Podcast: The Shape of Lady Bird

Nathaniel and Nick talk two Best Picture hopefuls, the generous funny adorable Greta Gerwig movie Lady Bird and the overstuffed visually creative Guillermo Del Toro fantasy The Shape of Water. 

Index (43 minutes)
00:01 Lois Smith & Lucas Hedges and lingering moments
06:00 Greta Gerwig, Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and Tracy Letts are all brilliant
16:00 More Lady Bird gushing
23:00 The Shape of Water -wanted to love it more
27:00 Guillermo del Toro problems and monsters
32:00 The performances in the movie
37:40 The Best Picture field, Hollywood sexism, and the atypical versus typical within the contenders

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Shape of Water & Lady Bird

The Oscar Week: Greta, Jake, and Timothée

Murtada is back with his weekly Oscars feature for a new season, following Oscar contenders and examining how their many interviews and appearances impact their chances.

Gerwig at the Gotham Awards

Are you ready for another season of Oscar campaign shenanigans? Frankly I wasn’t. In the year in which Hollywood revealed its ugly hidden true self of rampant sexual harassment, maybe they shouldn’t spend so much time patting themselves on the back. Cancel the Oscars, I cried to one in particular.

But then Greta Gerwig took me out of my dark despair...

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I'm Your Biggest Fan! - Reeves, Gerwig, and Chance

By Salim Garami

What's good? Apologies because I don't have much to say or talk about this week, except remark on how I'm still in a pretty pleasant mood moving out of Thanksgiving weekend and into the holiday season.

And part of what prolonged my pleasant mood was to find an admittedly 2-year-old video of movie star Keanu Reeves on promotional tour promoting John Wick in Japan discussing his admiration for martial arts film legend Sonny Chiba (of The Street Fighter or Kill Bill fame), influencing his physical choreography and style. Lo and behold, Chiba was in the studio ready to meet with Keanu and the Matrix star is suddenly starstruck to meet him and begins waxing rhapsodic over Chiba's work. Seeing such a household star in the industry be taken aback by the presence of figure that certainly isn't as well-known internationally as Reeves brought a smile to my face...

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NBR Goes Cuckoo for "The Post"

by Nathaniel R

The National Board of Review, which regularly has a recency bias in their awardage has gone full tilt boogie into stanning for The Post, with a couple of honors for Phantom Thread, too, which were both most definitely among the very last things to screen. Neither opens until the tail end of the year. They gave The Post their top prize and both lead acting awards for the film's iconic stars Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. That's unusual for NBR. The complete list of winners and commentary after the jump...

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Beauty vs Beast: Lady (Bird) You Are Doing Just Fine

Jason from MNPP here, fresh off of standing five feet away from Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach just hanging out at MoMA yesterday (Baumbach had actually just done a Q&A for The Meyerowitz Stories, so "hanging out" might be a stretch I suppose) to take us yonder Sacramento way. I think it's time for Lady Bird to get the "Beauty vs Beast" treatment, you guys.

The film has a perfect score at Rotten Tomatoes and it just crossed 10 million bucks at the box office, which is about what it cost to make. So it's all profit from here on out for Greta & Co, and all signs points towards plenty. It's in around 800 theaters and doing terrific - I can see it playing well all holiday-season. Hooray for good things doing good! Now let's pit the film's complicated mother/daughter core (and eventual Oscar nominees) against one another.

PREVIOUSLY You guys surprised me! When I wrote last week beside our Bigger Splash poll that I figured I knew who you'd vote for I really thought you'd go for Ralph Fiennes. I suppose in retrospect it was silly to underestimate the pull of Matthias Schoenaerts in very small shorts, which drew almost 70% of your vote. Explained Dancin' Dan:

"Yes, Harry is more fun and more interesting than Paul (and Fiennes gives by far the better performance), but he's also INFINITELY more exhausting. I don't think I could stand to be around him more than a few hours. So I'm gonna have to vote for Paul, and the less clothes he wears, the better."