Questions/Thoughts for the Moment

[Sabin]

mlrg wrote
Nicolas Cage keeps popping here in there. I haven’t seen the film, but do you guys think he has a shot at being nominated?

I didn't think so initially because I thought his performance was a bit too subdued. That's no knock on his performance. He's great. But he struck me as being in service of a director's vision more than the breakout wacko performance some might think. But now that the choices are more in focus... I think it's possible?

[mlrg]

Nicolas Cage keeps popping here in there. I haven’t seen the film, but do you guys think he has a shot at being nominated? From where we stand Cumberbatch, Smith and to some extent Garfield and Washington seem pretty locked. But with Nightmare Alley and Don’t Look Up underperforming, who will take fifth place? We are still to months away but Cage could be a surprise nominee like Willem Dafoe was three years ago.

[flipp525]

Many feel the supporting actress slate is close to solid -- Balfe, Dunst, Ellis, Negga, DeBose -- but Balfe has been missing from a number of those regional critics, and anyone but Dunst strikes me as potentially vulnerable. And, nope: I don't have a clue who might win from that bunch.

Negga has really shown surprising strength this season so far and I’m happy to have seen her cited over the weekend for critics awards and now a Golden Globe nomination. I’ve always secretly thought that she could end up running away with this in the end. But who knows. This is a strong category this year with a seemingly endless list of candidates.

The above lineup looks…realistic. And, it exactly matches what was just nominated at the Globes. But I feel like this category - as of late - has thrown in random performances that were relatively unexpected (Kathy Bates in Richard Jewell, I’m thinking), that you just never know.

This is also the category where, after 40+ years of no foreign language nominees, there were two in less than four years, one of which actually won the Oscar.

Rita Moreno seems too good of story to pass up and I think she might end up possibly knocking out Balfe. But there are people Ike Ann Dowd, Marlee Marlin, and Jessie Buckley haunting the edges, even if on the periphery.

This is one of the more interesting races to watch at this point.

[mlrg]

Right now, I think West Side Story, The Power of the Dog and Belfast are still the ones to beat, but that could change on a dime.

We are 3 months away from the voting period, which, by todays media standards, seems like an eternity.

[Big Magilla]

We'll soon see how much ignoring of the Globes there will be.

Bloggers won't ignore them but given that no one cooperated with them when they asked for submissions and had to waive them, talent is going to be mostly mute.

I completely agree with Tee's observations. I don't think West Side Story is close to dead as most of the bloggers would have you believe but it's not going to have anywhere near the almost unanimous support that the 1961 version had. The last musical to win Best Picture was Chicago 19 years ago. That was up against New York winner Far from Heaven and L.A. winner About Schmidt, both of which missed out on a Best Picture nod as well as the second installment in the Lord of the Rings franchise, and Roman Polanski's temporary return to favor with The Pianist. Gangs of New York (that year's Dune?) and The Hours were nominated in lieu of Far from Heaven and About Schmidt.

I don't see Drive My Car developing the same kind of energy as Parasite but it's still early. Right now, I think West Side Story, The Power of the Dog and Belfast are still the ones to beat, but that could change on a dime.

[Reza]

Tomorrow we get the Globe and Broadcaster's nominations, but everyone's going to at least pretend to ignore the Globes.

Please explain who is "everyone"? And why should they ignore the Globe nods which are one of the most prominent percusors to the Oscars? Every year they have followed them knowing very well the racism angle and lack of black people amongst the voters. Yet they chose to throw a fit early this year. Ok, better late than never. It's so much like the Woody Allen boycott where the incident happened in 1992, Farrow created an immediate uproar, everything was normal in Hollywood with major stars clamouring to be in his films, the Academy awarding him an Oscar in 2012 and then suddenly hypocrites like Kate Winslet and Timothée Chalamet went on the backfoot about starring in his films. And production companies refused to release his films in America. It was kosher to accept the part - Winslet is on record in an interview gushing about getting a call from Woody to star in his film which she deliriously accepted. And then to go back on him when the film came out.

So I'm curious who these hypocrites are who will ignore the Globe nods.

[Mister Tee]

Tomorrow we get the Globe and Broadcaster's nominations, but everyone's going to at least pretend to ignore the Globes, and anyone in their right mind SHOULD ignore the Broadcasters. There'll be more podunk critics' groups issuing lists all week, culminating in the actually meaningful LA results. But, apart from that, things'll go quiet -- the SAG nominations are post-Christmas, a month later than usual, and the DGA/PGA/WGA slates aren't till the very end of January. We're getting an unusually leisurely lead-in to the season. I've decided it's time to raise a few questions/points about where we stand.

Question to start: how serious is this Drive My Car thing? We came into late Fall thinking a surprisingly large crop of foreign-language efforts had Oscar hopes -- Parallel Mothers, The Worst Person in the World, A Hero, even Hand of God and Titane -- but they've all stood by and watched this (apparently) talky 3-hour film slash its way through the critics' voting. It may be strictly a mirage: I'm remembering another (quite wonderful) Murakami adaptation, from just 3 years ago -- Burning -- which also triumphed at critics' awards, but couldn't even scrape up an International Film nomination in the end. But perhaps not. Adapted screenplay is a sinkhole of a category this year -- The Power of the Dog is the only nominee I'd stake the rent money on (West Side Story is probably second most likely, which, given musicals' poor showings over the years, says it all). Hamaguchi would seem to have an excellent chance of slipping in there (especially with the other 3 subtitled hopefuls competing on the original side). Meanwhile, the addition of so many international members to the directing branch in recent years has led to foreign-language nominees in each of the past 3 years, some expected (Cuaron and Bong Joon-ho), some not so much (Pawlikowski, Vinterberg).

