Tuesday, March 24, 2020 at 6:52PM Cartoon Brew The National Association of Theater Owners is pissed at Universal about skipping theatrical for Trolls World Tour.
/Film Wonder Woman 1984 has been moved from June to August 14th but the other big Warner Bros summer release (In the Heights) doesn't yet have a new release date
More after the jump including a Star Wars book, a failed lawsuit, Terence McNally RIP...
Wednesday, September 4, 2019 at 3:00PM by Eurocheese
Since Nathaniel is flying to Toronto as we speak (TIFF kicks off tomorrow and runs through Sunday, September 15th), I volunteered to handle this week's Oscar Trivia column for him. I thought it might be fun to throw out a little quiz. THE ANSWERS WILL BE AFTER THE JUMP – no peeking! -- and be honest in the comments. How many can you guess correctly?
1. The highest number of Oscar wins for a single person is a whopping 22. Name the person who won them.
2. Last year, Roma won three Oscars. That means it missed the record for the most Oscars won by a foreign language film, a record currently held by which two films?
3. Have there been more female or more African-American Director nominees in the Academy’s history? (Both are sadly too few... bonus points if you can name all of those nominees)
4. The longest screen time for an Oscar nominated performance ended up netting the performer a win. The shortest nominated performance of all time did not. Can you name these two performances?
5. Which country has won the most Best Foreign Language Film Oscars? And which country has been nominated most often in the category?
6. Name the only actor or actress that has multiple posthumous nominations.
7. Only one person has an Olympic gold medal and an Academy Award. Name that person.
8. No film has ever won all four acting categories. Can you name the two films that came closest to that mark?
9. Name the most Oscar nominated woman in the Academy’s history.
10. How many times has a debut performance won the Best Actor Oscar?
Wednesday, March 13, 2019 at 3:16PM Guest contributor Tony Ruggio reporting from SXSW...
Olympic Dreams, starring comedian Nick Kroll and real-life Olympic athlete Alexi Pappas, is both innovative and a little mundane. Shot behind the curtain in Olympic Village during Pyongyang, it’s a romantic two-hander set against the 2018 games. It also doubles as a real deep-dive into an unknowable subculture. Blurring the lines between narrative and documentary, with many athletes and employees playing themselves, director Jeremy Teicher is a one-man band capturing the unglamorous side of the games. The dorm-like bedrooms, spare game rooms, and impending doom of life after it’s all over...
Monday, February 12, 2018 at 10:45AM By Glenn Dunks
The defining trait of I, Tonya that has separated it from a glut of biopics is that darkly comedic tone achieved significantly through fake direct-to-camera interviews by an assortment of ghoulish villains and anti-heroes. One could argue that with its cast of monstrous characters and flamboyant yet true-to-life costumes and wig-work, the film’s mock documentary device was entirely unnecessary at achieving its desired laughs.
Yet while I saw the value of its method as a sort of short-hand directorial device used to wrangle the story’s many real life contradictions and he-said-she-said-he-said-she-said-he-said narrative, having watched Nanette Burstein’s sublime The Price of Gold, it comes off as actually just lazy...
Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 9:39AM by Nathaniel R
Margot Robbie recently shared this pic from "exactly a year ago" when she was training for I TONYA
Is Margot Robbie the first actress to ever be nominated playing an Olympic athlete? I legit don't know the answer but I can't think of any others. The only previous Oscar nominated performances that we could think of were men: Will Smith as Muhammad Ali (though the focus there wasn't on the Olympics) and Mark Ruffalo as David Schultz (thanks commenters for this one!)
If you think back over movies that revolved around the Olympics in some way they aren't usually acting showcases (Chariots of Fire) or aren't focused on the Olympians themselves (Munich) or they're films that were either aimed at wide audience crowd pleasing or just didn't connect with awards voters (The Cutting Edge, Personal Best, Running Brave, Prefontaine, Eddie the Eagle, Cool Runnings) or they're documentaries which by their nature can't score acting honors.
There have been Olympians with movie careers but I can't think of any actors except Margot and Will Smith (who coincidentally co-starred in Focus in 2015) who have been nominated for playing an Olympian. Can you? Am I forgetting something totally obvious?
