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?
Friday, November 15, 2019 at 8:14PM 
As you may know I recently started a podcast series about the films of Cate Blanchett, my favorite actor. Seven episodes in I thought I'd share with you some observations that I discovered talking with my guests - who include critics you know and like from this site - about her career...
Tuesday, November 12, 2019 at 5:39PM Between this hard-to-miss Variety ad and her recent campaign flex, reprising "Red" from Us at a haunted house, Lupita Nyong'o's Best Actress dream doesn't feel so far-fetched does it? Are you starting to be convinced that her second nomination could happen? We're getting there.
Horror is a great genre for actresses, as Jason's column often reminds us, but when it comes to Oscar nominations for the genre, they only happen if the movie was a huge hit (think The Sixth Sense, The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, etcetera). Us has got that part covered, too, since it's the only original film to secure a spot in the box office top ten of 2019 which is otherwise full of spin-offs and sequels.
Sunday, November 3, 2019 at 9:47PM with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R
Index (60 minutes)
00:01 Murtada's New Fest jury duty
03:00 Martin Scorsese's The Irishman and why it should have been called I Heard You Paint Houses. Thoughts on the running time, Thelma Schoonmaker's editing, the de-aging visuals, and the performances of Anna Paquin, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino. And a trend in 2019: directors revisiting their favourite themes reflectively this year: Scorsese, Almodóvar, and Tarantino
23:30 The Best Supporting Actor Oscar race: Pacino versus Brad Pitt? Plus tangents about Marriage Story, Ford V Ferrari, Dolemite is My Name, Just Mercy and Honey Boy
43:00 Best Actor and Best Director races and what The Irishman's true competition is
50:00 Terminator Dark Fate and Harriet
57:45 The Best Actress race - is Cynthia in?
READ: A thoughtful positive review of Harriet from K Austin Collins
SHARE: Two tweets we mention...
Harriet is not my favorite film of the year but if you gave hours of your life to see Darkest Hour and The Theory of Everything, you have time for a Harriet Tubman movie.
— Murtada Elfadl (@ME_Says) October 29, 2019
TERMINATOR DARK FATE not giving us an ass shot of Gabriel Luna (the first time traveller not to get one in the franchise) is homophobia. pic.twitter.com/5bR2hgcxGl
— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) October 23, 2019
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
