Team Experience Awards 2018: Our Favourites

by staff

We couldn't let the Oscar season go without our team of writers giving you our 7th annual Team Experience Awards (Nathaniel doesn't vote on these but his Film Bitch Awards will resume in a couple of days). We've given ourselves some time to catch up to 2018's offerings and as a result we have some fun surprises in store for our ballot! This year our Best Film goes to Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite, one of the six prizes we've given it of thirteen total nominations. Next behind is Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk with nine mentions, and then the love is spread pretty wide elsewhere with Roma, Hereditary, BlacKkKlansman, and Can You Ever Forgive Me? doing well among nominations.

Best Picture

1. The Favourite
2. If Beale Street Could Talk
   
3. Roma
   
4. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
5. Hereditary
   
6. BlacKkKlansman
   
7. Widows
   
8. Annihilation
   
9. First Man
   
10. We the Animals

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Watch at Home: Eighth Grade & Old Man and the Gun

What's newly available for home viewing? Herewith a quick survey of new releases andgreat deals

DVD/Blu-Ray
• Halloween -  Jamie Lee Curtis returns to battle her star-making demons in this monster hit
• Madeline's Madeline - While it wasn't quite an arthouse hit, this experimental film has obsessive fans. 
• Mid90s -Jonah Hill's directorial debut
• Monsters & Men - John David Washington is up for a Spirit Award for his supporting role in this well reviewed race drama
• Old Man and the Gun - Robert Redford charms, and Sissy Spacek and Casey Affleck provide soulful support in this mellow but pleasing bank robbery movie...

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Blueprints: FYC, Adapted Screenplays

In this week's Blueprints, Jorge Molina looks into five adapted scripts that should be featured n the awards conversation. If you missed the Original Screenplay FYCs, they're here. 

While Original Screenplays tends to be where usually the Academy rewards more unconventional stories, the adapted screenplay category carries with it an air of respectability and prestige. Maybe it’s because it usually involves translation from a literary medium, respected novels or award winning plays. Maybe it’s because adaptations carry a built-in audience, something Hollywood values. Adapted screenplays have the advantage of arriving with an already fully formed and sometimes familiar story. But translating that into a cinematic medium is one of the hardest tasks for a writer: making the verbal into visual, compressing dozens of chapters into a two-hour story, learning what to leave in, what to take out, what to add or change.

Here are five screenplays that each took a previously published piece and turned it into an engaging, engrossing and cinematic experience....

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Toni Collette, Ethan Hawke, and "Roma" Conquer Chicago

The Chicago Film Critics Association held their annual dinner Saturday evening and named Roma Best Film of the year and handed it four other prizes to underline the point.  The Favourite, First Reformed, and If Beale Street Could Talk each picked up two prizes. The complete list of winners is after the jump...

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Lynn Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Lynn Lee..

In many ways, 2018 – like the two preceding years, only even more so – has felt like a nauseating carnival ride that I, for one, would like to stop and get off.  But the one welcome constant was always having something genuinely engaging to watch and, in the best cases, elevate my feelings on the state of the world and humanity. 

In that spirit, here are some of the many things I’m thankful for:

• The electrifying last 15 minutes of Nanette, wherein Hannah Gadsby turned stand-up comedy into something else altogether – and left our collective jaw on the floor.

• Daveed Diggs – so good in Hamilton, even better in the riveting and underrated Blindspotting.

• The shimmer in Natalie Portman’s and Oscar Isaac’s eyes at the end of Annihilation, one of the most bonkers and most unexpectedly rewarding films of 2018...

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