Oscar Narrows the Documentary Feature Field

Chris here, with more Oscar bake off lists. Today we have the 15 films advancing in the Documentary Feature race, many of which we have covered here at The Film Experience in Glenn's column Doc Corner. The eventual lineup could include two recent Honorary Oscar winners: Frederick Wiseman (Ex Libris: New York Public Library) and Agnès Varda (Faces Places, with JR), neither of who had ever been nominated in the category. Al Gore could be returning to the Oscars, as the follow-up to winning climate change doc An Inconvenient Truth has also advanced. Take a look at the rest of the list:

• Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
• Chasing Coral
• City of Ghosts
• Ex Libris: New York Public Library
• Faces Places
• Human Flow
• Icarus
• An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
• Jane
• LA 92
• Last Man in Aleppo
• Long Strage Trip
• One of Us
• Strong Island
• Unrest

Some beloved players that missed the lineup include Kedi, Whose Streets?, Dawson City: Frozen Time, and Casting JonBenet to just name a few. Jane, featuring recently rediscovered footage from Jane Goodall's study of apes, might be the early frontrunner thanks to a few wins with NBR and Critics Choice. Oscar Chart here!

"Shape of Water" way way out front at the Critics Choice Awards

by Nathaniel R

As always, full disclosure: I am a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association. So this award announcement is always filled with anxiety for me because I want to be heard. We all want to be heard. Nevertheless most of the longer shots I rallied for didn't make it, he said, pushing away a single tear. The Shape of Water led with 14 nominations... and it was so far out front it nearly doubled the nominations afforded to its nearest rivals (a clump of them jammed together with 8 nominations each:  Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Dunkirk, and The Post).

As ever I'm disappointed that the nominations double so heavily as "general Oscar pundit predictiveness" but here they are in their fullness with very immediate and perhaps too impulsive commentary after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Field Narrows for Visual Effects Oscar

Chris here. We should soon be getting word of what films have moved on in bake off rounds for Oscar categories like Foreign Film and Makeup and Hairstyling. But now we have a longlist for the Visual Effects category and many of the players are genre films and blockbusters as expected. There is still room for a surprise or two, the most heartwarming of which is certainly Netflix's Okja. There's even two unseen films among the lineup: The Last Jedi and the Jumanji sequel.

Here are the 20 eligible films:

• Alien: Covenant
• Beauty and the Beast
• Blade Runner 2049
• Dunkirk
• Ghost in the Shell
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
• Justice League
• Kong: Skull Island
• Life
• Logan
• Okja
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
• The Shape of Water
  
• Spider-Man Homecoming
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi
• Thor: Ragnarok
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
• War for the Planet of the Apes
• Wonder Woman

Isn't it surprising that the awe-inspiring motion capture work on the new Apes trilogy has gone un rewarded so far? Folks might need to be reminded about War, but it would make for a lovely series capper should it take the prize this year. The candidates will narrow further to end at the end of the month. Any thoughts on frontrunners? Oscar chart here.

Annie Nominations Embrace "Coco" and "The Breadwinner"

by Nathaniel R

Coco and The Breadwinner are the top competitors for the Annies (and maybe the Oscars)

The Annie Awards first began handing out prizes in 1992 but weren't quite on a calendar year yet with Beauty and The Beast, a 1991 film, honored in that inaugural year. They've since aligned themselves to the calendar and last year their top prize went to Zootopia, which also took the Oscar. Coco leads their nominations for 2017 and also presumably leads the Oscar race with The Breadwinner the widely admired darkhorse at both. Presumably again as we won't know what the Oscar nominations are until January 23rd. 

Both of the leaders are powerfully rooted in cultural specificity (Mexico and Afghanistan respectively) and are, in their own way, tearjerkers, rather than the more traditionally glib action comedies that tend to be the bread and butter of the animated film world... at least in America.

We'd love to raise a glass to the nominations for the streaming series Trollhunters which we're huge fans of but we'd rather throw the contents of that glass inb Annie's face for preferencing Cars 3 and Despicable Me 3 over the insanity of The Lego Batman Movie. If you wanted to honor a sequel, that's really the way you wanna go? The complete list of nominees and a few more comments, cheers, and jeers are after the jump...

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Podcast: The Shape of Lady Bird

Nathaniel and Nick talk two Best Picture hopefuls, the generous funny adorable Greta Gerwig movie Lady Bird and the overstuffed visually creative Guillermo Del Toro fantasy The Shape of Water. 

Index (43 minutes)
00:01 Lois Smith & Lucas Hedges and lingering moments
06:00 Greta Gerwig, Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and Tracy Letts are all brilliant
16:00 More Lady Bird gushing
23:00 The Shape of Water -wanted to love it more
27:00 Guillermo del Toro problems and monsters
32:00 The performances in the movie
37:40 The Best Picture field, Hollywood sexism, and the atypical versus typical within the contenders

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? 

Shape of Water & Lady Bird