Campaign flex - Lupita comes on strong

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. 

Podcast: The Irishman, Terminator Dark Fate, and Oscar Buzz

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? 

I Heard Scorsese Paints Houses

100 days til Oscar

It's exactly 100 days until the 92nd Academy Awards. What amazing Oscar record would you scream "100%!" at?

Our answer: Vivien Leigh's two-for-two Best Actress wins (Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire) both monumental pieces of lead acting, but in different modes though both characters are iconic Southern Belles. The first win was an A+ screen presence triumph, the epitome of a "star turn" or 'star is born' movie-movie event. The latter win was for the kind of exquisitely nuanced, passionate depth to a gloriously meaty part that only actors of that caliber are able to achieve. TFE is here for Leigh both times without question. Usually two Oscar wins can feel excessive (when so many top notch actors never manage one) but not in this case.  

108 days til Oscar...

Did you know that there are said to be 108 pressure points in the human body? That number factors into many martial arts. In popular fiction you only need to hit five of them to cause instantaneous death. Movies reference this occassionally and most famously, to westerners at least, in Kill Bill Vol. 2, when The Bride slays her titular foe with the "five point palm exploding heart technique".

What are five pressure points Oscar voters have hit in their attempts to kill you? One of mine is skipping Uma Thurman for her most iconic role. Hell, I would've been tempted to give her the actual statue for Kill Bill Vol 1 -- that was such a weird Best Actress year (2003) so why not? 

50th Anniversary: Liza Minnelli in "The Sterile Cuckoo"

by Camila Henriques

Pookie Adams is one of a kind. When we first meet her, she’s on her way to college and is the type of quick witted character that could very well be the Adam’s rib to the Amy Sherman-Palladino girls we have loved for the past two decades. With her round glasses and pixie haircut, Liza Minnelli’s Pookie is easy to love in Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo. As the film turns 50 today (!), it’s magical to witness how  Judy and Vincente's offspring always had a sparkle of her own, capable of turning a manic pixie dream girl archetype into a layered character that rightfully earned her that first Oscar nod.

Liza was by no means a newcomer when The Sterile Cuckoo came out. A child of Hollywood, she famously grew up on hotels and movie sets and, at the age of 17, made her debut in an off-Broadway play and did a number of performances alongside mama Garland...

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