The deluge of award season has officially begun, with a number of announcements recently.
The LA Critics named Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest as Best Picture and Director, as well as Peformance by Sandra Huller and Score. (LA Critics have also abandoned gender distinctions, although they include a "runner-up" slot to kind of make up the difference.)
Anatomy of a Fall, also starring Sandra Huller, is raking up most of the foreign language awards, taking the prize at the European Film Awards, much as it did at Cannes.
AFI and the National Board of Review also announced their winners.and Top 10 lists. The most notable aspect here, to me, is the complete omission of Asteroid City, which, so far, has netted exactly zero noms from any award ceremony. (On the plus side, it landed at #3 on IndieWire's list.)
Finally, today saw the release of the Golden Globes, which, unlike the AFI or NBR, is generally considered the more glib and populist of the award ceremonies. Almost to punctuate that point, I notice how they've placed their TV nominations over the film nominations this year - a sign of the times. The immediate headache is how they decided May December is a "comedy/musical". Although it has plenty of ironic distance, it's pretty clearly a psychological drama. I saw one review that addressed the issue of critics applying a "camp" tag to the film, questioning whether or not this was the critics' response of being unable to take the uncomfortable subject matter at face value. The IndieWire review exemplifies the confusion by calling it a "heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp", which is nonsensical considering how "camp" is defined as being the opposite of sincere. But whatever, I suspect that part of this designation may be due to not forcing the film to compete with the already stacked drama category. (Not that it matters - Barbie is clearly going to sweep the comedy/musical slots.) Meanwhile, for further inanity, Jennifer Lawrence is nominated for No Hard Feelings presumably as an excuse to have her sit close to the stage and boost ratings, and some new category, "Cinematic and Box Office Achievement in Motion Pictures", was added as an excuse for Tom Cruise to do the same. More intriguingly, the Supporting Actor category (Willem DaFoe, Robert De Niro, Ryan Gosling, Robert Downey Jr.) promises to be perhaps the truly most competive category going forth. (Which is bad luck for supporting actor Glenn Howerton's Oscar chances, I'm afraid.)
Bulding a safe watchlist from these awards for what I have left to see, I can place the following:
The Holdovers
Boy and the Heron
American Fiction
Poor Things
Zone of Interest
Maestro
Past Lives
Saltburn
Pricilla
Beau is Afraid
Oh, and Barbie of course.
crumbsroom wrote:
