FYC: Michael Stuhlbarg for "Call Me By Your Name"

by Chris Feil

It’s the final day of Oscar voting before the nominations are announced before the nominations are announced on Tuesday January 23! Who knows if most Oscar voters have their nomination ballots in or not, but that doesn’t stop the rest of us from screaming last moment FYC hosannas for the procrastinators that mights be listening. My last minute plea would be for one performance that I find shocking to have received so little traction over the season: Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name...

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Will "Call Me By Your Name" Be Ignored by Oscar?

The following article was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. It's reprinted here with some updates... 

Though you might feel like you’ve been hearing “Oscar buzz” for months, it’s always good to be reminded that timetables are askew and “buzz” is a lot faster/noisier than the real thing. Academy members don’t actually start filling out their nomination ballots until Friday morning!

They’ll have one week to determine which movies and performances are in the running for the industry’s most coveted golden statues. Each year some adult-oriented movies risk going wide without Oscar’s blessing while others lay in wait, banking on Oscar favor to help sell them to a wider audience. One of the pictures that’s trying the lay-low-until-Oscar game is the gay coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name. Though it’s been in theaters for six weeks it still hasn’t expanded past major markets and is only on 115 screens (stateside) at this writing. It’s poised to become either one of the biggest Oscar players or one of the most “snubbed”. So this seems as good a time as any to share some anxiety about it...

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Call Me With Kindness

by Jason Adams

Call Me By Your Name is turning out to be the sort of success none of us saw coming sixteen months ago when it was first announced that the director of I Am Love was tackling a little gay love story. It just broke the 2017 record for per theater average over the weekend, and its reviews have been unanimously stellar. It won Best Feature at the Gothams Monday night, it topped the Independent Spirit nominations, and it’s expected to stick around racking up such prizes all awards season long.

And yet there’s been one complaint that’s nagged at the movie from a determined bunch of folks (including the film’s own writer, legend James Ivory) since it first screened at Sundance in January – a supposed shyness about nudity and gay sex. Ivory told Variety it’s a “pity” there's no full-frontal nudity in the film, while The Guardian called the movie “coy” and Slate called it out for a “lack of explicit sex.” One shot in particular has rankled these folks the most – a seemingly old-fashioned pan out the window just as the characters finally approach their erotic consummation.

The film’s director Luca Guadagnino, who probably had to look up the word “coy” in the dictionary the first time it was lobbed at him for this, is nonplussed by the reaction – he told Vulture:

“It’s really something I don’t understand. It’s as if you said there are not enough shots of Shanghai. I don’t understand why there has to be Shanghai in this movie.”

I’m inclined to agree with him. Not only because I found the film sexy as hell, erotic in languorous, voyeuristic ways that movies don’t really approach anymore. Its sense of tactility, for sweat and fabric and skin, and its often-prurient stares – up the legs of swimming trunks, for example - are a welcome shock to the system that makes the forbidden seem commonplace, easy...

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Oscar Chart Updates: Actor & Supp Actor

All sorts of things could yet throw the Best Supporting and Best Lead Actor races into confusion. In a  somewhat uncommon development the former is much more crowded than the latter. The shallow pool of viable Lead Actors is very good news for candidates like Timothée Chalamet (someone Oscar might normally resist due to his age) and Jake Gyllenhaal (someone Oscar has resisted for reasons inexplicable to us).

What do you make of the Supporting Actor race in particular? They way it looks now it could be made up almost entirely of character actors with worthy careers who have never won an Oscar and that's a very exciting thing. More exciting if you happen to be a fan of either Michael Stuhlbarg, Sam Rockwell, Richard Jenkins, or Willem Dafoe. I doubt that all four of them will make it all the way to the shortlist but the buzz is currently in their favor.

UPDATED CHARTS
Picture | Director | Lead Actress | Lead Actor | Supporting Actress | Supporting Actor | Animated Feature | Original and Adapted Screenplays

Everyone Joins "The Papers"

by Ben Miller

Steven Spielberg made news a few months back with word that his next film about the Pentagon Papers would bring together two American treasures in Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.  The film, originally referred to as The Post and now titled The Papers, chronicles the Washington Post’s Vietnam War expose’ with Hanks and Streep as the Post’s editor and publisher, respectively. 

The big news is who else has been cast in the supporting roles.  Rather, who hasn’t been cast...

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