2019 Film Independent Spirit Awards Nominations

The 2019 Film Independent Spirit Award nominees were announced last Friday's morning at the W Hotel in Hollywood, presented by Gemma Chan and Molly Shannon and featuring yet another diverse group of talented creators with a shared belief in the power and promise of independent storytelling.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact in nominees list is that honors are well-spread among many films as pack leader is We the Animals by Jeremiah Zagar with five nominations followed by three feature films Eight Grade, First Reformed and You Were Never Really Here with four each.  Then we have the distributor breakdown where A24 scored 12 nominations followed by Amazon Studios, Netflix and the Orchard with six each plus Annapurna Pictures with five.

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2018 British Independent Film Awards Nominations

The Favourite leads with 13 nominations for the 2018 British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) announced this morning by British actors Ellie Bamber and Arinzé Kene at the Everyman Cinema, King’s Cross. Yorgos Lanthimos’s black comedy about the 18th century court of Queen Anne is recognized for Best British Independent Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Olivia Colman is nominated for Best Actress, with her co-stars in the female-led ensemble, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, competing in the Best Supporting Actress category, Weisz also receives a Best Actress nomination for Disobedience. The Favourite also sweeps the technical categories, newly introduced for the 2017 awards, with nominations for seven of the nine awards, including Best Production Design, Best Cinematography supported by Blackmagic Design, Best Make-up & Hair Design and Best Costume Design.

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75th Venice Film Festival Award Winners

As promised and because it's easy to read in one single place all winners, here are the winners of the 2018 Biennale Cinema.

Watched awards live but ceremony was not much entertaining and with so many American movies in the festival I was not that much interested in learning winners (sigh) nor watching clips.

Nevertheless I'm glad that most awards went to interesting possibilities and well-known and much-admired-by-me directors like Jacques Audiard, Yorgos Lanthimos and Julian Schanbel.  Worth mentioning that Audiard's award relaxes me a bit as I'm still anxious about his first film in a language that is not his mother tongue as there are so-many disasters with so-few successes when extraordinary directors work on English-language productions. Sigh.

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75th Venice International Film Festival Lineup

As was not easy to gather info about films countries submitted to Oscars 2019, decided to do the two missing posts about the 2018 Biennale as it's a lot easier to check info from only one source.  This is the lineup, the second will list the award winners.

Let's start by sharing that the festival poster was made by Lorenzo Mattotti. Mattotti says the following about his design, "I believe that a poster must have something intriguing about it, that attracts the eye, that attracts thought, but without revealing too much. It needs to have a sort of enigma, a sort of mystery to solve. After various attempts, I developed this idea of a girl of this female character – with a very graphic, unrealistic face – who looks with a rather serious expression through a lens. And instead of this lens, there’s Earth, planet Earth, symbolizing a gaze directed at us. Then there is a white square, and I believe that this combination is a successful match, because people wonder: what is that white square? I believe it is natural to think of it as a movie screen, the white screen. The gaze directed on the planet, directed on reality, must pass through this device, must be filtered through the screen".

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91st Academy Awards Foreign Language Film Submissions

Tuesday, October 9, 2018 Update

Yesterday the Academy released the accepted foreign-language films that will compete to be included in the shortlist of 9, get one of the 5 nominations and the ultimate goal, win an Oscar.

This year there are a total of eighty-seven (87) films, five short of last year ninety-two and there are quite a few countries that submit for the first time like Belarus and Malawi, for example.

Until yesterday the list had 81 countries, but there are not 6 new as 2 are out (Cuba and Kyrgyzstan) and 8 (Armenia, Australia, China, Kazakhstan, Malawi, New Zealand, Niger, Yemen) are new.   There are few films that have a different English name in the official list and for post purposes the list below will have the names in the official list, even when at least one film, official English name is not the one in AMPAS list.

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71th Festival de Cannes Award Winners

Watching red carpet, soon the top prizes of Cannes 2018.

Saturday May 19th Morning Update:  Un Certain Regard winners,  Queer Palm winners and more ...

Today AFP gives us the most interesting news as this year will be the first time in 71 years of the festival where those Cannes main awards that used to receive diplomas will receive a mini-palmes d'or!

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57th Semaine de la Critique Award Winners

Yesterday, the Cannes parallel section had their award ceremony with top award going to a Franco-Brazilian-Portuguese comedy drama.

