Sundance Buzz: Short Film Winners

The Czech queer short "Peacock" won Best DirectorWith the Academy Award short nominees opening in theaters today, it's a good time to note that the Sundance short film jury handed out their awards this week. This year's jury of three was Key & Peele's Keegan-Michael Key, MTV's chief film critic Amy Nicholson, and Amazon Studio's Gina Kwon. Since Sundance is a qualifying festival for Academy Awards you might hear the name of some of these shorts again in about a year. One of last year's big winners, for example, was World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt. That's an Oscar nominee right now for Best Animated Short. 

The 2016 Short Film Winners are as follows:

Grand Jury Prize Thunder Road (USA, Jim Cummings) an officer eulogizes his mother. Cummings is a producer/director with some shorts under his belt.
U.S. Fiction The Procedure (USA, Calvin Lee Reeder) a horror short about a captive man. Reeder has made several horror shorts and directed one of the segments in that anthology V/H/S
International Fiction Maman(s) (France, Maïmouna Doucouré) This one is about a young girl in a Parisian suburb whose father returns from Senegal with a surprise, a second wife
Non-Fiction: Bacon & God's Wrath (Canada, Sol Friedman)  an elderly Jewish woman cooking bacon for the first time and reflecting on her life. This short also received an honorable mention from the jury at TIFF in September so perhaps it's a legit long list contender for next year's Documentary Short competition?

Animation: Edmond (UK, Nina Gantz) see the teaser above. This short has been making the rounds for a bit now. It recently won the BIFA and it's a BAFTA nominee this year but it did not make the longlist cut to 10 finalists for the current Oscar competition. 
Outstanding Performance Grace Glowicki won for Her Friend Adam (Canada, Benjamin Petrie) in which her boyfriend's jealousy spirals out of control.
Special Jury Award for Best Direction: Peacock (Czech Republic, Ondřej Hudeček). Peacock bills itself as "a twisted queer romance" it's set in the 19th century and has something to do with the birth of an influential writer. The film promises "Suspense, laughter, violence, hope, nudity, sex, and a happy ending—mostly a happy ending."

Podcast: Oscar's Diversity Initiative, PGA Win

Nathaniel, Katey, Joe and Nick, talk about this week's tumultuous Oscar season events and somehow Dolores Hart former actress/current nun, keeps popping up in conversation.

30 minutes 
00:01 PGA goes to The Big Short. Will SAG?
03:00 Hollywood & Racism
08:40 AMPAS new diversity plans
16:30 Oscar Stats, Prestige Math, and Future Oscar Races
22:20 12 Years a Slave (2013)
25:00 Who might lose their Oscar vote?

Related Reading For Context:
• Academy press release Diversity initiative
• PGA winners
• Birth of a Nation (2016) at Sundance
• Penelope Ann Miller's statement
• Mother Dolores Hart "From Hollywood to Holy Vows"

On the Next Podcast:
We all share our top ten lists! 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes soon. 

Diversity & Hollywood

Batman v Running Time, Ex Machina v Blockbusters, and More

Can you believe Christmas is just 3 days away? Eeep how fast the month has gone. Let's jump right into news & links...

Women and Hollywood well, this is good timing. Charlotte Rampling is getting an eight film retrospective in NYC starting Wednesday... just in time to remind East Coast AMPAS members of her brilliance before balloting. Do NOT miss The Night Porter (1974) or Under the Sand (2000) if you haven't seen them.
THR looks at make or break moments coming in 2016 from Batman v Superman to MTV's Shannara Chronicles
Comics Alliance Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is apparently 151 minutes long. Yikes. Here's an idea: cut the death of little Bruce's parents because how many times we gotta see that origin story. The entire world knows it. No need for "previously ons" at this point.
The Wrap Dustin Lance Black and Gus Van Sant are working together again post-Milk. The new project is a miniseries When We Rise about the gay rights movement kicking off with the Stonewall riots

Variety Guy Ritchie's untitled King Arthur movie has been pushed back to 2017 
Variety Star Wars pay scales... back end bonuses don't kick in until the film grosses one billion dollars. Not that it won't pass that in record time (it's already over half a billion globally after that first weekend)
Slash Film modern movies getting the old VHS cover treatment
W Magazine the most provocative fashion photography of 2015. Miley Cyrus, Jessica Chastain, and Cate Blanchett among the subjects
W Magazine Bryan Cranston does a dramatic reading of Drake's "Hotline Bling"
AV Club charts the 24 times 2015 totally lost its shit. Outrage culture is exhausting! 

