FYC: Michael Stuhlbarg for "Call Me By Your Name"

by Chris Feil

It’s the final day of Oscar voting before the nominations are announced before the nominations are announced on Tuesday January 23! Who knows if most Oscar voters have their nomination ballots in or not, but that doesn’t stop the rest of us from screaming last moment FYC hosannas for the procrastinators that mights be listening. My last minute plea would be for one performance that I find shocking to have received so little traction over the season: Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name...

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Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Name the "Best" Film and TV of the Year

by Nathaniel R

The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association (aka GALECA) have announced their annual Dorian Award nominations. We thought we'd share the list here since a few of us at Team Experience are members. Though you might feel like I determined the nominees singlehandedly (PFEIFFER ALERT !!!) I am but one vote among many so I'm relieved that other voters chose the perpfect thing, while voting.

Perhaps it's no surprise that Call Me By Your Name led the nominees with 9 votes. Shape of Water was close behind with 7 nods. What was a surprise was 5 nominations for the still wildly underseen French drama BPM (Beats Per Minute) already shunned by Oscar in the category it should have been frontrunning in. 

I personally don't vote in every category, abstaining from the ones I feel are most problematic (does anyone actually agree on what "camp" means in 2018?) or in categories where I feel like I have not seen enough (like documentary though I love almost all the nominees they named this year in that category.)  The list with a few notes is after the jump...

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Will "Call Me By Your Name" Be Ignored by Oscar?

The following article was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. It's reprinted here with some updates... 

Though you might feel like you’ve been hearing “Oscar buzz” for months, it’s always good to be reminded that timetables are askew and “buzz” is a lot faster/noisier than the real thing. Academy members don’t actually start filling out their nomination ballots until Friday morning!

They’ll have one week to determine which movies and performances are in the running for the industry’s most coveted golden statues. Each year some adult-oriented movies risk going wide without Oscar’s blessing while others lay in wait, banking on Oscar favor to help sell them to a wider audience. One of the pictures that’s trying the lay-low-until-Oscar game is the gay coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name. Though it’s been in theaters for six weeks it still hasn’t expanded past major markets and is only on 115 screens (stateside) at this writing. It’s poised to become either one of the biggest Oscar players or one of the most “snubbed”. So this seems as good a time as any to share some anxiety about it...

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Soundtracking: The Best Musical Moments of 2017

Chris here. This past summer I started a series here at The Film Experience called Soundtracking that takes a deeper look at music in the movies. I hope you've loved reading (and listening) along!

2017 proved an appropriate year to start this musical exploration as brilliantly used tracks kept showing up in movies and television shows. Even some things that I didn't care for (Baby Driver, sorry) or missed entirely (Twin Peaks, sorry) proved that music is another storytelling tool that can define a narrative in interesting ways. Even films like The Florida Project and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 gave us memorable needle drops! Before Soundtracking brings a close to its first film year with full pieces on I, Tonya and Call Me By Your Name in the next two weeks, let's take a look at the best musical moments of TV and Film of the past year...

Top 5 TV Musical Moments...

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Cinematic Inverses: Beach Rats and Call Me By Your Name

by Dancin' Dan

It's the time of year where we're all playing catch-up with everything we missed in theaters. This prepares us for that most sacred of cinephile traditions: End-of-year list-making!

I had heard a lot of good things about Eliza Hittman's Beach Rats when it was released in theaters late this summer, but I wasn't able to catch it. But nothing I had heard about it prepared me for what I found. Beach Rats is nothing if not the inverse of the acclaimed (and currently playing) Call Me By Your Name; nearly everything in one is the opposite of the other.

It starts with our protagonists, Harris Dickinson's Frankie and Timothée Chalamet's Elio. Both are possessed of a certain amount of self-confidence but even more self-doubt...

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