The Academy Welcomes 395 New Members

by Nathaniel R

Harry Yoon (Editor), Lee Isaac Chung (Writer/Director) and Christian Oh (Producer) were all invited to the Academy post MINARI

Each year the Academy releases the names of their potential new members. Reports range a bit at how many voting members the Academy actually has. Deadline suggests that if all 395 of the new invitees accept membership, AMPAS will be around 9,750ish members while the LA Times places the number around 10,700. We're not sure where that discrepancy of nearly a 1000 voters comes from but let's just say it's hard to track. We rarely learn who declined membership, for example, and of course people die from year to year since many longtime members are elderly. 

As per usual, even before the Academy's largely successfully diversification and gender parity drive, a good portion of the invitees go out to fresh winners and nominees from the previous season. If they accept Youn Yuh-jung, Maria Bakalova, Steven Yeun, Paul Raci, and H.E.R. (to name a handful of examples) will now be Oscar voters. 46% of the new invitees are women and 39% are from underrepresented groups. One really interesting number is that over half of the new invitees, 53% to be exact, are international invites. Whether that translates to more international titles winning Oscar favor, who knows...

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"I Carry You With Me"

by Nick Taylor 

I am both tremendously enthusiastic and a bit disappointed that I Carry You With Me is finally getting a theatrical release. Enthused because it’s a goddamn gem that ranks among the best films of last year, and sits right alongside Lingua Franca and Welcome to Chechnya as one of the very best queer films. The disappointment comes from the fact that, as far as anyone's concerned, this is a 2020 film. Distributor Sony Pictures Classics went out of its way to give this an awards-qualifying run despite pushing its wide release date further and further back. As with the aesthetically entrancing documentary Gunda or the tonally triumphant, richly acted French Exit (both also distributed by SPC), it’s a bit mystifying that this was seen as the superior strategy rather than letting I Carry You With Me’s reputation build over the course of this year. Art doesn’t need awards, sure, but it’s a bummer that Heidi Ewing’s fiction film debut won’t be able to generate the sort of grassroots attention that Isabel Sandoval, Eliza Hittman, Kelly Reichardt, and Kitty Green all earned to different degrees over the extended 2020 season.

But enough griping! Legitimate criticisms about a film’s release strategy shouldn’t totally overcome the fact that such an engrossing, formally adventurous and emotionally direct feature has gotten a theatrical release. Compared to Lingua Franca and Welcome to Chechnya, it’s by far among the most approachable of the three, which shouldn’t bely how adventurous its storytelling approach is...

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On the Globes cancellation

You probably heard the news today that NBC has cancelled the Golden Globes for January 2022. The past couple of days have been a flurry of stars and distributors and PR firms condemning the Globes and boycotting them. Or 'stepping back from' to use Scarlett Johansson's gentler euphemism. But we find the timing of this sudden wave of condemnation to be suspicious and more than a little hypocritical of the industry given their own ethics problems and systemic racism and sexism. First and foremost, it's all happening three whole months after the Golden Globes exposé in the Los Angeles Times which touched a nerve with its revelation that the organization, which is made up of 87 people, had no black members. (Exacerbating that particular problem -- though nobody likes to try to understand structural problems as it's easier to simply condemn and move on -- is that they only allow one member to represent each "foreign" country and many aren't as diverse as the US; that 'per country' rule, at least, will have to go.)

Did Hollywood rise up against the Globes after that expose? Nope. They went right on courting their favor until awards season had entirely played itself out! There were awards to be won and films and tv shows to promote. No stars boycotted the ceremony and neither did any studios. But now, everyone is in the clear for another year. Distributors don't have to think about campaigning for awards or promoting their films and television shows in that particular way for a while now...

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Our 2020/2021 season coverage is a wrap! Will the site go on? Your choice.

Our Complete Oscar Coverage
• The Ceremony Reviewed
• Best Dressed
• on Anthony Hopkins win
• on Frances McDormand's win
• Best Presenter - Rita Moreno
• New Oscar Records
• Directing Actors to Nominations & Wins - Some Statistics
• Best Picture - Black and White Edition
• Harrison Ford on Best Film Editing
• Directors aren't "official" winners in International Feature 
• What's next for our "Best Directors"?
• The Charts
• Winners List

Best of 2020
• 9th Annual Team Experience Awards -voted on by the contributors
• Nathaniel's Top 20 - from And Then We Danced to Swallow
• 21st Annual Film Bitch Awards - Our original claim to fame prizes (just wrapped up)

And Previous Highlights
from Feb '20 | March | April | May | June | July | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb  thru March 2021

ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND. We'll start 'the new year' on Monday.

If you've ever considered subscribing (see right hand sidebar)  now would be a perfect time. You'll notice we didn't have much advertising this year and times have been tough. We'd like to keep going for at least one more year. We are building a Patreon and a shop as well because the just hoping miracles occur or lottery is won (without entering -tee hee) is no longer sustainable. 

SPECIAL EVENTS THIS SUMMER ESPECIALLY IF YOU'LL HELP US SURVIVE

✅ Final Supporting Actress Smackdown season and companion podcasts
✅  "Year of the month" parties: 2000 in May; 1946 in June; 1998 in July; 1937 in August; we like the time travelling=
✅  Klute (1971) - a tag team retrospective
✅ Emmy countdown coverage
✅ To Cher on her 75th Birthday
✅ And much randomness. You know how we do 'off season'

ICYMI - Ann Roth reacts to her Oscar win

This has been making the rounds but perhaps you missed it as we initially did. Veteran costume designer Ann Roth, who we've discussed at length before, wasn't at the Oscars. Like Hopkins, the oldest man ever to win Best Actor, she's the oldest to win in her field and the second oldest of all time; only James Ivory, Call Me By Your Name, was older in winning a competitive Oscar and by just a matter of weeks.

Roth seems very happy about the second Oscar, which was almost a quarter century coming after The English Patient. Her daughter wrote about it, saying...

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