Film Bitch Awards ~ Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, and more are up!

With the arrival of that Top Ten List you knew this was coming. The 22nd (gulp) annual Film Bitch Awards have commenced. We'll try to get all the Oscar-adjacent nominees up before Tuesday...

Page 1 - BEST PICTURE, DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAYS, ANIMATED FEATURE
Various honors for C'mon C'mon, Flee, In the Heights, Mass, Passing, Power of the Dog, West Side Story, The Worst Person in the World (finally in theaters!), and Zola

Page 2 - BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR & BEST ACTOR
You might have deduced these first five acting nominees (Colman Domingo, Mike Faist, Troy Kotsur, Anders Danielsen Lie, and Kodi Smit McPhee) given our noisy enthusiams! The lead actors are also up. Guess who!

Page 3 - CINEMATOGRAPHY, MAKEUP 
Page 4 - ORIGINAL SONG, SOUND
Honors for Annette, Cruella, Dune, Encanto, French Dispatch, Green Knight, Tragedy of Macbeth etcetera with more to come...

BAFTA Nominations: 'Dune' has a huge lead while 'West Side Story' struggles

by Nathaniel R

Dune has a gargantuan lead at the annual BAFTA awards with 11 nominations. People often look to BAFTA for clues as to last minute shifts in the Oscar voting vibes... but we strongly caution against that now. BAFTA has changed so many of their rules in the past few years and added so many intricacies to their voting (including partially juried fields and 100% juried nominations in some categories) that it's difficult to say what any particular nomination actually means or who it came from. 

Musicals had a rough morning. tick tick BOOM! went without any nominations at all (despite multiple longlistings) while West Side Story struggled. Despite five nominations (including Mike Faist, yay!) it missed in all sorts of crucial places. Nominations and comments are after the jump...

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Oscar Volley: Adapted Screenplay - a wealth of good choices, but will the Academy make the right ones?

The Oscar volleys continue. Today Lynn Lee, Mark Brinkerhoff, and Eurocheese sound off on this year’s Adapted Screenplay race.

a wealth of options for Oscar voters

Lynn: Gentlemen, I don’t know about you, but from where I’m standing, Adapted Screenplay is an embarrassment of riches this year. There are at least three contenders that tackle the incredibly difficult task of illuminating their characters’ inner lives and psychology (The Power of the Dog, Passing, and The Lost Daughter) with minimal to no voice-over narration and they all do it brilliantly. Then there are the play adaptations – everything from Shakespeare via Coen (The Tragedy of Macbeth) to Shakespeare / Sondheim / Laurents via Kushner (West Side Story) to Jonathan Larson via Lin-Manuel Miranda (tick, tick …BOOM!) to Stephen Karam doing Stephen Karam (The Humans) – where each manages to pull off a bold departure from previous iterations while retaining basic fidelity to the source text. And then there’s my personal favorite, Drive My Car, which manages to be at once an ambitious expansion of a Murakami short story and a spectacularly moving adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at once.

That said, we can’t realistically expect most Oscar voters to be familiar with the underlying material for these screenplays. It’s a safer bet the nominations will align pretty closely with the Best Picture nominees or almost-nominees that don’t have original screenplays...

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Oscar Volley: Can anything dethrone 'Dune' in Best Production Design?

With just over a week until nominations are announced Cláudio Alves, Mark Brinkerhoff, and Nathaniel Rogers discuss the Best Production Design race…

DUNE is in it to win it.

CLÁUDIO: The Art Directors Guild of America recently announced their nominees, and I'm in love with the Period Feature lineup. The French Dispatch, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and West Side Story offer such a varied approach to the matter of scenography, either swinging towards hyper-stylization or aiming for immersive historical accuracy. Honestly, I'd be OK if AMPAS just copied the guild's picks, though that's not likely to happen. Not with Dune in the conversation. As far as I'm concerned, it'd be a massive surprise if Patrice Vermette's conception of a dilapidated future doesn't end up winning it all. The scale of the achievement is undeniable, the sense of monumentality and balance between Villeneuve's sense of severe sci-fi and Frank Herbert's Baroque descriptions.

The question, then, is which of the period nominees will get the chop and if there are other outside contenders to consider. Examining the history of AMPAS' relationship to Paul Thomas Anderson's flicks, my guess is that Licorice Pizza is the most vulnerable. What do you think, Mark? 

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10th Annual Team Experience Award NOMINEES

From the Team...

Which movie does the Film Experience team like the best? Paul, Phil and Maria are all anxiously awaiting.Few people love awards as much as The Film Experience team does. That’s why we can’t resist having our own awards announcement. The 10th Annual Team Experience Awards nominations have been revealed. These nominees were voted on by all the writers at The Film Experience, sans Nathaniel (who will be revealing his own Film Bitch Awards separately). Three movies dominated our ballots, receiving 10 votes apiece – Dune, The Power of the Dog  and West Side Story. The team will be voting on the winners, which will be revealed next Wednesday, January 25th.

Check out the nominees after the jump...

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