Tuesday, November 26, 2019 at 7:45PM by Nathaniel R
It’s strange to be entering an Oscar season where the Best Actor competition *might* be more thrilling than the Best Actress race. This never happens. At least not to us here at TFE where actresses are sacred and actors are, um, glorified seat-fillers...
Sunday, November 24, 2019 at 11:32AM 
Shortly after updating the Best Supporting Actress chart and placing Kathy Bates in the mix for Richard Jewell, one of our SAG Nominating Committee friends sent us this image. SURPRISE. Kathy Bates is campaigning as a lead at SAG.
Longtime awards obsessives will already know this but for newbies to the intricacies of awards season you should know that SAG voters do not have a choice where they place actors. They can only vote on them in the categories for which they've officially been submitted by the studios (same with Emmy voters). Occassionally SAG and Oscar campaign tactics are different, studios changed their mind, or errors are made by administrative types so people nominated in lead at SAG occassionally go on to win supporting acting Oscars (Benicio del Toro in Traffic / Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind) or go from being a supporting nominee at SAG to a leading player with Oscar (Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider / Kate Winslet in The Reader).
How will this all shake out?
Saturday, November 23, 2019 at 1:19PM We will finish the Oscar chart updates this weekend We will finish the Oscar chart updates this weekend We will finish the Oscar chart updates this weekend We will finish the Oscar chart updates this weekend We will finish the Oscar chart updates this weekend We will fin
There's a ton of movement on the new Best Supporting Actress Oscar prediction chart. Laura Dern and Jennifer Lopez might be all locked up but that's for nominations, the win is still very much anyone's game. Florence Pugh has been gaining momentum with Little Women more heavily screening now and the fact that she takes a well worn familiar character and suddenly makes her freshly fascinating. The Academy would never touch MidSommar but enthusiasm for her leading performance there in critical quarters doesn't exactly hurt her prestige factor since she's still a relative lesser known in Hollywood. Meanwhile in the Oscar darling realms of voting, early screenings of Richard Jewell in Los Angeles have prompted suspicion that Kathy Bates might finally be back in an Oscar lineup (it's been 17 years since her comic turn in About Schmidt brought her her third and to date final nod). Perhaps we shouldn't have plopped her right into the lineup so soon but if we have misjudged we'll adjust next week after screening the picture.
Also rising in the charts this time: 75 year-old newbie Zhao Shuzhen (The Farewell), Oscar winner Octavia Spencer (Luce), and fresh revelation Taylor Russell (Waves) who all netted important Spirit nominations this week.
Friday, November 22, 2019 at 7:51AM Apologies for the sparse posting the past couple of days we've been buried in screenings & events and the like. I'm currently obsessing about five things...
1) How wrong I was assuming the character of Amy could not be the MVP of any iteration of Little Women (hi, Florence!) so our SAG screening guest was correct.
2) Potential trickery in the Original / Adapted screenplay placements with Ford v Ferrari attempting a Gangs of New York 'no, we're an original! a category in which they have virtually no chance of scoring... (so what is the campaign reasoning? Bizarre) and The Two Popes attempting a 'never mind that play the screenwriter wrote, we're an original)
3) TODD PHILLIPS DIRECTING STYLE ON JOKER WHICH IS THE MOVIE EQUIVALENT OF CAPS LOCK FOR AN ENTIRE DOCUMENT.
4) How we're seeing Glenn Close on the campaign trail tonight stumping for Jonathan Pryce in The Two Popes and how lovely that is that she is undeterred by her own horrible recent loss and right back out there.
5) We've updated Picture / Director / Screenplay / Actor and Supporting Actor Oscar charts but we know you're just waiting for the ladies and we'll do them tomorrow!
Friday, November 15, 2019 at 6:15PM All Oscar charts are being updated over the next four days but we started with Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor because there are so many questions haunting us. So go ahead and answer the following quandaries if you can...?
1. Can Tom Hanks finally break his strange Oscar curse?
Before anyone had seen A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood he was a lock "on paper" in Best Actor. But the movie turned out to not be a biopic at all but something far more creative and we'd argue more successful than a biopic would have been, in which Mr. Rogers is more of a symbol and catalyst for another man's journey. It's a gorgeous movie but the switcheroo from expectations to reality will likely throw some Oscar voters as well as general moviegoers. Hanks has been delivering better performances of late than the kind he used to win Oscars for but AMPAS hasn't nominated him in 19 years. Should we expect that they'll continue that "you already got yours" cold shoulder rather than be predicting him?
