We fully expect Marriage Story to be nominated in all four acting categories

We are starting to wonder if Lupita Nyong'o is closer to a nomination for Best Actress than we thought she'd be at this point. (She's great in Us but we assumed the genre trappings would hinder her... but is enthusiasm there for other performances the way it was earlier in the year for hers? That's a campaign strength right there if Universal goes for it.)

Netflix would like to have 80% of the BEST ACTOR field (Driver, Murphy, Pryce, DeNiro) but that will prove impossible.

The new predictions are in. Best Actor is more exciting and competitive than Best Actress this year which is a strange and unusual development... and we don't like it! We kid. The male actors deserve their moment in the sun occassionally, even if they're not as fun to shine light on. The strangest thing about the leading actor competition is, at least at the moment, Netflix literally appears to have about 1/3rd of the entire competitive field. But since their can be only 5, we think that this shotgun approach will only result in two nominees at best. Right now we're going with Adam Driver (who feels like the ultimate winner... though let's not pretend anything's locked up yet in late September) and Eddie Murphy (who could easily not happen given Netflix's other horses in the race).

As for Supporting Actor. It isn't that much different than Best Actor this year. This year has been fairly heavy with duet films for men (The Lighthouse, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Ford v Ferrari, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Two Popes) so naturally a few of the co-leads will definitely block out supporting players for the coveted nominations. We're mostly giving the side-eye to Willem Dafoe. He's the most egregious category frauder this year since you can't be a supporting actor in a cast of two! (There are technically a few other actors that appear in The Lighthouse but they're non-speaking cameos. It's a duet film from start to finish). It's a shame that Dafoe is competing supporting because we think he'd still be competitive for a nomination in lead despite the strong year. The only traditional-sized supporting role that we think won't be hurt by the co-leads muscling in is Alan Alda's divorce attorney in Marriage Story. In some ways he's the film's most loveable character, and Alda has been nominated for less (The Aviator). At 83 he'll have sentiment on his side, too.

UPDATED CHARTS
PICTURE | DIRECTOR | ACTOR | SUPPORTING ACTOR | INTERNATIONAL FEATURE | ALL INTERNATIONAL FEATURE SUBMISSIONS 

...Or, floored, rather. But we wanted to use a JLo song title. 

JLo walking the Versace fashion show to celebrate 20 years of THE DRESS that launched Google Images (no really) has to be among the most exciting Oscar campaign moments of recent years alongside events like David Lynch with that cow on the side of the road stumping for Laura Dern. 

Not that this is a literal Oscar campaign move but it might as well be, right? 

same energy? pic.twitter.com/AGWw8kWm4J

— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) September 20, 2019

Deadline France will send contemporary police/citizens/gang tensions drama Les Miserables to the Oscars (sorry, Portrait of a Lady on Fire fans)
Latino Entertainment Journalists Association - In their first ever TV awards, Barry, When They See Us, Chernobyl, and Euphoria lead the nominations. Jimmy Smit (Lifetime Achievement) and Isabella Gomez (Breakout) will also be honored.
Indie Wire - Have you heard that Brad Pitt is “abstaining” from Oscar campaigning. In our long years of following the Oscar race this only works for mega-stars and those who have just given undeniable performances (like Mo’Nique in Precious). Everyone else has to play the game. 

After the jump Julie Andrews, Maggie Cheung, Downton Abbey, Kevin Spacey and more…

Examples of TV series getting their own theatrical film outing with the original cast intact dates back to, we think, Dragnet (1954) and Batman The Movie (1966), both of which had one theatrical release during their TV runs. But it was fairly rare until recently and it has usually only happened after a television series has wrapped. A large part of this becoming more common obviously has to do with the narrowing gap between how audiences experience TV and film. On a less obvious and more theoretical level we suspect its due to the even newer cultural trend of immediate / perpetual nostalgia. It used to be that there had to be a bit of distance before the populace got collectively teary-eyed with longing but... no longer! 

Batman got a movie in the summer of 1966, even though it has just premiered on television in January of that same year.

You can now be wistful for things you experienced just the year or even a few months before and demand that they come back to you in the closest approximation possible. 

Let's look at some examples of this increasingly popular trend leading up to Downton Abbey (2019). How many of these spinoffs have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

The Coen Brothers have no shortage of veritable classics on their résumé (Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, etc.), but somewhat overlooked within their filmography are the quirky, sweet (read: non-violent, still absurdist) little diversions into optimism, vs. their patented nihilism. And so, sandwiched between the critical and commercial triumphs Barton Fink and Fargo, arrived The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coens’ mid-‘90s (25th anniversary, y’all!) ode to the zany, screwball comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

They had me at "You know, for kids.”

