Awards

As is tradition, the night before the Oscar ceremony takes place, the 37th Annual Golden Raspberry Awards will descend on Los Angeles to commemorate the worst that Hollywood had to offer in 2016. A mean-spirited diss-fest in the estimation of some, a good-natured ribbing to others, the so-called Razzies are twice as unpredictable and ten times as frank as the usual awards program. The expected categories of Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Actor/Actress share space with the distinctions of Worst Screen Combo and Worst Prequel, Remake, Ripoff, or Sequel at the ignominious ceremony. Some celebrities take the jokes in stride (Sandra Bullock famously showed up to receive her Worst Actress Razzie for All About Steve the day before she dropped by the Oscars to pick up her Best Actress prize for The Blind Side), but the program goes widely ignored by the industry overall.

It’s been a topsy-turvy week for awards prognosticators, relative even to the usual topsy-turviness of an industry based entirely on guesswork and speculation. Deadpool frightened and confused Oscar oddsmakers when it unexpectedly snatched up a Best Picture nomination from the Producers Guild Awards program on Tuesday, and then officially rejiggered everyone’s slate of predictions when director Tim Miller earned a nomination from the Directors Guild of America. What had been all but forgotten as a superhero oddball is staging a late-phase charge among the groups of professionals that vote for Oscar nominees — nothing is out of the question.

La La Land, duh. Manchester By the Sea, right. Moonlight, you better. Deadpool – excuse me? It’s true, Ryan Reynolds’ superhero movie has just been named one of the 10 best films of 2016 by the Producers Guild of America (via Variety). Many of us thought its Golden Globes nominations were just a result of the HFPA’s always wacky taste, but it seems the Deadpool virus has spread across the nation to multiple voting bodies, from the Writer’s Guild of America to the Producers.

The Golden Globes have a reputation as a kind of edgy awards ceremony. (Well, edgy by the standards of awards shows anyway.) But this year’s host, Jimmy Fallon, is about as edgy as sphere, and his monologue lacked the bite of other previous hosts like Ricky Gervais. The only really funny moment of the night came during one of the awards presentations, when Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig took the stage to give out the Golden Globes for Best Animated Feature.

The 2017 Golden Globes winners will be announced during the ceremony hosted by Jimmy Fallon on Sunday, January 8 at 5 p.m. PST/8 p.m. EST on NBC.

It’s only logical: after cleaning up across the board with city-specific critics’ groups far and wide (ceding the occasional prize to La La Land, its closest awards-season competitor), Moonlight was awarded the distinction of 2016’s finest film from the National Society of Film Critics. In a decision stunning exactly nobody, Barry Jenkins’ heartfelt triptych about a young gay man’s coming-of-age in Miami took the Best Picture prize as well as the Best Director for Jenkins. Left in the runners-up column were all-but-certain Oscar nominees La La Land and Manchester by the Sea. In fact, Damien Chazelle’s crowd-pleasing musical got kind of skunked by the NSFC; Chazelle landed the runner-up Best Director spot behind Jenkins, the film shared the runner-up spot for Best Cinematography with Silence, and star Emma Stone was shut out entirely.

The Golden Globes are a lot of fun. The stars show up to the Beverly Hilton in their most beautiful clothes. The host makes some jokes, the alcohol flows, and invariably, by the end of the night, someone does something a little foolish. What’s not to love? It’s all great.

Don’t let anyone tell you they know who is going to win the Golden Globes. Who knows what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of about 90 international journalists from all over the world, are going to do? (Seriously; their official site says they have “about 90 members.”) Predicting what any awards voting body is going to do is tricky to begin with; picking what a small and largely anonymous voting body with notoriously idiosyncratic taste is going to do basically impossible. Trying to pick the 2017 Golden Globe winners is like trying to predict the weather six months from now or who will win the Super Bowl in 2026. Unless you’ve got telepathic powers or the Grays Sports Almanac of Movie and Television Awards, you’re screwed.

Over the past few years, the American film industry has been taken to task for — let’s call it the “straight white guy”-ness of it all. Women, queer talents, and nonwhite artists have all come out of the woodwork to demand a piece of the pie currently being gobbled up by George Lucas and people who’d fit his general physical profile. One of the more organized expressions of this sea change has been the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, an effort to shame the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the disproportionate whiteness of their nominee slate. It’d be hard to argue that it’s been anything other than a force for equitable good, but The Paperboy director Lee Daniels doesn’t quite see it that way.

Following Sunday night’s Critics’ Choice Awards, the Golden Globes nominations have arrived. On Monday morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced their nominees for the 2017 awards, recognizing the best in film and television.

Film critics and awards pundits have been talking about Oscar frontrunners for months now, but it’s that time of the year when all that prognostication finally matters. This week marked the beginning of awards season with the Gotham Awards, the National Board of Review’s list of winners and yesterday’s New York Film Critics’ Circle picks. It’s still too early to tell who and what will win the gold come Oscar night, but when it comes to predictions, we’ve got you covered.

The end-of-year cavalcade of awards bestowments and ranked lists continues apace today, with one of the more prestigious critical bodies weighing in. Sight and Sound, the official film magazine of the BFI, runs an annual poll of United Kingdom-based writers and compiles a list of the year’s 20 finest films from the results. (Naturally, their cutoff dates for what qualifies as a “2016 release” are based on British release dates, which is how Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper landed on this list, though it will receive a U.S. run in the spring.) It’s a nicely balanced list well-stocked with festival favorites, but the most notable (and heartening) aspect of the ranking must be the strong showing from female filmmakers, who make up three of the top five selections.