Best Actress Volley: It's On!

Nick, Nathaniel, and Eric engage in a discussion about everybody's favorite Oscar category:  Best Actress. For the record this conversation started the day of the Globes nominations so watch things narrow down as we speak! 

 

Will a surprise SAG nomination rescue any underperformers?

ERIC:  Nick and Nathaniel, I'm really excited about this volley because the Best Actress category is as always stacked, this year featuring at least a dozen ladies who stand a fairly legitimate shot at a nomination at this point.  I thought it might be fun, before we get to the current leading contenders, to take a look at that back half of the possibilities to gauge your thoughts.  Of the actresses that seem slightly less likely to nab a nomination this year...Kate Winslet, Pamela Anderson, Amy Adams, Tilda Swinton, Saoirse Ronan...do you see the winds changing in the weeks to come where any of them could gather enough momentum to move to the front of the pack?

I'm considering Jolie, Madison, Gascon, Moore, Kidman, Erivo, Torres, and Jean-Baptiste more ahead at this point, but comment as you may.

NATHANIEL:  It does feel like quite a crowded, anything-could-happen* year. Take for example one from your column B: Saoirse Ronan and one from your column A: Angelina Jolie...

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Venice 2024: "Maria" and "Pooja Sir"

by Elisa Giudici

MARIA © Pablo Larraín

MARIA by Pablo Larrain
In Pablo Larraín’s unofficial trilogy of melancholic 20th-century female icons, Maria finds itself positioned somewhere in the middle. Maria is better than Spencer but falls short of Jackie's excellence...

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Venice Main Competition Round-Up (plus London and NYFF Openers)

by Nick Taylor

BLITZ (2024) Steve McQueen

So many film festivals the past few days have come to make an announcement! Steve McQueen’s Blitz, about Londoners trying to survive a bombing during WWII starring Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson, has been named the opening film for the London Film Festival. Meanwhile, the New York Film Festival will open with Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel helmed by Hale County This Morning, This Evening director RaMell Ross.

A lot of films have been announced for TIFF, and will presumably keep being announced until the festival starts in September. We’ve also received word of the full lineup for the 81st Venice Film Festival, and since they’ve got much fewer releases than TIFF, I’ll be doing a quick run-down of which titles are most exciting to me personally. While I won’t be able to attend Venice, you can still see me watching them take off from the sidelines, like a 20th century mother waving to her children as they set sail on a voyage to a new country, hoping for the absolute best but steeling myself to be strong, just in case of disaster...

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Ranking Roger Deakins' Oscar Nominations

by Cláudio Alves

Roger Deakins on the set of EMPIRE OF LIGHT | © Searchlight Pictures

Since two categories merged into one, no director of photography has amassed as many Oscar nominations as Roger Deakins. The British cinematographer earned his 16th nod this year for Sam Mendes' Empire of Light, having previously won for 1917 and Blade Runner 2049. His career spans continents and six decades, encompassing projects as varied as a Marvin Gaye video clip and pioneering work in animated cinema. What started as an early interest in the possibilities of digital filmmaking has turned into a veritable pursuit of innovation, bringing classic technique to virtual spaces. A visionary, a pioneer, a living legend, Roger Deakins is one of a kind.

To celebrate the master, let's look back at his many Oscar nominations, ranking them along the way. After all, in times of awards fever, everyone loves a good list…

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Almost There: Angelina Jolie in "A Mighty Heart"

by Cláudio Alves

There are few true stars in contemporary Hollywood. Angelina Jolie is arguably one of them, part of a dying breed of movie mythology. Not that it means she's a prolific thespian. For that matter, it's pretty sad how the actress has started to evade our screens in recent years, headlining fewer and fewer projects as time goes by. That being said, Jolie is back in theaters right now, thanks to The Eternals, where she plays an immortal goddess-like figure. It's a delightfully obvious casting choice. In celebration of this occasion, we shall look back. Look back to a time when this Oscar-winning powerhouse was at the high of her visibility and popularity, but the Academy ignored her just the same. In 2007, Jolie seemed like a likely Best Actress nominee for Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart…

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