As summer movie season begins to kick into high gear, I thought it would be nice to take
a look at another one of our favorite times of the moviegoing year - awards season!
And while this might SEEM like an incredibly early look at the frontrunners, there’s
becoming such a science to awards season that we actually CAN predict the contenders this
early on.
Of course hopefully we might get a surprise or two, but let’s break this down like the
savvy awards season connoisseurs that we are...
Let’s start with the mini-distributors whose bread and butter is awards season, most notably
the King himself, Harvey Weinstein.
Now - with the exception of Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Southpaw - a number
of his films set for this year don’t have specific release dates so some could find
themselves pushed to 2016, but here’s what he’s got planned at the moment.
He’s got Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Hateful Eight, and Tarantino has proved to
be quite the Oscar darling as of late.
However, Tarantino’s lucky charm Christoph Waltz is actually appearing in Harvey’s
long gestating project Tulip Fever, starring Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander.
Weinstein also has Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard’s Macbeth, a cooking film
with Bradley Cooper directed by August Osage County’s John Wells, as well as a World
War 2 drama starring his My Week with Marilyn star Michelle Williams.
But his strongest contender might be Carol, a Mad Men-esque period piece starring Cate
Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, and Kyle Chandler.
Carol is based on Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley novelist Patricia Highsmith’s
The Price of Salt, and is Todd Haynes first film since 2007’s I’m Not There.
Next up, let’s turn our focus to...Focus Features!
They’ve become a tad more commercial recently and at the moment only seem to have two real
awards contenders - but what contenders!
Their trump card is The Danish Girl, with recent Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne starring
as one of the world’s first transgender patients back in 1930s Germany.
The King’s Speech and Les Mis director Tom Hooper is at the helm here as well.
Then they have Suffragette, the UK’s star-studded film about the British movement to get the
vote for women featuring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham-Carter aaaand Meryl Streep.
Now Fox Searchlight has a very competitive slate.
They landed Sundance sensation Me Earl and The Dying Girl, which hopes to follow in the
footsteps of previous Sundance splashes Fruitvale Station and especially Whiplash.
Then Brooklyn also has strong buzz, another 1950s period piece - this time focusing on
Irish immigrants in the famous New York City borough.
Domhnall Gleeson, Saoirse Ronan, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters star.
Far from the Madding Crowd, another Carey Mulligan picture, could also be contender,
and then there’s True Story.
Now on the surface, True Story might not seem like much, but all three of its leads - Jonah
Hill, James Franco and Felicity Jones - are Oscar nominees.
And of course there’s Sony Pictures Classics, which will look to compete with Mark Ruffalo’s
Infinity Polar Bear as well as Woody Allen’s Irrational Man starring Joaquin Phoenix and
Emma Stone.
Whew!
And again, that’s just the specialty circuit!
The big studios have gotten pretty good at launching awards contenders themselves, and
this year will be no different.
Warner Brothers has their Whitey Bulger bio Black Mass starring Johnny Depp, Benedict
Cumberbatch and Joel Edgerton.
They also have Creed, the latest entry in the Rocky franchise.
Don’t forget the original Rocky was a huge Oscar winner, plus Fruitvale Station’s Ryan
Coogler and Michael B Jordan reteam here.
Rush’s Ron Howard and Chris Hemsworth also reteam for In The Heart of the Sea, and let’s
see if Warner Brothers does a better job getting them to the front of the pack than Universal
did with Rush.
As for Universal, this year they’ve got just one contender, the Aaron Sorkin scripted,
Danny Boyle directed Steve Jobs movie starring Michael Fassbender and Seth Rogen that they
wrestled away from Sony - as exposed in all those leaked emails...
But Sony won’t enter awards season empty handed, as they still have Robert Zemeckis’
The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as well as the controversial NFL expose Concussion
starring Will Smith as real life whistle blower Dr Bennet Omalu.
Meanwhile Fox will be sending Matt Damon back to space just one year after Interstellar,
as he stars in The Martian for Ridley Scott.
Interstellar’s Jessica Chastain also stars, with Ridley Scott directed a script by Drew
Goddard.
Fox might actually be the most competitive of all the big studios this year, as they
also have the new David O Russell-Jennifer Lawrence movie Joy, as well as Alejandro Inarritu’s
follow up to Birdman, The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy.
As for Disney they hope to compete with another reteaming, this time a classic one, as Tom
Hanks partners with Steven Spielberg again for Bridge of Spies.
And wait, there’s actually MORE!
Open Road, after a solid showing with Nightcrawler, will try to do even better this year with
Oliver Stone’s Snowden, also starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as well as Shailene Woodley.
Then newbie distributor Bleecker Street will also try to enter the awards race with Trumbo,
starring Bryan Cranston as blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
Helen Mirren, John Goodman and Louis CK also star.
And finally, FINALLY, Netflix - after so much success with television at the Emmys and Golden
Globes - will try to take on film and the Oscars with Beasts of No Nation - the indie
they acquired thanks to a big check, making huge headlines.
But we’ll see if the Idris Elba flick, directed by True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga, is shut
out during awards season just as theater owners plan to shut it out of multiplexes.
SO, that’s the expected Oscar lineup!
Which films do you think are the strongest contenders?
And keep in mind The Academy is considering going back to just five nominations for Best
Picture, so this could get ugly.
Write your thoughts down below.
I’m Grace Randolph and this has been a Movie Byte!
You can watch more, right now!