Podcast: Ford v Ferrari, Honey Boy, and Marriage Story

with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R 

Index (59 minutes)

• 00:01 Ford v Ferrari, Christian Bale, impressive crafts, and Oscar talk
• 19:06 Marriage Story, the opening scene, comparisons to Kramer vs Kramer, and more. Plus a lot of love for the actors including Alan Alda.
• 36:05 Honey Boy a Shia Labeouf's confessional with a great Noah Jupe directed by Alma Har'el. But, we confess we have Lucas Hedges fatigue.
• 47:10 Best Costume Design. We're rooting for extreme longshot Hustlers but we survey the whole field.

 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? 

Ford v Ferrari

"Klaus" is (half) a masterpiece...

Our resident animation expert will be looking at several of the movies vying for a nomination in Best Animated Feature. First up, a Christmas movie.

by Tim Brayton

The new animated feature Klaus is being pulled in a lot of directions. It's the directorial debut of Sergio Pablos, a former Disney animator who splits time between Hollywood projects (as screenwriter, he created the Despicable Me franchise) and nurturing his own company, SPA Studios, based in his hometown of Madrid. It's also the first animated feature produced by Netflix, which has been making sure to emphasize that fact in all of its marketing efforts. And it's not just any old Netflix production: this is part of the streaming service's increasingly deep bench of Christmas-themed movies.

It's hard not to think about this while one is watching the movie. Depending on how you approach it, Klaus is either a masterpiece, or a frankly irritating collection of tin-eared dialogue, odd casting choices, and dated clichés of kids' movie screenwriting...

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Questions we're asking ourselves about Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor

All Oscar charts are being updated over the next four days but we started with Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor because there are so many questions haunting us. So go ahead and answer the following quandaries if you can...?

1. Can Tom Hanks finally break his strange Oscar curse?
Before anyone had seen A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood he was a lock "on paper" in Best Actor. But the movie turned out to not be a biopic at all but something far more creative and we'd argue more successful than a biopic would have been, in which Mr. Rogers is more of a symbol and catalyst for another man's journey. It's a gorgeous movie but the switcheroo from expectations to reality will likely throw some Oscar voters as well as general moviegoers. Hanks has been delivering better performances of late than the kind he used to win Oscars for but AMPAS hasn't nominated him in 19 years. Should we expect that they'll continue that "you already got yours" cold shoulder rather than be predicting him? 

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Doc Corner: Five Highlights from the 159-deep Documentary Longlist

By Glenn Dunks

Have you heard? The Academy has announced the longlist of eligible titles for the 2019 Best Documentary Feature category. All 159 of ‘em; they don’t call it a longlist for nothing. The 15-wide shortlist will be derived from these and from there the five nominees will be chosen by the documentary branch.

As I suspected, Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old is not on the list. It is also worth noting – as I have done all year – that Amazing Grace gambled with the odds last year on a qualifying run and sadly didn’t make it. There were only a few films that we have written about in Doc Corner that either did not submit or were not eligible including Vision Portraits, The Raft, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché and Beyoncé’s Homecoming would be the best of that lot.

All the big titles that we have long expected to show up, however, did. Box office hits like Apollo 11, The Biggest Little Farm, Maiden and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice sit next to streaming heavyweights American Factory, The Edge of Democracy and Knock Down the House (Netflix), One Child Nation and Citizen K (Amazon), Gay Chorus Deep South (MTV), The Apollo (HBO) and big-name specialty titles like Western Stars and Diego Maradona with buzzy, low-key titles waiting to pounce like Advocate, Honeyland, The Kingmaker, 5B and Roll Red Roll.

We still have many of the movies featured on there to watch and (hopefully) get the chance to discuss. But we’re going to cheat and use this as a moment to play catch-up with some short paragraphs on some of the titles featured on the long list.

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Campaign flex - Lupita comes on strong

Between this hard-to-miss Variety ad and her recent campaign flex, reprising "Red" from Us at a haunted house, Lupita Nyong'o's Best Actress dream doesn't feel so far-fetched does it? Are you starting to be convinced that her second nomination could happen? We're getting there.

Horror is a great genre for actresses, as Jason's column often reminds us, but when it comes to Oscar nominations for the genre, they only happen if the movie was a huge hit (think The Sixth Sense, The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, etcetera). Us has got that part covered, too, since it's the only original film to secure a spot in the box office top ten of 2019 which is otherwise full of spin-offs and sequels.