Award Show Round Up: Oscars 2024!

Good morning! Was is just me and my obsessive love for these kinds of things or was the Oscars last night…good? Like, really fun and celebratory and serious when it needed to be, but never taking itself too seriously? Maybe it’s just my fan goggled blinding me, but I thought it was a really fun broadcast.

I went to the cinema St. Louis watch party again this year at the Hi-Pointe Theatre so I didn’t take as copious notes as I usually do (actually like to watch the Oscars so I’m not as good at blogging about them). But there were so many highlights (and a few things I have some notes on…) Though they aren’t maybe in my usual chronological order.

I complained when Jimmy Kimmel was announced as host again this year, and while I’m still ready for a new face up there (looking at you John Mulaney), I thought he did a pretty good job (though enough jokes about how long movies are), his monologue was fun, and I really loved the moment of union solidarity at the end:

We started the night off with a wonderful win from a deserving artist showing true emotion:

Also, so glad they brought back the past winners presenting the nominees! I wish there was a way to incorporate clips with this format, but I love these moments of connection to the legacy of the Academy.

I only saw one short this year (it was the Wes Anderson – glad he has an Oscar, wish he had been there, but given the Asteroid City snubs, I get it), but I really liked seeing Sean Oko Lennon shout out his mom, because I love her and our culture owes her a million “happy mother’s days” and also more than a few apologies:

The writing awards went to the coolest people:

And he’s right! Bring back midbudget movies!!

Then Oppenheimer (yay) and Poor Things (eye roll) won a lot of technical and craft awards (I would have given at least Production Design to Barbie come on!) But there were some moving and heavy speeches, from the director of 20 Days in Mariupol:

And Jonathan Glazer, who wrote and directed The Zone of Interest, which was far from my favorite film of the year, but I applaud his courage in talking about Gaza from the stage:

(If video isn’t loading, please click through to YouTube, the Oscars have – kind of suspiciously – not posted this on their official channel, so this is from the Deadline Hollywood account which makes embedding trickier).

Also, glad that Zone won, Best Sound, the use of background noise and score in that film completely transform the narrative and responsible for almost all of the creeping dread.

On a lighter, but still important note, I really loved the winners for Best Live Action short bringing along a student, who looked like a princess, and talking about arts education:

The presenter bits almost all worked! My favorites:

Batman villains:

John Cena saying the word “Costumes:”

Getting Steven Spielberg to play along:

John Mulaney, for some reason, recapping Field of Dreams:

Robert Downey Jr., gave great speech all season, and that included last night:

First SNL cast member to win an Oscar! Who do we think will be next? My husband’s bet is on Kate McKinnon, which I would love.

The best production number in recent Oscars memory happened, and somehow (no offense to Billie) didn’t win best song….

As you all probably know by now, I would have loved to see a Paul Giamatti win, but can’t be mad about Cillian:

Christopher Nolan won Best Director and gave one of the quotes of the night about our luck at being so near the birth of the art form of cinema, which was a beautiful sentiment:

Then, Emma Stone won Best Actress, she was, as she always is, very charming and humble in her acceptance, and I think she did a good job in Poor Things, but I think that this win not only fails to recognize Lily Gladstone’s astounding work at the center of Killers of the Flower Moon, misses the opportunity to make history for American Indigenous filmmakers, and continues the almost a century long trend of celebrating most acting as synonymous with best acting. That being said, I’m so excited to see what Gladstone does next, and hope that Emma as producer, has a hand in supporting that (which I think they will, they seem to have forged a lovely friendship. My issues with this win are not actually with her, but with the Academy.)

Then Al Pacino wandered onto the stage, and read the right winner, but seemed very confused, and managed to make the ending of the show feel very anti-climactic, but not enough to ruin anything in my estimation. (Oppenheimer, of course, won.)

Fashion wise, it was a sparkly, fluffy sleeved night, and I have a lot of favorite gowns. (Men mostly stuck to classic tuxes, that all looked lovely, but none spectacular enough to make the list.)

Sandra Hüller in Schiaparelli (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Justine Triet in Louis Vuitton (Photo Credit: Numero Netherlands)

Liza Koshy in Marchesa (Photo Credit: John Shearer/WireImage)

Amelia Dimoldenberg (Photo credit: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Gabrielle Union in Carolina Herrera (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

America Ferrera in Versace (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Greta Gerwig in Gucci (Photo Credit: Getty)

Anya Taylor Joy in Dior Haute Couture (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Greta Lee in Loewe (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Jennifer Lawrence in Dior Haute Couture (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Carey Mulligan in Balenciaga Couture (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Clara Wong with Paul Giamatti (Photo Credit: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

Sarah Thompson with John Battsek (Photo Credit: Getty)

Awards Show Roundup: SAG Awards 2024

I think that the SAG Awards are my favorite precursor. The Oscars are, of course, my favorite holiday, and I do think it’s important that we acknowledge all the different artists and technicians that make movies (on the broadcast please), but it is always very clear at the SAGs I touched all of the winners are by recognition from their peers. And last night’s show, the first to be on Netflix instead of TNT/TBS, felt looser (because they could swear?) and like a real love fest with only a few sections that dragged.

