Tag Archives: best picture

#Oscars 2024 | Best Actress / Actor +++ More Academy Predictions

Ah, the glitz, the glamour, and the relentless buzz surrounding the Oscars!

As the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences marches towards the 96th annual Oscar ceremony on Sunday, March 10th 2024, the speculation over potential nominees for the most coveted categories – Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director – has reached a fever pitch.

Here’s a glance into the crystal ball to discern who might grace the esteemed list of nominees. Oscar nominees will be announced on Tuesday, January 23rd at 5 a.m.

Best Picture

As we wrote yesterday, the leading contenders for the Best Picture Oscar are: Christopher Nolan’s hard-hitting biopic Oppenheimer; Greta Gerwig’s pastel-pink Mattel extravaganza Barbie; Martin Scorsese’s western gangster epic, Killers of the Flower Moon; Yorgos Lanthimos’ fantastical coming-of-age tale, Poor Things; Alexander Payne’s Christmas dramedy The Holdovers; Bradley Cooper’s biopic of composer Leonard Bernstein, Maestro; Cord Jefferson’s feature directorial début, American Fiction; and, writer / director Celine Song’s feature directorial début, the American romantic drama, Past Lives.

After that, who knows who will fill the 9th and 10th spots?

Best Actor

The Best Actor category often shines a light on performances that redefine the craft. Names already swirling in the Oscar conversation are …

Bradley Cooper. Maestro. Cooper’s portrayal of the sexually conflicted composer Leonard Bernstein in a film he wrote, directed and stars in, offers a performance poised to bring him his fifth acting Oscar nomination.

Leonardo DiCaprio. Killers of the Flower Moon. DiCaprio is in the running for his sixth performance under the direction of Martin Scorsese, in which he plays a simpleton who becomes part of a scheme to kill and rob the Osage community.

Colman Domingo. Rustin. In his first lead role, the Emmy-winning star of Euphoria has won universal raves. Domingo brings heart, mind and soul to the part of Bayard Rustin, a Black and gay civil rights activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington.

Paul Giamatti. The Holdovers. This veteran could land a Best Actor nomination — and at this point is actually the odds-on favourite to win Best Actor — 19 years after his prior collaboration with Alexander Payne in Sideways. He again plays a snob, this time a crusty boarding school instructor forced to stay on campus during Christmas break.

Cillian Murphy. Oppenheimer. The Irishman best known for the TV series Peaky Blinders has been doing notable work in film for more than 20 years. But never before has he played a part as widely seen or praised as that of J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic.

Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction. One of the most revered screen actors who’s never received an Oscar nomination, this Emmy winner arguably gives the performance of his career as a cranky college professor who writes books that nobody reads — until he writes one, of a very different sort, under a pen name.

Best Actress

Competition is heating up for the Best Actress Academy Award at Oscars 2024, with several great performances vaulting women into the awards race.

Margot Robbie. Barbie. The shining star of the movie, perfectly capturing Barbie’s toy-like looks and evolving her performance to fit with the movie’s exploration of Barbie’s empowering arc, this two-time Oscar nominee could take home the big prize this year.

Sandra Hüller. Anatomy of a Fall. Cannes Best Actress winner Hüller — who attempts to prove she is not responsible for her husband’s death, in this courtroom drama — carries the film on her shoulders and delivers an exceptional performance.

Carey Mulligan. Maestro. Mulligan plays Leonard Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre, chronicling their heartbreaking, decades-spanning love story through all the highs and lows, in a role that could win her her first Academy Award.

Lily Gladstone. Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese’s film is expected to be a massive hit with Academy voters. Gladstone’s role as Mollie Burkhart is at the heart of the movie, and is essential to the film’s emotional core. Thus far in the Oscar race, Ms. Gladstone has picked up all of the critics, and last Sunday the Golden Globe, Best Actress prize.

Emma Stone. Poor Things. Stone’s dazzling, revelatory performance as a Frankenstein creature brought to life is the expected winner of the Best Actress 2024 Oscar.

Best Supporting Actor

Ryan Gosling. Barbie. Gosling is definitely Kenough to run away with this whole thing.

Robert Downey Jr. Oppenheimer. On the campaign trail, Downey reminds voters of his outstanding work as Louis Strauss, transforming his appearance and affect.

Robert De Niro. Killers of the Flower Moon. De Niro’s villainous turn as William Hale is a lock for a nomination.

Mark Ruffalo. Poor Things. Ruffalo plays a promiscuous reprobate who can’t deal with a sexually empowered woman in Poor Things. Ruffalo is definitely in the mix, as is Willem Dafoe in that same film as a disfigured mad scientist/father figure.

Charles Melton. May December. Vaulting from TV’s Riverdale to a fascinating role as a man seduced by a married woman (Julianne Moore) when he was in middle school has picked up all of the critics awards thus far.

Best Supporting Actress

This category promises an array of talent.