Check winners below in GREEN and at official press release here.

Most interesting is the availability of 500 FREE tickets to watch the 2018 short films selection via Festival Scope.   Starting today, May 17th and until May 27th IF you hurry, will be able to watch the shorts; but act fast as there are only 500 tickets and yes, they're sold out quite quickly.  Festival Scope site is here.

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26th L'ACID Selection

The ACID program at the Cannes International Film Festival was created in 1993. Films are chosen by fifteen or so filmmakers, members of the association. It screens nine feature films, fiction and documentary, chosen among hundreds of works from all around the world.

ACID filmmakers follow their love for a film and wish to give visibility to directors whose work is scarcely distributed, in order to facilitate a theatrical release.

The screenings, open to professionals and also to the public are all followed by Q&As with the films' crews and ACID filmmakers who supported the films.

The films shown in Cannes are then accompanied by ACID and its filmmakers in the various stages of the theatrical release (search for distributors / promotion / programming / organization of the Q&A's / audience research).

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71st Festival de Cannes Official Selection - Update 1

As announced during the press conference of April 12th, today, April 19, organizers announced the films added to the composition of the Official Selection 2018.

There is some relief to my not positive feeling that this year there is an incredibly great official competition jury and there are not many great films for them to select winners from.  But now things can change a bit as, ladies and gentlemen, please notice that Nuri Bilge Ceylan is as of now in the competition to win the Palme d'or and perhaps has become the top contender along Jia Zhangke.  Well, at least their films have become must-be-seen for me no matter whatever happens in Cannes.

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#Cannes2018 Press Conference

Links to LIVE broadcast

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2018 Cannes Possible Films - The Buzz

As happens every single year, Cannes buzz starts during Berlinale and gets louder when Berlinale ends.  Even do been following the buzz since then this year haven't post anything as some of you guessed right, my life has changed and now it's not easy to keep on writing for you, loyal readers.  But no matter how many changes have happened or will occur, Cannes is Cannes for me and have to (or at least will try to) write my regular posts about the buzz, my wish list and all the other stuff done in the previous years.

No, this is not my Wish List but the usual compilation of possible films that could make it to Cannes which usually do in February but well, I'm doing it a month later and by now most industry publications have done their own lists, so it's not a novelty but will be a lot easier to make it, lol.

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43rd César Awards Winners

Last night the French Academy had their award ceremony and no, was not able to watch it live but as expected the big winner of the night was BPM as collected 6 awards but was followed very closely by See You Up There with 5.

What I really regret is not watching live the surprise appearance by Marion Cotillard to present along with Pedro Almodovar the Honorary César to Penelope Cruz, sigh.  Also, there are not many opportunities to see Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert and Marion Cotillard in one and the same event!!! But I'm watching videos and as soon as full awards ceremony video becomes available will include it in post.

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2018 Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild Awards Winners

A few days back the guild had their award ceremony and for the first time, the event red carpet was live-streamed from The Novo by Microsoft at L. A. and was hosted by Frankie Grande.  If you wish to check the red carpet event watch video at the end of post.

Frankie Grande also hosted the ceremony.  The night opened with a solo performance by him accompanied by pianist Jeremy Weinglass.

Winners are in *BLUE.  To check winners in all categories go official site here.  

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54th Cinema Audio Society Awards Winners

A few days back the society had their awards ceremony and according to twitter buzz, it was too-long as ceremony took over three and a half hours to present 7 awards and 4 honorary awards ... (LOL!). Just imagine presenting 23 or more awards using this ratio!

The top sound mixing award went to Dunkirk, a film that lost MPSE sound editing to Blade Runner 2049; so, perhaps Oscars will behave alike, with mixing to Dunkirk and editing to Blade Runner 2049.

Winners are in *BLUE.  To check winners in all categories go official site here.

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68th Berlin International Film Festival Award Winners

It's over we know all winners and there are some very-pleasant surprises. 

Spontaneously will share some perceptions, first the big Festival winners seems to be Brazil Cinema; Latin America also did really good but is Paraguay who conquers Berlinale 2018 with a film that obviously I'm "dying" to see (now more that know has to have the necessary quality).

Then, no doubt female directors did really well in this edition as hopefully is because they do great films; yes, seems that when festival programmers are "forced" to include female directors, great films, films that win top awards have not only accolades but a better-chance to be seen by audiences around the world.  Great.

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