My highlights:

I love the “I Am An Actor” opening, and though I missed the faux-awkwardness of people turning around at their tables, I liked the relay race to the stage:

We started off the night with a win for Jeremy Allen White, I probably would have given this to Ebon Moss-Barach, because “Forks” is the best episode of television I’ve seen in a long time (maybe ever), but can never be mad at White:

I still have not watched Beef, I’m deep in trying to force myself to watch some the most depressing seeming documentary nominees ever created, but I’m obsessed with Ali Wong’s mom’s little wave during this speech:

A few little gripes with the overall show then I’ll get back to the big stuff. I really didn’t like the set, it looked like an optical illusion and kept confusing me. And I understand that with no commercial breaks you have to do something to give people in the room some breaks, but in show interview segments are so awkward, and I feel like we could fill that time with more montages. Because I love montages and I hate awkwardness.

OK, back to the show, my favorite presenter bit, also includes the fun fact that Billie Eilish’s mom teaches at the Groundlings!

I love Ayo so much, even wrapped in a (very glamorous) picnic blanket she is always so charming:

Truly shocking that Pedro Pascal won over the Succession dudes. (I don’t watch either of their shows, just based on momentum.) And he was also clearly shocked, but delightful:

DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH ROLLING HER WAY TO HER MUCH DESERVED OSCAR, I LOVE HER:

Side note – thank you SAG for giving them a table to put their, notoriously heavy, awards on! I’ve been ranting about this all year!

Steven Yuen’s speech was very charming (and he did bring Pedro that envelope backstage in the only moment from the interview interstitials that was worth it):

Tim and I have been rewatching The Bear and while it has some very heavy points, and they may be what sticks in our heads the longest, but it is actually hilarious, and genre is fluid, and all that to say, give it all the comedy awards, and Twitter needs to stop being scoldy about it:

Barbra Streisand is, and always has been, a delightful, singular weirdo and this was a well-deserved honor, and though I didn’t cry, I was very moved that Anne Hathaway did:

A couple of unimportant side notes: 1. Why was Bradley Cooper so orange? It’s like he put the first layer of the Lenny age makeup on for the night. 2. That floating image of Barbra is the best picture of her I have ever seen and I have no doubt she picked it herself, which is perfect.

I liked RDJ’s approach of listing co-stars (probably would have skipped Mel Gibson myself, but it’s not on me to tell him who was important to him):

I feel like he kind of blended into the weird background!

I haven’t watched her seasons of The Crown, but I am obsessed with Elizabeth Debicki seeing those stairs and just kicking off her shoes:

The way the night was going for TV Drama I thought maybe someone was going to upset Succession, but it was nice to give them their send off:

Look, if I was handing out the awards, I would be handing them to New Haven’s own Paul Giamatti, but there is no part of me that can be mad at Cillian Murphy, ever:

Look, I was nervous, everyone keeps tweeting “we have a race,” about Best Actress, and like, I get that mathematically that is true, but this is and should be Lily Gladstone’s year, and when they said her name and I felt like Emma Stone looks celebrating for her, and then her speech made me cry:

Just give her her Oscar please

My favorite thing about Oppenheimer‘s ensemble win is that Josh Harnett and David Krumholtz were up on that stage, because they are both so great in that movie, and I’ve loved watching them since I was a kid, and I would them to work more, so they’re SAG Award winners now casting-agents of Hollywood!

Also, a brilliant decision to have exes Goldblum and Davis present, bring more divorced couples awkwardly together on stages!

Fashion wise it was a fun night! Even the boring dresses tended towards the pretty/pagent-y instead of the strange. Here were my best dressed:

Carey Mulligan in custom Armani Privé (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Colman Domingo in Off-White (Photo Credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Mirielle Enos in Christian Siriano with Alan Ruck (Photo Credit: Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock)

Hannah Waddingham in Tony Ward Couture with a cardboard clutch made by her daughter (Photo Credit: Variety via Getty Images)

Lily Gladstone in custom Armani Privé (Photo Credit: Jordan Strauss/Invision via Associated Press)

Meryl Streep in Prada (Photo Credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Lily Gladstone in Louis Vuitton (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Ali Wong in Iris van Herpen (Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock)

America Ferrera in custom Dior (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Ariana Greenblatt in custom Vera Wang (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

Da’Vine Joy Randolph in custom Valdrin Shahiti (Phot Credit: Getty Images)

Awards Show Round Up: BAFTAs 2024

We are rolling into a busy last few weeks of awards season (I’m still not used to SAG being this late in the year? I wonder if they’ll ever go back to their pre-Covid January slot, but I guess the strikes probably delayed things this year…)

Once again, the BritBox app on my television refused to let me watch this?! But thankfully it worked on my laptop, still wishing for a return to the BBC America broadcast, but since even the SAG Awards are moving to streaming this year it seems that is most likely a pipe dream.

