Taron Egerton WANTS that Oscar nomination

by Ben Miller

Elton & Taron at another ROCKETMAN screening

There’s long been an awards season cliché along the lines of 'I didn’t expect this and I’m so grateful to the Academy for the recognition.'  Let’s not kid ourselves, some talent understands the process of what it takes to get an Oscar nomination. That includes schmoozing with Academy members, attending press junkets and sitting on every late-night couch you can find.

No one understands this better in the current season than Taron Egerton.

Following his Golden Globes victory on Sunday night for the Elton John biopic Rocketman, Egerton is well poised to snag one of the Best Actor slots precisely because he has done the work and put himself in front of the most faces in the lead up to the Oscar nominations...

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Chart Updates - All Acting Categories

Is it us or are the four of the acting races murkier than they usually would be during the week of Oscar voting? We chalk this up to a bit less precursor uniformity between Critics Choice, Globes, SAG nods, and the regional critical consensus. On the other hand that regional critical consensus has been very pronounced with a clear lineup of winners that go like so: Parasite/Bong Joon Ho / Nyongo / Driver / Dern / Pitt. But what we're dealing with right now is the nomination game which is far more complex than "who wins".

BEST ACTRESS - Six women are still very much in the mix and it's quite difficult to guess who will be left out. Passion suggests that Cynthia Erivo or Charlize Theron would be in danger of the "snub" but on the other hand you're not often the snubbee if you're the one doing the biographical role... especially if there's mimicry. For now we've opted to have Saoirse Ronan be the odd woman out but that doesn't feel right either given the very current groundswell of love for that picture. At any rate we think it's between the six listed on the chart with Alfre Woodard (Clemency) and Awkwafina (The Farewell) staring to look like impossible dreams in this final decision week...

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The precursors don't always matter

by Cláudio Alves

In these merry times of winter holidays and gift-giving, there's no better present than the gift of hope. For Oscar obsessives, this can come in many forms. One of them can be the reminder that the precursors aren't everything when it comes to the race for Hollywood's most coveted little golden man.

Even if your favorite performance of the year hasn't been getting any sort of awards love, that doesn't mean its Oscar chances are dead and buried. Remember the case of Marcia Gay Harden, a surprise nominee that became a surprise victor when she conquered the Academy Award for Pollock. What a thrill.

She's the patron saint of Oscar surprises. In honor of her, here's a list of those lucky actors who scored an Oscar nomination despite having no nod whatsoever from the Globes, the SAGs, the Critics Choice Awards, or the BAFTAs...

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FYC: Robert Pattinson for Best Actor & Supporting Actor

by Cláudio Alves

Margot Robbie isn't the only actor with more than one performance in buzzy productions. 2019 has been a year full of actors with sterling bodies of work. There's also Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern, Adam Driver, among many others. I'd like to shed light on the excellence of a star whose work is quite far from Oscar's presumed radar. I'm talking about a former heart-throb turned character actor who spent the year getting drunk with Willem Dafoe, facing the challenges of single-parenthood in outer space and casting aspersions at Timothée Chalamet's disproportionate genitalia.

That's right, we're here to sing the praises of the one and only Robert Pattinson. First, we have his adventures with a fuckbox, a mad scientist and a baby…

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Review: Uncut Gems

by Chris Feil

In recent years, director duo Josh and Benny Safdie are cornering a market all their own of thriller of toxic neons and fatal consequence, after the deeply grim exploits of Heaven Knows What and Good Time. Nobody makes films quite in the way that the Safdies are making them right now, even if their particular brand of originality swims in back alley, off-putting aggressiveness. This round, their Uncut Gems is a dose of high anxiety filmmaking that’s partly Shakespearean tragedy of hubris and part underbelly crime saga in another unexamined pocket of New York City life.

Their best and most subversively accessible, it’s something enervating, infuriating, and compulsively watchable, all centered on a complex protagonist that also embodies all of the film’s contradictory qualities. That man is diamond dealer Howard Ratner, arrogantly betting off his assets and dwindling goodwill in the hopes of one massive payout, brought to exhilarating life by a possessed Adam Sandler.

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