FYC BFCA

'Critics Choice' Ballots are due today at 3 PM EST and I challenge my BFCA brethren and sisters to squeeze in one more screener / screening before sending off their ballots. I'll unfortunately have to send mine off without having screened Django Unchained (which I'm seeing as ballots are due) but I did not choose to have the flu this last weekend of voting when it finally started screening.

FYC #1 - Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy. Nicole Kidman is 5'11" and wears massive heels but even seated, squatting or horizontal this performance towers over most of the Supporting Actress Field. 
FYC#2 - Michael Fassbender in Prometheus. He's not being talked up in the Best Supporting Actor race because Oscar taste in acting doesn't ever stretch to androids but you can vote for him in the Best Actor in an Action Movie acting race. FWIW he's on both of those ballots for me because I won't be constrained by Oscar buzz; I'm voting "best" not "most likely to be nominated". 
FYC #3 - Remember that the Young Actor (Under 21) prize has more viable contenders than just Hushpuppy from Beasts of the Southern Wild. Also age-relevant and therefor eligible: Logan Lerman & Ezra Miller from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Tom Holland from The Impossible, Elle & Alice from Ginger & Rosa and the kids from Moonrise Kingdom. This has the potential to be an amazing category if voters don't get lazy. 
FYC #4 -Weep that they don't televise half the categories because that makes them essentially useless as critical causes go (unless you count fine print on fyc ads) but vote strong anyway: Holy Motors, Les Misérables and Lincoln for Best Makeup! 

Isn't it Bromantic? Gossbender & Hutcherflin

I am, like all sane citizens of the interwebs, living for the Michael Fassbender & Ryan Gosling PDA photos surfacing as they hang out on the set of Terrence Malick's latest. Gosling's cup runneth over: ever growing stardom, unique charisma, versatile talent, ... and now a backrub from Fassy!

In bromantic news 20something division... Jennifer Lawrence  is telling MTV News that Josh Hutcherson and Sam Claflin, her co-stars in 2013's Hunger Games: Catching Fire are totes in love. Video after the jump....

Click to read more ...

Best Actor Bait. The Key Word Being Bait.

The Oscar Prediction Chart Updates continue with the leading and supporting men. Best Actor seems especially confusing this year what with so many major stars or past Oscar nominees arriving with generally infallible bait right there in the roles. Let's do a quick chart. Here are, arguably, the five most infallible types of Oscar Bait and who is serving them up. (Obviously many of these men are still awaiting critical consensus on their performances or the fourth column would be larger.)

BEST ACTOR
In that chart right there I've only visually (and alphabetically) included  the top ten ranked men from my prediction chart. Now I'm even less enthused about Matt Damon's Oscar chances for Promised Land since he doesn't figure into these five columns at all. One might call him overdue if he didn't have that early writing Oscar (Good Will Hunting) but as it stands now he has no surefire hook for his Oscar campaign. This is not to say that "crisis of conscience" isn't a form of bait for leading men. That's a fairly common hook in leading roles but it's hardly the iconic carrot to dangled in front of voters like, say, debilatating suffering, addiction or ol' fashioned biographical dress up are.

If Anthony Hopkins is terrific as Hitchcock it's going to come down to the wire as to which of the top six men are given the boot on nomination morning since they're all packing serious bait as they fish for votes.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
The supporting categories are the last to lock down since so much what happens there depends on coattails from leading players and Best Picture nominations. Though you can safely lock up Philip Seymour Hoffman who is already a default Oscar player before you account for his enormous amount of screen time or the kind of reviews he won for The Master. Beyond Hoffman it's still anyone's game though reactions to Lincoln, which premieres Monday at the New York Film Festival, will certainly tell us whether David Strathairn is in the hunt for his second nomination. He's currently my only predicted Supporting Actor nominee who hasn't yet won the Oscar so if he's strong and the field really turns out that way, a win wouldn't be out of the question.

As for the men who have never been nominated, I'm particularly frustrated that Michael Fassbender who was so sublime in Prometheus is fading from the conversation but I expected as much since Oscar don't do sci-fi. I'm also frustrated that Matthew McConaughey who is inarguably having the best year of his career, isn't winning traction. Frustrated by not surprised. Though Oscar himself is famously nude and male and popular with the gays, He isn't generally turned on by the sexualization of male actors. That shiny Global icon is famously resistant to the matinee idol type ignoring them altogether or making them wait until they're gray and less sexually potent for their Oscar glory. Oscar just doesn't like leading men who trade on their own eroticism. Witness the Oscar fate of Michael Fassbender in Shame last year. McConaughey's selfploitation in Magic Mike (and to a lesser but more compromising degree in The Paperboy) is probably working against him no matter how much he's stepped up his game this year. 

Which actors are you banking on at this point? Where would you flipflop contenders on our charts?

Podcast: I Know What You Saw Last Summer (Pt 1)

The podcast returns for another Oscar season! I'm your host Nathaniel R and my ol' podcast mates Joe Reid & Nick Davis are joining me to discuss Summer Movie Season 2012. That's a wrap on summer so we're tying it off with our idiosyncratic messy multi-colored bows...

This podcast was inspired by our Summer Report Card series. Topics include but are not limited to:

• What's Wrong With Virginia? (no, really)
• Compliance
• Killer Joe 
• Best Picture Choices, Favorite Scenes, Summer Crushes
• Beasts of the Southern Wild and Oscar's Music Branch
• Hope Springs and Steve Carell
• Steven Soderbergh pros and cons & Magic Mike
• Sparkle
• Joe's hilarious ongoing obsession with Oliver Stone's Savages
• Bachelorette
• Moonrise Kingdom and  Red Hook Summer Double Feature
• Lesbian longing in Farewell My Queen
• Michael Fassbender as the next Ed Norton?

You can download the podcast on iTunes or listen right here at the bottom of the post. There's more coming in Part Two tomorrow!

I Know What You Saw This Summer (Pt. 1)

Twelve Years A Quvenzhané

JA from MNPP here. In case you fans of Beasts of the Southern Wild were worried that its formidable child star Quvenzhané Wallis was going to disappear the way formidable child stars sometimes do - especially if they're of color - you set aside your fears for today. The Playlist has word that she's joined the cast of Steve McQueen's next film Twelve Years a Slave, and also share that picture of her on the set with Slave's lead the wonderful Chiwetel Ejiofor. (He's so wonderful I even know how to spell his name without looking it up now - even Matthew McConaughey can't say that.) (Although neither can Quvenzhané just yet.)

Slave tells the true story of Solomon Northrup, a free man who was kidnapped and thrown into slavery in the 1840s. It co-stars McQueen regular Michael Fassbender, as well as (deep breath) Brad Pitt, Paul Giametti, Alfre Woodard, Garrett Dillahunt, Adepero Oduye, Paul Dano, Sarah Paulson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ruth Negga, Michael K. Williams, Taran Killam, and as of last week Quvenzhané's Beasts papa Dwight Henry.

Unlike Nathaniel and oh I'd say 97.5% of the rest of you I personally wasn't sold on Beasts the movie, but I agree with the consensus that Quvenzhané was wonderful, and I'm looking forward to seeing her show us more in the future. Maybe she can tell Michael Fassbender who's the man.