NBR announced their winners today. For best film, the WB-friendly group chose the commercial and critical hit Mad Max: Fury Road, for which it didn’t shower with any other wins. Instead, they bestowed The Martian (20th-Century Fox) with all kinds of honours (not unlike the disparity in awards between 12 Years a Slave and Gravity at the Oscars two years ago): Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
They chose eight more films (instead of the sometimes eleven total) to fill out the field for their best films of the year: Creed (WB), Bridge of Spies and Inside Out (from Disney), The Hateful Eight (TWC), Sicario (Lionsgate), Room (A24), Straight Outta Compton, and BP frontrunner Spotlight (Open Road). Always full of surprises, Sicario and Straight Outta Compton were the two least expected films to make the list. Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight also landed Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Best Original Screenplay, Room’s Brie Larson also took Best Actress, and Sylvester Stallone took Best Supporting Actor. Inside Out also took Best Animated Feature. Paramount’s only win was ensemble for the unreleased The Big Short. Sicario was given the Spotlight Award, and Beasts of No Nation and Mustang were awarded the NBR Freedom of Expression Award.
While the group goes top-heavy on WB every year, they didn’t go for three of their films like sometimes in years past, so the middling Black Mass was left out. Fox Searchlight is an excellent campaigner, and 20th-Century Fox has the most promising slate of films, but left out of the NBR-equation was Brooklyn, Joy, and The Revenant (the latter two being released late in the year, along with The Hateful Eight). Also missing was any representation from Focus Features. Both Suffragette and The Danish Girl are struggling to reach overall high critical marks. SPC was absent outside of Foreign Language Film, along with its parent company Sony, which only has the mixed reviewed Concussion as an award push this year.
Perhaps one of the biggest omissions was TWC’s Carol. Since 2009, the studio has always gotten at least one film onto their list, with Tarantino never having missed since Kill Bill. Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven made the list in 2002. However, as we saw in 2013, Fruitvale Station landed here, but it was Philomena that was TWC’s eventual big Oscar push. It may be a sign for things to come, or it may be much ado about nothing. Other than that, there were no surprises as far as omissions.
The biggest surprise as far as what got in was probably Sicario, even though, in retrospect, it wasn’t as much of an outlier as the details show. Lionsgate doesn’t have an especially notable track record with the NBR (Precious missed the main list, as well as 3:10 to Yuma and The Girl with the Pearl Earring), but, then, they have actually made an overall strong showing here and there over the years (Gods and Monsters, Monster’s Ball, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower did make the main list). Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners made the list two years ago, but that could have easily been chalked up to it being a WB release. Or perhaps not.
Universal seems to have established a good track record in recent years. Previous inclusions included Unbroken (2014), Lone Survivor (2013), and Les Misérables (2012). This year, their initial big award push was Steve Jobs, which has tanked at the box-office (Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours also missed in 2010). Despite this, they singled out semi-surprise nominee Straight Outta Compton.
A24 had last year’s winner A Most Violent Year, which wouldn’t have opened for another month, so them getting Room in was mostly expected. The same goes for Spotlight, which is a much bigger award push than Open Road’s Nightcrawler--also an NBR selection--the year before.
For Best Director, the group tends to go for Hollywood veterans (especially if you’re Clint Eastwood). Ridley Scott, who has been a near household name (or should be) since Alien in 1979, has never won. His Martian is arguably his most successful film both critically and commercially since his science-fiction horror classic. Their selections for Best Original Screenplay have been pretty random since they started the category in 2003, especially the last few years. However, this year, they went for rewarding Quentin Tarantino for the first time. For Best Adapted Screenplay, they generally go for screenwriting stalwarts. However, today they went for Martian's Drew Goddard, who received some attention for horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods a few years ago, and is still establishing himself on the award circuit.
For Best Actor, they tend to go for men who are in the awards hunt, though not necessarily from mainstream hits. Damon had never won before. Neither had Sylvester Stallone, who is getting some of the best ink of his career and won Best Supporting Actor. That category can be a little off kilter at times, but, for the most part, they generally stick to the script. Winning Best Actress or Supporting Actress can be more iffy and sometimes a curse. In the last five years, at least three out of five times have been bad luck for both categories as far as Oscar is concerned. However, Brie Larson is a lock for Best Actress. Jennifer Jason Leigh benefits from a showy role and the only female in her cast, along with decades of overlooked critically celebrated work. She has never hit an Oscar nod, even in a weak year like 1994 when she had Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (her biggest play was a year later with Georgia, when the category was obscenely competitive). The Hateful Eight, however, may end up being her biggest commercial hit, and she has Harvey Weinstein behind her. The curse may not apply to both categories, as it certainly didn’t from 2007 – 2009.
Foreign Language Film frontrunner Son of Saul (SPC) won its category. Its category included Goodnight Mommy (Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz; Radius-TWC; Austria; $1.2M; MC 81), Mediterranea (Jonas Carpignano; IFC; multi-country; MC 77), Phoenix (Christian Petzold; IFC; German/Poland; $3.2M; MC 90), The Second Mother (Anna Muylaert; Oscilloscope; Brazil; $0.4M+; MC 82), and The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky; Drafthouse; Ukraine/Netherlands; $0.2M; MC 78).
Amy (A24; $8.4M domestic; 85 MC) won Best Documentary. The list that included: Best of Enemies (Magnolia: MC 77, $0.9M domestic; about the televised debates in 1968 between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley), The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (PBS: MC 79; $0.5M domestic), The Diplomat (about ambassador Richard Holbrooke, released through HBO in October), Listen to Me Marlon (about Marlon Brando, it was released 29 June through Showtime with an 87 MC and $0.4M domestic), and The Look of Silence (Drafthouse; Joshua Oppenheimer’s latest has a 92 MC and $0.1M domestic).
While the group is one of the oldest and has been handing out awards since the early 20th-century, it can also be very random and eclectic, and has slowly been losing “credibility” over the years as far as Oscar predicting goes. Last year’s winner A Most Violent Year was the first film in decades to have not really made a dent in the Oscar race. There’s also probably a great deal of studio partiality, which affects matters a great deal.
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