/Film Cuteness. You can sit in a BB-8 chair (row BB, seat 8 in the balcony) while watching movies in the El Capitan in Los Angeles through February 7th.
The Guardian on the Bechdel Test's origins and Star Wars. Good history feminist politics piece but for the very odd suggestion that gays aren't interested in seeing heterosexual romance onscreen. What the what now? History (and LGBT culture) does not remotely support this notion.
i09 on the devolution of the fan fiction trope "the Mary Sue" with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens 
Gawker the complete history of Quentin Tarantino's use of the N word, used 65 times in The Hateful Eight which is second only to its use in Django Unchained  

Prize-Giving. Tis the Season
Playbill The Sydney Theater Award nominees for 2015 have been announced for fans of Aussie actors (i.e. everyone). Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving are among them
St Louis Film Critics chose Spotlight as Best Picture and Leo & Brie as best leading actors
Nevada Film Critics Society gave those exact same top 3 prizes but since The Revenant won four prizes it feels like the defacto winner

And Finally...
The Academy has announced the 10 finalists for Best Visual Effects, chosen from that longlist of 20 we shared earlier. The 5 Oscar nominees will come from these 10 pictures...

• Ant-Man
• Avengers: Age of Ultron
• Ex-Machina
• Jurassic World
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• The Martian
• The Revenant
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens
• Tomorrowland
• The Walk

The most surprising miss among the earlier semi-finalists is probably Spectre since James Bond films generally make the finals in the Daniel Craig era, don't they? But this category gets more competitive every year. I'm suddenly less confident about my current predictions (Avengers, Jurassic, Mad Max, Martian, Star Wars). Might Ex Machina, which hasn't left the awards conversation despite an April bow and is 1000% deserving of this particular nomination, actually make it despite not being of their preferred size and with the effects actually in a supporting role for a change? 

Michelle Williams (x2) Heading to Sundance

Manuel here. Michelle Williams has been surprisingly absent from our screens since she played Glinda in Oz the Great and the Powerful (2013). Though if you were abroad you apparently got to see her alongside Kristin Scott-Thomas in something called Suite Française? (No, it never opened in the US). That looks to change this year. The actress has two projects that will be unveiled at Sundance next month.

First up we'll see her reunite with Wendy and Lucy director Kelly Reichardt in Certain Women. Adapted from Maile Meloy’s short stories, the film will make its debut at Sundance and follows three intersecting stories of women in Montana. It co-stars Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, James Le Gros, Jared Harris, and Lily Gladstone.

She also has a role in Kenneth Lonergan's follow-up to Margaret, Manchester by the Sea. The fillm follows Lee (Casey Affleck) as he returns to his Boston suburb hometown after a family death, coming to terms again with his estranged wife (Williams). Kyle Chandler and Lucas Hedges also star.

It'll be a nice one-two punch of a return for the actress, especially coming from two such exciting writer/directors; Williams thrives in these low-key indie films so welcome her back with open arms. And, of course, if either of these films get her glowing reviews, might the actress be angling for Oscar nom #4?

A New Trailer for "Krisha"

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We hope you're having a safe and festive holiday. Hopefully, you're at least having an easier go of it than Krisha.

Set over the Thanksgiving holiday, Krisha follows its titular prodigal mother as she drops into her family after a years long (and substance induced) absence. Things naturally don't go so well. Just in time for the pumpkin pie, a24's next stunner dropped a new trailer!

Awarded both Grand Jury Winner and Audience Award at SXSW this year, this is no straightforward melodrama, but a consuming dive into both Krisha's fractured psyche and the absurd chaos of a bustling family gathering. I was lucky enough to catch it on the festival circuit earlier this month and was over the moon for Trey Edward Shults's debut. The overall package is far less conventional than the trailer here suggests, with nerve-wrattling sound design and editing giving the film a fiercer bite. Though it was recently nominated for the John Cassavettes Award (for features with a budget below $500,000), I was surprised it didn't show up elsewhere - especially considering what an audacious first feature this is.

And just you wait until you get a look at what star Krisha Fairchild can do. Rarely is a female leading role as taxing and broadly demanding as this (let alone for an unknown), yet she remains unflinching, raw, and fully realized.

Krisha will be released in March 2016, and it belongs at the top of your Most Anticipated lists.