Our Coverage of the 91st Academy Awards is a Wrap

24 articles later, and with the exception of this Sunday's Podcast, we should probably call it quits on The Film Experience's coverage of the 91st Academy Awards. Whew. Hope you enjoyed! Please sign up for our weekly email, follow us on Instagram (we'll improve that accont soon!), and follow our individual team members too, won'cha? We promise lots of goodies soon in 2019 like the new season of the Supporting Actress Smackdown, an improved podcast, and the usual goodies in our potpourri of new cinema, classic cinema, and the occasional sidebar dips into theater and TV.  Oh, and lots and lots of actressing just the way you like it. 

General
Index of Oscar Charts We went 17/24 on our predictions this year
Reader Poll Results Who you were rooting for
New Oscar Trivia Since we've wrapped up another year
The 5 Musical Performances - Chris Feil, our Soundtracking Man, ranks them
We are the Champions - Deborah on LGBT stories at the Oscars 
Ranking the 20 Acting Clips - from 'cringe-worthy' to 'favourite'

Wins & Losses
Glenn Close's Oscar Curse A 7th historic loss for the great actress
Complicated Feelings about Green Book's Win - Lynn Lee has conflicted feelings
Black Panther Wins - The zeitgeist smash has three historic wins 
Regina King's James Baldwin Tribute - Will we get more adaptations?
Worst Acceptance Speech - Vice wins Best Makeup
Appropriate Speeches? - Should the tone of the speech match its film? 

Oscar night's most unexpected photo: Madonna & Gaga at an after-party

Fashion
Best Dressed Supporting Actress - VOTE! 
Best Dressed Best Actress - VOTE !
Men's Fashion - Chadwick, Viggo, Diego, Henry, Rami, and more
20 More Oscar Lewks - Notable gowns from non-nominees
Joe vs Nicholas - VOTE !

Quickie Takes & Inspired Silliness
"Jenniferhudsoning" How many times did you do it on Oscar night?
Best Reaction Shot Hang this in the Louvre
First Gentleman of the Oscars Chris Evans is love 
Richard Met Barbra - Actors stanning other actors is always fun
Melissa McCarthy & Brian Tyree Henry - The funniest awards presentation
Team Reactions Pt 1 - Horniest & most joyful moments
Team Reactions Pt 2 - MVPs and noticeable absences  

Alison Janney has obviously seen The Favourite.

P.S. And here's a perfectly irreverent post-script to the Oscars... and an unintentional answer, surely, to why Paul Schrader had never before been nominated (his brutal honesty probably pisses off a lot of people in the industry!)  Here he is on Facebook the day after the Oscars...

Blueprints: Memorable Scenes from Your "Best Original Screenplay" Nominees

by Jorge Molina

We all rose at the crack of dawn on Tuesday morning to hear Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross banter in a way that we won’t see anyone do on the actual Oscar stage. While we were all bracing for catastrophe (and yes, Bohemian Rhapsody is a Best Picture nominee), the nods balance between expected precursors and delightful surprises (still high on the Marina de Tavira wave). As for Best Original Screenplay, there were no surprises. Four out of the five nominees were pretty locked from very early on. It was the fifth slot that was the question mark. While I was hoping for Bo Burnham’s distillation on teen angst, Paul Schrader’s distillation on environmental nihilism works just fine as well.

After the jump the writers, their history with Oscar, and what scene we think landed them that nomination...

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Bergman Centennial: Winter Light (1963) and the echo of First Reformed (2018)

Team Experience will be celebrating one of the world's most acclaimed auteurs for the next week for the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth. Here's Sean Donovan...

Perhaps none of Ingmar Bergman’s films do more to conjure clichés of what a ‘Bergman film’ is than 1963’s Winter Light. While Persona is undoubtedly the cinephile consensus choice for his best film, and The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries are his most widely-seen, frequently adorning college syllabi about the history of European cinema, the morose sadness for which his work became known feels most exemplarily expressed in Winter Light. The second part of a trilogy about “the silence of God” (starting out grim already), Winter Light’s infinite quiet, stark black-and-white cinematography, freezing cold exteriors, and tear-soaked monologues scream BERGMAN in capital letters. It’s strange viewing with which to start a hot summer weekday morning, but here we are. Though the severity of film that threatens to overwhelm you, it is my personal favorite of the Bergman canon, superbly acted and filmed with a brisk lightness that befits an auteur frequently in danger of getting weighed down in heavy-handedness. A freezing shot of aquavit on the rocks can knock you over and have you questioning the purpose of your life. 

Winter Light may be reaching new audiences this year as it has received a renewed relevancy from Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, an unofficial remake blatantly taking the premise and applying it to the contemporary United States...

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Links: Nutcracker and the Two Directors, Schrader on Selfishness

Gr8ter Days Terence Stamp makes rare US appearance to talk about this career and push his new memoir. The great actor is about to turn 80...
TFE ...so he's still too young for this 100 Oldest Living Oscar Nominees list.
THR Movie attendance has been steadily rising in Russia but the UK and France remain the top European movie markets
/Film Hmmm, The upcoming Disney spectacle Nutcracker and the Four Realms will now have two directors credited after reshoots. Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Avenger) will be credited after the original director Lasse Hallström
Vulture Director Susan Seidelman on her 80s NYC classics Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan 

MNPP Luca Guadagnino has shown Suspiria to Quentin Tarantino who loved it
Moviemaker Paul Schrader on our selfish legacy and environmental disaster (DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T YET SEEN FIRST REFORMED)
Playbill if you're in NYC in the second half of July there's a lot of 15th anniversary happenings for Avenue Q including an original cast concert
Pajiba Sofia Vergara's ex is making an anti-abortion movie about Roe v Wade and the news about it gets worse and worse
i09 The legal system in The Incredibles 2 is confounding
Pandemonium this video is 90 minutes long but if you're studying to be a screenwriter it's worth a look since Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3) maps out what makes for a great third act of a story
Coming Soon Keri Russell joins Star Wars: Episode IX. Her role is unknown but will involve fight scenes so I'll guess she'll have more to do than Laura Dern did.
Awards Daily the Limited Series race at the Emmys is wide open this year (with 44 programs eligible)  since no single series has been especially dominant with critics or the public this time around 
Film School Rejects the best movies of 2018 thus far
Nick Davis Nick does his beloved "fifties" to detail the best of the movie year thus far 

Ethan Hawke in "First Reformed"

by Chris Feil

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is a bit like running a psychological and spiritual marathon, an unflinching look at despair in the modern era but told with the style of Tarkovsky and Bresson to lend its concerns a punishing timelessness. All the critical hosannas it has received are spot on, but rest assured that this is one tough, bruising sit. What keeps us from running away from the trauma is the absorbing honesty of Ethan Hawke’s showcase performance.

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