Late yesterday Hollywood Reporter award-season pundits Scott Feinberg and Stephen Galloway posted one of their where-are-things-right-now? chit-chat pieces. Like many politically sensitive pulse-takers these guys tend to sand off the edges or otherwise soft-pedal what they’re sensing or hearing so I’ve (a) shortened the piece and (b) boiled the snow out of it.
Point #1: Best Picture winners “tend to reflect the larger zeitgeist,” Feinberg believes. Meaning that if Hillary Clinton wins the election (which of course she will) the Best Picture winner will not be a melancholy masterpiece like Manchester By The Sea (which Feinberg regards as too heart-breaky) but something upbeat, which means Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land, according to this tea-leaf reading, has it in the bag;
Point #2: The Birth of A Nation, already deemed a financial failure, also got the cold shoulder from industry types when it had its first AMPAS screening last weekend. Feinberg-Galloway believe that three alternative racially-themed dramas — Moonlight, Hidden Figures, Loving — will pick up the slack, but the real heavyweight in this realm, I suspect, will be Denzel’s Fences;
Point #3: Ava Duvernay‘s 13th will probably be nominated for a Best Feature Doc Oscar, but will probably be out-pointed by Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America.
Point #4: Having seen a portion of Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Feinberg says the 120 frames-per-second process in which it was partly shot is “eye-opening…there’s never been anything quite like it,” although it’s “risky” and “whether or not people will like this new look remains to be seen.” Translation: Huzzahs for the audacity but we all know what “remains to be seen” means.
Point #5: If there’s a stand-out element in Robert Zemeckis‘ Allied, it’s Marion Cotillard‘s performance.
Point #6: Galloway is sensing uncertainty about Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply, which will have a special peek-out screening tomorrow night (i.e., Thursday) on the 20th Century Fox lot. I can only repeat that a certain tough-hombre critic saw it a while back and tumbled wholeheartedly.
Point #7: Galloway has heard rumors “about trouble behind the scenes of Martin Scorsese‘s Silence…I don’t know if that’s just about finishing it on time, or if there are other problems with the story…I really hope not.” In other words, trouble. Two or three years ago LexG expressed a popular sentiment that Scorsese should stick to “gangster shit.” Galloway echoes this by asking if Scorsese “has ever made a great film that’s not set in New York, or at least somewhere on the East Coast? Is Silence his masterpiece or is it Kundun?” Christopher Moltisanti: “Marty? Kundun…I liked it!”
