5 Trends from Award Season’s Busiest Week Yet
‘One Battle’ rules, ‘Train Dreams’ keeps chugging and who could still come from behind. Plus: I talk to Will Arnett & John Bishop about ‘Is This Thing On?’
If your film hasn’t been nominated for an award this week, stay in line!
After what feels like a flood of awards and special recognitions and nominations — including today’s AFI winners — there’s still more to come. The Critics Choice Awards will announce their film picks tomorrow, and Monday will bring the Golden Globe nominations. If by then your project hasn’t managed to snag a nomination, well, you can take solace in the fact that the broader industry still hasn’t weighed in on this year’s contenders (but at least know time is slipping away…).
The first week of December is when the rubber really meets the red carpet in awards season, when we go from a seemingly endless field of possibilities to some clear favorites getting singled out over and over again. It’s not a foolproof process, but the combination of announcements this week — the Gotham Awards on Monday night, the New York Film Critics Circle vote on Tuesday and the Film Independent Spirit Awards nominations and National Board of Review winners on Wednesday — gives us a much clearer picture of the race than we’ve had all season.
I have an interview to share today, with Is This Thing On? star and co-writer Will Arnett and the man he sort-of plays in the movie, stand-up comedian John Bishop. But first, five takeaways from this busy week of awards, with good news for heavy-hitter Oscar contenders and underdogs alike.
1. One Battle: As Dominant as We Thought
Sure, things were looking a little dicey for the first few hours of the Gotham Awards on Monday, with the Warner Bros. movie losing out repeatedly to smaller contenders in categories like screenplay and lead performance. As my colleague Christopher Rosen pointed out on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, director Paul Thomas Anderson seemed almost relieved when the movie finally took home an award at the end of the night, for best film. “I didn’t expect this, I didn’t know what was going on,” Anderson said during his acceptance speech, after sitting through multiple losses. “This is great.”
But any surprise Anderson felt on Monday has probably faded this week, given what has come since: Best picture wins from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, as well as best supporting actor wins for Benicio del Toro from both groups (more on him below) and three additional wins from the National Board of Review, which really seemed to have One Battle fever. Plus, a spot on the AFI list of the year’s best movies. Surely it was a relief to all the Independent Spirit Award nominees that One Battle cost too much to be eligible.
I’ll be discussing this a lot on the podcast in the coming weeks, but this coronation is looking a whole lot like what happened with Oppenheimer, another massive studio movie from a beloved auteur who was overdue for an Oscar, featuring a dominant lead actor performance, a charismatic supporting actor turn and enough crafts to get attention from every single Academy branch. The field is different this year, of course, but take a look at the Oscars won by Oppenheimer and tell me if you don’t think One Battle could match every single one of them.
2. Train Dreams: Chugging Down the Track!
I’ve talked about Train Dreams so much on the podcast that my producer, Brett, has made a special sound effect for it, so feel free to consider my bias here. But the Netflix-released little engine that could has just kept chugging along, with mentions in the AFI and National Board of Review’s top 10 films of the year lists — plus an adapted screenplay win from NBR, plus four Independent Spirit Award nominations, including a lead actor nomination for star Joel Edgerton. We’re getting to the point of the season where you can tell what people really love by how they vote, and Train Dreams is clearly beloved. With a best picture field that still has plenty of room for movement, I’m feeling more confident than ever that Train Dreams can find a spot.
3. It Was Just an Accident: The Int’l to Beat
On Monday, the Iranian government announced that it had sentenced filmmaker Jafar Panahi to a year in prison for “propaganda activities” against the state; hours later, Panahi attended the Gotham Awards in New York City, where his film It Was Just an Accident won a whopping three awards, including best director.
Panahi has previously spent time in prison and under house arrest in Iran, and It Was Just an Accident — about a group of former political prisoners who attempt to take revenge on their captor — is deeply informed by that experience. His presence on the awards campaign trail this fall, after more than a decade of not being able to leave Iran, has felt like a minor miracle; though it’s unclear how or if he will serve a prison sentence in Iran, that miracle now seems to be running out.
All of this makes Neon’s It Was Just an Accident even more stunning as a film, and it feels even more urgently worth celebrating. When Panahi won best director from the New York Film Critics Circle one day after those Gotham wins, it served as further confirmation that Panahi and his film are one of the significant stories of this season.
4. The ‘You Know Who I Really Loved…’ Vote
I swear, I will still make the “you know who I really loved…” T-shirt I keep threatening on the podcast, because the power of that vote is perhaps the defining force for all award bodies.
We’re seeing it most prominently for del Toro, who seems to have leapt ahead of his One Battle After Another co-star Sean Penn in the supporting actor race, a showdown between two of the most frequent types you see in supporting actor categories: the bloodthirsty villain vs. the type we’ll broadly call “nice dad.”
Sure, bloodthirsty villains win in this category all the time. But the “nice dad” vote is often more decisive, because when you think about del Toro’s Sensei Carlos in One Battle After Another, you just feel good. I think the same goes for Wagner Moura’s performance in The Secret Agent, winner of the New York critics’ best actor prize. It’s a strange and sometimes prickly movie, but one guided by the warmth and persistence of Moura’s character, a man navigating treacherous political terrain who really just wants to raise his son and get on with his life.
