(You're Gonna) Love it Again - Rocketman!

by Nathaniel R

Kudos to Paramount to beating the Rocketman drums again with a screening and performance in Los Angeles yesterday. Early releases require this sort of care and attention from their home studios, come awards season. Rocketman emerged in the giant shadow of Bohemian Rhapsody this past May, and though it is vastly superior to the Queen picture in every way, shadows are shadows and sometimes they obscure the light...

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Halfway Mark: Best of 2019 (Thus Far)

by Nathaniel R

 
Let's wrap up the midyear review now with a general overview and behind the scenes beauty. Please don't consider this list 'official' awards since the back half of the year is usually more impressive than the first half due to annoying Oscar-focused distribution patterns. The point, nevertheless, is an important one: we should always be appreciating art and keeping lists so we don't forget delights that opened in non-awards season months like most awards voters do. 

TEN BEST MOVIES

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"(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again"

The race for Best Original Song nominations at the Oscars is just beginning. Here's Elton John and Taron Egerton singing what we assume is the end credits song for Rocketman. It was written specifically for the biopic. And a week before this film premieres we'll hear two new songs in Disney's live-action remake of Aladdin...

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Howard Keel Centennial: "Calamity Jane"

We're celebrating musical star Howard Keel's Centennial this week. Here's Tim Brayton...

Presenting a musical in which Howard Keel plays the obnoxious gunslinger love interest to a famous woman from the Wild West. My apologies if you feel a little bit of déjà vu from that logline: Nathaniel did, after all, just write about Keel's breakout performance in 1950's Annie Get Your Gun, about which every word of that sentence equally applies. And that's absolutely no accident. Warner Bros. had fought to get the rights to that stage musical as a vehicle for its up-and-coming singing star Doris Day, but lost out to MGM. When that film proved to be a hit, Warner's responded by developing an original Western musical based - oh so very loosely - on the life of Calamity Jane, famous frontierswoman and scout.

So eager was the studio to recreate that Annie magic that they even went to the trouble of borrowing Keel from MGM for the span of this one production. Not that you could tell any of this just by looking at 1953's Calamity Jane...

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April Foolish Predictions #2: Music and Sound Categories

[drumroll] It's Time! Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions have begun.

Ad Astra was supposed to be out next month but rumors are that it's not finished yet

First we looked at Animated Features and now we turn our attention to the Sound categories. It's rather perverse to do them second and here's why: Original Songs and Original Scores are among the last things we have confirmed each year. Technically speaking you can wait until your whole film is nearly complete before adding a score or commissioning an original song. It's not always wise to wait of course since songs, especially, can be more effective if they're woven in and some directors prefer to work with some idea of what the score will be like while they're editing. Nevertheless there is much that's completely unknown about this film year in terms of its music...

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