Adams / Weisz + Oscar

by Murtada Elfadl

Weisz and Adams at their first Oscars as nominees

This year marks the second time Rachel Weisz & Amy Adams have been nominated together in the supporting actress category: Weisz for The Favourite, Adams for Vice. The first time they did so was for their first nominations, thirteen years ago for The Constant Gardener and Junebug respectively. They are linked together in my mind -and possibly for some of you - because of that. Adams’ performance in Junebug is my favorite of her nominated performances and I've always said that if she had won that year we wouldn’t be talking about overdue status for years on end. 

Since that time their Oscar careers have diverged...

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It's time for final Best Picture predictions!

For the next week we'll be sharing final predictions for each Oscar category. We're starting with the big kahuna, Best Picture because it's the most crucial. It's a domino effect essentially since each year shows us that once voters favor your movie, they just favor it whether or not it's particularly worthy from one category to the next. We'll start with the not so obvious (if you ask me) question:

What would be nominated in a five film year?

Past statistics will tell you that that would be the DGA lineup (BlacKkKlansman, Green Book, Roma, A Star is Born, and Vice) because prior to 2010 when the Best Picture category expanded, the DGA lineup was slightly more predictive of Best Picture than of Best Director, as curious as that might seen. But it wasn't infallible, of course. And we don't think those would be the five this year. 

So let's take them in the order of strength after the jump...

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Four Random Thoughts on "Vice"

by Eric Blume

Adam McKay’s film Vice has been out in theaters for two weeks or so now, and as we head into Golden Globe weekend where it leads the nominations, we ought to discuss it a bit more. Here are some thoughts about the film, which do carry SPOILERS, not about story points (as unfortunately these things really happened), but about just how truly odd this film is in so many ways...

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Aquaman still tops. Mary Poppins also floats

We haven't done a full weekend box office post in some time since we've been sharing the 'top grossing of the year' lists which are all updated if you missed them and you can see the hits in 11 different categories including docs, foreign films, female directors, gay directors, films with female leads, etcetera...

But as for what people were seeing Christmas week and this past weekend, here are the nation's top dozen+ movies chart for both wide releases and limited/expanding titles. Which titles were you catching up with?

Weekend Box Office (Actuals) (December 28th-30th)
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
1 Aquaman  $52.1 on 4125 screens (cum. $189.3) Review, Podcast	1 🔺 Simmba $1.7 on 300 screens *NEW*

2 Mary Poppins Returns $28.3 on 4090 screens (cum. $99.2) Podcast ❤️	2 🔺 If Beale Street Could Talk $766k on 65 screens (cum. $1.9) Review, Podcast ❤️

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Links: Letitia, Lists, Lady Gaga, and 'Live-Action' Remakes

• Slate a rant about Vice's insulting post-credits sequence. A *lot* of people really hate Vice. Will that stop the Academy from voting for it? The studio controlled the conversation for a long time with the embargo and it built up real awards steam. We shall see.
• Cartoon Brew looks into Disney's weird stance about their Lion King remake. They keep saying "it's not animated" but we all know it is!
• /Film the live action remake of Japanese hit Your Name will be 'Americanized'

• Deadline Dame June Whitfield of Absolutely Fabulous fame has died at 93
• Into the Spider-Verse the screenplay is online if you're interested
• Vulture a survey and exploration of what Asian-American art meant this past year featuring Burning, Crazy Rich Asians, Searching and more...
• The Atlantic has a series of articles called "And Scene" that's worth checking out zeroing in on great scenes from the year
• Coming Soon supposedly Bird Box had the best first week of all time for views on Netflix but the company is still totally cagey about stats and numbers so it's hard to trust. We don't even know what counts as a view really - did you have to finish watching it for example?
• The Root Letitia Wright crowned box office queen of 2018 (it helps to be in the top two grossers of course)
• Vulture "horror is not defined by what scares you"
• MovieWeb More news on what Disney+ streaming service is planning (i.e. tons and tons of Marvel shows)

List-Mania
• IndieWire 52 directors choose their favorite films of the year. This is a good read and the variety of titles cited is noteworthy, reminding you more than critics lists have how different each person's experience of cinema in a particular year can be.
• Cinemablographer chooses 20 best performances of the year and Nicole Kidman makes the list twice! Some unusual picks here but thankfully no category fraud!
• Furious Cinema top 20 of the year, in no particular order featuring Suspiria, Spider-Verse, and more
• Jesse Knight best movie taglines of 2018 beginning with... Dog Days (lol!)
• Vulture 10 best podcasts of 2018
• The Guardian Mark Kermode's top 10 list with BlacKkKlansman, Leave No Trace...
• Vulture 10 best film scores of 2018

Exit Video
Lady Gaga performs inside a mecha-robot in her new Las Vegas residency show "Enigma"

I’m gonna be thinking about this for a few days... the POWER... #ENIGMA pic.twitter.com/4Yj9orazre

— LG Updates (@LadyGagaVegas) December 29, 2018