This Had Oscar Buzz

Remember that time a movie where Johnny Depp explains vaping to Angelina Jolie made everyone super mad at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? That’s right, we’re talking this week about The Tourist, a film so notorious in Oscar buzz history that we’ve invited a special guest to unpack it: deputy editor for VanityFair.com Katey Rich!

The Tourist had a labored pre-production history that eventually landed it in the lap of recent Foreign Language winning director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. However our Oscar-watching eyes were mostly (perhaps cynically) directed toward its stars: a waning Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie as an arresting but nondescript fancy European lady. Toss in a very convoluted plot of spies, assumed identities, and flatlining humor and you have a recipe for a critical and commercial misfire.

But immediately after The Tourist thudded into theatres, it earned its notoriously generous Golden Globe nominations. We dissect the movie’s lunacy, defend the HFPA’s recent Musical/Comedy picks, and most importantly, we Consider Melissa Leo.

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2014 was a year of mirrored Best Actress hopefuls launched at the Toronto International Film Festival: out of nowhere, Julianne Moore capitalized on a “weak” field and finally won for Still Alice. And then, ultimately snubbed on nomination morning after being recognized by the other big prizes, there was Jennifer Aniston in Cake.

Notorious among Oscar watchers, Cake stars Aniston as a woman dealing with grief and chronic pain, and felt like a dubious candidate from the beginning. Was it the bad reviews, or was it the public’s sometimes cruel consideration of Aniston’s film career, or was it “Anna Kendrick as imaginary friend on a pool inflatable nudging her into suicide” that spelled disaster? Regardless, Aniston’s snub was perhaps the year’s least shocking “most shocking” missed nomination.

This week, we get into 2014′s bench of great, but less Oscar-friendly lead female performances, the mythos of Aniston, and detour into Gaga Five Foot Two.

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The Sundance Film Festival is an elusive mistress that giveth Oscar buzz only to taketh away when at lower altitudes. Case in point is this week’s would-be Oscar title: 2002′s Tadpole. The film was a sensation of the festival, winning a Best Director prize for Gary Winick and stirring buzz for newcomer Aaron Stanford and Bebe Neuwirth. But the newfangled digital technology that won praise at the festival for all the new filmmaking possibility it represented ended up looking amateurish and garish upon release.

Tadpole ultimately got lost in a slew of 2002′s rich boy movies and disappointed on release after Miramax’s big $6M acquisition. This riff on The Graduate by way of Voltaire quotes may have been lost to time, but for a minute, it was kind of A Thing. This week, we’re also talking about the distinctions between regular Oscar buzz and Sundance Oscar buzz, the Meryl Streepness of The Hours vs. the Nicole Kidmanness of The Hours, and the National Board of Review’s “prize as party invitation” special recognitions.

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After landing a Best Actress nomination in a great Best Actress year for Unfaithful, we once thought Diane Lane could come back to the Oscar race by going to a horse race. This week, we’re talking about Secretariat, a live-action Disney biopic that got buried in the wake of The Social Network. Get ready for a dive into the 2010 Oscar nominations, including a strong defense of its Best Picture lineup. And we obsess over the real reason to watch the movie, even though it does her dirty: the eternal Margo Martindale.

Join us as Joe explains horse racing awards hierarchy, Chris has an Oscar host hot take to end all Oscar host hot takes, and we unpack the cornucopia of the film’s rich white people problems. Come for the remembered Oscar buzz, stay for the elevator stories! Oh and we try and fail to not call this movie Seabiscuit.

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Happy Halloween, listeners! This week, we’re getting creepy with Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Best Picture winner Gladiator, the gross-out macabre sequel Hannibal. The legacy of The Silence of the Lambs made this one of the most heavily covered productions of the early 2000s and convinced that it might be similarly bound for Oscar glory. Maybe someone was just feeding us our brains.

With Jodie Foster out as Clarice Starling as well as Jonathan Demme passing off directing duties, Scott was chasing every actress in Hollywood that was also among the Academy’s favorites. Also on our mind’s this episode: producer Dino De Laurentiis, how the film (wisely) nixed its more problematic elements, and its terrifying makeup. Also Anthony Hopkins talking about poppers.

