33 Days till Oscar

33 is sometimes called 'the Jesus year' but how many people have won the Oscar while sporting Jesus hair. Not too damn many. We can only think of Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club, Best Supporting Actor), Robert Richardson (three wins in Cinematography), and Ludwig Goransson (Black Panther's score) if you don't require the beard with the long hair. Christian Bale (The Fighter) almost applies but then he went and cut his hair between the Globes and Oscar night in the winter of 2011. Anyone else?

Great Acting or Great Makeup?

by Cláudio Alves

As soon as the first Bombshell teaser dropped, many were ready to claim Charlize Theron's performance as a great feat of transformative acting. She had become Megyn Kelly, apparently. That people were saying this after having only seen a couple of pointed glances and a tense smile left me perplexed. Were people reacting to the acting or the makeup? Still thinking about Theron, one remembers how she sailed to an Oscar in 2003 but Monster didn't get a much deserving Best Makeup nomination. Sure, that performance is incredible, but part of the transformation is the cosmetic wizardry of the makeup brush rather than the virtuosity of the actress.

When it comes to "transformative performances", a lot of people conflate great acting with great makeup...

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Michelle in Makeup

Oscar Rule Changes. It's about time with the Makeup & Hair, Academy

They finally listened! Or, rather...

We are now allowing ourselves to freely fantasize that our annual griping here at TFE for the past forever years that Makeup and Hair deserves as many nominations as any other filmmaking craft, planted the seeds that eventually led to discussions on the other coast. The Academy announced that there will be five nominees going forward in the category starting this next season. (We've already adjusted this year's April Foolish Prediction Chart). Should we go power-mad, loyal readers??

Alas, nope.  The other rule change we've requested for a long time, didn't happen...

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April Foolish Predictions #5: Visual Categories

[drumroll] Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions continue

"Nomadland" was shot by the cinematographer of "The Rider"

We always mention at the start of all this that we call them April Foolish predictions because it's foolish to assume we know anything at all quite yet. Oscar buzz begins the day of announcement for projects with "pedigree" but the reality of the Oscar race is much more complex than that as the quality of films, size of campaigns, box office results, media pets, and public perception all end up weighing in later in the year. So consider these early bird predictions as "what ifs"... we do not pretend to have the year figured out just yet as we're going on hunches...

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