Category Confusion '24: LEAD or SUPPORTING – Part One

by Cláudio Alves

With the first batch of awards season honors coming in hot, questions of category fraud are bound to come up. And this year will be a doozy in that regard, with various leading actors campaigning as supporting for convenience's sake. It's a tried and true strategy that tends to block actual supporting and character actors from getting their flowers, forever living in the shadow of big stars in the wrong category. Well, if you're a regular at The Film Experience, you probably have read all this before, so let's not belabor the point. Instead, let's have some fun with polls like we did last year. This is just part one, of course, since many contenders still haven't been released beyond the festival circuit...

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"The Room Next Door" and "Emilia Perez" lead the EFA Nominations

by Nathaniel R

Nominations are in the for 37th annual European Film Awards which will take place on December 7th in approximately one month's time. You may recall that last year was dominated by Anatomy of a Fall which took home six awards (Film, Director, Actress, Screenplay, and special awards like Editing and the European University Film Award). It also proved popular with Oscar voters. Here are your nominees for the 2024 prizes. The awards ceremony moves each year. In December it moves to Switzerland for the first time. Oscar hopefuls The Room Next Door (hitting US theaters in December) and Emilia Perez (which hits Netflix next week) lead the nominations with four citations each. International Feature Film Oscar contenders like Denmark’s The Girl with the Needle, Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Italy’s Vermiglio, Latvia’s Flow, Norway’s Armand and Senegal’s Dahomey were also popular with voters, scoring multiple nominations. 

Although people don't tend to think of the EFAs as an Oscar precursor, their collective taste does align fairly well with Oscar voters. It's been 9 years, for example since the winning film wasn't also Oscar nominated for either Best Picture and/or Best International Feature Film...

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(Pt 1) Everything you wanted to know about the International Feature Film race... but were afraid to ask

by Nathaniel R

BEAUTIFUL EVENING, BEAUTIFUL DAY - Croatia's gay entry

Though 89 films were originally announced as submitting to the Best International Feature Film Academy Award competition this year, only 85 became official contenders. We’ve done a deep dive of the list, updated the charts, and crunched some stats and sought out any patterns to bring you this report. We'll start with the LGBTQ+ competitors, genre classifications, chronology of stories, running time stats, and unintentional 'twins' if you will. Hope you enjoy...

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AFI Fest: “The Fire Inside” Packs a Surprising Punch

by Eurocheese

I have to admit that on the last day of AFI Fest, I was not particularly excited to see a boxing film. Oscar seems to have an affinity for the topic, but sports films in general don't resonate with me. Shame on me for underestimating Barry Jenkins as a screenwriter and for not having higher hopes for cinematographer Rachel Morrison’s directorial debut. The Fire Inside, much like its protagonist, proves itself again and again: It’s a compelling, smart drama with a scope that stretches far beyond the game.

The film is based on the true story of Claressa Shields who overcame obstacles all her life in Flint, Michigan on her way to becoming an Olympian...

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When will AMPAS embrace Horror makeup?

by Cláudio Alves

Between its box office numbers and pop culture footprint, The Substance has been one of the year's most unexpected success stories. MUBI's biggest release is also its most profitable, growing steadily through word of mouth and an aggressive campaign unafraid to highlight the picture's extreme body horror, its sheer grossness. Indeed, the Cannes Best Screenplay prizewinner is among the year's most-watched original films, having found its audience without the aid of IP recognition or all those shiny notions that excite Hollywood execs. In a world where genre bias wasn't a thing and snobbery didn't run rampant in film circles, one might expect Coralie Fargeat's provocation to factor heavily into the awards season. We don't live in that world. 

While one might suppose The Substance's rhapsodies of aged and mutated flesh, exaggerated voluptuousness, and grandiose gore would score an easy Best Makeup & Hairstyling nomination, that's not a safe bet. As the genre most dependent on makeup effects and where technical innovations often manifest, horror should have a place of honor in the category. Sadly, it doesn't. It hardly ever did…

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