105 Days until Oscar Night! Let's talk running times.

by Nathaniel R

Did you know that only two Best Picture winners ever have been 105 minutes long? Well, now you do. They were  It Happened One Night (1934) and Kramer vs Kramer (1979). We hope you are wise enough to love both of them. When we first listed the Best Picture winners from longest to shortest by length four years ago we realized that the average Best Picture winner length was a whopping 138 minutes long. Since then, rather shockingly, given how longwinded storytellers on TV and in film are getting, all four of the new winners have been shorter than that... 

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Does Box Office Matter to Best Actress Hopefuls?

by Nathaniel R

Helen Mirren's The Queen was in many ways a completely standard win... a solid success before the nomination and an even bigger hit afterwardsDoes Box Office matter to Oscars? It does and it doesn't. And how much it matters varies from year to year and from category to category. It obviously matters, regardless, if you're either a flop or a big hit but anything inbetween (where most movies fall) is up for speculative debate.

For instance, just this year people have debated whether The Wife's box office take is strong enough for a Best Actress nomination for Glenn Glose (hint: it totally is... though winning will be harder) and whether it will matter that Roma won't really have that much of a theatrical presence (it might. it might not. The streaming only/mostly thing is relatively uncharted territory) or if the major success of A Star is Born will make a win possible for Lady Gaga (it won't hurt!)

For fun let's look at how much the Best Actress nominees films made before they were nominated for the past fifteen years and see what patterns emerge. The films in red won Best Actress Oscars.

BOX OFFICE RANK OF BEST ACTRESS FILMS
BEFORE THE NOMINATIONS (2003-2017)
AND WHERE THIS YEAR'S LEADING ACTRESSES CURRENTLY FIT...

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25 Films to Compete For "Best Animated Feature" Oscar Noms

WELL WELL WELL

Just last night we were speculating about what might be on Oscar's eligiblity list for Animated Feature and today, two weeks ahead of schedule (according to when they usually announce that is),  the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has gone and revealed the list. Perhaps we should have bought a lottery ticket?

Five of the 25 titles listed after the jump will go on to Oscar nominations in January...

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Posterized: Warner Animation and "Smallfoot"

by Nathaniel R

The animated comedy Smallfoot opens today. It has a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, so a mixed response from critics but we expect audiences will like it since they're not always so picky about animated films. Plus the concept is cute and there are lots of big stars to promote it.

Let's take a quick visual perusal of Warner Brothers theatrical animated films. Warner Brothers is such a massive corporation that their subsidiaries are legion and "Warner Animation" as it is now is not exactly like "Warner Bros Animation" of the 1990s or what not but you catch the drift. The various animated subsidiaries of Warner Bros tend to have specialized in TV animation and direct-to-dvd titles which is one of three key reasons that the company has yet to land an Oscar nomination in the Best Animated Feature Film category. The second reason is quality. And the final reason is just bad luck. Surely their best film The Iron Giant would have been nominated had the category existed in 1999. And the snub of exceedingly clever blockbuster The Lego Movie ...well everything was NOT awesome when that happened, don't you agree?

How many of their 12 theatrically released animated features have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

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TIFF Delivers an Oscar bound-surprise with "Green Book"

by Nathaniel R

Go figure. The winner of TIFF's "Grolsch's People's Choice Award" is a film that literally none of my TIFF airbnb troupe (Joe Reid, Chris Feil, Nick Davis and I) saw during our 10 day stretch in Ontario. Green Book by Peter Farrelly (yes, of Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary fame) took TIFF's most coveted prize. (the runners up were Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma). So we'll have to add it to the Best Picture chart when we update this week (we're looking at probably Wednesday night for across the board updates to reflect all the festival madness).

In the entire 40 year history of this prize, stretching From Girlfriends (1978) through Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), 16 of the winners went on to Best Picture nods at the Oscars. The 40 winners also include 7 future Best Picture winners, 6 future Best Foreign Language Film winners, and 2 future Best Documentary Feature winners. The Oscar correlation is getting stronger all the time, too...

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