The “you know who I really loved…” vote doesn’t always go to a heroic character or even a nice one, but someone who inspires passion — a character you wouldn’t mind imagining meeting in real life. It’s making me think del Toro is cruising for a win, and that in the best actor race, the shaggy-dog likability of Moura, Edgerton and Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle might give them all an edge.
5. Still Room for Underdogs
There is really no point in having all these awards if you’re not going to spread the wealth, and I cheered every time that happened this week. Good for lead actor Sope Dirisu for beating out a ton of heavy-hitters at the Gotham Awards for the British-Nigerian indie My Father’s Shadow, which also won the breakthrough director prize. Good for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You star Rose Byrne for winning best actress from the New York critics and the National Board of Review, a much-needed shakeup to the presumption that Jessie Buckley would walk away with every single award for her performance in Hamnet. The Independent Spirit Awards are always the home for underdogs, but I love that their nomination leader was the teeny-tiny Ira Sachs experimental drama Peter Hujar’s Day. I am holding out hope that the Critics Choice Awards nominations tomorrow can invite even more contenders to the party.
I’ll be back tomorrow to talk live about those nominations with Chris and returning guest Joyce Eng — but unless you’re a paid Prestige Junkie After Party subscriber, you won’t get to hear a replay of our conversation should you miss it. Fix that now, right here, and then read on for my chat with Will Arnett and the inspiration for his new film.
Just For Laughs
John Bishop is a stand-up comedian, not an actor or filmmaker, but he’s familiar enough with Hollywood to know how it works. When you give over your life story for someone else to turn into a movie, you give up a lot of control over how that story will take shape. And when Bradley Cooper decides to take on that story as a co-writer and director, you really know you’ve got to take a backseat. As Bishop told me recently, “I’m not expecting Bradley Cooper to phone me up and say, John, what do you think about this line?”
But, Bishop continued, “That’s exactly what happened.”
Bishop, 59, has been telling the incredible true story about the origins of his stand-up career onstage for 25 years now; the short version is that when he and his wife were on the brink of divorce, Bishop started doing stand-up on a whim — and their road to reconnection began when she accidentally sat down in the audience of one of his shows. That’s also the rough outline of what happens in Is This Thing On?, the new film directed by Cooper and written by Cooper in collaboration with the film’s star Will Arnett, Arnett’s writing partner, Mark Chappell, and Bishop himself.
Arnett and Bishop met by chance in Amsterdam a few years back, and Arnett was captivated not just by the funny coincidence at the heart of Bishop’s story, but also by the heartbreak of separation and divorce built into it. The film shifts the story from Manchester, U.K., where Bishop lives, to New York City and changes many details, but Arnett said the bittersweet core remains the same.
“When we first met with John, we said, there are going to be elements that are going to not really ring true, or they’re going to feel like, ‘Wait, that didn’t happen,’” Arnett told me. “John really got that right away. But I always felt like it was incumbent upon me to try to stay true to that original feeling, all the stuff John said to us when we first spoke to him — the things about the metamorphosis that he has as a person, and how it changes the way he looks at his wife and how she looks at him. Those were the things that were the most important.”
With Laura Dern cast opposite Arnett as Tess, who goes on her own journey of discovery following their separation, Searchlight Pictures’ Is This Thing On? (out Dec. 19 in limited release) is much more of a two-hander than you might expect — more of a portrait of a marriage than the story of one man’s mid-life crisis in the world of stand-up. But there’s genuine care put into the stand-up as well, from casting real people from New York’s comedy scene in supporting roles to how Cooper films the stand-up sequences, particularly the first time Arnett’s character, Alex, takes the stage and the camera lingers so close to his face you can see his pupils dilate.
“When you’re a professional comedian, movies about comedy never seem to get it right,” Bishop said. “I was really conscious that this film had to stand up— the character Alex had to be on the stage, and any comedian watching it needed to recognize what he was going through. And then when Bradley said that he was filming it so close up, I thought, he’s got it.”
Arnett, 55, who has been part of the comedy world for decades but never had a stand-up career, did his time onstage in New York comedy clubs in preparation for the movie, often performing under his character’s name, Alex Novak, and bombing as hard as any inexperienced comedian might. One night, Arnett even opened for Bishop — or at least, Alex Novak did — “which is kind of trippy,” Arnett said. It was after that night that Bishop admitted to Arnett something he’d been holding back.
“I remember John, we were talking on 3rd Street,” Arnett continued. “It was the first time he admitted to me, ‘I wasn’t sure if you were going to be able to pull it off.’ He was really honest with me.”
To both Bishop and Cooper, it was important that Arnett not just experience standing onstage under those hot lights, but also know what it’s like to bomb hard in the process.
“Stand up, when it’s done properly, is the most instant form of communication,” Bishop explained. “People laugh, or they don’t laugh. That means you have instant success and instant failure. You have to be in front of people who have paid $20 for someone to make them laugh and disappoint them to realize what it feels like.”
Arnett remembered standing in the stairwell at the Comedy Cellar, a location that recurs often in Is This Thing On?, during one of his stand-up efforts before filming began. Cooper was with him, and told Arnett — a seven-time Emmy nominee for comedies Arrested Development, 30 Rock and Bojack Horseman — to ignore all of his well-honed instincts for getting people to laugh and let himself, or let Alex Novak, fail.
Now, in that exact location where Cooper told him to bomb, there hangs a headshot of John Bishop, and next to it is another headshot of Arnett — with the name “Alex Novak” underneath it.