Juliette Binoche. The Taste of Things. As Eugénie, Binoche plays the personal cook to renowned gourmet Dodin Bouffant in his country home in 1889 France, the French reverence for the art of cuisine serving to define the film.

Emily Blunt. Oppenheimer. A formidable contender, potentially signaling a promising awards journey ahead.

Danielle Brooks. The Color Purple. Brooks and Taraji P. Henson, the standouts from Blitz Bazawule’s daring re-imagining of Alice Walker’s beloved novel are both vying for recognition in this fiercely competitive supporting actress race.

Penélope Cruz. Ferrari. Cruz fuels Oscar talk with her extraordinary turn in Michael Mann’s Ferrari biopic, as the scorching, melancholic heart of the film.

Jodie Foster. Nyad. Could this be Oscar #3 for Nyad scene-stealer Jodie Foster?

Da’Vine Joy Randolph. The Holdovers. The odds-on favourite in this category, Randolph delivers a standout performance in as Mary Lamb, a cafeteria worker mourning her son’s loss.

Best Director

The visionary minds behind the lens are poised for recognition.

Frontrunners

Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer.
Greta Gerwig. Barbie.
Martin Scorsese. Killers of the Flower Moon.
Yorgos Lanthimos. Poor Things.
Jonathan Glazer. The Zone of Interest.

Major Threats

Cord Jefferson. American Fiction.
Celine Song. Past Lives.
Bradley Cooper. Maestro.
Alexander Payne. The Holdovers.
Todd Haynes. May December.
Blitz Bazawule. The Color Purple.
Ava DuVernay. Origin.

#Cinema | Holiday Oscar Awards Season, Part 2 | Best Picture Contenders

With epic cinematic re-makes, like Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt and heart-breaking re-imagining of West Side Story, and ferociously inspiring biopics like King Richard in contention, Academy Awards Oscar voters have a plethora of worthy choices in a Best Picture category that has been set at full and expansive 10 slots this year.

The Academy Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 27th, 2022.

In last week’s Part 1 of VanRamblings’ Oscar preview, we wrote about all of the probable Oscar contenders that are readily available to you in the comfort of your home — available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, or Apple TV.

This week, we’ll turn our focus to the Oscar contending films that will be available exclusively as an in-cinema experience — the best way to enjoy cinema.

A fundamentally and marvelously old-fashioned cinematic entertainment, a working class sports drama that is so authentic, appealing and engaging that it simply pulls you right in, King Richard is the story of the dream of Richard Williams — father to future tennis phenoms, five time Wimbeldon champion, Venus, and her younger sister, Serena, winner of 23 Grand Slam tournaments — this crowd-pleasing, socially alert story of perseverance, and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence, is VanRamblings’ favourite Hollywood film of 2021.

Further, we believe King Richard will win the 2022 Oscar for Best Picture, while also boasting this year’s presumed Best Actor front-runner in Will Smith.

Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene  Williams, Demi Singleton as Serena Williams. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Aunjanue Ellis’ richly layered performance as Venus and Serena’s mother, Oracene ‘Brandy’ Williams — who winds up stealthily stealing the movie despite her co-star, Will Smith’s gravitational charisma — is nothing short of a revelation, possessed of an unshakeable source of love and balance for her husband Richard and their five children, in a magnificent character portrayal that deserves a shower of raves.

Rush out to see King Richard because, quite simply, it is a revelation.

The reviews are in for Steven Spielberg’s re-imagining of the 1961 Best Picture Oscar winning classic musical, West Side Story — and they’re all raves!

The critics are simply waxing poetic about this big screen cinematic reverie …

  • Says The Globe and Mail’s Arts Editor and ‘professional’ movie critic, Barry Hertz, “I would accuse Spielberg of playing the romantic fool — of being convinced that his audience will fall in love with whatever he’s already become smitten with or blinded by himself — but West Side Story proves that he is as annoyingly, lovingly, dastardly whip-smart as ever. This film is the reason that we go out to the movies, and should continue to do so for as long as the opportunity is afforded to us.”;
  • Writes Robbie Collin, in his five-star review in The Telegraph … “West Side Story is, I believe, Spielberg’s finest film in 20 years, and a new milestone in the career of one of our greatest living directors. A little less than a month before his 75th birthday, he has delivered a relentlessly dazzling, swoonily beautiful reworking of the 1957 Manhattan-set musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which feels just as definitive and indestructible as the previous screen adaptation, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.”

Ariana DeBose as Anita and David Alvarez as Bernardo in a scene from Spielberg’s new West Side Story

Opening a week today, on Friday, December 10th, Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt and heart-breaking adaptation of West Side Story remains faithful to its roots, and emerges for audiences today, alive to the concerns of the modern world.

