Gotham Award Winners & Favourite Cheekiness

The Gotham Awards proved a great night for multiple films, but especially for A24 who dominated the prizes with multiple awards for both First Reformed and Eighth Grade and even a Best Actress win for our beloved Toni Collette in Hereditary.  Not that other studios didn't get some attention. Sony Picture Classics nabbed a surprise win in the Best Feature category and Fox Searchlight's The Favourite got a lot of attention, given that it received essentially two special prizes with an Ensemble Award and a tribute to Rachel Weisz. Weisz brought her co-stars along in cutout form in the acceptance speech - love it! 

 The list of winners and a few notes are after the jump...

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The Spirit Award Nominations are Here

by Nathaniel R

Gemma Chan (Crazy Rich Asians) and former Spirit Award winner Molly Shannon (Other People) announced the Spirit nominations for the 2018 film year. No film truly dominated the announcement because, while We the Animals led with 5 nominations (YAYYYY) it wasn't nominated in the top category. Eighth Grade, First Reformed, and You Were Never Really Here each had 4 nominations. The highest profile expected contenders with not so great results this morning were BlacKkKlansman (only Adam Driver was recognized) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (the Screenplay and Richard E Grant only). 

so happy for this little gem!

An important note before the full list of nominees: Unlike other major awards bodies, film festival releases are (sometimes) eligible here, overseas films even if they're in english are (mostly) ineligible outside of foreign film, and anything over a $20 million budget is (usually) ineligible here, so the eligibility pool is slightly different. Some examples of 'not eligible' this year for those reasons are: The Hate U Give and Beautiful Boy (too expensive) The Rider (festivals and nominated last year), Roma and The Favorite (both foreign film only though The Favourite led the Gotham nods). The Spirit Awards has multiple nominating committees assigned to different categories. Even better they meet several times throughout the fall before selecting the nominees which is, we think, why the nominations sometimes have a better spread of titles (in terms of release dates) than the Oscars do.

The full list of nominees along with a few comments are after the jump...

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99¢: Boogie Nights, First Reformed, Heathers, A History of Violence

Heads up on these great deals for four truly awesome movies on iTunes. iTunes deals expire quickly so if you've always wanted to see or revisit any of these they're only 99¢ this week.

• First Reformed - The nomination leader at the Gotham Awards and we still think Ethan Hawke could nab a Best Actor Oscar nomination for it. 
• Boogie Nights - The film that made Paul Thomas Anderson famous, and delivered Julianne Moore 'the foxiest bitch in the whole world' her first Oscar nomination (which she should've won). 
• A History of Violence - David Cronenberg's masterful adaptation of a graphic novel nabbed two Oscar nominations for its screenplay and for William Hurt's late film curtain chewing but it started the season with lots more Oscar buzz. It should have been up for everything, especially the big four: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress. It did really well at our own Film Bitch Awards that year winning several medals including the gold for the frankly scorching sex scene between Viggo and Maria Bello in her all time best screen performance. 
• Heathers - 'Fuck me gently with a chainsaw...' it's the high school black comedy wherein Winona Ryder's  'teen-angst bullshit has a body count'.

Gotham Nominations: "The Favourite" and "First Reformed" Lead

by Nathaniel R

It's the first official awards announcement of the season! The Gotham Awards, the East Coast's answer to the Independent Spirit Awards, have announced their nominations with the palace intrigue tragicomedy The Favourite and the existential heavy drama of First Reformed sharing the lead with 3 matching honors each: Best Feature, Best Screenplay, and one acting citation (a special ensemble prize for the former and Ethan Hawke for the latter). One assumes that they'd have both been nominated for director, too, but one of the quirks of Gotham is that they don't have a Director category, only a category for brand new directors and we love the nominees there, especially Bo Burnham for Eighth Grade and Ari Aster for Hereditary. 

Other films receiving much needed good news since they were released before the fall glut and needed awards bodies to be reminded of them over the next few months: Leave No Trace, The Wife, Sorry to Bother You, and The Rider. The complete nominations and a few more comments after the jump...

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Bergman Centennial: Winter Light (1963) and the echo of First Reformed (2018)

Team Experience will be celebrating one of the world's most acclaimed auteurs for the next week for the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth. Here's Sean Donovan...

Perhaps none of Ingmar Bergman’s films do more to conjure clichés of what a ‘Bergman film’ is than 1963’s Winter Light. While Persona is undoubtedly the cinephile consensus choice for his best film, and The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries are his most widely-seen, frequently adorning college syllabi about the history of European cinema, the morose sadness for which his work became known feels most exemplarily expressed in Winter Light. The second part of a trilogy about “the silence of God” (starting out grim already), Winter Light’s infinite quiet, stark black-and-white cinematography, freezing cold exteriors, and tear-soaked monologues scream BERGMAN in capital letters. It’s strange viewing with which to start a hot summer weekday morning, but here we are. Though the severity of film that threatens to overwhelm you, it is my personal favorite of the Bergman canon, superbly acted and filmed with a brisk lightness that befits an auteur frequently in danger of getting weighed down in heavy-handedness. A freezing shot of aquavit on the rocks can knock you over and have you questioning the purpose of your life. 

Winter Light may be reaching new audiences this year as it has received a renewed relevancy from Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, an unofficial remake blatantly taking the premise and applying it to the contemporary United States...

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