Stage Door: "Teenage Dick" and "Boylesque Bullfight"

Stage Door is our intermittent theater column because there is more to live than cinema and also because cinema and the stage frequently interact...

Teenage Dick (Public Theater)
This very cheekily titled show -- so embarrassing to say or type! -- is actually Shakespearean. (What isn't when it comes to theater? We'd love playwrights and directors to leave Shakespeare behind for a few years and discover vast untapped realms, but they're all Bard addicts who perpetually need a fix.) If you're going to riff on the Bard, please have as much fun with it as Teenage Dick does! This comic interpretation of Richard III recast the disabled king as a teenager in hate with his boring high school and the jock star and Christian activist classmates he aims to take down via an upcoming student election...

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Box Office: Jumanji, Tonya, and the Oscar waiting game

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (Jan 5th-7th)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
1. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle  $36 (cum. $244.3)	1.🔺 I Tonya $2.4 on 242 screens (cum. $5.2)  REVIEW | GLOBE SURPRISE?
2. 🔺  Insidious The Last Key $29.2 (cum. $212.1)	2.🔺 The Post $1.7 on 36 screens (cum. $3.8) REVIEW | OSCAR KICK-OFF PODCAST
3. The Last Jedi $23.5 (cum. $572.5) LYNN'S REVIEW | NATHANIEL'S TAKE	3. Call Me By... $758k on 117 screens (cum. $6) REVIEWISH | SCREENPLAY | SEX
4. The Greatest Showman $13.8 (cum. $75.9) REVIEW | ZAC ATTACK | ZENDAYA	4.🔺 Hostiles $310k on 46 screens (cum. $435k)
5. Pitch Perfect 3 $10.2 (cum. $85.9) REVIEW	5.🔺 Along with the Gods $280k on 35 screens ($1.1)

One thing that we're always forcefully reminded of each holiday season -- since we tend to forget -- is that the whole world is not, in point of fact, thinking about Oscar buzz. Each year countless films casually ring up rather large box office returns without generating any "heat" in award season and some not even being part of that game. Insidious for example had the weekend to itself in terms of new wide releases and was rewarded for it. The Greatest Showman, is another one that isn't really banking on Oscar love. The musical's global gross has already doubled its budget (though given the P&A expenditures it's probably got some ways to go before a profit still)...

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Animated Feature, the April Foolish Oscar Predictions

If only Laika had waited until 2017 to release Kubo and the Two Strings -they might finally have won that elusive Oscar that almost always goes to Disney or Disney/Pixar.

Owen Wilson poses with a life size McQueen for "Cars 3"

As previously discussed this year's animated slate doesn't look too promising in terms of American studio features, and there's also a complete absence of stop motion features *sniffle* from abroad as far as we can tell. What's worse, the Academy's just-announced a rule change for voting on the animated features that might well make the category less penetrable for brilliant work from across the ocean. But we'll have to wait and see if our worst fears materialize.

First Oscar Predictions for 2017's Best Animated Feature

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