Cinema and Popcorn

TIFF and Venice are coming soon and it's time to line-up the first serious Academy Award nominations predictions. As I said in a previous post, all comes around which movies the studios/distributors are determined to promote and build an awards campaign around - and aspects like box-office performance and critical reception are key factors in the decision process, but they are not the only ones. Considering the cultural impact of the internet, social media and niche target audiences are also valid points when start predicting - Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores might indicate the general reception, but if a movie is truly loved, even for a smaller group of moviegoers, then it might score enough #1 votes in the Best Picture ballot. Basically, you must know the Academy members and you must sense which movie might target a certain group of Academy members better. That said, I believe this year can be one of the most diverse in terms of cinematic offer for voters. Of course, there ...

Genre: Drama Director: Christopher Nolan Writer: Christopher Nolan Starring: Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Emily Blunt, Kenneth Branagh, Florence Pugh and Benny Safdie Oppenheimer is good... in fact it is quite good! I believe it is the most assured movie Christopher Nolan has ever made in his career. It doesn't mean it is my favorite movie of his, but here you feel he is in full control of every dimension of his movie at the same time: narrative, style, acting and technical aspects. Technically, this movie seems perfect - everything is in perfect harmony with everything - but there's a lot of information going on-screen and it is a movie that demands you to be focused. The movie switches from a narrative line to another: the central storyline, which tells the story of Oppenheimer and how his personal and professional life have led him to the creation of the atomic bom; then there's Lewis Strauss' public hearing (the black and white par...

With the announcement of the TIFF lineup, I believe it's time to look at the current state of the race according to what each big distributor has on its plate. Of course there will be movies without a distributor that will be picked during Fall film festival season that are not being considered here (like Elliot Page's starring vehicle Close to You, Kristin Scott Thomas directorial debut North Star or Michel Franco's Memory) and they might actually shake the Oscar predictions of Oscar predictions folks. The thing is... with the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, I believe this year's early releases might actually benefit from the lack of promotional campaigns (specially from actors, which always boost the movies' profiles). Let's not forget this is a war against the billion-dollar studio-system and not against the independent/auteur films A24 Past Lives :  After winning rave reviews in Sundance Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival (where it was in...