Since the advent of movie sound, there have been movie musicals. Their power has waned over the years, but there is almost always one that a big studio will take a chance...
The Oscar race’s precursor phase is generally thought to kick off once the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), National Board of Review (NBR), and a...
I like to romanticize editing as an art in and of itself. Unlike painting, sculpture, stage performance, or photography, film gets the benefit of an edit. A scene in a movie can...
There is a concept that circulates every award season and is pervasive in every conversation about the performance categories. It's called a "Legacy Oscar." Essentially, a "Legacy Oscar" is about rewarding a...
It seemed for a while there (pre-pandemic) that superhero films were building to something. It seemed a sort of legitimacy was developing within critic's groups and awards circuits as the genre ballooned...
I've discovered that rather than trying to categorize the five nominated films in Best Original Screenplay into archetypes like you would with Best Picture— the Indie Darling, the Blockbuster, the Genre Defier,...
Pundits handicap Oscar nominations on a spectrum between activism and dispassionate observation. Even those who typically lean toward the latter pole will occasionally (when wading through the uncertainties of a category’s bottom...
Power is almost always equated with violence: all of those old-school movie heroes, from John Wayne to Arnold Schwarzenegger, were males who proved their worth on screen through killing, mutilating, beating the...
