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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Soundtracking: The 2018 Oscar Performances

by Chris Feil

Thank you Lady Gaga, all of the nominated Original Song performances were given a shot to perform on the Oscars! That "Shallow" leverage reportedly kept the ceremony as much of a musical night as possible. Sadly logistics kept us from getting a Kendrick Lamar and SZA performance of Black Panther's "All the Stars", but I found it frustrating that the producers didn't find some way to work the song into the telecast somehow. A montage needle drop, underscoring for the pre-commercial announcements, something?!

Even without Lamar (who also missed the Grammys), the night was a mostly solid salvage of Oscar musical tradition. It certainly fared better than some recent years, and also helped set variety and a pace for the night that otherwise felt a tad too amorphously rushed. A Star is Born's "Shallow" triumphed for the win as expected all season long, but what of the performances themselves? Time for a ranking!...

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Team Experience's Happy Gay Thoughts, Our Globe Reaction Finale.

Thank you for your robust comments on our the Golden Globe nominations, Globe snubs, and Vice/First Man nomination theorizing! Please do enjoy your weekend but it'll be busy here non-stop through the Oscar nominations so please check back in daily... or several times a day, bitches! To wrap up our Globe nomination reaction coverage, let's get happy and gay.

We asked friends and teammates at The Film Experience to share their giddiest thoughts and we hope you'll answer these final three questions, too. Here we go...

1. Which acting nomination were you most thrilled about?

DEBORAH LIPP: Alex Borstein 4Ever! I am here for any woman who appears on television in boxer shorts. 

MURTADA ELFADL: John David Washington because he is the real star born in 2018 and should be rewarded as such... 

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Soundtracking: FYC 5 Original Song Outliers

by Chris Feil

In lieu of a regular deep dive into the soundtrack of one film, Soundtracking is indulging in some For Your Consideration tracks before the season narrows down to a few contenders. Naturally, all of the talk for original songs this season has been gobbled up by A Star Is Born with some hopes being thrown towards the likes of Mary Poppins Returns, Black Panther, and even Radiohead's Thom Yorke for Suspiria. I'll unpack the field once Oscar reveals its shortlist on December 17 (remember that quiet news item that the Academy will be announcing song and score shortlists all at once along with such categories as visual effects?).

But the outsiders deserve some love too, so allow me to champion a few solid tracks...

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Showbiz History: Band-Aid and "Best Original Song" Behemoths

6 random things that happened on this day (Nov 25th) in showbiz history...

1932 Claudette Colbert infamously bathes in milk in Cecil B DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, new in theaters.

1947 The Hollywood Blacklist begins, denying employment to those with perceived Communist ties or sympathies. This period has haunted ever self-reflecting Hollywood since as witness in Trumbo, The Way We Were, Guilty by Suspicion, Good Night and Good Luck, and numerous other movies.

1984 Bob Geldolf's blockbuster charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" recorded in London...

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