Producer's Guild Nominations: Wonder Woman is this year's Deadpool

by Nathaniel R

The Producer's Guild, by "virtue" of the fact that they have more nominees than Oscar each year, often get fairly close to "predicting" the Best Picture list. This year they've chosen 11 titles. Recency bias surely helped give Molly's Game a winning hand and the PGA's love of the blockbuster delivered for Wonder Woman which is a good call here since it did help define the year and superhero movies are very much producer events. Last year Deadpool was nominated at the PGA and was the only film to drop off on Oscar nominaiton morning. The other 9 pictures selected are all then looking strong as Best Picture possibilities for the Oscar nominations on January 23rd. Nominations and more commentary after the jump...

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35 days til Oscar nominations. 35 years of Make-up

by Nathaniel R

Since there are 35 days left until Oscar nominations --well perhaps 34 by the time this is published. Damn you, ever ticking clock! -- let's look back back at the 35 films that have won the regular Achievements in Makeup Oscar. We should admit straightaway that that's fudging the number a bit for the sake of a trivia countdown. In truth 37 films have won this prize but two were before the category was an official competitive one. The first two films to be Oscared for their Makeup effects were The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao  (1964)  and the original Planet of the Apes  (1968). Nevertheless it took quite some time for a category to emerge and title changes and such until it became the character we know today (which is also sure to change again!)...

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Are Three Multiple-Win Actors Competing for the 5th Spot in "Best Actor"?

by Nathaniel R

They were 35, 37, and 32 when they won their first Osars

This Best Actor race has not been shaping up as we suspected two months ago when few imagined that fresher faces like 21 year old Timothée Chalamet, 28 year old first time leading man Daniel Kaluuya and 39 yr old but reads younger fringe dweller James Franco would be looking more secure for Best Actor spots than three of Oscar's all time favorite legendary leading men: Denzel Washington (2 wins), Tom Hanks (2 wins), and Daniel Day Lewis (3 wins). But that's what it feels like today after the SAG nominations have capped off a busy busy couple of weeks worth of pre-Oscar honors. 

But can it really be true that there's only one spot to claim between these three titans of Oscar hearts? Or are we reading the tea leaves wrong? Are voters ready to move on to fresher blood (two twentysomething in one Best Actor category would be quite something since that category far prefers mileage on a man) or will two or even three of the legends make it, tossing out one of the rising stars? What's your take on the situation? Though people have been calling Best Actor "weak" for months (perhaps for the lack of frontrunners... with Gary Oldman less of an inevitable winner than he at first seemed) it seems awfully competitive at the last minute.

UPDATED BEST ACTOR CHART

44 days til Oscar nominations. Screenplay stats!

by Nathaniel R

With only 44 days until Oscar nominations and lots of confusion as to what might be nominated for screenplay (there are seemingly 7 locks for Original and only 1 contender for Adapted -- the math doesn't work. Haha!) let's use today's numerical trivia prompt for writing awards. Fact: Oscar's 4 favorite screenwriters have 44 nominations between them for writing. That's a lot of hogging of writing honors. They are...

OSCAR'S 20 FAVORITE SCREENWRITERS
(Numbers below are for screenwriting categories only)
01 Woody Allen (16 nominations and 3 wins)
He's also been in the Acting and Directing races. Classics include Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan and more...
02 Billy Wilder (12 nominations and 3 wins)
He's also been in the Directing and Producing races. Classics include Sunset Blvd, The Apartment, Some Like it Hot, and more...
03 John Huston (8 nominations and 1 win)
He's also been in the Acting, Directing, and Producing races. Classics include The African Queen, The Asphalt Jungle, Prizzi's Honor and more...
04 Federico Fellini (8 nominations but he never won for writing)
He's also been in the Directing, and Producing races and of course his films have taken multiple Foreign Language Film Oscars. He's the Academy's favorite Italian... yes, even more than Sophia Loren. Classics include La Dolce Vita, I Vitelloni, 8½ and more...

It's perhaps no surprise that all of these writers are also directors and thus were in charge of bringing their own words to visual life. With greater control comes greater consistency in results. Without checking before you hit the jump can you guess which working writers are next in line to join this group?

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47 days til Oscar nominations and I'm feeling a bit morbid...

by Nathaniel R

Edith Piaf and Judy GarlandPerhaps it was those uninspired Critics Choice nominations? Perhaps it's no critical year-end love for La Pfeiffer in her comeback year? Perhaps it was my anti-depressant prescription running out with no health insurance to renew it with? Or, probably, it's the generally miserable state of the world in which things are so dire that we're watching a kleptocracy filled with proud sexual predators, treasonous pathological liars, greedy overlord billionaires, fact-averse idiots, and blatantly sociopathic racists amass power at a record pace, dooming future generations to have it much much worse than we even do now? Meanwhile the good people of the world stare in disbelief whilst fighting amongst themselves for any number of reasons but the largest, we suspect, is a feeling of impotence against the actual enemies.

But since I was feeling terrible all day whilst trying to come up with our habitual trivia fun with numbers as we countdown, I kept remembering that Judy Garland died when she was just 47. (I'm working my way to a non-morbid point after the hand-wringing...)

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