Like anyone who’s been covering what’s become, as the party line goes, “the closest Best Picture race in recent memory,” I’ve gone through many mental rewrites of this top-prize breakdown.
In the absence of a de facto Best Picture frontrunner, the Oscar here usually goes to the slickest contender.
I don’t expect you to read this, and you have every right not to.
This past weekend, Gravity claimed the Live Action Film award for sound mixing from the Cinema Audio Society, one more precursor voting body whose results could prove prescient when it comes to Oscar’s March 2nd endgame.
Last year’s tie in this category allowed us the unique opportunity to call it either 50 percent right or 50 percent wrong.
Tomorrow, the WGA will announce its 2014 award winners, and whichever scribe(s) waltz off with the Original Screenplay prize may do the same on Oscar night.
We come to it at last.
The most pleasant surprise of this awards season has been the widespread embrace of Her.
Sadly, unlike Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler, we can’t all get what we hope for.
Our ballot here will look much different from Oscar’s.
In a year replete with great trash, American Hustle is the crown princess of the bunch.
If I had to bet which Oscar contender will score the most nominations without a single win, I’d go for Saving Mr. Banks.
The departure of a new Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle surely meant another equally high-profile or even several smaller-profile releases would be flocking to the date.
Anchored by its attachment to The Avengers, this new film’s artistic aspirations become irrelevant to domestic reception, since the massive global opening ensures its event status.
The D or F CinemaScore can indicate something potentially subversive about the material, whether intentional or not.
It would certainly make sense to see Paul Greengrass among shoo-ins like Steve McQueen and Alfonso Cuarón.
The entirety of the marketing for The Counselor suffers from what I’m calling “prestige-film fallacy.”
These Academy members possess an elementary school understanding of art, where films operate in a purely denotative register.
In what sense, then, is Machete Kills not simply that: a cash-in sequel meant to make fast money?
The more movies he makes, the more Paul Greengrass’s have-it-both-ways m.o. as a filmmaker becomes clearer.