Sunday, December 9, 2018 at 1:30PM by Nathaniel R
Will Mary Poppins Returns receive both Actress and Cast nominations?
The Screen Actors Guild Award nominations will be announced on Wednesday the 12th and voting wraps up tomorrow on Monday the 10th. So it's time to do predictions as well as possible darkhorse surprise attack theorizing. Let's begin...
Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 7:32PM 
The American Film Institute has announced their top 10 of the year... well top 11 since they did a bit of cheating this year. Well, more than a bit of cheating. Though their raison d'etre is to honor American films (see: their name), they included The Favourite, which is clearly a UK/Ireland production with a Greek director (even if some of the money is American). They also felt the need to give Mexico's Roma a special award. Can you blame them? Otherwise those two movies would have gone without awards this season. [Editor's note: Sarcasm!]
Their top ten is as follows...
Monday, November 26, 2018 at 1:20AM Nathaniel R and Murtada Elfadl welcome back Nick Davis to talk new films
Index (67 minutes)
00:01 Palme d'Or winner Shoplifters. Plus: Roma and Oscar talk.
20:22 Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite, directorial style, tragicomedies, and three stellar actresses: Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone. Plus: Sandy Powell's costumes
39:45 Reader Q: Which film will get the most Oscar nods this year?
43:06 Reader Q: What is going on with Mary Queen of Scots?
48:05 Reader Q: Why did Widows underperform?
52:50 Nick on Creed 2
58:32 Randomness to wrap-up: Museo, and Ruth E. Carter's costumes for Black Panther
Further Reading / References
• Nathaniel's review of The Favourite
• Murtada's interview with Hirokazu Koreeda on Shoplifters
• Oscar Predictions, Current
• ...and this royal Angela Bassett costume in Black Panther
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
Friday, November 23, 2018 at 1:24PM by Nathaniel R
Photographed by Kayla Reefer for The New York TimesAny list of the newest generation of exciting movie stars would have to include Michael Bakari Jordan (aka Michael B Jordan), and presumably way up top. The Jersey-raised actor, started young on television as a teen actor with acclaimed work on The Wire. With a name so reminiscent of a superstar in another field, it felt like a dare; How could he be that big for the movies? When he hit his mid 20s, though, the movies came calling to make good on the pop culture connotations of that name. It's been a match made in heaven thus far.
All that said he's been strangely absent from our movie screens since proving his film-carrying charisma so thoroughly with the one-two punch of Fruitvale Station and Creed. But then came 2018 to prove to us that he'd been hard at work all along but movies have their own temperamental calendars and sometimes they all get bunched up together. Four movies arrived in quick succession, one of them likely to be the biggest hit he'll ever have. He's already an Emmy nominee for producing the TV movie Fahrenheit 451 earlier this year, but the Oscar nomination has to date eluded him. Will that change with the Black Panther campaign? We don't yet know though we definitely hope so since it's his second, not his first, nomination worthy role; Oscar was sleeping on that whole Creed success back in 2015, a movie that was wildly better than it had any right to be given its provenance.
How many of his Michael B Jordan's key movies and TV shows have you seen? The posters are after the jump.
Thursday, November 22, 2018 at 11:36PM As a special Thanksgiving gift to all of you, we've updated all the Oscar charts.
The Favourite In theaters tomorrow! DO NOT MISS IT.
BEST PICTURE
The box office this weekend and so many openings and/or guild screenings this week (Roma and The Favourite both in limited release, Green Book going wide, Vice and Mary Poppins and Mary Queen of Scots screenings) etcetera will likely disrupt this chart, as will the impending NYFCC and NBR decisions, but here's what we're thinking right now...
