Hey everyone. I know there's a few people here interested in film, but the majority aren't really. With the Oscars right around the corner, I was curious as to how many of this years nominees you have seen. Here's the Wikipedia page to see the nominees.

I've seen all the Best Picture nominees and most of the acting contenders. Notably I haven't seen Spencer, Parallel Mothers, and The Worst Person in the World which I will try to watch by the time of the ceremony. This year I have seen 4 of the Best Picture nominees in theaters (Belfast, Licorice Pizza, West Side Story and Dune). This is in comparison to last years 0 (obviously) and the year before's 5 (1917, Little Women, Parasite, Joker, and Once Upon A Time Hollywood). The rest I saw through streaming.

If I had to rank this year's Best Picture nominees, this would be the order:

1. West Side Story
2. Licorice Pizza
3. Don't Look Up
4. Belfast
5. Nightmare Alley
6. King Richard
7. Drive My Car
8. The Power of the Dog
9. CODA
10. Dune

What about you guys?

Okay, I’ve been bombarding all of you with article after article of what other award shows have been nominating and awarding.

Here are the nominations for what I had in November. It’s interesting to see how much has changed, sadly it seems like The Last Duel is going to end up with zero awards.

Anyways, if you have an Oscar pool going what I’m about to give you would probably put you at the top if your friends don’t follow awards. I did place 30 out of 2200 on Goldderby for my BAFTA nomination predictions so there’s that.

Here’s what I have, in order of what is most likely to win as of right now:

Best Picture

1. The Power of the Dog
2. Belfast
3. Licorice Pizza
4. Dune
5. Don’t Look Up
6. West Side Story
7. King Richard
8. CODA
9. tick, tick... BOOM!
10. Being the Ricardos

Alternative choice: House of Gucci

Best Director

1. Jane Campion - The Power of the Dog
2. Paul Thomas Anderson - Licorice Pizza
3. Denis Villeneuve - Dune
4. Kenneth Branagh - Belfast
5. Steven Spielberg - West Side Story

Alternative choice: Adam McKay - Don’t Look Up

Best Lead Actor

1. Will Smith - King Richard
2. Benedict Cumberbatch - The Power of the Dog
3. Andrew Garfield - tick, tick... BOOM!
4. Denzel Washington - The Tragedy of Macbeth
5. Leonardo DiCaprio - Don’t Look Up

Alternative choice: Javier Bardem - Being the Ricardos

Best Lead Actress

1. Lady Gaga - House of Gucci
2. Alana Haim - Licorice Pizza
3. Nicole Kidman - Being the Ricardos
4. Jessica Chastain - The Eyes of Tammy Faye
5. Olivia Colman - The Lost Daughter

Alternative choice: Rachel Zegler - West Side Story

Best Supporting Actor

1. Kodi Smit-Mcphee - The Power of the Dog
2. Ciaran Hinds - Belfast
3. Troy Kotsure - CODA
4. Bradley Cooper - Licorice Pizza
5. Jared Leto - House of Gucci

Alternative choice: Jamie Dornan - Belfast

Best Supporting Actress

1. Ariana DeBose - West Side Story
2. Aunjuane Ellis - King Richard
3. Caitriona Balfe - Belfast
4. Kirsten Dunst - The Power of the Dog
5. Cate Blanchett - Don’t Look Up

Note: I’m actually taking a big risk in predicting Blanchett, Ruth Negga - Passing seems to be the most obvious fifth choice.

Best Original Screenplay

1. Licorice Pizza
2. Belfast
3. Don’t Look Up
4. King Richard
5. Being the Ricardos

Best Adapted Screenplay

1. The Power of the Dog
2. CODA
3. Dune
4. The Lost Daughter
5. West Side Story

Alternative choice: tick, tick... BOOM!

Best Cinematography

1. Dune
2. The Tragedy of Macbeth
3. The Power of the Dog
4. West Side Story
5. Belfast

Alternative choice: Nightmare Alley

Best Film Editing

1. Dune
2. Belfast
3. Licorice Pizza
4. The Power of the Dog
5. West Side Story

Alternative choice: Don’t Look Up

Best Costume Design

1. Cruella
2. Dune
3. West Side Story
4. House of Gucci
5. Nightmare Alley

Alt: Cyrano

Best Hair and Makeup

1. House of Gucci
2. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
3. Dune
4. Cruella
5. Coming 2 America

Alt: Cyrano

Best Production Design

1. Dune
2. West Side Story
3. The Tragedy of Macbeth
4. Nightmare Alley
5. The French Dispatch

Alt: Licorice Pizza

Best Original Score

1. Dune
2. The Power of the Dog
3. Don’t Look Up
4. The French Dispatch
5. Encanto

Alt: Being the Ricardos

Best Original Song

1. No Time To Die from No Time To Die
2. Dos Oruguitas from Encanto
3. Just Look Up from Don’t Look Up
4. Be Alive from King Richard
5. Down to Joy from Belfast

Alt: Guns Go Bang from The Harder They Fall

Best Sound

1. Dune
2. West Side Story
3. No Time To Die
4. The Power of the Dog
5. Spider-Man: No Way Home

Alt: A Quiet Place Part II

Best Visual Effects

1. Dune
2. Spider-Man: No Way Home
3. No Time To Die
4. Godzilla vs Kong
5. The Matrix: Resurrections

Alt: Shang-Chi and the legend of the Ten Rings.

