Venice: Danny Boyle Returns with "Ink"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

We live in such a dark age of media, information, conflict and geopolitics that even Rupert Murdoch doesn't seem quite so evil anymore. Or at least his evilness now comes with a why, a when, a where, and all the other Ws clearly attached. It's paradoxical, considering that Ink opens with Murdoch trying to professionally seduce Jack O'Connell's Larry Lamb into becoming the editor of the least serious newspaper on Fleet Street, the heart of the British press back in 1969. (Murdoch is played by Guy Pearce who, after The Brutalist, apparently has become the go-to guy for tycoons who want to own talented people as if they were property.) Lamb tells Murdoch that, of the five Ws, "'Why' is the least important": sometimes there is no why behind what happens, and even when there is, not giving readers one makes it possible to rerun a story forever.

Lamb and Murdoch's power struggle is at the center of a movie that feels like the ideal follow-up to Boyle's little-loved Steve Jobs, another biopic full of shades of morally gray about a powerful mediatic figure...

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Nathaniel's Best Supporting Actress Ballot

by Nathaniel R

Da'Vine Joy Randolph owns the Best Supporting Actress party. She brought baked goods and "it".

Dearest readers, imagine my terror when I realized this morning that it was just one week until the Oscars. That's the deadline to finish the Film Bitch Awards (at least in the Oscar-parallel categories). So let's have our final pre-Oscar discussion about Best Supporting Actress, mine and theirs... 

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Oscar Volley: the still bonkers-crowded Supporting Actress race

Here are Baby Clyde and Mark Brinkerhoff to discuss TFE's favorite category, Best Supporting Actress:

Jessie Buckley in WOMEN TALKING

MARK:  Happiest season, to all who celebrate! I love a supporting actress smackdown, in real time, don’t you?This is a blood bath, to be sure, although one thing I’m fairly certain of: There will be someone from  Women Talking and  Everything Everywhere All at Once. At this point, I’d say Claire Foy and/or Jessie Buckley and Jamie Lee Curtis and/or Stephanie Hsu could even form the bulk of the lineup.  Curtis definitely is gunning for it—will she be the third veteran, overdue actress in as many years (after Amanda Seyfried and Kirsten Dunst) to find herself finally nominated in supporting?. If Everything Everywhere All At Once overperforms, that could augur well for Hsu. (Wouldn’t it be something if we got four actors in a single film nominated again this year after The Power of the Dog did it just last year?)

My hunch is we’re likely to see a majority of first-timers in this category, which is always exciting...

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Almost There: Claire Foy in "First Man"

by Cláudio Alves

For a film to get two nominations in the Best Supporting Actress category isn't especially rare. Several titles vie for that double spot this year, though Women Talking appears to be most likely to succeed. Jessie Buckley was nominated for The Lost Daughter last season and feels poised to nab a second consecutive honor, while Claire Foy has the other juiciest role. Moreover, this isn't the first time the British actress made famous by The Crown has been a significant player in the Oscar race. Early in the 2018 awards season, she appeared to be a near-lock for her work in Damien Chazelle's First Man, wherein the actress played a variation on AMPAS' favorite stock character – the stalwart wife to "a great man" of history. 

As Women Talking is gracing theaters with a new buzzy Foy performance and Chazelle's First Man follow-up Babylon is almost upon us, let's look at her work in the Neil Armstrong biopic…

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Best Supporting Actress is wide open!

by Nathaniel R

Image © A24

While we can be reasonably certain who the major players are in Best Actress and Best Actor (both charts updated), can we really know about Supporting Actress yet? With Michelle Williams having vacated the Supporting Actress race it feels truly like anyone's Oscar to grab this coming March. But do we really even know who is competing? No, we do not! The shortlist also feels wide open with no locks as of yet. So here is where we are right now and where we might be heading...

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