Awards Season 2016: ‘Birth of a Nation’ Uproar Opens Door for Challengers
[...] on the verge of the Venice, Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals, it’s about to bring a batch of films that are going into the fall festivals with high hopes, but nothing like the buzz that preceded films like “The King’s Speech,” “Birdman” or “12 Years a Slave.”
[...] maybe the rave reviews out of Venice for Damien Chazelle‘s musical “La La Land” will make it an instant awards season frontrunner, the way the Venice reception did for “Birdman” two years ago.
Or maybe — probably — none of that will happen, and we’ll muddle through awards season wondering if we’ve seen the big winner yet, and waiting for Ang Lee to seize the moment at the New York Film Festival with his PTSD drama “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” or Warren Beatty to do so at the AFI Fest with “Rules Don’t Apply,” or Martin Scorsese to knock us out with “Silence” whenever he finishes it, or Denzel Washington to do it with the Broadway drama “Fences,” or Ben Affleck to upend the game at the last minute with his Dennis Lehane adaptation “Live by Night.”
Questions about the 2016 awards season, though, all start with the elephant in every room: “The Birth of a Nation,” which back at the Sundance Film Festival was supposed to be the sensation of 2016 and the awards movie that would show #OscarsNotSoWhiteAfterAll.
Unless it can somehow manage to be such a spectacular festival hit that voters are willing to overlook the fact that they heard the director talk about rape before they ever saw his movie, it has quickly gone from (possible) top dog to (potential) dead duck.
[...] Oscar-worthy movies have already screened this year, either theatrically or at festivals: “Weiner” and “Life, Animated” in the documentary category, “Zootopia” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” in animation, “Neruda” and “Toni Erdmann” in foreign language.
On the Movie City News website, a collection of Oscar pundits dubbed the Gurus of Gold (to which I am a contributor) have chimed in with their pre-fest predictions; their top three films are “Manchester by the Sea,” “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and “La La Land,” in that order.
Arrival” and “Fences” are next, followed by “Silence,” Jeff Nichols‘ subtle interracial drama “Loving,” Barry Jenkins’ African-American coming-of-age drama “Moonlight,” the Jeff Bridges genre flick “Hell or High Water” and Ben Younger’s boxing story “Bleed for This.
From this vantage point (and I’m writing this not having seen the majority of those films), I don’t really trust the awards chances of “Hell or High Water,” “The Birth of a Nation,” “The Light Between the Oceans” and “Sully.”
If I had to guess right now, I’d stick “Billy Lynn” atop my list of predictions, and then slot “Fences,” “La La Land,” “Silence,” “Rules Don’t Apply,” “Arrival,” Manchester by the Sea, “Moonlight,” “Miss Sloan” and “The Queen of Katwe” into the other potential Best Picture slots.