Best Animated Feature

1. Encanto
2. Flee
3. Luca
4. The Mitchell’s vs the Machines
5. Raya and the Last Dragon

Alt: Belle

Best Documentary Feature

1. Summer of Soul
2. Flee
3. The Rescue
4. Procession
5. Ascension

Best International Feature

1. Drive My Car
2. The Hand of God
3. Flee
4. A Hero
5. The Worst Person in the World

And those are all the categories. Oscar nominations will be announced on the 8th and of course I will be posting them.

The last part of the original trilogy has been completed! For those unaware, the 4K## project from Team Negative 1 is a full remastering of the original trilogy from 35mm negatives. Around September of 2018 4K77 (A New Hope) was released. Under a year later, 4K83 (Return of the Jedi) was released.

A few years later and the first release of 4K80 (The Empire Strikes Back) is out! Its pretty grainy and does need some work, but this is definitely a project worth keeping an eye on if you're into the OT.

If you want a copy, you can join the forum and use Resilio Sync to get them. 77 and 83 are available on most file sharing platforms, too.

• 4K77 (A New Hope)
• 4K80 (The Empire Strikes Back)
• 4K83 (Return of the Jedi)

Once 4K80 is a few versions deep, it'll completely unseat the Despecialized version as the purest OT experience, at least in my opinion :)

The various guilds released their nominations today (in what’s been called D-Day for Awards followers since it’s usually not lined up like this). These are reflective of what the industry likes (and gives us really big clues as to what will end up nominated at the Oscars).

Producers Guild of America:

BEING THE RICARDOS

BELFAST

CODA

DON’T LOOK UP

DUNE

KING RICHARD

LICORICE PIZZA

THE POWER OF THE DOG

TICK TICK BOOM

WEST SIDE STORY

Directors Guild of America:

Feature Film:

Paul Thomas Anderson - Licorice Pizza

Kenneth Branagh - Belfast

Jane Campion - The Power of the Dog

Steven Spielberg - West Side Story

Denis Villeneuve - Dune

First Time Feature:

Maggie Gyllenhaal - The Lost Daughter

Rebecca Hall - Passing

Tatiana Huezo - Prayers for the Stolen

Lin-Manuel Miranda - tick, tick...BOOM!

Michael Sarnoski - Pig

Emma Seligman - Shiva Baby

Writer’s Guild of America:

Original Screenplay:

Being the Ricardos

Don’t Look Up

The French Dispatch

King Richard

Licorice Pizza

Adapted Screenplay:

CODA

Dune

Nightmare Alley

tick, tick... BOOM!

West Side Story

It's fairly rare to get the opportunity to get to watch a Japanese animated movie in theaters in the US, and earlier today I watched Belle in IMAX.

It's honestly really hard to talk about the film in it's entirety. It's a really deeply layered film, and even with how extensive the previews for this film have been they don't really do a very good job of describing what the film is about. Even after saying that I don't really want to explain it because I think that it's best to just jump in and enjoy it - and frankly I'm not sure I could explain it very well without spoiling it. That being said, because it's so layered and there's so much content it talks about it can be hard to grasp the deeper meanings. I saw this movie with my husband and I can tell you that he definitely didn't get it. After reading a handful of reviews it looks like a number of critics didn't get it either. The good news is that you don't have to be a film major to enjoy it; it's still going to be plenty enjoyable even if you miss those meanings. It helps that the production on this film is utterly fantastic, and the sound design and music are particularly fantastic.

From an academic perspective this film literally pulls off every trick in the animation and filmmaking books. It uses traditional style 2D animation, it's got 3D animation, some scenes use a mixture of the two. It has computer-generated tweening at times, and in other times the 2D drawings are morphed to animate them and create the illusion of life. The director Mamoru Hosoda has a pretty long track record at this point and this film has aspects that show off his signature aesthetics and unique techniques that he has developed over the years. And he does so to a great effect; I found myself being strongly emotionally affected by several of it's scenes. Of those highly affecting scenes, not all of them evoked tears; there were also plenty of times where I found myself almost laughing because the scenes were full of positivity.

While it's tempting to consider this a retelling of Beauty and Beast from the previews, the film is so much more than that. Even the most basic understanding you could take from this film would not support that position. In fact the "beast" of this story is not even a romantic interest.

The thing that endears me personally to this movie so much is that there are two dramatic scenes that are handled so realistically and naturally it felt like I was reliving portions of my own life. There is a scene early on where the main character tries to sing quietly to herself when she's all by her lonesome but is so overcome with emotions that she not only can't hold a single note, the act makes her throw up. And in the last act there is a scene where a boy is suffering from emotional abuse from his father and is completely unable to trust people who are trying to help him. He's been too hurt by people who promised to help but eventually left him in the same situation, allowing more abuse to happen.

There are many reasons that I would recommend watching this movie, but I wanted to recommend this movie to this community in particular because I think that some of the messages this movie was made to tell will resonate with the people here. The film is a struggle to answer the question "why should we help other people?" The film also has a lot to say about how we treat each other over the internet, as you may have already surmised.