EFA Winners: "Another Round" Sweeps

by Nathaniel R

The European Film Awards were held yesterday, mostly virtually, with Denmark's Another Round winning all four of its nominations (Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay). Mads Mikkelsen headlines as a depressed high school teacher who decides to experiment with binge-drinking with three of his closest teacher friends. The funny sad beautifully executed film has a star turn at its center that we hope Oscar will consider in the crowded Best Actor race. We already presumed it a major threat at the Oscars for Best International Feature Film and this should all but erase any doubts that it will be nominated. It will be available to rent online starting December 18th in the US. At the EFA site you can see all the acceptance speeches. Here's the complete list of winners for the 33rd Annual European Film Awards and a couple of more comments...

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Cinema Eye doc nominations

by Nathaniel R

"Time" keeps racking up the honors

The Cinema Eye Honors are now in their 14th year and considered an influential prize for documentary films. Prison sentence justice movie Time leads the nominations with six but two competitors for the top prize, Romania's political corruption doc Collective (Romania's Oscar submission) and Norway's farm doc Gunda aren't far behind with four nominations. 

Outstanding Nonfiction Feature
“Boys State”
“Collective”
“Dick Johnson is Dead”
“Gunda”
“Time”

The full list of nominations and links to our reviews are after the jump...

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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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"Klaus" and "I Lost My Body" surprisingly dominant at the Annies

Will "Klaus" get the ultimate delivery -- an Oscar! -- in February?by Nathaniel R

Netflix had a very good night at the Annie Awards via their international outreach to animators. The TV awards were dominated by their anthology series "Love Death, and Robots" and the feature film prizes were hogged by Spain's Klaus (with 6 awards) and France's I Lost My Body (with 3). That's a surprising outcome for an awards night usually dominated by American blockbusters.

Curiously Frozen II, which is not nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, was the only one of the high profile American films to win a prize. Toy Story 4, HTTYD: Hidden World, and Missing Link all came up entirely empty-handed despite plentiful Annie nominations. Best Animated Feature might just prove to be the only true nail-biter on Oscar night.

The full list of Annie Award winners is after the jump...

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Sam Mendes wins DGA again, 20 years later

by Nathaniel R

Sam Mendes was an acclaimed theater director when American Beauty hit the scene in 1999 asking audiences to "look closer" in its promotional material. They did. The film went on to become a sleeper hit and then a very big one and eventually win the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director among others. Mendes is likely to repeat that trick at this year's Oscars 20 years later even though his film career in the interim hasn't been noteworthy enough to scream "2 time director winner!" But then Hilary Swank has two Oscars and Renee Zellweger is likely to join her while Close, Bening, Pfeiffer, Weaver, Garland, Stanwyck, Dunne, and many other genius actresses from Hollywood history have none so this is the way it goes sometimes...

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