Stunningly detailed, wickedly enjoyable, with an A-list cast up and down, director Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous and fantastically sinister moral fable about freak shows, dark and stormy nights, innocent dames, morally bankrupt schemers, and a femme fatale to die for, Nightmare Alley offers a gloomy dip into the dark side, immersive and bleak from start to finish.

You know. Just standard holiday film fare.

This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the dark margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for the most damnable creatures sparks life into Nightmare Alley, as it narrows towards its inevitable end. (Dec. 17)

Winner of the prestigious Audience Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, his semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Belfast during ‘The Troubles’, at only 97 minutes never overreaches, and could very well end up in Oscar’s top spot.

For VanRamblings, though, Belfast’s tenderly nostalgic memoir never coheres, but rather comes across as a low-rent version of Alfonso Cuarón’s personal tour de force, 2019’s Roma, which deftly captured the emotional balance of intimacy and the poetic power of a land in turmoil and transition, a necessary feat that Belfast fails to achieve.

Belfast, with its underdeveloped central characters — most especially Jamie Dornan and Catriona Balfe — is a film given to broad strokes, without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.

As such, Belfast emerges as only a scattershot pleaser, rendered with too little whimsy, and blarney left to spare. Still and all, film offers viewers a reflection on their own lives, a subjective and iconoclastic experience that may prove satisfactory for some viewers — as it did in Toronto this year. But, sorry to report, not for VanRamblings in any great or moving measure.

Critics who’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s freewheeling, half-forgotten memoria of growing up in the golden, shimmering  suburban San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, Licorice Pizza, have found the film to be a tender, funny ramble forged in all the hope and absurdity of adolescence, the film carried on the shoulders of first-timers Alana Haim (Anderson has directed several of her band’s videos) and Cooper Hoffman (son of frequent Anderson collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), both actors thoroughly engaging in their début performances.

Christie Lemire writes,”Haim is just a flat-out movie star. She has that “thing”: that radiant, magnetic charisma that makes it impossible to take your eyes off her.”

Clearly, Licorice Pizza is just the sort of small, under-the-radar film that audiences find, and are wowed by. An irresistible and delectably euphoric film, Licorice Pizza emerges as more than just a film, it is a playful, sentimental reminder of what it means to be young, as well as an embodiment of what it feels like to grow up.

A beyond-dazzling re-imagining of Cyrano de Bergerac, novelist Edmond Rostand’s fictionalization of the early 17th century playwright, epistolarian, and duelist Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, director Joe Wright’s charmingly poignant musical version of the 1897 stage play, offers vivid performances, intoxicating bravado, and a ravishing Roxanne (played by Haley Bennett, with whom Wright is besotted in real life). Cyrano took the Telluride Film Festival by storm — as may well be the case with you, and your family and friends.

Yet another true holiday film treat.

Of course, there are at least a dozen more films to sweep you off your feet this extended holiday Oscar movie season, including Joachim Trier’s revelatory The Worst Person in the World, VanRamblings’ favourite film of 2021, and a certain Oscar contender for Best International Film.

Sad to say, though, Trier’s latest film — which débuted at the Cannes Film Festival in July, winning the Best Actress prize for lead Renate Reinsve — won’t hit screens in the Metro Vancouver region until January 2022.

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta — a substantial, sophisticated, yet briskly paced and always highly entertaining drama, the story of a 17th-century nun in Italy who suffers from disturbing religious and erotic visions — balances quiet scenes of shrewd backroom politicking with lurid scenes of wild religious madness. A big hit at Cannes. Set to be released on December 21st.

Sean Baker’s Red Rocket features Simon Rex as an ex-Porn star returning to his small town home. Critics at Cannes loved Red Rocket, a humane comedy, a portrait of romantic douchebaggery & an America of flailing last chances.

Recommended.

Finally, for today, we’ll leave you with Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, starring an Oscar-bound Penélope Cruz, in  a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama.

Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama.

But Parallel Mothers, while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party. Rather, it’s an unabashedly serious movie, one so straightforwardly sculpted and emotionally down-to-earth that there’s no distance between the audience and what’s happening onscreen.

Parallel Mothers is as serious as any film Almodóvar has made, but in this case he hasn’t let go of his luminously light, beguiling, puckish side. Parallel Mothers draws you in and holds you. It’s Almodóvar’s disarming tribute to the shifting, ever-bending bonds of motherhood, and the inexorable pull of family.



New York Film Critics Circle Winners (announced Friday, December 3, 2021)

Best Film: Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Sideshow and Janus Films)
Best Director: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Actress: Lady Gaga, House of Gucci (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
Best Supporting Actor: Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Supporting Actress: Kathryn Hunter, The Tragedy of Macbeth (Apple Original Films/A24)
Best Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
Best Animated Film: The Mitchells vs. The Machines (Netflix)
Best Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski, West Side Story (20th Century Studios)
Best First Film: Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter (Netflix)
Best Foreign Language Film: The Worst Person in the World (Norway)
Best Nonfiction Film: Flee (Neon)