The Days of Wine and Roses (c) Joan Marcus
"New York is my Personal Property and I'm gonna split it with you." I review mostly movies and New York theater shows. I am also an awards prognosticator. And a playwright.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Film: Oscar Nominations 2023-24
Barbie (c) Warner Brothers
Oscar nominations day is always full of highs and lows. While one tries to stay impartial, an interested bystander one might say, i do have my favorites, and there are invariably films everyone else loves that leave me baffled. This year, the top ten predicted to make it, made it, as did most of the actors. Oppenheimer got the most nominations with 13. The biggest surprise has to be America Ferrera, who received her first Oscar nomination for Barbie, while she didn’t get many nominations in other award bodies (but had a lot of fan support). It’s odd that Ferrera got in but Margot Robbie, who plays the titular Barbie, did not. And I guess Barbie directed itself. I was very happy to see the Nyad women get nominated as the acting got rave reviews, but the film did not. And of course, happy millionth nomination for Maestro himself, John Williams.
Congrats to all. The Oscars will be handed out on Sunday, March 10 on ABC.
Sunday, January 21, 2024
The Interested Bystander’s Final 2023-2024 Oscar Nomination Predictions
Barbie (c) Warner Bros.
For a film year, the best films of 2023 have become a rather predictable in its critical consensus. My predictions for the films to make the Oscar final ten Best Picture category are far and away the strongest ten in many years, and while I know there might be a big surprise when Oscar nominations are announced on Tuesday, Jan 23, it’s hard to figure out what might crack the nominations and which one of the ten would fall. And yet, the acting and writing categories are harder to predict, especially for any actor and script not associated to these ten films to make a splash, and yet I have six such actors and three screenplays this year, which may be a big mistake, but this is all in fun, so why not have some quirky choices in my predictions, considering some of the surprises in the last week with the SAG Award and BAFTA nominations.
Enjoy my predictions and as a bonus, my nominees if I had an Oscar Nomination ballot.
Friday, January 5, 2024
The Interested Bystander's Top Films of 2023 (and 2022!)
Passages (c) MUBI
Two Years in Films: Best of 2022 & 2023
The 2023 film year was hampered (but necessarily so) by the Writer’s Guild and SAG-AFTRA strike, but I have a feeling that the full effect of the work stoppage will be felt in 2024. Still the lack of promotion of some of the indie films really hurt their chances in the theaters, so I hope you will check out the films listed below that are unfamiliar to you.
Like last year, I will only list my favorite twenty films of 2023, in alphabetical order and not actually list them in order of my top ten favorites until the end of 2023, after a year of reflection and catching up on films I may have missed. In fact, at the time of this article, I have not seen Napoleon or American Symphony yet.
Which means, my final Top Ten of films of 2022 is below. I am also pointing out some 2023performances that haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve from award groups so far.
So, enjoy my wrap up of 2023 and, as always, I hope you have a safe and cinematically rich 2024.
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