The Oscar Race Plot Keeps Thickening... or is it Thinning?

by Nathaniel R

For those of you who are wondering why the Oscar charts are still not updated, here's a simple fact. Every time I go to work on them, something huge changes and I have to start over. I'm fully aware that other pundits keep making breathless pronouncements of what will actually WIN the Oscars but I just can't do that. We STILL have no real sense of what will actually open since Hollywood keeps clearing and resetting the chess board. The latest upheaval is that West Side Story, Steven Spielberg's remake of the Oscar-winning classic that didn't need to be remade, has moved back an entire year to December 2021. So now both of the big latinx musicals that were originally intended for 2020 have just essentially scrawled a one over the final zero on their original calendars with The Heights in summer 2021 and West Side Story for Christmas 2021...

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"Nomadland" wins TIFF's People's Choice

by Nathaniel R

This year's TIFF has wrapped. Normally we cover it extensively, as you know, but they cut out a big swath of press this year including us... *cries*. Hopefully we'll return next year and if not we'll have to find a new favourite festival to obsess over. Herewith the winners and some Oscar stats, and if we've already discussed the movies, there's a link...

AUDIENCE PRIZES

People's Choice: Nomadland dir. Chloé Zhao.
(First runner up: One Night in Miami... dir. Regina King; Second runner up: Beans dir. Tracey Deer.)
People's Choice, Documentary: Inconvenient Indian dir. Michelle Latimer. 
People’s Choice, Midnight Madness: Shadow in the Cloud dir.  Roseanne Liang. 

That's right ALL of the audience prizes this year went to female filmmakers! Even the runners up were directed by women. The People's Choice Award is major bragging rights since it often signals kind Oscar fates down the road. Basically it would be a shock if Nomadland misses the Best Picture nomination at this point afterwinning TIFF and Venice though One Night in Miami has less convincing stats on its side. The stats go like so... 

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International Oscar: A Yak in the Classroom

by Nathaniel R

We've already told you about submissions from Ivory Coast, Poland, and Switzerland. Now we have a fourth contender for the Best International Feature Oscar. We suspect in the end that there won't be as many entries as usual (the list usually reaches about 90 films) due to the chaos of the pandemic but you never know. 

Bhutan will be sending Lunana A Yak in the Classroom by 37 year-old photographer turned first time director Pawo Choyniing Dorji. It's about a young man who is assigned to teach school children in a remote village in the Himalayas but doesn't want to be there (at first). This is only the second submission from the small landlocked country which is located on the southern border of Tibet. Their film industry only began in the 1990s but produces multiple films per year and is reportedly growing quickly. Given their output, we expect they'll start submitting more frequently since the neighboring countries that influence their cinema (Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Tibet, and especially India) all submit regularly. Their first submission was the feel-good film The Cup (1999) about soccer-obsessed monks in the Himalayas.

On "Nomadland" and other Venice winners

Please welcome guest contributor Elisa Giudici. She saw all the Venice competition films and she brings us this special report!

By Elisa Giudici

The oldest Film Festival of the world was the first to roar back from the pandemic. Venice International Film Festival president Francesco Ciccutto and artistic director Alberto Barbera worked hard to organize this year's edition. At first, it played like a fever dream: an international film festival in one of the nations that lived through the most severe lockdowns and highest death count just a few months ago?

Hollywood majors and newer realities like Netflix, which in the recent past Venice would coddle with attention, betrayed the Venetian Mostra, and didn't send a single movie. Old friends rallied, though.  Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Ann Hui, and Abel Ferrara wanted to be in Venice to help the Mostra. They were supported by European festivals early on in their filmmaking and didn't forget them in their time of need... 

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"Night of the Kings" is our third International Oscar submission

by Nathaniel R

Director Philippe Lacôte and a still from "Night of the Kings" his second feature

We have our third reported Oscar submission for Best International Feature at the 2020 Oscars and this one is a rarity. Ivory Coast, a West African country, has only ever submitted two previous films to the race. Though Ivory Coast, a former French colony, became independent in 1960, their first submission Black and White in Color (1976), which won the Oscar, was the debut of French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud who was quickly snapped up by Hollywood. Ivory Coast didn't submit again until they had their own debut director, Philippe Lacôte. His first film, a crime drama called Run, was submitted to represent the country in 2015 and his sophomore feature will represent the country again. Screen Daily recently spoke with the filmmaker about why there are so few African films at A-list festivals and how this new film came into being.

Night of the Kings which premiered this past week in Venice, is a Scheherazade-like story about a thief (Bakary Koné, pictured above) who becomes a storyteller in order to survive in the infamous MACA jail in the city of Abidjab (Lacôte's home town). The story the thief is telling is a true one about a crime lord called Zama King but  Lacôte wasn't interested in making a traditional biopic (bless him!). French actors Steve Tientcheu (from last year's Oscar nominated Les Miserables) and the always incredible Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) co-star.

Previously
Poland selects Never Gonna Snow Again
Switzerland selects My Little Sister