"The Two Popes" rising...

by Nathaniel R

"I have four more Oscars nominations than you. I've also won!"

Yours truly is still trying to get back into the swing of daily life after the always delightful Middleburg Film Festival. At the conclusion of the festival, the votes were counted and The Two Popes emerged as the Audience Award winner. You may recall that Green Book won that prize just last year before it went on to very leggy box office (final international tally $321.7 million on only a $23 million budget) and the Best Picture Oscar win.

The Two Popes is a less controversial crowd-pleaser and surely an Oscar nomination threat for two categories...

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Best Picture / Director Oscar chart updates !

by Nathaniel R

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...

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Oscar Predictions for August Complete!

It only took three days to revamp all the charts. Woohoo. Have a looksie.

In this mass overhaul we have major gains for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Farewell, naturally, since both have proven themselves with critics and at the box office already. Experiencing small gains are The Irishman and Just Mercy (now that they're officially going to be premiering this year), The Lighthouse and 1917 (after their stunning teases), and Judy (sigh). Small losses were incurred by Harriet (after a somewhat generic trailer) and The Report (given Amazon's sudden cold feet about regular theatrical exposure for their films). Films tumbling downward since our April Foolish wild guesswork include The Good Liar, Ford v Ferrari, and The Goldfinch (though we're definitely looking forward to two of those).

We've also added documentary predictions for the first time this year though this is still blindfolded guesswork since we won't know what's actually eligible and long-listed for quite some time still. 

 All Pages
INDEX | PICTURE   | DIRECTOR |
ACTRESS | ACTOR | SUPP ACTRESS |
SUPP ACTOR | SCREENPLAY  |
FOREIGN FILM | ANIMATION, DOCS |
VISUALS | SOUND

The New Classics - The Hurt Locker

Michael Cusumano here to look back on one of the few classics about the Iraq War on the 10th anniversary of its release. 

Scene: The Daisy Chain Bomb
When Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker hit theaters in the Summer of 2009 it was sold as an all-thrills, zero-politics experience. Here, the ads promised, was a film that wasn’t going to go all Valley of Elah on you with ponderous anti-war messages. The trio of soldiers that make up the film’s central bomb disposal unit never discuss politics. They defuse the bombs, they don’t get to hung up on why they are there in the first place. At no point do any of them sigh during a low moment and wonder, “Man, I don’t even know what we’re doing here...”

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50th Anniversary: "Midnight Cowboy"

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Gay pride month is nearly upon us, so what better time to revisit Midnight Cowboy, the first LGBT-related Best Picture Oscar winner, which arrived in theaters 50 years ago this week. It remains, incidentally, the only X-rated film (for “homosexual frame of reference" and its "possible influence upon youngsters”) ever to win the Academy’s top award. 

Centering on Joe Buck, a wannabe hustler from Texas who finds himself entirely out of his depth in the big city (New York, that is), Midnight Cowboy succeeds poignantly, in the words of its director, as an “exploration of loneliness.” It also doubles as — and doubles down on — disastrous toxic masculinity: how men often are conditioned to (mis)treat others, not to mention themselves, as disposable, degradable objects of disaffection. 

In this ambling story, callousness reigns supreme, with humanity increasingly lost in the constant shuffle, on the streets of Manhattan...

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