Oscar Chart Updates: Supporting Categories

by Nathaniel R

While both Best Actress and Best Actor (recently discussed here and here) appear to have furious volatile competitions for the anxiety-provoking fifth slots, is the same true in the Supporting categories? 

Click to read more ...

Oscar Chart: Best Supporting Actor's potential spoilers

by Nathaniel R

We live in fear of a Jared Leto nomination. Do you?

When we last dove deep into Best Supporting Actor just over a month ago it felt like there were 10-20 contenders still in the conversation. Sadly once the critics began to throw their weight entirely behind just two contender (Kodi Smit-McPhee in The Power of the Dog and Troy Kotsur in CODA) and the Globes and the Critics Choice came up with almost identical lists  (Kodi + Troy + Ciaran Hinds and Jamie Dornan from Belfast) the race began to look unlike a race at all but more of a slow waiting game until the Oscar nominations which are still five weeks away.

Is there reason to hope for the race to widen again? We'd like to think so...

Click to read more ...

Review: "Nightmare Alley" only in theaters

by Matt St Clair

Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s anticipated follow-up to The Shape of Water, is quite a risk for the Oscar-winning auteur. Del Toro ditches the phantasmic monsters he’s known for in favor of human monstrosity, the beasts within all of us that drive our carnal needs. As with the original 1947 noir, Nightmare Alley is an exemplary exercise on the folly of man and what happens when the line between man and beast becomes blurred. 

The main anti-hero who toes that line is Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a carny with a knack for manipulating people. His subjects include fellow carny and eventual love interest/accomplice Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara), Paul Krumbein (David Strathairn) and his fortune teller wife Zeena (Toni Collette), and a wealthy fearsome widower Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins). Cooper's piercing eyes and bewildering smile make him a perfect casting fit for the manipulative con man. He is a man of few words which is just as well; the words when they come are lies and deceit. It is in Cooper’s expressive face where we see Stan’s constant fear of his troubled past resurfacing...

Click to read more ...

Best Supporting Actor is unusually confusing for mid-November!

by Nathaniel R

19 of the Oscar hopefuls in this category

If you've been reading The Film Experience for more than a year you already know that we do our best to avoid the typical Punditry habit of giving out Oscar statues before nominations are even announced. That's the super gross reductive part of Punditry and its far more exciting (and generous) to focus on who might and who should be nominated. Every once in a while the awards gods will comply and throw us a truly confusing race. Such is the case with Best Supporting Actor this season.

Depending on how you look at it there are anywhere from 10-20 contenders still in play and this is just the way we like it...

Click to read more ...

Will Smith is the Best Actor frontrunner. But who else is coming to that party?

by Nathaniel R

While the Best Supporting Actress race, discussed yesterday (and chart updated), is a little fuzzy and possibly volatile with major performances still left to screen, Best Actor is feeling more or less concrete in terms of available possibilities. Mind you, the cement is still wet.

THE FRONTRUNNERS
Two time nominee Will Smith (King Richard) and one-time nominee Benedict Cumberbatch (Power of the Dog) have the early lead. Both films are widely screened and well liked and both roles are actorly showcases.  Major stardom does a lot of footwork in building Oscar traction; they both have that advantage, too. But who will join them?

Click to read more ...