Awards Madness On Steroids; Oliver Stone Gets ‘Wicked’; Marianne Jean-Baptiste Tells The Hard Truth About Oscar – Notes On The Season

A column chronicling events and conversations on the awards circuit.

Even as people are still drifting back slowly from the holiday break, and Chanukah actually just celebrated its eighth and final night, the awards season is taking no prisoners as the whole thing has just crash-landed on us whether we like it or not.

Yes, it IS only the 3rd day of January but no rest for the weary. Mikey Madison, Kieran Culkin, Denis Villeneuve, Colman Domingo , Ariana Grande, Ralph Fiennes and the Conclave cast, Nicole Kidman, Adrien Brody, Angelina Jolie, Timothee Chalamet, and the cast of Emilia Perez are headed as we speak down the 10 freeway to Palm Springs where they will all give acceptance speeches on that massive Convention Center stage Friday night at the Palm Springs International Film Festival Gala that might serve as warmups for some as they jet back to L.A. for Sunday’s Golden Globes Awards where every single one of them is also up for an award and hoping to make yet another acceptance. In between there will be party opps at Paramount and Amazon/Vanity Fair, UTA, private dinners, a brunch for Indie Spirit Award nominees, and more, plus after Globes parties thrown by Netflix, Universal, UTA, and the Globes themselves.

NO TIME TO SLOW DOWN

Since they are available many of them will also be squeezing in some late-in-the-game Q&As over the course of the weekend, whether in the desert or around Hollywood hoping to still get the attention of those Oscar voters who are franctically trying to see as much as they can before their five day voting period starts on Wednesday and goes through Sunday January 12, a period where these chosen few contenders all may be seen again at the AFI Awards Lunch, the BAFTA Tea Party (with final BAFTA nomination voting going on next week after today’s longlist reveal), Universal’s “Toast” to the season from Donna Langley at Sunset Tower, the AARP Movies For Grownups Awards, the LA Film Critics Awards banquet, and the Critics Choice Awards., not to mention earlier in the week at the New York Film Critics and National Board Of Review shindigs on the other coast, plus nominations announcements from SAG (same day Oscar voting starts on the 8th), Producers and Directors guilds among others.

OSCAR FRIDAY

If all of this seems too much, it is, but the tight 2025 calendar is just so tight this year that it all has to get crammed in before those Oscar voters have offered the final word on all this campaigning and run up to the main event: the announcement of the nominations for the 97th Annual Academy Awards on January 17th. This year, for the first year I can ever remember the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will be naming their nominees on a Friday, Yes, a Friday folks, and not just any Friday, but the one that kicks off another holiday weekend culminating with MLK day on Monday January 20th. Usually the nominations announcement is on a Tuesday, even a Monday or a Wednesday, but never on a Friday. Who does that? Exhibition execs can’t be happy about this because the Academy is allowing no time to key up the first post-noms weekend with all those TV ads, billboards, trade and newspaper ads touting those ever so valuable nominations to cash in on a holiday weekend where an Oscar nomination(s) can be a very big deal. What are they thinking? Do they really need five days to count the votes? This is the most confounding development since the DGA and the PGA both announced their Guild dinners would be on the same day, February 8, this year. Don’t they realize many of the same people will be nominated at both???

You gotta just love this stuff?

HITTING THE ROAD TO MPTF

Meanwhile campaigning won’t be slowing down until every last voter is accounted for. American Cinematheque continues to get into the game by throwing career retrospectives with appearances by the likes of Robert Eggers, Mike Leigh, Alfonso Cuaron, Denis Villeneuve, and Timothy Chalamet among others, some of them overlapping. And let’s not forget our residents at the Motion Picture & Television Fund campus in Woodland Hills where some retired Oscar voters reside (numbers vary of just how many voters are there in any given year). On January 8th writer/director Jason Reitman will be out there doing a screening of Saturday Night with a Q&A beforehand in the MPTF’s cool movie theatre where various screenings have been taking place this year, as always. About ten years ago I moderated a screening there when it opened with On Golden Pond director Mary Rydell. The director liked it so much he moved in eventually.

SEPTEMBER 5: A MOVIE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY

I am hoping Reitman’s brilliantly conceived and executed comedy, Saturday Night isn’t forgotten by Oscar voters. The movie which chronicles the 90 minutes leading up to the very first live SNL broadcast on October 11, 1975 is a marvel, equally as impressive an achievement as another contender that focused on a live TV event from the 70’s , albeit one that is very different. That movie would be the superb September 5 which focuses on the 1972 Munich Olympics when it was disrupted by a Palestinian terrorist group taking the entire Israeli team hostage, a devastating event that ended tragically but turned into the first live global TV news broadcast, one that landed in the hands of the ABC Sports crew covering the Games when suddenly they found themselves bringing this unfolding story to the entire world.

The Paramount release is one of the year’s best films, a heart-pounding thriller that finds a new way to tell a story you only thought you knew. Thursday night I had dinner at The London with the film’s veteran German film editor, Hansjorg Weissbrich (She Said, I’m Your Man, Unorthodox) who had just arrived in town from Europe where he is editing his latest film, Rose which will be Sandra Huller’s first since her Oscar nominated turn in last year’s Anatomy Of A Fall. She plays a woman passing as a man in the period set drama. He will be doing a Q&A and various meetings with other colleagues before heading back to Vienna on Sunday, not even able to stay for the Golden Globes where his film is up for Best Motion Picture Drama. Weissbrich has already won the LA Film Critics prize for Editing this year as well as nominations for a Critics Choice Award and Independent Spirit Award for the film. He’s so in demand he won’t be able to make it back next week for the LAFCA banquet or CCA ceremony next weekend, but if all goes well we will probably see him back around Oscar time no doubt. Unfortunately Paramount’s indecisiveness on actually releasing the film theatrically and not through its subsidiary Republic Pictures cost the film valuable time including having enough mojo behind it to get into the ACE and BAFTA races.

