Middleburg: Crowd-pleasing with "King Richard" and "Belfast"

by Nathaniel R

The family watching "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in BELFAST

The 9th annual Middleburg Film Festival wrapped up Sunday night but they programmed well so the joy lingers. The two events that always have after parties, Opening Night and Saturday Centerpiece, were King Richard and Belfast respectively. In both cases you could feel the love in the room even before the booze began to flow. Since the Middleburg audience is a reasonably good proxy for the bulk of Oscar voters (mature, well to do, cultured, and with movie tastes that fall somewhere between critics and the general public) it's easy to imagine both films greeted just as warmly on Oscar nomination morning...

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Best International Film: Brazil's "Private Desert", Iceland's "Lamb" and more...

Since I last piped up on the Best International Feature Film race at the upcoming Oscars, Italy released their finalist lists, and the following five countries have also picked their ponies:

BRAZIL
They're sending Aly Muritiba's Private Desert about a suspended policeman who is looking to meet his internet love. She's vanished but he finds a man who offers to connect the would-be lovers. It premiered at Venice...

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The Italian Oscar race: 18 contenders for the submission, 1 probable winner

by Elisa Giudici

THE HAND OF GOD

The Italian longlist for the 2021 Oscar submission is very long and much better than usual, quality-wise. Although if the Italian Cinema Academy appointed by ANICA really wants to give Italy a chance to make the finals,the choice is obvious: Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God.

Unfortunately, in the last decade, the Italian film commission's rulings on this matter have not proved to be that smart. I mean, how can you send Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor (as beautiful and important as it was domestically) when The New York Times states that Pietro Marcello's Martin Eden is the best movie of 2020? Our only solace was that that was the year of Parasite, so there was no room for a real contender to Bong Joon-ho's victory in Best Internatural Feature Film...

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Oscar Chart Updates - All Acting Categories

by Nathaniel R

I'm just back from the Middleburg Film Festival, which we'll tell you more about soon, so I've mostly caught up with the Oscar hopefuls that have screened to date. The only true mysteries for us Oscar pundits now, other than how precursors will react, is the films that haven't screened very much or at all: West Side Story, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza, Being The Ricardos, House of Gucci, and Don't Look Up. So let the revised punditry commence. The links go to the charts...

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Highlights from Middleburg's "Coffee & Contenders"

by Nathaniel R

Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay and I created this annual panel at Middleburg together (I named it!) and now we're a regular event early in the morning at the beginning of each fest.  The new venue, outside in a tent, is a big improvement over our initially cozy but cramped space while the crowd is the (wonderful) same. Here are highlights from the public discussion this morning as well as the private discussions before and after the event (it all blurs together at film festivals which are so social)...

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