Awards Season 2023

[therewillbeblus]

I know a lot of people connected with Past Lives, but I don't think it carries the epic cumulation of emotional payoff audiences want to give a top prize, even in subtlety. As far as recent Asian stories breaking through to American mass appeal, it feels more like Minari than Drive My Car

I also don't think Saltburn stands a chance at the show. It's so divisive but not in a way that seems to be provoking much thought, and I think the films that usually break through under these conditions are clearer and more pointed satires like Triangle of Sadness. Saltburn isn't even really satirizing the thing people think it is, and I think that's confusing audiences, but I do think a lot of people are connecting to it aesthetically, as twisted performance, and to Fennell as a visual storyteller.

[lacritfan]

National Society of Film Critics

BEST PICTURE: Past Lives
BEST DIRECTOR: Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest
BEST ACTRESS: Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
BEST ACTOR: Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Charles Melton, May December
BEST SCREENPLAY: Samy Burch, May December
BEST FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: Fallen Leaves
BEST NONFICTION FILM: Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Rodrigo Prieto, Killers of the Flower Moon
BEST EXPERIMENTAL FILM: Jean-Luc Godard’s Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars
SPECIAL CITATION FOR A FILM AWAITING U.S. DISTRIBUTION: Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes
FILM HERITAGE AWARDS:
— Criterion Channel, for an adventurous, wide-ranging, finely curated selection of films, ranging from American independents to world cinema to short films to classic Hollywood, making readily available the kind of repertory cinema that every city should have.
— Facets, Kim’s Video, Scarecrow Video and Vidiots, for maintaining wide-reaching libraries of films on disc and tape and making those libraries available to the general public.

[Matt]

I also don't think Saltburn stands a chance at the show

Someone on Twitter the other day referred to Emerald Fennell as “Peridot Parsley” and that’s funnier to me than anything in Saltburn.

Honestly I wouldn’t mind Rosamund Pike winning Best Supporting Actress, but I also don’t think there’s a chance of that happening.

[thirtyframesasecond]

The Globes seemed to play to the form guide. Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Actress are probably locked down now, and Best Actor and Actress are a flip of a coin. Anatomy of a Fall is probably the outsider with momentum now.

[MistressAmerica]

The Globes seemed to play to the form guide. Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Actress are probably locked down now, and Best Actor and Actress are a flip of a coin. Anatomy of a Fall is probably the outsider with momentum now.

I am genuinely curious about Adapted Screenplay, I know that, with WGA being delayed to post-Oscars, Anatomy of a Fall's Globe win will probably be it's first and only precursor piece of hardware, and I could see Oppenheimer vs. Barbie vs. Poor Things for the Adapted Screenplay.

[Matt]

I don’t think it will necessarily be a surprise, but Past Lives is going the be “The Little Indie That Could” this year.

Welp, I got that one wrong. No SAG nominations for Past Lives or Saltburn but three for American Fiction and two for The Holdovers. These are the only crossover films with the Independent Spirit Awards, and the only actors with nominations for both awards are Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph. It’s going to be a real shock if Da’Vine Joy Randolph doesn’t walk away with every major award from here on out.

[colinr0380]

David Ehrlich's annual musical Top 25 rundown of the year

[Apperson]

2024 BAFTA Nominations

[Apperson]

Btw are we doing any sort of predictions contest this year? I'll happily participate if we are.

[Computer Raheem]

Btw are we doing any sort of predictions contest this year? I'll happily participate if we are.

Second this; I have a few hotshot predictions I need to fire off into the ether \:D/

[Toland's Mitchell]

The usual host of the predictions contest is on hiatus. So somebody else would have to step up and do it. It's probably too late to start the contest for the nominations, but I don't see why it couldn't be done for the winners after the noms are announced. Again though, somebody has to be willing to host. I'd be interested in playing.

[TechnicolorAcid]

I could be interested in hosting. Is it like announcing who got the winners correct or is there more to it?

[Never Cursed]

Not sure where to put this, but: amid a last-minute push by the To Leslie people to get Ava DuVernay's Origin Oscar nominations, film critic Jourdain Seales has spoken on Twitter about something pretty rancid that DuVernay's distribution company ARRAY does with the films it buys. Specifically, following a distribution deal the company signed with Netflix in 2016, ARRAY has a pretty well-documented pattern of:

1. Buying small, independently-produced, POC-led films at American festivals, frequently Sundance or Tribeca
2. Licensing them, under the terms of the deal, to exclusive streaming distribution with Netflix for 3 years
3. Following the expiration of the exclusive distribution period, yanking them off of Netflix and not distributing them permanently, in any other capacity

Seales named Mississippi Damned, Residue (astonishingly still on ARRAY's website with Netflix branding even though ARRAY took it off Netflix), and Burning Cane specifically as having been affected by this practice, but I'm sure many other films have been as well. True to what she said, I can't find any place still streaming these three films, offering them for rent, or selling a non-bootleg physical copy of them. Just something to think about if Origin begins a season of junkets starting tomorrow

[domino harvey]

This whole Origin push is truly out of left field, especially since it only has a chance of being nominated for Best Picture and that’s it. And the film apparently closes with Ghost Trayvon Martin showing up to affirm the work of the author of Caste, which is so tasteless that I’m kind of in awe

[soundchaser]

Worth noting that Searles is a pretty incendiary figure with a questionable relationship to the truth at times. I'd be interested to see someone else reporting on this before taking it 100% at face value.