This marks only his fourth time in L.A. , but ironically the second time he was here in 2001 he got to attend the Oscars for a Live Action Short he edited called Quiero ser (I want to be…) which actually won the same year Gladiator took Best Picture, ironic since Gladiator II is a contender this year. “We even got to go to the Vanity Fair party. Pamela Anderson was there, ” he laughed about the coincidence she is on the same awards circuit he is this year. I’m not sure about Gladiator or Pamela Anderson’s chances, but I am betting Weissbrich will likely be going to his second Oscar show come March 2. A more exceptional example of the art of film editing you will not find, especially in how it seamlessly blends actual archival footage in the tight quarters of a television control booth where most of the film takes place in front of monitors as the action unfolds in front of their eyes. In Indiewire’s recent survey of notable filmmakers naming their favorite 2024 films, first time director for Unstoppable and veteran Oscar winning editor William Goldenberg (Argo) had September 5 first on his list. “It shows the power of great editing. Beautifully directed by Tim Fehlbaum. Sheds a new light on a story I thought I knew everything about,” he wrote.

DIRECTORS SPREAD THE LOVE

And speaking of filmmakers admiring others work, Anora‘s Palme d’Or winner and prime Oscar contender Sean Baker might as well be campaigning for Focus Features instead of his own NEON film. He tweeted this: “It’s going to be very hard to beat NOSFERATU for my fave film of the year. Must see on the big screen. (Robert) Eggers’s direction is masterful and Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult deserve best actor noms. Glorious cinematography, score, production design and editing. My god this an incredible film.” Nosferatu is a late-inning surprise, not just at the boxoffice (especially for a horror film opening on Christmas), but possibly a dark horse the studio now thinks for some Oscar love. Let’s just hope it doesn’t knock Anora out of the race (!) In that Indiewire survey Eggers continued the love fest: “Like most people on the planet, I loved Anora.”

Actually in that same survey none other than Oliver Stone joined in the chorus: “Anora was the most surprising new film to me and really hit me hard. I liked it very much, so I’d say it’s one of, if not, my favorite film for 2024, but I haven’t had time to see many of the new movies yet.” However now, like other stragglers in the Academy, he is catching up and he may have changed his tune knocking Anora down the list a few notches on his X account and anointing a surprising number one (at least for Stone), Wicked: “Wow! I never saw the stage play or followed the coverage, but I just purely loved the sensuality and intelligence of the movie. I didn’t know these two actresses, but what a surprise to find both their performances so fresh and different…Jon M. Chu is a helluva filmmaker and is working with challenging material in this prequel that turns everything in The Wizard Of Oz upside down. All the more amazing that he pulled it off with a Hollywood studio.”

MARIANNE JEAN-BAPTISTE ON THE HARD TRUTHS OF THE OSCAR RACE

Finally, I got the chance to sit down in the Brentwood Baltaire lounge with the remarkable Marianne Jean-Baptiste who delivers a gut wrenching and devastating performance in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. And it is indeed a ‘hard truth’ to accept that she did not land among the 12 (!) women nominated for their lead performance in a film (Drama plus Comedy or Musical) at the Golden Globes, but shed no tears because she is up for a Critics Choice Best Actress award and has already won at LA Film Critics, NY Film Critics, Toronto, San Diego, Chicago, San Francisco, African American Film Critics and more. Can she break through in the impossibly crowded Lead Actress Oscar race? It would be her second nomination, the first also coming way back in 1996 for Supporting Actress in another Mike Leigh masterpiece, Secrets And Lies.

“Now I don’t remember much about it,” she says. “Yeah, it just came out of the blue because, you know, we were going around talking about film. That was fun to do, going to Brazil, South Korea, to all these festivals, totally unaware that is what an Oscar campaign was. It was great, like it just came out
of nowhere. Oh, wow. I was stunned. Now everybody’s got their own little award show. But then there were only a couple and it wasn’t something that was sort of televised in London.”

Playing her character Pansy was not easy as this woman is what you might call difficult, but Jean-Baptiste is kind of amazed at the reactions she gets to her performance, the recognition of who this person is. “I know people who have got elements of Pansy in them. I think we all have, to be quite honest with you. I think most of us have just a bit more self control. We’re a bit more filtered than she is. And I think that’s the extraordinary thing about having done it, and then doing the Q and A’s where people, I mean,
aunts, mother in laws, mothers, sisters, people are just like, ‘that’s my mother, that’s my sister, that’s my aunt’, and you just think wow,” she said.

For Jean-Baptiste the important thing is to understand the situation of the character and the marriage she finds herself in, with no way out. “They are very damaged individuals, right? Co-dependent, yeah. You know, both in a lot of pain, both somewhat emotionally disabled. And I think it’s interesting,” she said. “So I think that people stay in relationships through habit, through fear of starting again, of the unknown and all that sort of stuff, they are kind of addicted to this sort of misery, that they can’t get out. Yeah, it becomes part of their identity. And clearly she can’t get out.”

And as for working with Mike Leigh again? Hopefully it doesn’t take another 28 years. But it is a unique way of making movies, fully improvised and worked out for months before cameras roll, a true collaborative situation. “It’s a full body experience, if you know what I mean,” she says. “You’re creating everything. Your imagination is working on steroids, and you end up with this wonderful thing.”