Hats off to HE’s ad guy Sean Jacobs for throwing this together yesterday — the first in a series of many charts that will attempt to gauge sentiments about potential Oscar favorites in the usual categories, Best Picture being the natural lead-off. (It’s included in HE’s first Little Yellow Pill newsletter blast, which goes out today.) I can’t allude to the source but during Telluride I heard second-hand that Leonardo DiCaprio‘s confidence about the quality of The Revenant is through the roof. Do I seriously believe that Son of Saul has a shot? No — it’s a likely Best Foreign Language Feature nominee, but it’s easily one of the ten best of the year and right now there’s no ignoring that fact. Will the same Academy faint-of-hearts who refused to watch 12 Years A Slave screeners watch Beasts of No Nation, much less vote for it? Yesterday I was quoted by a WKYC TIFF poll as follows: “If you want a very good film that some might even walk out on, it’s this one. But it’s almost Apocalypse Now-like.”
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