FYC: Moonlight, Best Original Score

By Chris Feil

It's always ceaselessly frustrating to see deserving below-the-line work from so-called smaller films miss out on Oscar nominations. Even when a film is a favorite in the major categories, it can still be hard to break through beyond major races - just look at last year's Room. This year, Moonlight deserves those nominations for its behind-the-scenes craft, each of its elements too powerful and integral to deny. But for brevity's sake, I'll just call attention to its evocative score by Nicholas Britell.

Britell threads recurring melodies and tones through each of Chiron's chapters without feeling repetitive. As the piano theme comes in and out, it takes us back to the previous struggles that add weight to the fresh one, just as life is connected memory to memory. The sharp strings show the soaring relief of a moment like Juan teaching him to swim, but also reveal the anxiety of being seen for what he truly is, the fear of what that means.

Click to read more ...

NSFC Gives Isabelle Huppert the Critical Triple

The National Society of Film Critics have spoken. The last important critics prizes of each season is sometimes idiocyncratic but not this year. They've gone with the the leaders in every single category (in terms of past critics prizes from all over the nation) except Best Cinematography. That award has varied from groups to groups and here it goes to Moonlight.

Most importantly they've given Isabelle Huppert the rare triple crown of film critic prizes. She'd previously won both New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. To show you how infrequently that happens a list of the previous winners of all three after the jump...

Click to read more ...

AARP Deems Loving The Most Grownup Movie of the Year

by Daniel Crooke

As Paul Ryan and his conference of House Republicans noodle over whether to raise the national retirement age, it’s more important than ever to stand with the AARP – even in Oscar season, when they honor their annual favorites in film. You can rely upon their Movies for Grownups Awards to serve up some fresh names in the same-old stale category line-ups and this year’s idiosyncratic nominations were no different: Molly Shannon! Tilda Swinton! Stephen McKinley Henderson! The ballots have been collected, the final winners tabulated, and this year the AARP Movies for Grownups selected Loving as the Best Picture of 2016. And Character Actress Margo Martindale will host their awards ceremony!

It would be silly to blow these awards out of proportion but as Nathaniel has pointed out, it’s interesting to consider the chief commonality between the Academy and the AARP: age.

Click to read more ...

Online Film Critics Choose "Moonlight"

by Glenn Dunks

Moonlight took 4 prizes from the OFCS

The Online Film Critics Society, of which I am a member, just announced their winners and... I'd love to say they're a great bunch, but I haven't been able to see at least two of the big winners yet. International release dates (I'm back in Australia) always make voting in these sort of awards a tricky prospect when the need to be early is ever-present, but I have no doubt that the OFCS's selection of Moonlight as the best picture of 2016 is worth cheering about.

The organisation with its some 260 members awarded the Barry Jenkins' drama with three additional wins for Best Director, and duel supporting acting prizes for Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris. Casey Affleck and Natalie Portman took the lead actor awards, Arrival and Hell or High Water took screenplay honours, Kubo and the Two Strings was handed a much-deserved animation win, and the Oscar frontrunner La La Land settled for the two technical prizes that the organization gives out for cinematography and editing.

And proving yet again that South Korea made the wrong choice by not selecting Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden for the foreign language Oscar, it was awarded Best Film Not in the English Language alongside its nomination for Best Picture.

What do we think that film's Oscar prospects are like? Hong Kong's The Grandmaster surprised with two nominations several years ago - there's certainly precedence. It just depends on whether Oscar's costume and production design voters are having one of those years where they think more outside of the box or fall in line with general Oscar buzz.

FULL NOMINEES AND WINNERS AFTER THE JUMP...

Click to read more ...

Co-Star Chemistry, The "Make or Break" Secret Ingredient

Year in Review. Each day another different angled wrap-up.

Last year during our year in review roundup we did our first list of "best co-star chemistry" and it was such a fun way to pinpoint the intangible and often uncategorizable spark that ignites greatness in movies that we're doing it again. Want to capture lightning in a bottle in your movie? Hire the right casting director who will pair the right actors together. No special effect, setpiece, or plot twist can or will ever rival the amount of movie-long electricity that can be generated when actors are really sparking off each other and nailing whatever the roles their characters play in each other's lives simultaneously.

The list is presented without much commentary... unless we couldn't escape it. Chime in in the comments, won't you?

16 Chris Pine & Ben Foster, Hell or High Water (Brothers)

Click to read more ...