Boy the BFCA is something else. The nominations for the Critics Choice Awards were announced today and they were…interesting to say the least. 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle led the field with 13 nominations a piece. I have some thoughts about these noms…
This headline is a bit misleading as I don’t think one of these three is good, bad, and ugly, but such is the nature of the English language. I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake with these awards since they seem to be coming out every two seconds so I’ve decided to do a good, bad, and ugly on three major groups: the Gotham Awards, the Satellite Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle.
Can you believe that we are just two months from 2014? The new year seemed so long ago like two weeks ago but now here we are about to be done with the year. Which of course means now is ripe for a new set of Oscar Predictions! I will be attending AFI Fest on behalf of AwardsCircuit.com, which I may have spoken about (idk really it’s been a rough past two weeks). Anyways there has been a lot of jostling and jockeying in the past few weeks.
By the time 12 Years a Slave had finished it’s running time, I found myself having to take stock of myself. The film, directed by Steve McQueen, is certainly an experience, painting a tough portrait of what happened to many Black people. Though I managed to make it through the film without much incident, I felt a small sense of disconnect, having endured through the movie but not thoroughly engaged, inspite of knowing the film was good. Luckily, there was enough artistry and ideas to keep the film bouncing around my mind and some truly astonishing performances to smooth the issues.
If you have been following any movie news, you know that 12 Years a Slave, the new Steven McQueen film starring Chiwetel Ejiofer, Michael Fassbender and Lupita N’yongo, is tearing up the festival circuit, inspire all sorts of praise and talk of Oscars. It’s been interesting to see a film made by someone of a dark hue winning raves, but there’s another facet to the conversation surrounding the film that has been confounding me. It all started when Brad Pitt made a comment during a press conference about Americans not asking about why there aren’t more films about slavery and eventually saying that it took an outsider to be able to tell this tale.