Best Picture, Black-and-White Edition

by Cláudio Alves

Ever since NEON released a black-and-white version of Parasite during the awards season's peak, we've begun a tradition here at The Film Experience of looking the Best Picture nominees each year, and trying to imagine what they'd look like devoid of color. Naturally, we'll never know that since making a black-and-white movie is much more complex than simply turning the saturation to zero. Matters of design and lighting are involved, as are other elements of pre and post-production. Still, it's fun to peruse movies in search of striking imagery. But of course, beyond personal amusement, there's another component to this exercise…

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SAG Predictions!

Look at this table! If this is not just placeholders but actual seating this table is going to get a lot of camera time with Squid Game, Gaga & Salma from House of Gucci, Will Smith and Jessica Chastain. Plus White Lotus's Alexandra Daddario, and Ms Lifetime Achievement Helen Mirren. The ceremony airs live this Sunday February 27, 2022, 8:00 PM EST on TNT and TBS and again at 11 PM for an encore if you missed the earlier broadcast. Okay! Predictions after the jump...

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Best Supporting Actor - "How'd he get nominated?"

by Nathaniel R

The Best Supporting Actor Chart now contains a ton more information and a poll which you can vote on daily. If you fused all these men into one Oscar-Nominee they'd be a 6' tall 49 year-old veteran character actor with 41 films under their belt and experiencing their first career nomination thanks to the help of a female director. Incredibly the majority of this acting lineup was directed by a woman -- an Oscar first...

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Oscar Volley: Adapted Screenplay - a wealth of good choices, but will the Academy make the right ones?

The Oscar volleys continue. Today Lynn Lee, Mark Brinkerhoff, and Eurocheese sound off on this year’s Adapted Screenplay race.

a wealth of options for Oscar voters

Lynn: Gentlemen, I don’t know about you, but from where I’m standing, Adapted Screenplay is an embarrassment of riches this year. There are at least three contenders that tackle the incredibly difficult task of illuminating their characters’ inner lives and psychology (The Power of the Dog, Passing, and The Lost Daughter) with minimal to no voice-over narration and they all do it brilliantly. Then there are the play adaptations – everything from Shakespeare via Coen (The Tragedy of Macbeth) to Shakespeare / Sondheim / Laurents via Kushner (West Side Story) to Jonathan Larson via Lin-Manuel Miranda (tick, tick …BOOM!) to Stephen Karam doing Stephen Karam (The Humans) – where each manages to pull off a bold departure from previous iterations while retaining basic fidelity to the source text. And then there’s my personal favorite, Drive My Car, which manages to be at once an ambitious expansion of a Murakami short story and a spectacularly moving adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at once.

That said, we can’t realistically expect most Oscar voters to be familiar with the underlying material for these screenplays. It’s a safer bet the nominations will align pretty closely with the Best Picture nominees or almost-nominees that don’t have original screenplays...

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Team Experience SAG Reactions: Happy Thoughts, Outrageous Snubs, and Table-Lust

by Nathaniel R

After the SAG nominations I polled the team on six questions about the SAG nominations. One of them gets its own post (being a big topic we'll be discussing for some time still). But here are the general reactions to the other five questions from love to loathing to which OUTSTANDING CAST table we'd like to sit at...

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