THB #609: 19 Weeks To The Os-Scares!

Os-Scare!

We are now 19 weeks until Oscar night. And this season is still as wet and messy as a newborn baby. People talk about paths to 270 in the Presidential election… this award season has a lot of potential paths in front of it right now.

Look at Gold Derby about now and as much as half of their Top 10 group predictions for Best Picture will not be nominated for Best Picture. I mean… a laugher. Normally, a group of modestly insightful writers would do better in August. This year, it’s a challenge.

To start with, if you look at that Gold Derby list (really, you don’t have to), they are posturing that only 3 of the 10 nominees with do $30 million or more at the box office. This has happened once in the expansion era… in 2020, in the middle of COVID. None of the movies made even $10 million domestically that year (and change).

Also, there are a lot of truly great directors this season, some who have been nominated in the past… but only Ridley Scott really counts as a superstar director, which is to say that his name draws broad national attention before you even get to the film or its stars, with a real chance at a nomination. No Nolan, Spielberg, Scorsese, Cameron, no 3 Amigos (Cuarón/Del Toro/Iñárritu), no Coens, no Ron Howard… not even a Greta Gerwig.

I did something a little like this a month ago…. but a month has passed and I have seen almost all the festival films now… and I am not ready to make lists until a couple of more screenings… so…

Anora is a wonderful movie… and carries huge challenges to be nominated, much less to be the #1 pick to win Best Picture at this point. Neon could succeed in mainstreaming it, which would change its current status. But it’s a challenge. If you were one of those who actually wanted to see Judy Holliday getting the ol’ Arnold Palmer in every direction from Bill Holden in Born Yesterday, you will love the movie. If that notion offends, you may not be as comfortable. And I am always surprised by the number of people who the word, “fuck,” still offends when used a lot.

Speaking of sex, Babygirl is a really interesting movie. Nicole Kidman has never been better in anything. And the fact that she gets botox on camera is shocking and amazing and strips the audience of any “why does she look like she’s had botox” questions, even though it fits her character so perfectly. Halina Reijn’s movie is, ultimately, not about sex at all, but about power… not unlike Anora or Nightbitch. Perhaps the biggest challenge as an awards player is that the film strips bare any illusions about how we see ourselves and what we hide… but the answers remain ambiguous. That is, depending on the audience, the power and the weakness of the film.

Netflix’s Emilia Perez is another wonderful, but challenging movie. Jacques Audiard is a master, but his work upsets people and challenges people and even with a mainstream TV star and a major action star in the film, the level of accessibility for some audiences will be work for the Netflix crew every step of the way. This may actually be a movie that benefits greatly from streaming, if people are compelled to watch it more than once.

The challenges for The Brutalist and The Nickel Boys become obvious when people who are not at festivals actually see the films. Both are more art projects than mainstream commercial cinema. That doesn’t disqualify them. It doesn’t make them bad in any way. But it raises the hurdles significantly.

Conclave is, for me, the most overrated film of the season. It’s not like it stinks… but the ending kind of does… not because of its politics but because of its ham-fistedness. But even before you get to the Shyamalan-by-SVU’s-3rd-Act ending, the whole effort feels like a double-length episode of Columbo in Cassocks. I mean, what a cast! From Fiennes to Castellitto, yay! But it is so… well… basic. Watching it is like watching Edward Berger desperately looking for moments where he can do something interesting, if just to distract us from the the next candidate getting disqualified, over and over again.

With all respect to Sing Sing, it came out. In July. Did you hear about it?

Blitz is a movie that feels like the best of Steve McQueen at times.