Links: French Exit, Barb and Star, and More...

• Sundays with Cate Murtada on Michelle Pfeiffer in French Exit which has finally been released
• ...TFE and my own take in case you're finally seeing the movie (which I'm hoping to watch again very soon now that I'm acclimated as a huge fan of the novel)
• Vogue on Pfeiffer's expensive wardrobe in the picture
• THR "Searching for Shelley Duvall" -someone we missed this profile from Seth Abrahamovitch. Duvall, who has been absent from the public eye for years and years talks with him about fleeing Hollywood and The Shining.
• AV Club revisiting a musical number from Muppets Treasure Island that speaks to the now “Cabin Fever”
•  Coming Soon speaking of musical numbers. A new musical animated short called “Us Again” will premiere before Disney’s Raya and teh Last Dragon in its theatrical run next month.

More after the jump including Bridgerton news, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Frankenstein movies, and yet another remake of The Three Musketeers...

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Beauty Break: Born on Christmas

MERRY CHRISTMAS. Listen, we can't do an "on this day in showbiz history" post for Christmas because approximately a trillion movies have opened on Christmas day over the years. It's traditionally the biggest moviegoing day of any year... or at least it was before COVID made movie theaters unavailable or scary. But what we can do is celebrate movie and tv stars who were gifts to their parents on Christmas day because there aren't too many of them. We were only going to highlight 5 legends but we ended up including 20 showbiz people because we are insane. Please enjoy the pretty people after the jump...

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It's "Two of Us" for France. With so many Oscar nods will they ever win again?

by Nathaniel R

In something of a surprise move, France has selected the lesbian seniors drama Deux  (or Two of Us) for Oscar submission rather than their higher profile titles Summer of '85 with its EFA director nomination or Cuties with its hot potato festival run and Netflix controversy. This suggests that Two of Us might do very well in a month or three at the César Awards but for now let's talk France and Oscar as there's a LOT to discuss.

France is of course a total powerhouse at the Oscars. The Best International Feature Film category has existed as a competitive category for 64 years (as of last season) and France has been nominated in 59% of those races.

What's more they've tried to factor in to the competition 100% of the time! In point of fact, France is the only country that's never skipped an Oscar submission year.

FRANCE'S OSCAR STATS and key submissions after the jump...

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The Furniture: "À Nous la Liberté" and Freedom from Industrial Design

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Once upon a time, the Oscars were in November! Well, thrice upon a time. The 3rd, 4th and 5th Academy Awards were held in the fall - the last of them on November 18th, 1932. Nathaniel covreed the biggest piece of trivia from that night earlier this morning. But there were also a few firsts, including the debut of the short film categories and the first-ever foreign-language nominee. René Clair’s À nous la liberté was nominated for Best Art Direction, an award it lost to a cruise ship comedy called Transatlantic.

But it’s Clair and art director Lazare Meerson who have the last laugh, as their losing film is now largely regarded as a classic and Transatlantic barely has a Wikipedia page. A nous la liberte is a charming little oddity, a musical comedy about the alienation inherent in modern industry. It opens in a prison, where cellmates Émile (Henri Marchand) and Louis (Raymond Cordy) are at work hand-carving toy horses. The cavernous space evokes the ominous architecture of the modern prison, its high balconies a reminder of constant surveillance...

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Chi Film Fest: "Summer of 85"

Coverage from the 56th annual Chicago Film Festival

by Nick Taylor

One fun thing about not really watching trailers anymore is that a movie can surprise me pretty easily. For example, I knew from teasers that François Ozon’s Summer of 85 was pitching itself as the French answer to Call Me By Your Name. The story sees two incredibly handsome teenagers named Alex (Felix Lefebvre) and David (Benjamin Voison) have a life-altering romance during a life-changing special summer. But I completely missed the trailer that revealed a whole second narrative where a zombie-like Alex is being tried for an unspecified crime that sounds a lot like murdering David. 

So, there’s the part of Summer of 85 that’s very much Ozon doing a Call Me By Your Name-style romance and the part that's the melancholic aftermath...

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