Gotham Nominations Spread the Wealth / Kick Off Awards Season

by Nathaniel R

THE INVITE nabs four nominations at the Gotham Awards

Hi strangers! I know I’ve been absent but I will now be inching back into the site. It's that time of year again! The Gotham Award nominations are in, unofficially kicking off “awards season”. Awards season continues to always be both shape-shifting and staying exactly the same. Each year is familiar in terms of narrative tropes, genre "slots" and more, but also brand new with a new set of films and constant awards show tinkering with rules and categories! Usually with awards shows one or two films get the headlines as “leaders” but the Gothams have so few categories (just 10 really) that no film can truly claim to be "leading" the pack this time around. Japan’s Oscar submission All of a Sudden, the Nigerian “Mrs Dalloway” adaptation Clarissa, Olivia Wilde’s open marriage dramedy The Invite, Mike Leigh’s possible swan song Tender Loving Care, and the festival darling La Gradiva share the “lead” status with four nods apiece.  If you look at it by distributors the “leaders” are more glaringly obvious; A24 and NEON, distributors who have carved out recognizable identities and developed their own loyal fanbases, lead with 15 and 14 nominations respectively. Let's talk about each category...

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Cannes: "La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)"

by Elisa Giudici

The cast of LA BOLA NEGRA

By now, the Los Javis hardly need introduction at Cannes. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who just tied Pawel Pawlikowski to win Best Director at the Cannes closing ceremony, have spent the last decade becoming not just successful filmmakers and showrunners, but cultural architects for a new generation of Spanish storytelling: proudly queer, emotionally maximalist, deeply rooted in national history while fully conversant in pop melodrama and contemporary television language. If Veneno made them unavoidable and La Mesías confirmed their creative ambition, La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) arrives as the film where they attempt to canonize themselves.

The scale alone announces the shift. Produced under the banner of El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’ company, also in Competition this year with Pedro’s latest) La Bola Negra carries the unmistakable aura of succession mythology around it. Not a rejection of the Almodóvar lineage so much as a generational mutation of it...

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