Trivia Collection for the 96th Academy Awards

Here's what we came up with as the dust settles from Oscar night. Let us know in the comments if there's any other interesting trivia bits you noticed from this season. 

PICTURE / DIRECTOR

• Oppenheimer is the third consecutive movie to be released before fall film festival season to win the Best Picture Oscar (after Coda and Everything Everywhere All At Once)... so perhaps distributors can learn to start trusting that movies can be released at any time and still factor into awards season? It's also the first movie to go straight to theaters (no festivals) to win Best Picture in ages (well, since The Departed in 2006)

• Three female-directed films Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, and Past Lives were nominated in Best Picture which is an all time record...

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168 Documentaries to Compete for the Oscar

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long (long, very long) list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny. 

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States (Laura Tomaselli, Jesse Short Bull), Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission (Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine), Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim), To Kill a Tiger (Nisha Pahuja) and 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov). But the whims of this branch can change on a dime, so we won’t know until the shortlists announcements later this month.

You can scroll through the entire list below beginning with After Sherman through to Your Fat Friend. I have linked to reviews of titles where we have them, but also included ten short capsules for other titles that I have seen and been unfortunately lax in actually writing about.

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Doc Corner: Surprise Nominee, 'A House Made of Splinters'

By Glenn Dunks

I wasn’t expecting to have to review this movie so early. Until little more than a week before the 85^th Academy Awards, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s film about Ukrainian children didn’t even have an American distribution deal. PBS and POV swooped in just in time, acquiring the rights to a film that nobody had on their predictions and yet ultimately landed a surprise nomination for Best Documentary Feature alongside more recognised titles All That Breathes, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Fire of Love and Navalny (all titles we have looked at over the last year).

The movie had of course been on my radar for a while. Wilmont’s previous film, The Distant Barking of Dogs, was one of the great documentaries of the 2010s. A House Made of Splinters doesn’t quite reach the five-star heights of that one, because it has less of a laser focus. But it’s a beautiful, aching story and it is definitely not just making up the numbers on the Academy’s five.

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Best International Film Reviews: Belgium, Pakistan, and Ukraine

by Cláudio Alves

The most wonderful time of the year is upon us. No, not the holiday season. No, not even the awards season as a whole. It's time to delve deep into the submissions for Best International Film before the Academy's committees whittle down the 92 titles to a measly 15-wide shortlist from which the entire voting body will choose its five nominees. The list will be made public on December 21st, so until then, we shall explore the race's offerings, from its major contenders to more obscure selections. To start things off, let's look into three titles that feel bound to make the shortlist, both for reasons of quality, reputation, and international controversy…

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TIFF: Israel’s ‘Valeria Is Getting Married’

By Abe Friedtanzer

As one of the most-nominated countries yet to actually take home the Best International Feature Oscar, Israel tends to offer up some very interesting choices. Its top contenders for the Oscar submission are always initially up for the Ophir, Israel’s Academy Awards which will be held on September 18th this year. The winner becomes the country’s official submission. Among the Ophir nominees we’ve already seen Karaoke, which played at Tribeca, and the animated film Where Is Anne Frank, which bowed at Cannes last year. Now another Ophir nominee, Valeria is Getting Married, makes its North American premiere in Toronto. 

For all the political content that Israeli films often contain, this one has less to do with Israelis and more to do with a disadvantaged immigrant population...

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