio Alves

From 1956 to 1958, Deborah Kerr received three consecutive Best Actress nominations. According to such sources as Mason Wiley and Damien Bona's "Inside Oscar," she was considered a favorite for 1957's HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON, but lost to Joanne Woodward.

So, the title I gave this new chapter in my ongoing Best Actress series might seem a tad strange. After all, the real Oscars didn’t start honoring thespians for non-English-speaking work for a while.

Following Nathaniel’s advice, I’m only covering three years this time – 1956 to 1958 – a period when AMPAS nominated a grand total of zero performances of the kind, and didn’t even pay much attention to British cinema to add insult to injury. It was a time for Hollywood celebrating Hollywood, perchance in reaction to an awareness that the industry, as it existed then, was fast approaching irrevocable change. The era of the big studio was facing its twilight. The most international stuff you’ll see is more of Kerr’s unfortunate nominations, Magnani recognized for a George Cukor melodrama, and Bergman welcomed back to Tinsel Town by winning her second Best Actress trophy for one of her worst performances ever.

Alas, this isn’t a chronicle of the real Academy Awards, but an alternative Oscar history according to my personal taste. And, at long last, those pesky eligibility lists have started to include a lot of international cinema – the American public was more into subtitled movies in the 1950s than they are now – which means my Best Actress lineups are suddenly quite multilingual and multinational…

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"Elsinore" Leads the BIFA Nominations

by Nathaniel R

Andrew Scott stars in ELSINORE

Hot on the heels of the Gotham nominations here in New York, London follows with the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) nominations. Elsinore, hotly tipped to land Andrew Scott an Oscar nomination (finally) leads the field with 12 nominations while Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is a distant but still impressive second with 8 citations. Because these nods are overseas AND independent, I’ll attempt to explain some of the titles -- educating myself in the process, too, since I hadn't heard of a few of these.

Nominations and synopsis of sorts after the jump...

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Review: Not even Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve can save “Gentle Monster”

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes, the story behind a project’s making can be more interesting and engaging than the finished product. Such is the case of Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer’s latest and the follow-up to her critically acclaimed Corsage. Its development started during the production of that 2022 Sissi pseudo-biopic, when the Austrian director began contacting police, psychologists, and other experts who could help her develop a script inspired by the pedophile ring scandal that had been revealed a couple of years earlier by the Die Zeit newspaper. But what was born as an attempt at exploring the complex realities hidden in the sordid story took a turn when, after Corsage’s successful run, it was discovered that one of its stars was involved in similar criminal activity.

Florian Teichtmeister played the emperor to Vicky Krieps’ empress, and was sentenced to a suspended two-year prison term for possession and production of the sordid materials. For Kreutzer, an examination of realities far away from herself suddenly became a matter too close for comfort. The director considered scrapping the whole thing but instead reinvented Gentle Monster as a gesture of self-reflection cum self-therapizing through art. The main question put forward is one about how much we truly know those we believe to understand beyond measure, those closest and most beloved. The unknowability of “the other” is central and terrifying. Yet, the reckoning with this and other ideas remains frustratingly shallow, as if we’re witnessing a film still trying to find itself…

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