kristen wiig – This Had Oscar Buzz

213 – Where’d You Go, Bernadette

As Cate Blanchett inches towards a possible third acting Oscar with this week’s Tár, we look back at the quickly forgotten Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Based on the praised novel by Maria Semple about an eccentric former architect’s disappearance, the film paired Blanchett with director Richard Linklater (and reunited her with actor Billy Crudup, playing her husband) and faced numerous delays from distributor Annapurna despite its pedigree. Linklater streamlined the novel’s techno-epistolary structure, resulting in a more straightforward film that lost much of the novel’s unique comic tone and character insights. Though Blanchett would earn a Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy nomination at the Globes, the film was already long forgotten at that point of the season.

This episode, Blanchett joins our Six Timers Club and we talk about the barrier of entry to third acting Oscar wins. We also look at Crudup’s filmography and his shockingly paltry lack of awards love, Linklater as a director hard to pin down to a career narrative, and Annapurna’s bumpy and brief road from production company to distributor.

Topics also include “prepandemic” as a concept, Broadway actors telling stories at benefits, and Tyra interviewing Beyoncé.

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197 – Downsizing

And we’re back to your regularly scheduled episodes! This week, we return to our non-EW episodes with one of the more divisive high-profile bombs in recent years, 2017′s Downsizing. A globalization satire from Alexander Payne and his Sideways co-writer Jim Taylor, the film follows an everyman played by Matt Damon who decides to join the masses deciding to shrink themselves for the sake of green initiatives and a little outsized wealth. The film ran the 2017 fall festival gamut, opening the Venice Film Festival to raves only to see increasingly negative receptions at Telluride and Toronto. In the long wait to its eventual Christmastime release, the negative perceptions settled in and the film became a box office bomb.

By Oscar time, its biggest chances lied in the supporting turn from SAG, Globe, and Critics’ Choice nominee Hong Chau as a political activist forced into downsized life as punishment. This episode, we’ll be talking about the 2017 Supporting Actress race and how she was shut out at the last minute. We’ll also discuss Damon’s constant foot-in-mouth syndrome, 8 Kinds of F*cks, and the National Board of Review’s Top Ten Films of 2017.

Topics also include our thoughts on this year’s Cannes, talking head documentaries, and Paramount’s big year of bombs.

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068 – The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

In the fall festival season, a primo premiere status can assert a film as having major Oscar ambitions. This week’s title, 2013′s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, is a such a case – after debuting an eye-catching trailer, the film debuted as the centerpiece selection of that year’s New York Film Festival. But this typically very selective festival provided a major platform for the film that the film couldn’t measure up to, earning the film an underwhelming status it couldn’t overcome before its Christmas day release.

Directed by and starring Ben Stiller, the film struggles with the payoff of its character arc and its sense of magical realism, making for a disappointing modern remake. This week, we look at the film’s heavy-handed product placement and music cues, and the brief recent history of New York Film Festival’s world premiere gala selections.

We also discuss this year’s fascinating and defensible Golden Globe acting nominations, the film’s notoriously unruly first press screening, and we predict this year’s National Board of Review Top Ten.

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