Best Actress Predictions and that Michelle Williams kerfuffle

by Nathaniel R

As you have undoubtedly heard by now, Michelle Williams has opted for a Lead Actress campaign for Steven Spielberg's memoir film The Fablemans. This shocked both the armchair and professional pundit community a good percentage of whom had already handed her the Best Supporting Actress statue a week ago. This despite it being a full six months until Oscar night (March 12th) with other movies yet to screen when everyone decided to call it.

Some people are angry because they feel the role is clearly supporting but most seem angry because they thought they had it all figured out already. But opinions vary (like they always do) about what constitutes a leading role versus a supporting one. Consider...

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TIFF prizes: The Fabelmans, Weird Al, Black Ice, and more...

by Nathaniel R

The first wave of the bridge festivals, taking us from summer to the fall film season and thereby kicking off the Oscar race have ended with TIFF wrapping hot on the heels of Venice and Telluride. It's time to update the Oscar charts which we're busy with at the moment and will start posting very soon. While you wait for those updates, here are the winners from TIFF. While TIFF is a non-competitive festival unlike the other "big five" festivals (Sundance, Venice, Canes, Berlin) they do have audience awards as well as a few juries for very specific things, just not the main slate. Their "People's Choice" audience awards get a lot of press partially because the winners often go on to Oscar nominations and sometimes wins.

AUDIENCE AWARDS

PEOPLE'S CHOICE: The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
runners up: Women Talking (Sarah Polley) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson)...

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TIFF Diary #6: Moving On, The Fabelmans, Corsage, Triangle of Sadness

by Baby Clyde

This was gonna be the big one. A day jam-packed full of the most talked about  films of the festival, from some of the world’s most esteemed auteurs. So why was my favourite movie of the day a middling buddy comedy from the director of America Pie?

You'd think it would be impossible to make a light-hearted farce about the trauma of historic sexual abuse but Moving On from director Paul Weitz and starring the legendary duo of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin gives it a good go. I’d happily watch these two in anything but to wholly succeed this probably needed a darker, harder edge instead of Grace and Frankie – The Movie which is essentially what we have here. Having said that it’s thoroughly enjoyable. That's not something I can say for the rest of my days viewing...

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Yes No Maybe So: "The Fabelmans" and "Glass Onion"

by Nathaniel R

It's hard to keep up in September with festival premieres, Oscar news, and fresh trailers arriving daily. The strangest thing about September though is how future-oriented everything is. It's not about what people have access to now (theaters start crawling out of their current wasteland Friday) but what they might be talking about in December and January. Which makes September feel like foreplay without pleasure. But October is just around the corner and things get significantly more in-the-moment the further into the last quarter we get. Still trailers have their own kind of anticipatory pleasure. So today let's talk The Fabelmans which is getting raves from the first responders at TIFF...

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What's next for this season's Oscar-celebrated directors?

Tis the post-season to wonder about next season... and the seasons after that. While Will Packer, ABC, and the Academy continue to try to dull our love for Oscars, they could never dull our love for the movies themselves. So let's look at what this year's most celebrated filmmakers are up to next. We'll take them in alpha order...

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
PTA, who turns 52 this June, has 11 nominations to his name but no Oscar yet since he just lost his Licorice Pizza directing and writing bids. Generally he takes quite a long time between films though he tends to stay busy inbetwen directing music videos (the latest is Haim's "Lost Track"), fatherhood  since he and Maya Rudolph have four children between the ages of 10 and 17 (one assumes that keeps them busy) and, we hope, tinkering on script ideas. So who knows!?

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