June 2019 – This Had Oscar Buzz

050 – Bobby

Can you believe we have made it to our 50TH EPISODE?! And for the occasion, we’ve allowed you the listeners to pick the film we are discussing – and you’ve chosen Bobby, Emilio Estevez’s 2006 film about the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassdor Hotel during the 1968 Democratic presidential primary!

The film stars a smorgasbord of famous faces and called-in-favors, including Sharon Stone, Martin Sheen, Anthony Hopkins, Elijah Wood, Laurence Fishburne, and many many more. But the cast is so sprawling that the film struggles to make any of its ensemble all that interesting and never really settles on what Bobby’s assassination means for mid-00s Americans. Perhaps its Golden Globe Best Drama and SAG Ensemble nominations were always the ceiling for Bobby’s awards prospects.

This episode we talk about stylistically chasing Robert Altman’s Nashville (and a certain reviled Best Picture winner), lounge singer and hairstylist meet-cutes, and, of course, the thwarted prestige legacy of Lindsay Lohan.

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049 – Stonewall

This Pride season honors the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots – and here on This Had Oscar Buzz, we are taking a look at the film that only did so in lip service.

From director Roland Emmerich, Stonewall is a cautionary case against the kind of year-ahead Oscar predictions that are made without much details on the film’s details. But when we got indication that Emmerich would be taking a white-washed (not to mention Newsies-inflected) approach to queer history, the film became a hot take factory before bombing both at TIFF and with audiences immediately after. This episode, we look at Emmerich’s disaster movie career progression, recommend other better films on queer activism, and run the marathon of Stonewall’s cringey moments.

Since Pride is also about honoring community, we also take time to spotlight on two organizations that serve LGBTQ youth: The Ali Forney Center and Kaleidoscope Youth Center. Both organizations work in their communities to work against queer youth homelessness and provide programs that empower queer young adults! Donate and discover more at aliforneycenter.org and kycohio.org, follow at @AliForneyCenter and @KYCOhio!!

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048 – Rendition

With the return of Big Little Lies to our television screens, we’re taking a look at a film starring one of the Monterey Five’s key players and her newly arrived nemesis. No, that outdoor coffee shop wasn’t the first time someone demanded answers between Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep – they first squared off in 2007′s Rendition. All together now: “JUST TELL ME HE’S OKAY!!”

Rendition was one of the many, many prestige titles that tried to unpack the War on Terror to underwhelming results with Oscar. But this film also had some of the highest expectations of them all due to the star wattage of Streep and newly minted tabloid staple couple Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, plus recent Foreign Language-winning director Gavin Hood at the helm. Ultimately, this film was too dull and obvious to be embraced by a critical community already impatient with these kind of very similar films, and Oscar followed suit.

This episode, we discuss more Foreign Language director successes that sparked buzz for their first English-language films in the years to come, the impact of a poor TIFF reception, and the romance that wasn’t meant to be. Get ready to try to tell those 00s anti-war films apart, because we have a quiz coming!

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BONUS – A Kiss At The End of 2003’s Rainbow

To wrap up our 2003 miniseries, Joe and Chris take a final look at the Oscar year that was 2003 in this special episode! We take a guess at what the remaining five films would be in a year of ten Best Picture nominees, share our personal ballots, and hint at what future This Had Oscar Buzz miniseries subjects could be. And instead of our usual IMDb Game, we close out the episode with a different guessing game for one of our most-discussed favorite pieces of awards miscellania…

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