[Never Cursed]

This whole Origin push is truly out of left field, especially since it only has a chance of being nominated for Best Picture and that’s it

Apparently they were also hoping to squeeze Carey Mulligan out of Actress, but I imagine they won't manage that even if they get a Picture nom (though we won't have to wait long to find out). There's a lot of the script that is...abominably tasteless, especially if you have any historical knowledge of some of the people and places it depicts, so I'm rolling out for it as soon as it gets here.

[beamish14]

I can’t stand DuVernay’s work, and that makes me incensed. She owns the distribution rights to at least two of Haile Gerima’s films, and we’ll never get them on Blu-Ray

[CSM126]

What would she gain from withholding films from distribution? Moronic practice, especially from someone who just a few years ago was calling out Criterion for not acquiring more POC-led films (and didn’t Criterion respond that she was the one holding up their attempts to get her early films put out?).

[Never Cursed]

What would she gain from withholding films from distribution?

She can sell or lease the rights to other distributors for presumably higher prices. Criterion Channel itself is a good example of this right now: they're currently streaming The Burial of Kojo, the first film by Blitz Bazawule (who went on to direct a film for Beyonce and then the new The Color Purple adaptation), which used to be on Netflix after ARRAY bought it, but disappeared from streaming for a while.

[Peacock]

What would she gain from withholding films from distribution? Moronic practice, especially from someone who just a few years ago was calling out Criterion for not acquiring more POC-led films (and didn’t Criterion respond that she was the one holding up their attempts to get her early films put out?).

Not quite.

DuVernay said that Criterion had passed on her own film, “Middle of Nowhere” (2012), for which she became the first Black filmmaker to win the directing prize at Sundance. “There wasn’t any rights issue,” said DuVernay, who owns the movie. “It was just a pass.” In an emailed statement, Becker said he had no record or memory of this, and offered to release “Middle of Nowhere” on Blu-ray.

“If Ava would want to work on a special edition with us, we would be honored and would just need her help to get Lionsgate to say yes,” he wrote, referring to the film’s current distributor.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

What would she gain from withholding films from distribution?

She can sell or lease the rights to other distributors for presumably higher prices. Criterion Channel itself is a good example of this right now: they're currently streaming The Burial of Kojo, the first film by Blitz Bazawule (who went on to direct a film for Beyonce and then the new The Color Purple adaptation), which used to be on Netflix after ARRAY bought it, but disappeared from streaming for a while.

Also Isabel Sandoval's Lingua Franca which had been on Netflix for awhile as per the deal referenced above.

[spectre]

I can’t stand DuVernay’s work, and that makes me incensed. She owns the distribution rights to at least two of Haile Gerima’s films, and we’ll never get them on Blu-Ray

Which two films?

[beamish14]

I can’t stand DuVernay’s work, and that makes me incensed. She owns the distribution rights to at least two of Haile Gerima’s films, and we’ll never get them on Blu-Ray

Which two films?

Ashes and Embers and Sankofa

[spectre]

Thanks!

I was having a look online just now and Gerima seems to take a different view of the partnership (or at least did in 2022):

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/hail ... 235185475/

Perhaps the most significant element of Gerima’s partnership with Array was the distributor’s decision to re-release “Sankofa.” Before 2021, the film had rarely been seen since its debut. Since they weren’t getting any support from showbiz, Gerima and Aina had acted as their own distributors, organizing screenings in different cities as often as they could. But they didn’t have a sustainable method to make the film accessible to audiences until DuVernay stepped in, having seen Gerima’s work years before and finding it formative to her own filmmaking. Before “Sankofa” made it to Netflix last year, Gerima had given up hope that he’d ever have a consistent way to share his work.

“Until I met Ava, who proposed her vision, her dream, and became my die-hard supporter, I didn’t think there was such an outlet for [‘Sankofa’],” he said. “In fact, we distributed the film, and we got tired of the war and fighting we had to wage to show it. We really stopped showing it out of defeat. So her coming now and resurrecting ‘Sankofa’ into another life is a complete pleasure for me.”

Though he also makes this admission toward the end of the piece, which suggests that he may not be up on all of the fine print regarding distribution on streaming platforms:

“Well, I don’t know Netflix. I’m a very backward person. I don’t even possess a cell phone. I don’t know nobody. All I know is Ava”

[Beloved Aunt]

I wonder if this will be the year Jeffrey Wright finally gets the Academy Award recognition he so richly deserves (many times over)? I'm guessing...no?