The nominees in the Best Director category are all very good. After not getting Best Director nods for Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, Spike Lee finally gets his due. Pawel Pawlikowski returns to the Oscar sphere with his follow up to the Best Foreign Language winner Ida. Adam McKay returns, as well, with his follow-up to The Big Short. Yorgos Lanthimos makes his debut in the Best Director category after receiving nominations in other categories for The Lobster and Dogtooth.
And then there is two-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuaron.
Unlike Best Supporting Actor, the 2019 award for Best Supporting Actress is a tough call. There is immense talent in this pool of actresses, and no single name has risen to a front-runner status.
For whatever reason, Best Supporting Actor is, year after year, the easiest acting race to predict. It is often narrowed in on one or two candidates long before the Screen Actors Guild announce their awards. The SAGs just act to solidify the already established front-runner.
2019, by and large, shows the same conditions. The race is already narrowed down, and it is not hard to pick a winner before the SAGs even happen. There is always upset potential, but this race is much more predictable than the other categories.
The Best Actor race is a tight one this year. You have fan favorites like A Star is Born. Crowd-pleasers like Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book. Transformative performances in Christian Bale and Rami Malek. And Willem Dafoe is in there, too. Because why not?
Early on in the year, it looked like Lady Gaga had Best Actress in the bag. A Star is Born hit strong, much stronger than The Wife. Over time, A Star is Born has cooled off a bit, particularly following its near shut-out at the Golden Globes. Glenn Close, as a result, has risen back into the conversation as a front-runner.
Nothing is certain, however, and an acting front-runner cannot truly be claimed as a true front-runner until they pick up the SAG award. Until that time, we can only speculate.
Oscar season is in full swing, and the Best Picture race is heating up fast. Green Book is on the rise. A Star is Born might be on the decline. Can Roma sweep? Will Black Panther upset?
M. Night Shyamalan has created a comic book world completely divorced from real-world comic books, yet all he wants to do in Glass is fit into the canon of superhero comics. The exposition often harps on, among many other things, comics—their origins, their narrative formulae, their character construction.
Glass is a superhero film, in that it recenters Shyamalan’s Split into a superhero versus arch-villain plotline, in which James McAvoy’s multiple personality super villain “The Horde” is Continue reading Glass (2019) Movie Review→
