Best Supporting Actor - Strongest Lineup in Years?

by Nathaniel R

Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in THE APPRENTICE © Briarcliff Entertainment

It's that time when you should start voting on the chart polls of "who SHOULD win?" We all know Kieran Culkin has the "supporting" Oscar locked up for his moody insightfulness and purposefully too-much lead performance in A Real Pain. But can we pause for a moment to appreciate that, Category Fraud aside, this is the best Best Supporting Actor lineup we've had in ages. There's not a bad or solid-but-unexciting performance in the bunch, just excellence across the board. Because I was so stunned at the quality of the shortlist, I had to look back through Oscar history to find its equivalent  - a year wherein there's not a single performance nominated that would look bad as a winner. I think you have to go back thirty years to either 1995 or 1993 to find a lineup as consistently strong. This message has been brought to you by a post-nomination viewing of The Apprentice a film I'd been avoiding for trauma reasons around the death of democracy. Strong is just excellent in the awards magnet role of Roy Cohn, a role that's already won Al Pacino an Emmy and Nathan Lane a Tony (both via Angels in America). Strong is so good that it's legitimately surprising that he's not even third best in the category...

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MONSTRO BEST ACTRESS - Vote Daily!

by Nathaniel R

THE SUBSTANCE

We’re updating all Oscar charts this weekend (if we can manage) and of course we start by spotlighting Best Actress, the category we live for as actressexuals. As is silly tradition, we like to mush all the contenders together and see what we’ve got. A unique caveat: it feels a little weird to play this game in a year where one of the nominees comes from a movie that does create a creature, “Monstro Elisasue”, by fusing women together. ANYWAY… If you stitch all of this season’s Best Actresses together your Bride of Frankenstein beauty is a 47 year old raven-haired American actress (with family ties to the UK and Brazil) enjoying her first ever nomination. Read on for more craziness...

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A few thoughts on the Oscar nominations...

by Nathaniel R

Nominations have been announced for the 97th Academy Awards and our worst fears are realized: we’ll now be forced to watch a movie about T**** just as he’s in the process of dismantling democracy. The Apprentice scored two acting nominations. Though Sebastian Stan hadn’t been winning awards for this movie but the other one (A Different Man, in which he is brilliant), never doubt the power of a famous actor playing a famous person. Unless that person is Angelina Jolie I guess? She famously missed the category in 2008 for a biopic despite doing well in the precursors and now she’s missed again for Maria. 

Our other worst nightmare for this season is also true: Problematic messy Emilia Perez has obliterated the record set by infinitely better movies Roma and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon to become the most nominated non-English language film of all time at the Oscars. In fact, with 13 nominations it’s one of the most nominated movies of any kind. We are living in wild times...

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"I Saw the TV Glow" leads the 16th annual Dorian Award nominations

by Nathaniel R

I SAW THE TV GLOW © A24

Oopsie. While celebrating Paul Newman's centennial we forgot to mention another round of nominations. This time it's GALECA: THE SOCIETY OF LGBTQ ENTERTAINMENT CRITICS taking on the challenge of naming "best" this and than of the year. This group, which includes over 500 entertainment journalists (including some of us here at TFE) and media personalities, showered I Saw the TV Glow with nominations. Perpetually overperforming gonzo horror satire The Substance was a close second.  

For my part I'm grateful that the category list has been expanded to make the awards more LGBTQ centric, because what is the point of any critics groups if they don't have a specific point of view/ place of origin apart that differentiates them from other critics groups? See the nominee list after the jump...

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Paul Newman @ 100: "The Hustler"

by Nathaniel R

Paul Newman's second Oscar nomination came for THE HUSTLER (1961). All screenshots sourced from FilmGrab.

A smiling illustration on salad dressing bottles, a serious visage on movie posters, a guest on television talk shows? I can't recall when I first became aware of Paul Newman. He was always there, an unmoving fixture of popular culture. When I was a kid he'd already been in the movie business for 30 years. For most stars, two back-to-back lead Oscar nominations in your late 50s (Absence of Malice and The Verdict) would be a winding down or a swan song but Paul Newman was the definition of "enduring". When I started hitting movie theaters on the regular he was just 30 years into a career but there was still tank in the gas. He'd be back to the Oscars as a nominee thrice more, four if you count the Honorary statue.

For today's celebration, we're travelling way back to his second Oscar nomination to meet "Fast Eddie" Felson in The Hustler (1961)...

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