I was one of the few who saw The Hudsucker Proxy in theaters—it bombed…hard—at the mall where I worked as a teen (at Subway in the food court, natch). In fact, it wasn’t by chance that I saw The Hudsucker Proxy; I actually sought it out, for reasons I can’t totally recall. But loved it I did, from the very first watch... 

The thing about having daddy issues is that you can never escape them. No matter how far you travel, even into space. In Ad Astra these issues drive Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an astronaut sent on a mission across the solar system to find out the reason behind recent catastrophes,  including fires and plane crashes, taking place on Earth. The kicker here is that his astronaut father (Tommy Lee Jones), who went missing in another space expedition 29 years ago, might be connected to what’s happening. Not only does Roy have to confront the dangers awaiting him on his mission, he also has to deal with his feelings about his father and being abandoned by him.

The space odyssey element is surprising twist for writer director James Gray (The Immigrant, Two Lovers) but the father son imbroglio isn’t at all...

Marriage Story would have been a true blockbuster like Kramer vs Kramer or Terms of Endearment in a different era. Now it will just stream but could still be a big player at the Oscars.

There’s still so much we don’t know.

That’s an important fact to start with because reading online discourse about Oscar predictions each year is like pretending we live in a perpetual January when the precursors are well underway and the template is already set which will only vary slightly from organization to organization/pundit to pundit. Oscar fanatics (and pundits) never know as much as they pretend to know early on. History is filled with films with breathless first screenings that didn’t amount to much at the Oscars and vice versa. These things take time and all parts of the cycle should be considered when making predictions. If your predictions are exactly the same as someone else's this early, take a risk. Then you can be wrong in different ways instead of in the same way. Haha.

Five Very Important Things We Don’t Yet Know...

Jennifer’s Body was never meant to find mainstream success. A film about women, made by women, and starring women - a campy flick about a possessed teenage girl who kills men after she seduces them, no less - was somehow expected to fulfill every man’s fantasy. At long last, we would finally witness Megan Fox naked on-screen. Rejoice, for she would also be kissing her co-star, Amanda Seyfried, for our enjoyment. Indeed, the male gaze was directed firmly at Jennifer’s Body, waiting to see if it would disappoint.  

And sure enough, it did. Critics were quick to call it empty and vapid, hardly anyone bothered to see it, and Jennifer’s Body was quickly forgotten. But is any of this surprising? Despite their undeniable cultural cache in 2009, both Megan Fox and screenwriter Diablo Cody were experiencing an ongoing backlash that reeked of sexism. And quite plainly: many weren’t ready to see, let alone enjoy, a film about male fear controlled entirely by female sexuality. 

But perhaps for those same reasons, Jennifer’s Body is claiming the cult status it was always destined to have. 

It’s that time of the year where we play musical chairs and look at some of the music documentaries that have come along because there are just too many. Not all that much connects this batch of musicians – other than I am a fan of them to a degree, I suppose – but watching the films and there is a surprising spread of style and form. Surprising, also, because the artist that comes out on top is the most unexpected of them all.

The most informal, yet ultimately least satisfying of the batch is Linda Ronstadt: Sound of My Voice. It is somewhat disappointing that Oscar-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet) decided on such a rudimentary structure considering their subject was somebody who repeatedly coloured outside of the lines of the artform.

But any film about somebody as talented and interesting as Ronstadt, there is always going to be much enjoyment even if it is assembled rather blandly.

“This is a story about control...”

Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers begins by brilliantly underlining its thesis through the musical vessel of Janet Jackson. The film is a story about control, of reclaiming it in a workforce that tries to take it from you, and ultimately of losing it. But the film is also about female power and shoving back against an oppressive system, all of this embodied in the pop perfection prowess of Jackson herself. Hustlers may be the most slamming pop soundtrack of the year, but it’s also deployed with similar subtextual wisdom. The hits keep coming, but they also reinforce Scarfaria’s examination of feminine defiance with a razor specific period detail.

Last year's international film Oscar race was one of its all-time most popular years with all of the pictures turning into arthouse hits (that never happens. Usually one is a flop). 2019's competition might be just as exciting. If countries choose well and the Academy follows suit, that is. Spain's Pain & Glory and South Korea's Parasite are the two highest profile international films in the race (both opening in early October in the US) and are likely to be successful in theaters, the former due to the consistent sales of Almodóvar imports and the latter due to its buzz and accessibility as entertainment. The third most high profile contender MIGHT be Portrait of a Lady on Fire from France. But France has yet to choose a film. UPDATE 9/20/19: THEY HAVE CHOSEN "LES MISERABLES"

They have however narrowed it down to three...

Best Film: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Best Director: Marielle Heller, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood