The Prestige Junkie Mid-Year Awards! 🏆
From Best Breakthroughs to Best Thighs to Best Supporting Accent, I offer up the kudos you didn't know you needed
Gentle readers, please do not panic at that subject line. I know you may be shaking off the cobwebs from a long weekend — I sure am! — and you may be thinking, wait, did awards season move up to starting in July?
Rest assured: movie awards season still kicks off Labor Day weekend, which is still absurd six months before the actual Oscars. And though Emmy nominations are indeed right around the corner, we’ve still got a week to prepare for that announcement (July 17 at 8:30 am Pacific, hosted by Sheryl Lee Ralph and Tony Hale, see you there!)
But the midway point of the year does function as a kind of starting gun in awards pundit world: Variety already has its list of 10 best picture predictions, led by Steve McQueen’s Blitz, and Gold Derby has its full hub of editors predictions, where they’re also high on Blitz but also the recently released Sing Sing. I have a hard time making serious predictions this early in the season, but these attempts have some utility in making sense of early releases that might have legs and recognition of where the hype bubbles are forming.
You know what’s more fun though than just making semi-blind predictions? Handing out awards!
So get out your formal swimsuit, prepare your best placid smile and sit back for a handful of made-up awards that might help us single out what’s worth remembering about the first six months of this year.
But first . . .
Festival Fever
We may be looking backwards, but it’s already time to look ahead, too. The London Film Festival announced last week that it will kick off in October with the world premiere of the London-set Blitz (maybe that’s what made it shoot to the top of so many early rankings).
The Venice Film Festival, for its part, has announced that it will kick off with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, an unusual choice for a festival that has opened with studio projects before — Damien Chazelle’s First Man, last year’s Challengers — but never a sequel. And the Toronto International Film Festival has been busy as well, announcing the premieres of such major fall films as the Amy Adams-starring Nightbitch and the animated The Wild Robot.
Amid all of that, recent weeks have brought first-looks and trailers for Robert Zemeckis’s Here, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2, and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, all of which come with varying levels of awards buzz.
Later this summer I plan to get into why some of these glossy first-looks happen so early, and the endless juggling that goes into who premieres what and when. For now, suffice it to say all of these projects are hoping you’ll be intrigued enough to hold space for them on your own version of an Oscar predictions list.
🏆 And the Winners Are . . .
Without further ado, let’s hand out some awards for the accomplishments of the year thus far — and the people and titles I hope will be remembered one way or another when the year is through.
Best Box Office Success, Good Vibes Edition
I’ve already written about why it’s probably best not to get your hopes too high for Inside Out 2 to crack the best picture race, the way previous box office saviors Top Gun: Maverick and Barbie did. On the other hand, the higher it climbs past the billion-dollar mark at the global box office, the more easily that anti-animation bias in the best picture category might fade.
No matter how the Oscar futures shake out, let’s take this moment to appreciate the spring in our steps courtesy of this Pixar hit — a sequel that’s actually pretty good, a feather in the cap for the universally liked Amy Poehler and the host for one of the funniest voice performances in years courtesy of Ron Funches, playing the ever-helpful Pouchy.
Best Box Office Success, Bad Vibes Edition
With an estimated budget of $50 million and a $121 million global gross, Alex Garland’s somber apocalyptic saga Civil War isn’t exactly an Inside Out 2-level hit. But those kinds of numbers for a drama that ends in [spoiler alert] an extrajudicial killing in the Oval Office? It sounds weird to call that something to celebrate . . . but it really is!
A24 will have plenty of other potential contenders when it comes to actual awards season. Take, for example, Sing Sing, which when I rewatched it for an interview with Colman Domingo for tomorrow’s Prestige Junkie podcast seemed even more like a true best picture contender. Civil War probably won’t factor much into A24’s year-end awards budget — but as a genuine hit with genuine artistic ambitions, it’s worthy of at least this small celebration.
Best Director Who Absolutely Does Not Want an Oscar Nomination
Some directors and stars have trouble figuring out how to match the heights of their awards successes. Then there’s Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, who reunited just months after the Oscar triumph of Poor Things for Kinds of Kindness, an anthology film that’s been driving audiences crazy — exactly as intended.
As I discussed with Esther Zuckerman on the podcast a few weeks ago, Kinds of Kindness is a return to the more polarizing films of Lanthimos’s early career, like Dogtooth and Alps. It is almost guaranteed not to get any year-end awards attention, despite that Cannes best actor win for Jesse Plemons. And to everyone, Lanthimos included, that seems perfectly fine! Even as the Oscars get to a point where the Academy can embrace our most bonkers auteurs, it is okay for those auteurs to push themselves even further. The awards will surely be waiting if Lanthimos ever wants to return.
Best Actress Proving That Star Power Isn’t Dead
For us grownups who feel pretty sure that the events depicted on Euphoria are none of our business, Zendaya’s star power was something we just had to accept in good faith. She was magnetic on the red carpet and in interviews, blindingly famous while still making interesting choices as an actor. In small roles like in Dune or the Spider-Man films, she stood out in a way that promised even more great things to come.
Those great things came in quick succession this spring in Dune: Part Two and Challengers, hits of different scales that both benefited enormously from Zendaya’s wattage. Dune: Part Two will almost certainly be a major crafts contender at the Oscars, while Challengers could get more attention for its performances (more on that later). That’s provided it doesn’t get drowned out by director Luca Guadagnino’s next film, Queer, which is set for later this year.
When the year ends, though, it’s hard to imagine there will be a more consequential female star than Zendaya. We give Oscar nominations to older actors for their bodies of work all the time. Could a best actress nomination for Zendaya in Challengers be both about her performance and her incredible power as the kind of star we thought Hollywood couldn’t support anymore? I wouldn’t be mad about it.
Best Actor Proving That Star Power Isn’t Dead
Sure, this one is a bit of a cheat. Glen Powell’s big rom-com hit Anyone But You technically came out last year, and as of this writing I haven’t actually seen Twisters, his big attempt at summer blockbuster leading man status.
But sandwiched between those studio projects is Hit Man, the breezy crime caper from Richard Linklater that deserved a more proper theatrical run, but was still a sizable hit on Netflix when it launched in June. Co-written by Powell, it’s an exceptional argument for his versatility as a star — he’s a hunk who can convincingly play a nebbish, can hold his own in comic sequences and can deliver such a perfectly timed wink that it inspires spontaneous applause.
Whether or not Twisters is a success — I am perhaps overly invested in it being one — Powell clearly has the goods, and is doing some strategic thinking about how best to deploy them. I’d love to see a best actor nomination for his role in Hit Man, but I will also settle for 50 more years of Glen Powell vehicles, with an Oscar inevitably sprinkled in there somewhere.
Best Actress Proving That Sometimes Star Power Takes 90 Years to Emerge
The 94-year-old June Squibb did the full court press to promote her first-ever leading role in Thelma, the winsome revenge comedy that debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Having earned her first Oscar nomination a decade ago in Nebraska, could she be the indie spoiler in this year’s best actress race? Stranger things have happened — I know we haven’t forgotten To Leslie. With a small and hilarious voice role in Inside Out 2 as Nostalgia as well, Squibb is certainly the summer’s hardest-working nonagenarian movie star.
Best Supporting Accent
When Jeff Nichols’ biker drama debuted to muted response at Telluride last fall, the one awards potential anyone could agree on was for Jodie Comer and her thick Chicago accent, playing the wife to Austin Butler’s taciturn biker character. Now that The Bikeriders is finally out in theaters, after an awkward turn in which it was dropped by distributor 20th Century and picked up by Focus, Comer remains the undeniable standout.
Following her Emmy win for Killing Eve and Tony for Prima Facie, Comer and her greatness are no longer a surprise, but she lights up every single scene of The Bikeriders she’s in. The response to the movie as a whole was probably still too lukewarm to take it anywhere in the fall season, but Comer might still be able to pull off a few mentions — she really is that good.
Best Supporting Thighs
I say this with all due respect both to co-star Mike Faist, whose thighs are also on exceptional display in Challengers, and to the rest of Josh O’Connor’s performance, which I am already on the record saying deserves serious awards consideration. But O’Connor’s quads in short-shorts are doing a lot of impressive work in Guadagnino’s sweaty tennis saga. (Guadagnino’s clearly not the only one with thighs on the brain: Did you see that first look at Paul Mescal in Gladiator 2?)
Handsome men have historically been put through their paces when it comes to Oscars. Don’t laugh! They genuinely have a tough time being taken seriously! But maybe the tide is turning. An Oscar lineup with Mescal in lead and O’Connor in supporting — with the two having already completed filming a historical romance together — would have to be good for ratings, at least.
Best Breakthroughs
I’m fascinated to see what kind of awards path will be forged by I Saw the TV Glow, one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year and the arrival of a genuinely huge talent in writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. It’s an A24 release, which means critics groups aren’t likely to forget it, but it’s also a small and sometimes aggressively strange film, even by A24 standards.
Schoenbrun may wind up the focus of critical attention, but I hope the film leads to many more good things for stars Brigette Lundy Paine — best known until now as one of the rock star daughters in Bill & Ted Face the Music — and especially Justice Smith, who has been appealing in such big projects as Detective Pikachu and the Dungeons & Dragons movie but is on a whole other level here. At the very least, both of them should have far more interesting work headed their way based on what they do in Schoenbrun’s film.