9 days till Oscar

Final voting has begun for the Oscars with just 9 days until the big night. Preferential balloting is such that we can dream of crazy outcomes on the big night even though it's fairly clear that 1917 is in the lead amongst the 9 Best Picture contenders. (Have you voted on our "who should win polls yet?If not do so on each Oscar chart) Only Parasite and Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood are well poised to spoil the war film's party if preferential balloting is kind to them.

For those who don't know how preferential balloting works it's a complicated math system which begins rather simply by counting #1 votes until one of the contenders has reached 50.1% of the votes. Since that rarely happens on first pass, #2 votes become important... but only from the ballots that have been discarded by whichever film came in last on the most recent round.  It's a process of elimination whereby the least loved pictures votes are continually reallocated to that movie's biggest fan's next preference until one movie eventually gets half of the voters on its side...

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Interview: Double Lopez on "Into the Unknown"

by Eric Blume

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down to speak with Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, nominated for the Best Song Oscar for "Into the Unknown" for Frozen 2.  This talented duo has already won the Oscar twice in this category, for the megahit "Let It Go" from the original Frozen, and "Remember Me" from Coco.  They could not be more charming and charismatic, as witnessed here...

[This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity]

Eric: At what point in the process were you brought in on FROZEN 2?

KRISTEN: Very early on when it was like, 'I think we're going to do Frozen 2. We're thinking it's about change.' Jennifer Lee [Frozen 2's writer/director] called us, sort of tipped us off.

ROBERT: It needed to happen because, you know, the sounds in a musical are as integral as any dialogue and in fact, they have to bear a lot more weight. So we had to be there. We helped influence the story and they helped influence the songs...

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Doc Corner: Ranking the Documentary Short Nominees from Least to Most Depressing

By Glenn Dunks

We have done this very particular ranking twice before now. Does that make it a tradition? We have only had to skip one year (2017) of Best Documentary (Short Subject) nominees because that year’s batch were a happy lot for a change.

This year’s nominees for what is often the most dour of categories could have certainly been darker – trust me, I’ve seen the other films that were shortlisted. They didn't nominate the one about murderous street gangs or the one about the humanitarian crisis following Hurricane Maria! Still, there are big themes among this year’s strong selection of titles (although it must be said, the feature category is far superior): we are taken from a warzone in Afghanistan to a man-made tragedy in South Korea, refugee stories from Vietnam to Sweden, and back to the streets of Missouri.

The nominees are:

In the Absence
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)
Life Overtakes Me
St. Louis Superman
Walk Run Cha-Cha

Let’s take a deeper look…

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The Cinematic Redemption of Amy March

by Cláudio Alves

Greta Gerwig's Little Women is a bold adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic in more ways than one. Structurally, it shatters the novel's chronology, making past and present, childhood and adulthood, talk to each other in a dialogue of echoes and rhymes. For instance, when Jo loses a sister in the wintery coldness of the present, Gerwig marries the moment to the memory of another kind of sisterly loss, when a wedding in warm colors was a harbinger of future loneliness for the heroine. Another element that makes this new adaptation so radically different from the previous ones is its treatment of Jo's sisters. No longer are Meg, Beth, and Amy March relegated to the periphery of the text. This 19th-century classic is called Little Women, after all, not Little Woman.

When it comes to its portrayal of Amy, the novel's most condemned character, the 2019 film is of particular innovation. We could almost say this Little Women redeems Amy March after centuries of villainizing her…

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Podcast: a conversation about list-making and polarizing Best Pictures

with Nathaniel R & Nick Davis

On this week's podcast, we check in with Nick Davis as he completes his "top 100 of the decade" list and also discuss the Oscar race, the shortened season, and the more polarizing nominees for Best Picture. 

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? 

Making Lists and Best Pictures