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.
Update 2/5: As award season continues, it appears as though the stock of A Star is Born is dropping and dropping. While I still think it has an outside shot at Best Picture, Roma has risen to take its place as the consensus front-runner. The Best Picture race is rather up in the air, given the split voting from the guilds, but Roma and Green Book are rising to the top of the heap, with upset potential from the likes of Blackkklansman and The Favourite.
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→
The Upside is a remake of the 2011 French film Intouchables, a facile yet hugely crowd-pleasing story about a white wealthy quadriplegic who hires a black ex-con to be his live-in caregiver. In the American iteration, the two roles are fulfilled by Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart, with the role of Philip Lacasse’s (Cranston) uptight executive Yvonne being played by Nicole Kidman.
Neil Burger’s film is just as facile, and likely just as crowd-pleasing, as Intouchables.
While On the Basis of Sex illustrates the obstacle-laden road Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) had becoming a lawyer, it pauses for a moment of attachment. A place where we understand the to-be U.S. Supreme Court Justice on a deeper level than we can by simply following her real-life legacy.
There is always some overlap between the two sound categories. Sound Editing is the creation of foley. Sound Mixing is the recording and mixing of the soundtrack. They are two distinct aspects of sound production, but often if a film does one well it does the other similarly well.
That said, a well-mixed film may not require a lot of sound effect production. A musical, perhaps. A film may require a heavy amount of foley, which usually means the mix is harder to master. An action movie, perhaps. A lot goes into the soundtrack, making it hard sometimes to discern whether the Academy will honor films in both categories, one, or none.
The Golden Globes telecast is right around the corner (Sunday, January 6), and Oscar season is in full swing. In a couple of weeks, the Academy will announce its nominations (Tuesday, January 22). In preparation for that, CineFiles has put together a series of predictions in (most of) the 24 categories.
Note: these articles are predictions for what films will get nominated in each category, not who will win in each category.
With the WGA nominations still a few days out, it is a bit difficult to get the full picture on the Oscar race in Best Original Screenplay. There are the Golden Globes to go on, but those nominations don’t always translate.
There are a few great screenplays that could be snubbed, and a few big Oscar contenders that are more likely to get the nod.
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