Notes On The Season: Oscar Race Defined In The Last Hour; Plus Catching Up With Contenders From A ‘King Richard’ Key Player To Dame Judi Dench
deadline.comA column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit.Well, this is what they call crunch time as ballots are, if not in the hands of, at least somewhere in the laptops of some 9487 eligible Oscar voters.
In an unprecedented single day in which a tsunami of important, and possibly very predictive guild nominations were announced at the very same time voting for the 94th Annual Academy Awards began – what is being called in political terms Super Thursday – I don’t think you can quite underestimate the impact on Academy voters who probably can’t help but notice the winnowing of the field we have been talking about for months now.
It looks more than ever like a wide open race at this point. Critics groups which earlier in the season have dominated the space, basically alternating between Netflix’s The Power Of The Dog and the three hour Japanese film, Drive My Car for the lions share of their Best Picture picks can basically move aside now that the majority of guilds, whose memberships definitely cross over big time with that of the Academy (save for the influx of new international members AMPAS has been welcoming in recent years) and are usually a much better signal of where the winds are blowing in terms of likely Oscar nominees we will be celebrating come early morning February 8.The fact that your inbox was likely inundated with alerts from WGA, DGA, PGA, ACE etc yesterday, and adding in previous announcements from SAG and other guilds we have a good idea of what is likely to rule with the Academy and it isn’t necessarily what highbrow critics with darker and more austere tastes have tried to inject into a year that seems to be favoring more accessible feel better, if not feel good style films.
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