Remember 127 Hours?

It's 127 days until the Oscars. Remember Danny Boyle's 127 Hours in which James Franco sliced off his own arm years before his own career was cut off by allegations of sexual misconduct. Were you into that film at the time? Do you think it deserved its six nominations: Picture, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Score, Song)?

I believed at the timethat it was in 10th place but its nomination haul was impressive. Now that we're back to a flat 10 for Best Picture (this year will be the first set of ten since that 2010 Oscar race) we can begin wondering which film might overperform on Oscar nomination morning that wouldn't have gotten nearly as fall without the benefit of the Academy having to choose a full top ten.

Best Picture, Directors, Screenplays. Where are we at?

by Nathaniel R

With virtually every late year release, save arguably House of Gucci, meeting an enthusiastic response even if they weren't quite expected to (hello showbiz drama Being the Ricardos and all star satire Don't Look Up) and two more potential behemoths about to start screening (West Side Story and Nightmare Alley) the Best Picture race is yet more crowded and confusing. Let's break it all down...

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What's the average length of a Best Picture?

by Nathaniel R

This is Lawrence of Arabia... not Dune

It's 136 days until the Oscars and 136 is a golden number. It's the average length, in minutes, of a Best Picture Oscar winner. When we first calculated this number over a decade ago 138 was the average but in the past 10 years or so, running times of actual winners have been shaved a bit. Here are the running times of all winnners from longest to shortest. You'll see that the majority of winners are over 2 hours long which has caused no end of padding in "serious" movies but alas, not enough padding for tender buttocks watching interminable movies.

Here are the running times of all winnners from longest to shortest as well as this year's contenders from longest to shortest...

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Middleburg: Crowd-pleasing with "King Richard" and "Belfast"

by Nathaniel R

The family watching "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in BELFAST

The 9th annual Middleburg Film Festival wrapped up Sunday night but they programmed well so the joy lingers. The two events that always have after parties, Opening Night and Saturday Centerpiece, were King Richard and Belfast respectively. In both cases you could feel the love in the room even before the booze began to flow. Since the Middleburg audience is a reasonably good proxy for the bulk of Oscar voters (mature, well to do, cultured, and with movie tastes that fall somewhere between critics and the general public) it's easy to imagine both films greeted just as warmly on Oscar nomination morning...

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Highlights from Middleburg's "Coffee & Contenders"

by Nathaniel R

Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay and I created this annual panel at Middleburg together (I named it!) and now we're a regular event early in the morning at the beginning of each fest.  The new venue, outside in a tent, is a big improvement over our initially cozy but cramped space while the crowd is the (wonderful) same. Here are highlights from the public discussion this morning as well as the private discussions before and after the event (it all blurs together at film festivals which are so social)...

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