"Cats" trailer tease doubles as its first FYC ad

Universal is not fooling around with Cats. There's a (presumably) gargantuan budget on the line but an insanely high level of brand awareness will help it turn a profit and they surely know that Oscar buzz wouldn't hurt toward that goal, either. This promo for the teaser (due Friday), which has no actual footage from the movie, is playing just like an FYC ad for the film's cast and crew...

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Yes No Maybe So: Knives Out

by Ben Miller

Director Rian Johnson can do what he wants these days.  After helming a Star Wars movie, directors have the cache to explore different realms of entertainment.  Johnson decided to go with Knives Out, an original story inspired by Agatha Christie murder mysteries.  Let’s break it down with our Yes, No, Maybe So™ system...

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Stage Door: "Beetlejuice" and "Pretty Woman"

by Dancin' Dan

Adapting a non-musical film to a stage musical is always a dicey proposition. Leave the story exactly as is and just add songs, and you risk the show feeling rote and uninteresting. Change the story so that it fits a musical structure better, and you may alienate fans of the source material. This Broadway season has practically been a study in how to adapt a film to a musical. We’ve already talked about Tootsie, but this season saw three other screen-to-stage adaptations of varying levels of quality: Beetlejuice, King Kong, and Pretty Woman: The Musical. Each has proven divisive in varying ways, and they had much different degrees of success with the Tony nominations. I’ve recently seen two of them, and what one lacks, the other has in spades...

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April Foolish Predictions #5: Visual Categories

[drumroll] Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions continue

"Nomadland" was shot by the cinematographer of "The Rider"

We always mention at the start of all this that we call them April Foolish predictions because it's foolish to assume we know anything at all quite yet. Oscar buzz begins the day of announcement for projects with "pedigree" but the reality of the Oscar race is much more complex than that as the quality of films, size of campaigns, box office results, media pets, and public perception all end up weighing in later in the year. So consider these early bird predictions as "what ifs"... we do not pretend to have the year figured out just yet as we're going on hunches...

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I've been obsessing over this shot in "Us"

by Nathaniel R

Not sure if there's an audience out there for a return of our Hit Me With Your Best Shot series but Jordan Peele's horror smash Us would certainly be a worthy candidate for the treatment. Lately I've been obsessing over this particular image (above) in which Red (Lupita Nyong'o) has handcuffed Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) to her own coffee table. It's not just the slow upsetting crack of the glass, or Lupita's stunning dual performance...

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The Joyous Triumph of "Black Panther"

by Chris Feil

Of all of the great wins of Oscar night, some of the most uplifting belonged to the team from Black Panther. The film ran a gauntlet in the past year - early release, genre bias, institutionalized racism - to defy the odds and rack up three richly deserving wins in Costume Design, Production Design, and Original Score. It was the most popular film of the year and yet these wins still shouldn't be taken for granted, theirs a collective trio representing the world we experienced when we experienced Wakanda.

Adding to the sense of massive victory here are several crucial pieces of contextual trivia...

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