What was the first film you watched post-Oscars?

By Juan Carlos Ojano

An unpredictable awards season ended in an ANORA near-sweep at the Oscars.

It's been a week now since the Oscars.

The winners have celebrated, the losers have extended their congratulations (hopefully), the dust has settled, and the noise is slowly fading out. As we collectively move on from the recently concluded awards season, let me pose this question: what was the first film you watched post-Oscars?

Whether it be a leftover from the previous year, a new release from this current film year, or a good old classic, the first film one watches post-Oscars is fascinating to me because I do wonder if other cinephiles - especially those who intentionally subject themselves to the grueling roller-coaster ride of awards season - have a ritual of sorts on how to move forward with the recently concluded season...

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Robert Altman @ 100: “Nashville”

By Juan Carlos Ojano

To continue celebrating Robert Atman’s centennial anniversary, I have decided to finally take care of a longtime cinematic blind spot: his seminal 1975 opus Nashville. Released during the heyday of New Hollywood, the film tracks the lives of twenty-four main characters — singers, dreamers, and others — as they navigate their lives in the titular city within five days as the presidential campaign of a populist candidate is set to mount a political rally cum concert. 

For my first encounter with this film, I decided to watch this film twice within a three-day period. And how powerful the experience is...

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Split Decision: “Emilia Pérez”

In the Split Decision series, two (or three) of our writers face off on an Oscar-nominated movie one loves and the other doesn't. Today, Nick Taylor, Lynn Lee, and Juan Carlos Ojano discuss Emilia Pérez...

NICK TAYLOR: Hello, Lynn and Juan Carlos! I’m really excited to start our conversation on Emilia Pérez, surely the most divisive of this year’s Oscar contenders. I am entering this talk as our resident hater - I admire the nutty swings this movie is taking, though very little of that admiration extends to how those nutty swings are executed by Jacques Audiard and his collaborators. Still, I wanna hear what makes the movie work for you guys, or at least makes these experiments worthwhile. Lynn, as the person in this conversation who likes Emilia Pérez the most, do you wanna take the baton?

LYNN LEE: Haha, is it even safe to admit you like Emilia Pérez these days?...

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Split Decision: “Anora”

Come celebrate Valentine’s Day with the season’s most talked about love story gone wrong. It’s time to discuss Anora in the Split Decision series. Abe Friedtanzer and Juan Carlos Ojano disagree over the merits of this Oscar frontrunner…

ABE FRIEDTANZER: We're starting this conversation one day after one of my favorite films of 2024, Anora, won the Critics Choice Award for Best Picture and nothing else. As you may imagine, I think there's plenty to celebrate about it, and it's a bit strange that it won ONLY the top prize. But it is good to see it back in the awards race after picking up so many critics' prizes and then sort of fading into third or fourth position in most races (like Best Actress). I tried and failed to see Anora at TIFF and then did end up seeing it a few weeks later at a press screening in LA and was quite impressed…

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Paul Newman @ 100: "Hud"

By Juan Carlos Ojano

Martin Ritt’s 1963 revisionist Western Hud is remembered these days for mainly two things: for Patricia Neal’s Best Actress-winning performance (one of the shortest in Oscar history) and for hailing one of Paul Newman’s seminal works as an actor, two years after his Oscar-nominated turn in The Hustler. Hud further solidified Newman’s film star persona, now with indelible iconography within an all-too American genre. However, Newman’s performance as well as the film’s overall prickliness help the film transcend surface-level memorializing...

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