Team Experience: Personal Favorite Oscar Nods

While I update the charts I asked the team to share their single favorite Oscar nomination of the day. And I hope you'll pick a single nomination to praise in the comments to. What most delighted you?

And now the favorite things hoopla begins... 

Mad Max: Fury Road - Best Picture
Back in May, critics and cinephiles, myself included, fell in love with Mad Max: Fury Road. It wasn’t just lust or infatuation. It was the kind of love that breeds doubt that others could see in the movie what we saw. Perhaps for that reason, a chorus of moans immediately went up about how not only is the Academy so often forgetful of Spring films, but that Mad Max was probably too fun, too action-y, too daring, hell, too feminist, for the academy to acknowledge it come Oscar season. Then, over the course of the summer, it didn’t even become the blockbuster many expected it would. Domestically speaking, it barely recouped its $150 million budget. (That may sound like a lot, but in the summer of “gigantosauri,” as Mark Harris called it, it was runtish.) How wonderful then today, to see a movie as exciting as it is smart get its due. - Kyle Stevens

Lenny Abrahamson, Room - Best Director
Every moment is so carefully considered. His touch is so gentle that he earns every tear he's coaxed out of us by patiently setting up character and context. He makes Room feel so big and the real world so oppressively small. You can feel that the film was constructed by someone with a deep well of compassion and a profound understanding of what presentation the story demands to impact us. I had hoped that he could make it in, but so rarely does the director's branch award solid quiet observation. - Chris Feil  

more after the jump... 

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Surprises Abound for the PGA Nominations

Chris here. In addition to the Art Directors Guild earlier in the morning, today the Producers Guild of America announced their feature film nominations, and we have some surprises.

The omissions included Carol (take a breath, everyone) and Room, both also left out from the ADG nominations. We may be passionate fans of Carol around these parts, but the miss here is a sign that our pony still has to capitalize on its momentum to continue in the race. Room on the other hand is a tiny, non-American produced film that was probably overestimated to show up in a group that has leaned populist enough nominate the likes of Star Trek and Skyfall.

Speaking of blockbuster candidates, The Force Awakens also missed out here. While thought to potentially upset here, the franchise's Oscar hopes can now likely be put to bed for major categories. Here are our nominees:

The Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Motion Picture

• The Big Short
• Bridge of Spies
• Brooklyn
• Ex Machina
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• The Martian
• The Revenant
• Sicario
• Spotlight
• Straight Outta Compton

The biggest surprises are Ex Machina and Sicario, also surprising at the ADG - are you sensing a trend? While they are not major Best Picture threats for the Oscar race, their place here shows passionate support brewing and certainly raises their profile. Straight Outta Compton, whose ensemble was recognized by SAG, is one of the bigger financial successes here and a nice nod to Universal's outstanding year at the box office.

Check after the jump for who got the biggest boost...

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Review: Anomalisa

Tim here. The biggest strength of Anomalisa is that it's the most prominent, prestigious animated feature made in the U.S. for an exclusively adult audience in ages and ages. Since Fritz the Cat, probably; maybe even of all time. The film is the brainchild of Charlie Kaufman, who initially wrote it as an audio-driven stageplay performed by the same cast as the movie; he turned it into a stop-motion feature with the help of co-director Duke Johnson, a veteran of the dark Adult Swim satire Moral Orel. Oddly, it's perhaps the least outré film of Kaufman's career, despite being animated. Or maybe it's exactly the dirty trick of the movie that Kaufman's most ruthlessly realistic story ever would also be the one that is the least objectively "real" of all of them.

That story centers on Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a melancholy author traveling to Cincinnati to give the keynote speech at a conference for customer service representatives. Michael is not a happy man, a fact omnipresent in every facet of the film, from Thewlis's perfectly drained line deliveries, those of a man who could do with a good cry and is too tired even for that, to the painfully bland color palette of the film. [More...]

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The Animated Feature contenders: Regular Show: The Movie

Tim here. Our tour of the films submitted for this year's Best Animated Feature Oscar now takes us to the most obscure American-made film on the list, Regular Show: The Movie. It's a spin-off of an absurdist Cartoon Network series – that is, absurdist even by the standards of Cartoon Network – which was given the tiniest whisper of a theatrical release to ensure the publicity of articles like this one. So, a success!

The film has the freaked-out energy of a kid on a sugar rush, and assembles its plot in roughly as coherent a manner: in the future, talking raccoon Rigby (William Salyers) and talking bluebird Mordecai (director & series creator J.G. Quintel), formerly best friends, are on opposite sides of a galactic war to stop a rift in the space-time continuum for devouring all of existence. The only way to do this is for a mortally wounded Rigby to travel back to the present, where his younger self and younger Mordecai are working a dead-end job as park groundskeepers. And they have go back even further, to high school, where Rigby told a lie that kicked-off the creation of a broken time machine that led to that same rift in space-time. [More...]

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The Animated Feature contenders: Boy and the World

Tim here, to spread the Good News about the best animated feature of 2015. Though for everybody in the U.S. outside of New York and Los Angeles, it's not coming until 2016, and anyway it first premiered in 2013. The point being, this weekend marks the Oscar-qualifying release of Boy and the World, an astonishing, crazily inventive, unnervingly thoughtful fable from Brazil and the hands of director/animator Alê Abreu.

It's a wholly idiosyncratic vision of childhood and globalization, and a film with no clear target audience - there's nothing kid-unfriendly here, but I also can't imagine a kid understanding any of what's going on. Nevertheless the self-selecting population of adults willing to watch a cartoon that looks for all the world like a video for pre-schoolers is in for a rare treat.

more after the jump...

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