Anyway, enough logistical griping, it was a pretty fun show! I wish they didn’t keep quite so many awards off broadcast, especially since it is on streaming and they could just…let the show be long, but I really enjoyed David Tenant as host (never not enjoyed him in anything to be honest) and though I wasn’t surprised by any of the winners, there are still some races that feel a little open, which is fun. Here are my highlights:

Enjoyed the whole dog bit, and have always enjoyed Michael Sheen and David Tenant’s dynamic. (Side note, while Hamish was pretending to be frozen, Tim and I were trying to cast my laptop onto the TV and I literally couldn’t tell if it was working, which was a funny little meta moment.)

I reiterate that Justine Triet is the coolest person this awards season, and her partner is also hilarious:

The one win that truly shocked me was Cord Jefferson for Adapted Screenplay, not because it’s not deserved, it totally is, but because the BAFTAs don’t tend to go for things like movies with “America” in the title. (Though Tim did suggest that it may be because it makes a mockery of America, which, might be right.) Either way, thrilled about this. But, hilariously, Cord’s speech is one of the very few (maybe the only?) not currently uploaded to the BAFTA YouTube, so trust me…he won and was charming, but very American.

Robert Downey Jr. is going to win an Oscar, and he’s been giving good speeches all season:

Also – everything he keeps saying about being in the MCU is infinitely more damning than any criticism Scorsese or any other “auteur” has leveled against comic book movies.

Also going to win an Oscar Da’Vine! And I just adore her:

Zone of Interest won both Foreign Language Film and British Film which is…funny? I don’t know, it’s hard to say anything related to that film is funny, but the silliness of categories is fun to point out. Anyway, this speech isn’t funny, but it is important:

Really wish I could find a clip of Hugh Grant looking miserable while he recites an Oompa Loompa poem to present this award to Chris Nolan, but that’s fine:

Also the younger brother he mentions in this, ended up going to high school in Chicago, and sounds very American, and then they have another brother who is a con man and is (or at least was) in prison, and I don’t really have a point, I just need you all to know it, because I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about the Nolan family and neither Chris nor Jonathan seem likely to ever talk about it, but I would love to see a Nolan film about the Nolan family.

Samantha Morton is wonderful, and her Fellowship is very well deserved, but it is weird to watch her generation of actors age into lifetime achievement awards, because I remember when she was young and cool. (To be clear, she is still very cool, but you know what I mean.)

Mia McKenna-Bruce is great in How To Have Sex, and she was adorable winning Rising Star:

Best Actor is still an open race I think, and though I’m leaning toward Paul, Cillian was apparently the first Irish-born actor to win a Best Actor BAFTA, which is insane:

The fact that the British Academy didn’t even nominate Lily Gladstone, means that to me, this Best Actress race was completely illegitimate, and if people use it to say that Emma has “momentum” towards her second Oscar I will scream at them. (More accurately, I will scream at Tim, who has nothing to do with this and doesn’t deserve it, but that’s what being married to me is like.)

Emma is great in Poor Things even though I don’t love that movie, and I find her very charming, this is not about hating her, it is about loving Lily.

Always great to see Michael J. Fox:

And then Oppenheimer won, which, I think at this point isn’t a surprise to anyone, and though it’s not my pick for Best Picture, it’s definitely not one that’s going to make me angry:

Also, apparently, a guy on stage with them was not in any way affiliated with the film which is funny, because he didn’t do anything?

Fashion wise, it was kind of a snooze fest, a lot of black, with occasional red, and lots of open backs that connected to cut outs I didn’t particularly care for. There was some sparkly fun though. Here were my favs:

Claire Foy in Armani Privé (Photo Credit: Alan Chapman/Dave Bennett/Getty Images)

Deepika Padukone in Sabyasachi (Photo Credit: John Phillips/Getty Images)

Dua Lipa in Valentino (Photo Credit: Mike Marsland/WireImage)

Ayo Edibiri in Bottega Veneta (Photo Credit: John Phillips/Getty Images)

Mia McKenna-Bruce in Carolina Herrera (Photo Credit: Corbis Entertainment/Getty Images)

Fantasia Barrino in Benchellal haute couture (Photo Credit: Alan Chapman/Dave Bennett/Getty Images)

Carey Mulligan in vintage Dior (Photo Credit: Mike Marsland/WireImage)

And the Nominees Are 2024: Round 5

We now have all the nominations! And, while my viewing has slowed down a little bit, I’m actually glad this post isn’t going up in the week of the Oscar noms announcement, because the unexpected distribution of nominations for Barbie really broke some brains on the internet and I don’t want to be perceived as wading into that at all. Beyond saying, Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie are both immensely talented women who were nominated for Oscars this year for their work on an incredibly commercially and critically successful film, which is nominated for Best Picture. And everyone should go outside and take a deep breath, or even better go to the movies! Go even when it’s not a cultural (or marketing) event you feel you need to be part of. If you saw more movies each year I think you would be happy rather than angry that the love gets spread to more films/filmmakers. Last year’s sweep was kinda boring!