Sub-note on that last: I've noted often here that the directing slate almost always includes at least one previous nominee -- 1948, 1995 and 1997 are the only years post-1929 without a repeater. But there's a converse that also applies: 1950 is the only year in that same period where all five nominees were repeaters. The vast bulk of this year's credible hopefuls have at least one nomination behind them: Branagh, Campion, Anderson, Spielberg, Villeneuve -- even McKay or Del Toro, were they to rally. If a first-timer is going to emerge, it could I suppose be Gyllenhaal, or Rebecca Hall. But it might just be Hamaguchi.

West Side Story, I suppose everyone knows by now, had a "soft" opening weekend. About a million short of the In the Heights June debut that made us all drop the film from prediction charts. I'm not ready to write off West Side just yet. Grown-up audiences have shown for months they're still wary of theatres, plus we're in that pre-holiday period where attendance traditionally drops, only to explode some between Christmas and New Years. It could be this burial is premature. And, even if not...we all know financial expectations for films are way down across the board (with Omicron hitting us just when we thought we were done), so the excellent reviews and audience scores may be more important than grosses in terms of Oscars. However...it seems to me, implicit in a lot of the rapturous Hollywood response to West Side, was a belief that this film was not only good, but that it would bring audiences back to theatres in droves for good old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment. Like King Richard, it was seen as a big crowd-pleaser, and its not drawing those crowds creates, at best, an image problem. At worst, it may turn out that people just don't feel a great need to turn out for a new version of West Side Story -- and that could carry over to people not feeling a need to vote for it for best picture, either.

But, what CAN win best picture? It seems to me the field has narrowed to a bunch of films that all seem to have strikes against them. Belfast is charming enough but critics were lukewarm, and the grosses are pretty wee. Dune is fantasy, and only Part One; nominations seem its ceiling. Both Power of the Dog and Licorice Pizza have enthusiastic supporters, but neither is going to be universally popular (I have my own issues with Power of the Dog, which I'll articulate when I get a chance -- it's good, but hardly a goes-down-easy choice). West Side has what I've just described. I expect all five to be nominated for best picture, but, truly, I can't rule in or out any of them potentially emerging from that final envelope. And, may I remind you: we're still 3 1/2 months from that envelope bring opened; every one of those films could go through ten media cycles between now and then.

In fact, I see this year as being fully scrambled in virtually every category (except Adapted screenplay -- Power of the Dog will win -- and Visual effects to Dune.) This, naturally, upsets the folks at Awards Worthy, who so desperately want the races closed off at the earliest possible date. Many of them are still loudly shouting, Will Smith and Kristen Stewart -- their choices for months. But King Richard has to fend off reports about its financial failure, genuine "Is that all?" reaction to the Smith performance, and Cumberbatch's (to-date) strong performance at those regional groups, who you would have expected to fall in line for Smith. Smith will likely still win the Globe (which we'll all pretend we don't notice) and Broadcasters, but Cumberbatch sure seems a hot prospect for BAFTA. This could be a lively race. (I'm not really projecting the whole list -- just the two I think could win -- but I see Garfield as pretty solid by now, and Washington very likely. After that, maybe Dinklage? Or Cooper/DiCaprio, despite their films' shortfalls?)

Stewart definitely has her great reviews and the celebrity-impersonation factor, but you can't ignore the truly horrendous audience scores the film has been getting. The Gaga win in NY may be just Cameron Diaz-redux, or it may propel her to contention based on her film's actually making money. Olivia Colman, Alana Haim, Frances McDormand, even Jessica Chastain (whose film's box-office flame-out doesn't look so bad now that so many films have met the same fate) -- they could all be in there, and, honestly, as with best picture, I can't rule anyone in or out for the win. Which is refreshing at this point in the year.

The crash-and-burn of Don't Look Up, Nightmare Alley and Being the Ricardos has drastically reduced the supporting actor field. I see it as pretty much being down to Ciaran Hinds and Kodi Smit-McPhee (either of whom might have vote-siphoning fellow nominees, Jamie Dornan and Jesse Plemons). I could see either winning. Am I forgetting someone important? (I don't really believe in the Bradley Cooper thing, but I'll mention him for the record.)

Many feel the supporting actress slate is close to solid -- Balfe, Dunst, Ellis, Negga, DeBose -- but Balfe has been missing from a number of those regional critics, and anyone but Dunst strikes me as potentially vulnerable. And, nope: I don't have a clue who might win from that bunch.

Finally: is there really a chance a non-Disney could stomp on the animation field? A few weeks ago, I was resigned to Encanto. But the critics have really come out for The Mitchells vs. the Machines -- even the groups that chose Flee instead have The Mitchells as runner-up. Might this create enough noise that The Mitchells takes the prize on momentum alone?