Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 9:01AM Nathaniel gathered the team members who were available on Tuesday night for a quickie discussion of the Oscar nominations.
You can listen to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify or download the attachment below. And while you're thinking of the Oscars, check out the charts and vote on the polls!
Friday, February 4, 2022 at 11:00AM TFE’s Oscar volleys wrap up with Lynn Lee, Eurocheese, and Christopher James making predictions for the Big One (Best Picture). Nathaniel’s final Oscar chart predictions will be up tonight to usher in the weekend.
Lynn Lee: Oscar nomination voting closed Tuesday night but before it did do we agree we were approaching a consensus core group? Taking the precursors into account (minus BAFTA which hasn't yet announced as I type this), eight of the ten spots are close to locked up (in alpha order): Belfast, CODA, Don't Look Up, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, The Power of the Dog and West Side Story. That leaves two nomination spots for maybe a half dozen viable contenders. PGA went with Being the Ricardos and tick, tick...BOOM!, but as Nathaniel’s noted, the Oscar list is rarely an exact copy of the PGA. Could it happen this year? Entirely possible but I suspect at least one of those two is going to drop out and if I had to take a bet, it’s sadly more likely to be BOOM!...
Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 11:45PM by Nathaniel R
Movies are not quite keepsakes anymore with physical media dying. Yet they remain emotional treasures to return to or reflect upon as real as any beloved mementos you could place in a keepsake box. For awards and list obsessives they take on extra-meaning as stand-ins for each calendar year as well. We have to have a gimmick for the top ten lists each year, else the task of putting so much love into words becomes too daunting. So this year we've chosen memorable objects as a frame with which to remember the year's best. These great films were filled with fawned over items and knick knacks from "purty" paper flowers to restless coffee cups, from razor-sharp seashell bracelets to winning lottery tickets, from horny religious figurines to magical belts.
20 HONORABLE MENTIONS
So that you don't immediately ask "WHERE IS ____?" here are the 20 films outside of the top 10 list that were loved and/or deeply admired. Plus, in keeping with the chosen theme, the visual object we most closely associate with them...
Tuesday, February 1, 2022 at 11:42AM Continuing our Oscar Volley series at The Film Experience. Eric Blume, Elisa Giudici, and Glenn Dunks talk Best Cinematography.
Greig Fraser shooting Timothée Chalamet in the desert for Dune (2021)
Eric Blume: Glenn and Elisa, Do we all agree that we probably have two "locks" for Best Cinematography nominations: Delbonnel for The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Greig Fraser for Dune? Those feel like two very worthy nominees to me. While I think Joel Coen's conception of his film is limited and flawed, I admired Delbonnel's execution of Coen's concept, really leaning into that austere Calvinist guilt like we got in Carl Theodore Dreyer movies, and stealing from Sven Nykvist's framing in Bergman movies...yet netting out in its own unique visual scheme to highlight those sets and costumes. And I thought Fraser's work made Denis Villeneuve's arid sci-fi epic surprisingly sensual, which helped the film (which is dense and heavy) enormously by taking you out of your head sometimes and back to your senses. Do you think both are locks? What are your thoughts on those two, and their closest challengers...
Sunday, January 30, 2022 at 11:01AM With just over a week until nominations are announced Cláudio Alves, Mark Brinkerhoff, and Nathaniel Rogers discuss the Best Production Design race…
DUNE is in it to win it.
CLÁUDIO: The Art Directors Guild of America recently announced their nominees, and I'm in love with the Period Feature lineup. The French Dispatch, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and West Side Story offer such a varied approach to the matter of scenography, either swinging towards hyper-stylization or aiming for immersive historical accuracy. Honestly, I'd be OK if AMPAS just copied the guild's picks, though that's not likely to happen. Not with Dune in the conversation. As far as I'm concerned, it'd be a massive surprise if Patrice Vermette's conception of a dilapidated future doesn't end up winning it all. The scale of the achievement is undeniable, the sense of monumentality and balance between Villeneuve's sense of severe sci-fi and Frank Herbert's Baroque descriptions.
The question, then, is which of the period nominees will get the chop and if there are other outside contenders to consider. Examining the history of AMPAS' relationship to Paul Thomas Anderson's flicks, my guess is that Licorice Pizza is the most vulnerable. What do you think, Mark?
