THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
I was as generous as I could be. 38 movies seems to be the maximum that could be in contention for everything but Shorts, Animation, International, and Documentary. This includes 6 titles that are not currently scheduled to premiere this year, in theaters or out, or which have no announced their awards ambitions.
Now… remove, if you will, the 15 titles that everyone reading this knows do not have a chance in hell of getting within a mile of Best Picture or Screenplay or Director and the 6 that may well not join this dance, and your entire Oscar season is a battle between 17 movies, the vast majority of which have not been seen outside of their production teams.
Meanwhile, New York, which has been months ahead of getting the COVID issue settled… they seem to be about to tighten things back up as cases and positivity rates are on the rise again. And The PGA, which announced their Oscar-connected date today, has not publicly acknowledged whether movies with have to play in theaters in NY and LA this time out.
I’m going to just shut my big mouth now and leave you with this question… Does this look like any kind of Oscar Season to you?
Ammonite
The Assistant
The Broken Hearts Gallery
Cherry
C’mon C’mon**
Coming 2 America
Connected
Da Five Bloods
Downhill
Dune
The Father
First Cow
The 40-Year-Old Version
Greyhound
Hillbilly Elegy
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
I’m Your Woman**
The Invisible Man
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Mank
Minari
Next Goal Wins**
News of the World
No Time To Die
Nomadland
On The Rocks
One Night in Miami
The Outpost
Penguin Bloom**
Pieces of a Woman
Promising Young Woman**
Respect
Soul
Stillwater**
Summerland
Tenet
The Trial of The Chicago Seven
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
The White Tiger
-30-
May 1, 2022
"Netflix, the great disrupter whose algorithms and direct-to-consumer platform have forced powerful media incumbents to rethink their economic models, now seems to need a big strategy change itself. It got me thinking about the simple idea that my film and TV production company Blumhouse is built on: If you give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success, more often than not the result will be both commercial (the filmmakers are incentivized to make films that will resonate with audiences) and artistically interesting (creative freedom!). This approach has yielded movies as varied as Get Out (made for $4.5 million, with worldwide box office receipts of more than $250 million), Whiplash (made for $3.3 million, winner of three Academy Awards), The Invisible Man (made for $7 million, earned more than $140 million) and Paranormal Activity (made for $15,000, grossed more than $190 million).From the beginning, the most important strategy I used to persuade artists to work with me was to make radically transparent deals: We usually paid the artists (“participants” in Hollywood lingo) the absolute minimum allowable by union contracts upfront, with the promise of healthy bonuses based on actual box office results—instead of the opaque 'percentage points' that artists are usually offered. Anyone can see box office results immediately, so creators don’t quarrel with the payouts. In fact, when it comes time for an artist to collect a bonus based on box office receipts, I email a video clip of myself dropping the check off at FedEx to the recipient."
Jason Blum Sees Room For "Scrappier" Netflix
| April 30, 2022
"As a critic Gavin was entertaining, wry, questioning, sensitive, perceptive"
Critic-Filmmaker Gavin Millar Was 84; Films Include Cream In My Coffee, Dreamchild
April 29, 2022
| January 24, 2022
DP/30 Audio: Bombshell, Jay Roach
| December 13, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jonathan Majors
| December 4, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
| December 4, 2019
I guess that probably means we’ll be back to just 5 nominations this year
Any given year there are about twenty films worthy of best picture, assuming you limit the field to actor-driven dramas, as is customary. This does not mean that there are twenty films at the level of, say,……Roma, but twenty or so that are about as good as the median-quality BP nominee. I think that you could rustle up 6-8 from this list that would be as good as the average nominee,. For instance, you could have a closing shootout between Mank and Ma Rainey, Fincher and Wolf, that would stir up all kinds of PR, and twitter fights. Add in Sorkin, Chloe Zhao, Spike and Lee Daniels… this starts to look close to normal., at least as far as quality goes.
And, I could imagine a distanced Dolby ceremony restricted to nominees, the presenters and their families. That should be enough to have a pretty good red carpet, too.
Won’t The Boys in the Band be eligible?
I’d love to see a push for Tracee Ellis Ross in The High Note, possibly in Supporting, since Dakota Johnson has the protagonist arc.
How about no awards this year?
I haven’t, and won’t, see any of these films. My streaming is classics only. There is way too much classic streaming for me to care what streamed new this year. I am indifferent to Oscars but enjoy the live audience and presenters. Zoom presenters/”winners” over streamed dull films. Not so much.