Best Actor. April Foolish Predictions

It's that time of year. But judging on your semi-quiet response maybe you weren't quite ready for it yet? Anyway. Light a fire. Whoohoo. It's time to pull out the crystal balls and make stupidly early Oscar predictions.

There are so very many questions to ask about the forthcoming Best Actor race. These are just 8 of them:

• Can Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl) be the first back-to-back acting winner in 21 years?
• Will Tom Hiddleston (I Saw the Light) & Don Cheadle (Miles Ahead) do their musician legend biopics proud?
• Will Michael Fassbender prove Michael Fassbender's undoing (5 leading roles this year)?
• Same question for Jake Gyllenhaal (3 leading roles this year)?
• Perennial Write-In Question from Leo "when will it finally be my turn?" 
• Can money-grubbers Will Smith (Concussion) & Johnny Depp (Black Mass) find artistic redemption and thus Oscar favor?
• Can Bryan Cranston (Trumbo) triple-crown by February next year? He's already got the Tony & the Emmy 
• Will any of the old guard (Warren Beatty, Tom Courtenay, Sir Ian McKellen) rise up?
• Will Beasts of No Nation sort out its theater vs online situation so that Idris Elba has a shot?

SEE THE NEW CHART. Discuss.

April Foolish Oscar Predix - Supporting Actors

As is the case every year the supporting categories are incredibly foggy early on. One rarely knows which supporting players have big roles (unless they're co-leads campaigning fraudulently which we should always expect). And then there's the matter of who will steal scenes and who will be reduced to glorified cameos even if their roles sound good on paper.

Will Poulter and Tom Hardy heading to shoot scenes for The Revenant

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about this Foolish early punditry: Supporting players, unlike leads, almost never win traction unless their film is also well liked. That adds yet another layer of clouds blocking future vision.

All of which makes April Foolish supporting pictures an exercize in fantasy. But it's fun! The chart is now up for  Best Supporting Actor and to start things off I'm predicting an all newbie lineup. But looking over the general foggy field one could have genuine with high hopes for a couple of respected actors who've never had a real Oscar shot like Tom Hardy and Kyle Chandler, actors who have been mistreated by Oscar like Ralph Fiennes (future cinephiles will be driven mad puzzling how he missed for Grand Budapest Hotel) and Kurt Russell (tell me again how he missed for Silkwood?) and actors who fit right into Things Oscar Does like Seth Rogen (comic gone serious), Bradley Cooper (you like me you really like me) and so on. The chart is big and extensive because it's silly to rule anyone out before most films have begun screening.

Among films with large casts that we suspect are teeming with possibly eventful supporting players but who can really say are Warren Beatty's Untitled Howard Hughes Project, Quentin Tarantino's Hateful Eight, and the press expose of the Catholic Church scandal drama known as Spotlight

Some of "Spotlight"s key cast members: Keaton, Schreiber, Ruffalo, McAdams, Slattery, James

And that's not all. There's also the head-injury medical sports drama Concussion led by Will Smith, an FBI drama led by Emily Blunt called Sicario, and the all star period literary drama Genius which features Jude Law, Guy Pearce, Dominic West, and others as famous authors. There's also the Hollywood Blacklist drama Trumbo which is headlined by Bryan Cranston but features a lot of other actors as famous showbiz figures

Do you have any suspicions about this field or any wild card predictions?

April Foolish Predictions. Let's Talk Best Picture

Subverting expectations, let's not start small but big with our annual April Foolish Oscar predictions. The first chart is up for the BEST PICTURE competition. Bear in mind that apart from Fox Searchlight's Brooklyn, (reviewed at Sundance) nobody has seen any of these films so this is pure fumbling in the dark for things that have the general shape of Oscar darlings. There are so many variables in each season and this first guess as to the general field is meant to spur conversation and must be taken with a grain of salt salt block.

A lot of recent Oscar darlings will try to sell new wares including Hooper, Inarritu, Vallée, Tarantino, and David O. Russell. Steven Spielberg, a perennial, could be back with his cold war film Bridge of Spies. Previous winners with heavy cobwebs on them in terms of Academy favor like Ron Howard, Warren Beatty, Jonathan Demme and Robert Zemeckis will try for comebacks. And one of TFE's all time favorite filmmakers, Todd Haynes, is back after a long long big screen hiatus. Oscar has never quite known what to do with him so will they figure him out once they see Carol? It's a big question mark even though the movie sure looks like a potential beauty.

The films I have the most faith in at the moment -- in terms of Oscar appeal only -- are The Danish Girl and The Revenant but it's all guesswork until we see real footage on all these films.

Thoughts? Psychic revelations? Future tomatoes thrown?

Yes No Maybe So: Southpaw

If this post were a sportsmovie, it would be like the first hint of a redemption arc to come after a downward spiral. Yes, I'm (gasp) over 48 hours late saying "yes" to Jake Gyllenhaal.

It's always "yes" so what's the rush?

The occasion is the first trailer to Southpaw, Jakey's new boxing movie from director of dark violent machismo programmers Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Olympus has Fallen, The Equalizer). In other words, we'd have no interest at all if it didn't star actors we obsess over. But we're already jumping into the Yes No Maybe So breakdown so let's just get the eternal "yes" that is Jake Gyllenhaal and our Gyllenhaalism out of the way first.

The only thing that could make slo mo and fetishisizing body shots of Jake Gyllenhaal's physique better is if his tattoos were more relatable, like...

Click to read more ...

We Can't Wait 2015. The Complete Series

In the We Can't Wait series, just wrapped, we looked at our team's most anxiously awaited movies for the 2015 film year that's just begun. ("It's March!" you cry. It's okay. You're new. Our calendar goes Oscar to Oscar.) For the curious, the team decided and yours truly (Nathaniel) looked at the list -- essentially a top 20 at that point -- and voted only on the finalists... which amounted to a couple of "executive saves" I suppose you could say. Here's to hoping that all 15+ of these movies provoking Pavlovian drooling in our corner of the cinephile blogosphere satisfy.

Now that the list is fully up, I wonder how much of the next Oscar battles for Best Actress & Supporting Actress we've inadvertently prophesied what with Blanchett, Streep, Moore, Page, Cotillard, Winslet, Swinton, Rampling in juicy leading roles and Mara, Paulson, Chastain, Wasikowska, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judy Davis and Dakota Johnson all featured (we assume) prominently in these 15 features, too. (yes, first our Oscar predictions arrive in April)

What movies DIDN'T we cover for the summer and following prestige season that you're most excited about? And which movies on our list did we properly whet your appetite for? 

Lady MacBeth (Marion Cotillard) and her would be king (Michael Fassbender)

We Can't Wait
#1 Carol in which Blanchett ♥ Mara and her husband does not ♥ that
#2 Ricki & The Flash in which Streep rocks out / returns home
#3 Macbeth in which Fassbender seeks the crown whilst Cotillard tries to remove that damn spot and though we've had enough Shakespeare they're both too irresistible to deny
#4 Mad Max: Fury Road in which all post-apocalyptic hell breaks loose
#5 The Lobster ...who knows but electic cast and Dogtooth director intrigue
#6 Crimson Peak in which del Toro goes Gothic with scrumptious cast
#7 45 Years in which Andrew Haigh (Weekend) directs Rampling ♥ Courtenay
#8 Bridge of Spies Spielberg + Hanks  ÷ The Coen Bros
#9 Taxi in which Jafar Panahi continues to make movies despite the ban
#10 Freeheld in which Moore ♥ Page and they reenact a true LGBT rights story
#11 A Bigger Splash gets the I Am Love team back together for erotic drama
#12 The Dressmaker in which Kate Winslet seeks revenge... with fashion!
#13 The Hateful Eight  in which it's Tarantino so... our best guess (we don't read bootleg scripts) is sausage party mayhem + elaborately poetic shit-talking. One thing that's an absolute certainty: not enough actresses. Contrary to Hollywood's entire western genre, women made up half of the population back then, too.
#14 Knight of Cups in which we view Hollywood sellouts through a Malick prism?
#15 Arabian Nights  in which Miguel Gomes (Tabu) makes a 6½ hour political fable

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