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It’s time for some failed harlequin romance Oscar buzz and that means we are talking 1993′s Sommersby. A post-Civil War era love story of overtaken identity and languorous beard shaving, the presence of a post-Silence of the Lambs Jodie Foster had us thinking this weepy could be Oscar-bound. But as the dueling elements of Richard Gere’s non-accent and Foster’s scream-whisper will attest, we were so wrong.

As if the gaslighting by oil lamp wasn’t enough to warn us, the movie is fairly cringeworthy in its plot mechanics and ripping off of the third act of The Crucible. We get into Sommersby’s mishaps this episode as well as Gere’s Oscar shutout vs. Foster as one of Oscar’s golden children, making out while protecting expensive seeds, and the Great Cuckold of 1993, Bill Pullman. We never loved not this movie as much as we loved this movie.

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Cuddle up to your jellyfish, because this week’s we’re talking about Seven Pounds. Just two years after being nominated for The Pursuit of Happyness, we thought that Will Smith’s reteaming with director Gabriele Muccino could maybe bring the Oscar that has eluded him since first being nominated for Ali. But that was before we realized what this movie actually was, let alone how painfully bad it is.

Scattered among the sacrificial flesh of the film’s thwarted Oscar dreams, we discuss Will Smith’s Oscar trajectory, Rosario Dawson’s underrated career, and the many ways this bonkers movie grinds our gears. We also take a look at 2008’s whirlwind tour to Kate Winslet’s Best Actress win and the full insanity and ramifications of how the film withholds its twist. And of course, we don’t forget to notice the collateral beauty around us.

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If the past few weeks of movies we like had you weary, fear not for this episode we have a real stinker for you: 2013′s The Fifth Estate. This was the year that Benedict Cumberbatch was everywhere and nowhere, alone yet not alone. After the rise of Sherlock, this year saw him in four major movies including his biggest role in this film as Julian Assange, the controversial figure at the head of WikiLeaks.

This week we look at Cumberbatch’s expected Oscar rise and how The Fifth Estate quickly died when faced with competition from bigger and more beloved movies. Joe finds a perfect summation of the film through The Simpsons and Chris defends the oeuvre of Bill Condon. Other topics include Josh Singer’s oddball Wikipedia page, Daniel Bruhl’s near-miss Oscar nomination for Rush, and this film’s bizarre opening credits sequence.

But most exciting this episode: a first ever perfect score on The IMDb Game!

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For a short time in the 90s, Elmore Leonard was an Oscar thing and post-Pulp Fiction John Travolta being due was also an Oscar thing. Both of those may sound confounding in today’s era of Gotti and an unwatched series on Epix, but this week’s film brings both of those statements together to prove them true: Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 comedy Get Shorty.

And guess what? We kinda really like this one.

Topics include the short-lived splitting of the Original Score category into Drama and Musical/Comedy, the early days of IMDb, and our love for the undersung Rene Russo. This episode also finds Joe revealing his secrets on remembering film years and Chris delivering his “Blythe Danner in To Wong Foo” impression.

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This week’s episode is the sound of something trying to not make a sound. It’s our first failed Oscar buzz movie that we genuinely love and it’s 2004’s The Door in the Floor. Adapted from the first segment of John Irving’s A Widow for One Year, this film stars Jeff Bridges as a grieving novelist, Kim Basinger as his estranged wife, and Jon Foster as the young student spending the summer between them.

The Door in the Floor also introduced us to Elle Fanning and gave us what might be the best adaptation of Irving’s work. The film feels like a crucial stop on the path to Bridges’ eventual Oscar for Crazy Heart, and is best remembered for his performance. Or maybe, it’s just his muumuu caftan. Listen along as we obsess over the lore of Focus Features, gush over its underappreciated and oft-repurposed score, and gasp over the film’s cameo from a beloved Tony winner.

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Joe: @joereid

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