We’re still 7 weeks away from the Telluride Film Festival and Venice Film Festival kicking off awards season, but, then again, there’s always time to speculate. I’m just reposting an earlier spitballing article I had printed back in 5.27.19. I have added Tom Harper’s “The Aeronauts,” which I hear is the kind of crowdpleaser that would be too hard to resist for Oscar and Bill Condon has a new drama/thriller called “The Good Liar.” Word on the street is that Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” is, at the moment, the obvious frontrunner for the Best Picture prize — test screenings for that film have been playing like gangbusters.
1. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese); 2. Knives Out (Rian Johnson); 3. The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh); 4. Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi); 5. Uncut Gems (The Safdie brothers); 6. Ad Astra (James Gray); 7. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt); 7. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller); 8. Joker (Todd Phillips) 9. Wendy (Benh Zeitlin) ; 10. Lucy in the Sky (Noah Hawley)
11. Nomadland (Chloe Zhao) 12. Waiting for the Barbarians (Cirro Guerra); 13. Untitled Noah Baumbach (Noah Baumbach); 14. Dry Run (Todd Haynes); 15. Ford vs Ferrari (James Mangold); 16. The King (David Michod); 17. Fair and Balanced (Jay Roach); 18. Little Women (Greta Gerwig); 19. The Last Thing He Wanted (Dee Rees); 20. Fonzo (Josh Trank)
21. An Officier and A Spy (Roman Polanski); 22. Gemini Man (Ang Lee); 23. The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci) 24. Antlers (Scott Cooper); 25. The Glorias: A Life on the Road (Julie Taymor); 26. The Nest (Sean Durkin); 27. Waves (Trey Edward Schultz); 28. The Woman in the Window (Joe Wright); 29. Downhill (Nat Faxon/Jim Rash); 30. The Hunt (Craig Zobel);
31. Against All Enemies (Benedict Andrews); 32. Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton); 33. The True History of the Kelly Gang (Justin Kurzel); 34. The Good Nurse (Tobias Lindholm); 35. The Devil All the Time (Antonio Campos); 36. The Goldfinch (John Crowley); 37. The Rhythm Section (Reed Morano); 38. A Rainy Day in New York (Woody Allen) 39. The Truth (Hirokazu kore-eda); 40. Ema (Pablo Larrain);
41..Bergman Island (Mia Hanson-Love); 42. About Endlessness (Roy Andersson); 43. One Second (Zhang Yimou, China); 44. MalmKrog (Christian Puiu); 45. Undine (Christian Petzold) 46. Shirley (Josephine Decker) 47. Untitled Miranda July (Miranda July) 48. Harriet (Kasi Lemmons) 49. Proxima (Alice Wincour) 50. Radioactive (Marjane Satrapi) 51. The Aeronauts (Tom Harper) 52. The Good Liar (Bill Condon)
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.