(That being said, would love for the Academy to remember that more than one woman can be directed for Best Picture in the same year. They should try it out a few more times, since they only did it once.)

OK, now on to reviews! I have now seen all of the Academy’s Best Picture nominees (ranked list will be on my Twitter and Threads) and caught up with a few Indie Spirit and BAFTA picks too.

All of Us Strangers

The second post (with no images or anything, because I had no idea what I was doing) on this blog was just me gushing over Andrew Haigh‘s debut feature Weekend. So, when I saw that he had a new movie with Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal making the festival rounds last year my countdown and jealousy at festival attendees) began. So, what feels like close to a full year later, it finally came to my theater.

In some ways, it feels very reminiscent of Weekend, two gay men who have trouble connecting fall fitfully in something like love with each other. There’s a sexual frankness that I don’t find voyeuristic (unlike, say, Passages). But, this time it’s all layered on tope of a ghost story/potential ketamine hallucination that in some ways felt like we were watching Scott’s character undergo inner-child therapy. (If you haven’t seen the trailer, he’s able, somehow, to visit his parents at the age they were when they died.)

The acting is superb, the lighting is beautiful, the soundtrack evocative and perfect. But, I think in the end I may have been over-warned about how much this would destroy me emotionally, it worked on the whole for me as a metaphorical exploration of loneliness and as a ghost story. And Haigh is still on my list of favorite working directors.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

The debut feature from poet Raven Jackson, there’s a lot to love about this portrait of a Black girl coming of age in the rural south sometime in the 20th century, but I had trouble connecting to it. The fact that Jackson is a poet was important context for me, because it feels like an adaptation of a poem – nonlinear narrative, lingering symbolic visuals, recurring motifs, lack of exposition. Which can all be beautiful, and as individual elements are often beautiful in this film, but over the 97 minutes run started to feel a bit ponderous.

Might have worked better for me as a short film, since what is often most powerful in poetry comes from its concision.

Anatomy of a Fall

I feel like its almost a cliche to say this at this point, but my main reaction to this was “is that really what French trials are like?” Because goddamn they could really just say whatever they want and introduce whatever they want into evidence literally at any point?! Like, I know that the American legal system is a shitshow, but at least we have an idea of order.

What the French system, or at least the version of it that Justine Triet shows us here, allows for is a dialogue that feels like a play, which quickly becomes a philosophical exercise about marriage, commitment, and truth under the guise of a courtroom procedural. It’s talky and very European, but it also includes a very funny use of the song “P.I.M.P.”

Also, best child and dog performances of the year.

The Zone of Interest

I was quietly dreading the fact that this movie was definitely going to be nominated for things, because even just the score in the trailer made my skin crawl. And, quiet dread pretty much sums up the way I felt watching it.

A portrait of Rudolph Hoss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family, it’s a Holocaust movie where all of the violence is just out of frame. We hear shots and screams and know, of course, the cause of the ever present smoke, but it all remains “over the wall.”

The phrase “the banality of evil” has itself been repeated to the point of banality, but writer-director Jonathan Glazer, literalizes it on screen in a way that really got under my skin. The casual venality of Hoss’s wife (Sandra Hüller) contrasted quietly with her mother’s (Imogen Kogge) dawning horror of the reality of her daughter’s newfound prosperity, will haunt me for a long time.

American Symphony

I’ve subscribed to Suleika Jaouad‘s Substack “The Isolation Journals” since 2020 so, I knew a lot about her and her husband, the musician and composer Jon Batiste, before this movie but I’m still really glad I watched it. Originally conceived of as a short film tracking Batiste’s process composing his “American Symphony” to debut at Carnegie Hall, it ballooned in length as the life around the art got more complicated (and compelling). Batiste was nominated for 11 Grammys on the same day that Jouad learned that her leukemia had returned after 10 years in remission.

Director Matthew Heineman does a great job illustrating the stark contrasts of their daily lives, while also highlighting their clear love for each other. The musical rehearsal sequences were wonderful (is there somewhere to listen to the whole symphony?) But I found Batiste’s piano improvisations the most moving sections of the film, particularly one he dedicates to Suleika after he gets a rough update call for him when he’s on tour. It’s heavy, but hopeful, and on Netflix, you should watch it.