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Midweek Movie Free Talk
Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Scream VI came out so I watched all the Scream sequels. I had watched the original a few years ago and thought it was a masterpiece. I thought most of the sequels were okay, but VI is definitely the best of the bunch. If I had to rank them it’d be: 1, 6, 2, 5, 4, 3
Also with the Oscar’s happening I thought I’d rank my top 3 favorite winners in each acting category of the past 10 years:
Lead Actor:
Lead Actress:
Supporting Actor:
Supporting Actress:
Couple more Oscar things that you guys don’t care about but I need to get out of my system.
I was thinking about why Elvis underperformed so heavily. It went home empty-handed despite supposedly being locked for 2 wins with a potential of 5 wins. The locked wins were Make-up and Costumes. It swept the make-up category everywhere, but Whale ended up winning Oscar night despite not winning a single precursor. Costumes was also highly likely since Black Panther lost to EEAAO at the Costumes guild and the costume designer (Luhrmann’s wife) also won for Great Gatsby and this would have been her fifth Oscar. The other categories were Cinematography, Production Design, and Lead Actor. There was actual competition in Cinematography and Lead Actor, and Production Design was less likely but the front-runner Babylon wasn’t a Picture nominee and wasn’t well liked by the industry.
I think the main reason why it underperformed was mostly backlash. Backlash to the heavy campaigning and all the parties that Baz was throwing. And also backlash to Butler’s Elvis voice which has been joked about. Howard Stern did an interview with Brendan Fraser where he brings up Butler’s voice, and perhaps that was a more common sentiment in the industry than most of us expected. Butler is also pretty young, most Lead Actor winners are north of 40 (in contrast with the Actress category which has a lot of young winners).
Kyle Buchanan, who’s the official NYT reporter for Oscar stuff, caught onto this backlash early on as he has actual interactions with voters. He didn’t directly say it, but he hinted at it. I have a thing about not seeing other people’s predictions because I prefer to go with my own intuition. But I really wish I saw his predictions before finalizing mine.
I just want to specify that I read and care about almost everything you write regarding movies. You are inciteful and interesting. I know that sometimes commenting feels like writing into a void, but there are people reading!
(I only hedged and said almost everything, because I sometimes take breaks and might not see everything)
re: the Oscars, here's a pivot table I did up with the winners for best picture, actor, actress, director, and foreign since the start -- link to sheet.
I doubt its perfect, but I tried to standardize the categories since they change them every so often.
I finally watched RRR. It was epic and everything you want from action India. Chapo Trap House guy’s description was fun: Like Mel Gibsons passion, but if Jesus was two badass Hindus without weird repressed sex hangups.