Curious notes on the 344 films eligible in most Oscar categories

Feature categories like International, Documentary, and Animated and all three shorts categories have their own eligibility rules with Oscar. Visual Effects, Makeup, Song, and Score have bake-offs to narrow things down. But the bulk of Oscar's 24 categories don't have any winnowing process to speak of. The Academy has recently released their annual reminder list of eligible titles which always has a few odd reveals. You can read the full list of 344 features here but here are a four things that stood out to us.

Netflix gave most of their originals one week qualifiers from Velvet Buzzsaw early in the year til Atlantics now

1. Netflix gave almost all their non Best Picture contenders one-week qualifying releases this year, including Velvet Buzzsaw, Always Be My Maybe and Earthquake Bird and the mesmerizing Atlantics ...

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Oscar Trivia, Weekly: Everything Cate Blanchett

by Nathaniel R

As promised Wednesday mornings are for Oscar trivia! With Where'd You Go Bernadette in theaters, let's dive into Blanchett-related Oscar trivia. While it's true that no one is clamoring for Bernadette to be an Oscar contender, and Cate Blanchett is actually under some criticism for her performance for a surprise twist, any excuse is a good one for Oscar trivia. Yes? Yes! We shall approach the Blanchett Oscar trivia in three questions after the jump.

1. Who has the most similar track record to Cate Blanchett at the Oscars?

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Box Office: "Good Boys" makes good - did you see it?

With 16 features in wide release -- which is a lot given that there's usually only 10-12 with today's tendency to pack movies on 4,000+ screens -- let's cover the whole field, shall we?  Plus the specialty titles in limited release because we think they're just as, if not more, important on the regular. After the jump the full chart...

Weekend Box Office August 16th-18th (Actuals) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
W I D E	PLATFORM / LIMITED
1 🔺 Good Boys $21.4 *new* REVIEW  ★	1 🔺 Mission Mangal $1.3 on 263 screens *new*

2 Hobbs & Shaw $14.1 (cum. $133.7)  REVIEW  ★	2 🔺 The Peanut Butter Falcon $287k (cum. $583k) on 49 screens REVIEW ★

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Review: Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Murtada Elfadl

What if that one thing that you cared about and that you built your life’s work around was gutted away from you violently? Can you recover? How do you cope in the days and years that follow? These are some of the questions that Richard Linklater is trying to answer with his adaptation of the Maria Semple novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Bernadette (Cate Blanchett) is a harried mom (to Emma Nelson’s 15 year old Bee) and wife (to Billy Crudup’s Elgie) in Seattle. She spends her days in her big semi-rundown house trying to manage the small details of her family’s life, but mostly running away from facing the minutiae and drudgery of those tasks by composing long email and text messages to her virtual assistant Manjula. But Bernadette’s life wasn’t always so banal and she wasn’t in perpetual war with everyone she meets (Kristin Wiig plays her nemesis and next door neighbor). She used to be a genius architect with lots of promise until she suffered a major career setback that she couldn’t recover from. 

If you are a fan of the novel you might not recognize what you liked about it from this adaptation...

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Posterized: Where'd ya go with Richard Linklater?

by Nathaniel R

Richard Linklater directing Cate Blanchett on the set of "Where'd Ya Go, Bernadette?"

Richard Linklater, who burst on to the indie film scene as the voice of the "Slacker" generation, has had quite an eclectic career all told. He's made 19 theatrically released narrative features of a wide variety of genres and been instrumental in launching new stars (Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, and Miranda Cosgrove) or adding significant lustre and awards notices to other filmographies (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Jack Black and Patricia Arquette chief among that list). The Austin-based filmmaker's latest is the adaptation of the best-seller Where'd Ya Go Bernadette. Cate Blanchett stars as the artist in self-imposed exile. 

Linklater's films have ranged from perfect gems to little seen oddities, director for hire gigs, weird and funny larks, remakes, misfires, and ambitious personal projects. How many of them have you seen? All 19 posters are after the jump...

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