For those that try to watch every nominee or looking for additional resources to watch harder to find films the Oscars Death Race subreddit is a great resource that I’ve used the last few years.
Watched The Substance last night. Didn’t see that one coming
Watched Conclave and The Wild Robot yesterday. Both extremely good—the animation style for The Wild Robot is gorgeous and very interesting.
Saw ‘The Brutalist’ over the weekend. Still haven’t given it a rating on my Letterboxd (I know, who cares?) because I wanted to take some time to process it. Honestly still not sure how I feel about it.
Went and saw “A Real Pain” yesterday and it was overall wonderful. I thought Kieran Culkin was excellent. Truly incredible performance moving between a charming and lovable person and one who battling some demons and moving through self medicated manic episodes. I don’t know if he’ll win but I think it will be close between him and Jeremy Strong.
I got through about the first 10 minutes over the weekend but was distracted or otherwise not in the right mindset to watch it. Lots of secondhand embarrassment to start. Will try again sometime soon, too many positive reviews to ignore it.
As a very anxious person, I too had a lot of secondhand embarrassment from Eisenberg. I won’t say it gets better throughout the movie but I think that is an important story telling piece. We all have family that embarrass us, especially in front of strangers, but in the end we love them for their faults.
Firing up Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat tonight
Update: hard to compare docs to narrative films but this jumps into the Top 5 of things I watched from 2024
This is maybe spiteful/petty, but I refuse to watch The Brutalist and am praying it wins nothing because of all the AI stuff. I don’t know how that isn’t disqualifying Brody from best actor considering how huge a part of negotiating AI rules was part of the SAG strike.
It feels like such a slippery slope and I feel like allowing any use of that stuff to slip through the cracks is Not Good.
Also, how was Rebecca Ferguson or Zendaya not nominated for either actress or supporting actress???
Almost spit out my coffee this morning when Big T made a reference to @djpie talking about “pocket sand”. I understand asking Spieth his opinion on this year’s Nest gift but are we also polling the Hollywood elite??
The Big Picture talked about this a bit. While I don’t like that it was used, it didn’t seem to be nearly as big an issue as the news around it was. To be clear, still don’t like it, but not disqualifying to me.
Gonna be a while before I get to listen to this. Got a lot of catching up to do.
Literally making sure I watch The Brutalist before I listen to this pod.
I have lots of thoughts and will circle back this afternoon, but it absolutely was being weaponized as a smear campaign - Harvey Weinstein would be proud
100%. The campaigning around the Oscars is gross.
