Oscar Volley: Who will triumph in Best Documentary?

Team Experience is discussing the various Oscar categories. Here's Baby Clyde, Glenn Dunks, and Nick Taylor to discuss Best Documentary Feature.

Baby Clyde: Every December (Or more likely January) when I’m putting together my year end ‘Best of’ list, it’s always filled with docs and International Features. In recent years I’ve found them vastly more interesting than the prestige pics that get churned out by Hollywood and inevitably nominated for Best Picture (I’ll be coming to that soon). 2021 was no exception. Half of my Top 10 is made up of documentaries. Three of which have made it into this category.

The big, splashy, hit of the year Summer of Soul, cleared its biggest hurdle by making the list in the first place. (The sometimes snobby Doc branch is notorious for snubbing the crowd pleasers -- Remember the Won’t You Be My Neighbour? debacle).  Whilst I’m mostly delighted by the quality of the nominees it does leave me with a quandary... 

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Oscar Volley: Split predictions in Adapted and Original Screenplay!

Team Experience is discussing the various Oscar categories. Here's Matt St. Clair, Christopher James, Lynn Lee and Josh Bierman discussing the screenplays.

MATT ST. CLAIR: Hello all. So, in Best Adapted Screenplay, I think that it remains Jane Campion's to lose but Maggie Gyllenhaal could be The Lost Daughter's sole win here instead, given the clear passion it has. What do you guys think?

CHRISTOPHER JAMES: Thanks for kicking us off, Matt! As in Best Picture, The Power of the Dog is the one to beat. I still think it will ultimately be the big winner of the night, but it is vulnerable...

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Oscar Volley: Best Cinematography could make History

Team Experience is discussing the various Oscar categories. Here's Cláudio Alves, Nick Davis, Ben Miller, and Eurocheese discussing the Best Cinematography race.

CLÁUDIO ALVES: From an aged future that looks like the ancient past to a black-and-white nightmare of Expressionistic Shakespeare, from digital polish to a rainbow of 35mm lens flares, the Best Cinematography Oscar race presents a cornucopia of varied visual strategies. However, to celebrate this category for variety feels somewhat disingenuous this year. For the first time since the color and black-and-white categories merged in 1967, the Cinematography ballot looks identical to the Production Design one. Even though voted on by separate branches, these lineups' sameness speaks to a broader problem – how the Academy feels increasingly resistant to expand its interest beyond a select group of pictures each season…

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Oscar Volley: Sobbing and Fuming at the "Best Animated Feature" nominees

Team Experience will be covering the various Oscar categories in the lead up to Oscar night. Here's Tim Brayton, Cláudio Alves, and Nathaniel R...

TIM BRAYTON: Hello Nathaniel and Cláudio! I'm thrilled to have the chance to discuss this year's slate of nominees for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars with you - animation is, I think it's fair to say, the most important form of filmmaking to me, and it's always fun to share it. Whether these exact five films represent animation at its peak, well, we'll just have to get into that as we go.

A quick recap for all of us and those of you reading, here are the five nominees: Encanto, a CGI feature produced by Walt Disney Animation; Raya and the Last Dragon, a CGI feature produced by Walt Disney Animation; Luca, a CGI feature produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by their corporate owners, the Walt Disney Company; The Mitchells vs the Machines, a CGI feature produced by Sony Animation, who sold it off to Netflix. And then literally on the other side of the world, Flee, a Danish documentary about politics and identity, largely consisting of interviews that were animated in a cartoony 2D style by Sun Creature Studio. So my point, obviously, is that this isn't exactly the most stylistically or industrially diverse set of nominees this category has ever produced...

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Oscar Volley: Picture - Does it really come down to just two spots?

TFE’s Oscar volleys wrap up with Lynn Lee, Eurocheese, and Christopher James making predictions for the Big One (Best Picture). Nathaniel’s final Oscar chart predictions will be up tonight to usher in the weekend.

Lynn Lee: Oscar nomination voting closed Tuesday night but before it did do we agree we were approaching a consensus core group? Taking the precursors into account (minus BAFTA which hasn't yet announced as I type this), eight of the ten spots are close to locked up (in alpha order): Belfast, CODA, Don't Look Up, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, The Power of the Dog and West Side Story. That leaves two nomination spots for maybe a half dozen viable contenders. PGA went with Being the Ricardos and tick, tick...BOOM!, but as Nathaniel’s noted, the Oscar list is rarely an exact copy of the PGA. Could it happen this year? Entirely possible but I suspect at least one of those two is going to drop out and if I had to take a bet, it’s sadly more likely to be BOOM!...

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