January 2019 – This Had Oscar Buzz

Class Of 2018

An episode an entire year in the making – we’re welcoming This Had Oscar Buzz’s Class of 2018 into the fold! As requested, we’re running down all of this past year’s films that had lofty Academy Award aspirations and were left with nothing come last week’s nomination morning. And not to confuse these new inductees into the THOB fold, we also unpack the Widows/Eighth Grade/Leave No Trace of it all and discuss the difference between what makes a THOB movie and a movie that is just a bummer to miss out come Oscar time.

This episode we dive into 2018′s films by several categories: The Cake Memorial Award for Happiest Miss, the Justice for Slaughter Race Saddest Snub, the Dr. Louise Banks Award for Most Surprising Shutout, Most Forgettable, and most importantly we name the film we can’t wait to select for a future episode! Oh, and don’t forget to watch our Class of 2018 video!

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030 – Brothers

Our episode this week is on a film that once dominated the earliest Oscar predictions for 2009: Jim Sheridan’s American remake of Brothers. Led by Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman, the film repurposed Susanne Bier’s film as another in a line of film’s to take on the war in Afghanistan – and like many of its predecessors, it failed with Oscar. Except this one stood in stark contrast to that year’s major Oscar story, The Hurt Locker.

Sadly, Brothers fell flat despite its promising pedigree. This week, we discuss the film’s three stars (a bug-eyed Maguire, Gyllenhaal in hottie transition, and Portman in limbo between Star Wars and Black Swan) and Sheridan’s successful Oscar history, and the HFPA’s 2000s love story with U2. And naturally, we get sidetracked on talk of kitchen and Batman soundtracks.

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029 – To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday (with Gavin Mevius)

This week, we dive into our pfirst Pfeiffer and it’s also pforgotten Pfeiffer. To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday arrived in 1996, coasting on a triple threat of Oscar buzz: a popular stage play, adapted by the Picket Fences team of David E. Kelley and Michael Pressman, and starring the beloved Michelle Pfeiffer as its ghostly object of affection.

Critics quickly dismissed the film as maudlin (with oddball comparisons to Ghost) and audiences forgot about it even faster. This week, The Mixed Reviews’ cohost Gavin Mevius joins us to rediscover the film – in all of its icky sexual mores and misrepresentation of how karaoke works. We also discover Freddie Prinze’s Jr.’s late career switch, luxuriate in the trash of William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, and unpack Pfeiffer’s stalled Oscar trajectory.

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028 – The Paperboy

An episode that asks that oft-repeated eternal question: will the Academy ever be ready for a movie where Nicole Kidman pees on Zac Efron? In 2012, Lee Daniels followed up his Precious Oscar success with a film that scandalized Cannes and answered that question with a resounding “no”. McConaissance be damned!

The Paperboy may be a pulpy southern crime saga that shows Daniels at his most excessive, but it got shockingly close to Oscar thanks to Kidman’s audacious (and divisive) performance. But while negative reviews and the film’s definitive griminess kept it out of Oscar history, it still gave us Efron dancing in his tighty whities in the rain.

Also in this episode, we look at some highs and lows of the this era of the McConassaince, 2012′s odd Supporting Actress year, and an underrated performance from Macy Gray.

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