‘Drive My Car’ Wins Best Picture Award From National Society of Film Critics

Clayton Davis The best picture prize is what every studio and filmmaker covets, whether they publicly admit it or not. But, of course, it would help if you had the star power to make it happen. Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett both have proven that they have said star power with the amount of best picture nominees (and winners) they’ve appeared in over their careers.

Clayton Davis A tsunami of buzz and Oscar-telling indicators drop on Thursday, with the major guilds announcing award nominations. The Directors Guild of America (DGA), Writers Guild of America (WGA), Producers Guild of America (PGA) and American Cinema Editors (ACE Eddies) all serve as critical barometers for the Academy Awards, especially in the race for best picture.DGA has averaged four of their five nominees landing in the Oscars’ best director category, including last year with Aaron Sorkin (“The Trial of the Chicago 7”) getting bumped for Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”).

Clayton Davis Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” has been a critical darling, after garnering stellar reviews and winning the top prize from the New York, Los Angeles and National Society of Film Critics. The last films to win those three prestigious groups were Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” (2009) and David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (2010), with the former winning the Oscar for best picture.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorBack in 2018, “Black Panther” cracked the best picture race and showed that the industry was ready to recognize the superhero movie. It also landed five other nominations and made Oscar history when Ruth E.

UPDATED with new date: The New York Film Critics Circle said the new date for its previously postponed 2022 awards ceremony will be Wednesday, March 16 at TAO Downtown in Manhattan.

best picture race continues to narrow, Variety staffers take a look at some of the individual scenes that made us laugh, cry and think — sometimes at the same time.“Being the Ricardos”(Amazon) Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) pulls Madeline (Alia Shawkat), the only female writer on Ball’s “I Love Lucy,” out of the writers room for a little one-on-one discussion about a scene that Lucy has been trying to make funnier — or at least make logical, and therefore funny. Like Madeline, Lucy is a smart, funny, strong women in the early 1950s — a unicorn in this man’s world in which they have mastered “work-arounds.” This scene from writer-director Aaron Sorkin is an honest yet sharp and somewhat frustrating talk about the TV character, the way the character is treated on the show and what type of comedy works.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop made headlines awhile back thanks to the release of the “This Smells Like My Vagina” candles, and during her Friday night appearance on “The Tonight Show” she discussed the latest offering in Goop’s vaginal candle line.

those prognosticators who know that, outliers like “Parasite” notwithstanding, the Oscars tend to focus on upbeat, middlebrow studio product that’s in the English language.awards bloggers: why does DRIVE MY CAR keep winning things???us: it's a beautiful filmawards bloggers: what about it is connecting with voters?us: everyone was cryingawards bloggers: this is a case for the hardy boys!!!Critics, say the awards journos, are being contrarian, ivory-tower snobs — or even (gasp!) globalists:Some people on here are really having a normal one about Drive My Car's awards sweep, Jesus Christ. pic.twitter.com/1HmXMGV5CYThe critic-handicapper divide widened further when The New York Times ran a piece by Manohla Dargis and A.O Scott called “And the 2022 Oscar Nominees Should Be…” There’s nothing revolutionary about critics applying their personal choices to “Hollywood’s biggest night”; for years, Siskel & Ebert hosted an annual episode called “If We Picked the Oscars.”Somehow, the fact that Dargis and Scott mentioned performances like Fabrizio Rongione in “Azor” and Toko Miura in, yes, “Drive My Car,” was treated by the internet’s awards-industrial complex as shots fired across the bow.

EXCLUSIVE: The Santa Barbara Film Festival will be getting a touch of Lucy and Desi by way of honoring another pair of major stars.

I argued that there was one easy way to help a bigger variety of films receive nominations for Best Picture: Junk the system that produced a variable number of nominees and go back to a flat 10 nominees, the system that was in place in 2010 and 2011.Now we’ll get to see if I knew what I was talking about.My point in late 2018 was that the move to a variable number of nominations also reduced the number of lines on the Best Picture nominating ballot from 10 to five, giving voters no reason to reach for adventurous or offbeat choices to fill those slots.“Enough with the variable-nominee silliness, AMPAS,” I wrote. “Its very existence narrows the thinking of people who ought to be embracing all that filmmakers have to of fer.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the full list of movies that are eligible for the Best Picture prize at the upcoming 2022 Academy Awards.

EXCLUSIVE: A new musical stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning 1959 film Black Orpheus is being readied for a Broadway premiere next season, producers said today. The production will feature a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz, original music by Brazilian music icon Sergio Mendes, and direction and choreography by Sergio Trujillo, the Tony-winning choreographer of Ain’t Too Proud.

Best Picture: “The Harder They Fall”Best Director: Jeymes Samuel (“The Harder They Fall”)Best Screenplay: “Don’t Look Up” (Adam McKay)Best Actor: Will Smith (“King Richard”)Best Actress: Jennifer Hudson (“Respect”)Best Supporting Actor: Corey Hawkins (“The Tragedy of Macbeth”)Best Supporting Actress: Aunjanue Ellis (“King Richard”)Breakout Actor: Saniyya Sidney (“King Richard”)Best Ensemble: “The Harder They Fall”Emerging Director: Reinaldo Marcus Green (“King Richard”)Best Music: “The Harder They Fall” (Jeymes Samuel, Kid Cudi, Jay-Z)Best Independent Feature: “Who We Are”Best Documentary: “Summer of Soul”

EXCLUSIVE: Benedict Cumberbatch has been named the honoree of the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard Award, which will be presented March 9 following an in-person conversation I will moderate about his career. That résumé includes Oscar-nominated turns in movies like The Imitation Game and Emmy-winning work in the iconic Sherlock Holmes series. It also includes a banner 2021 not only with his critically acclaimed SAG- and Critics Choice-nominated Oscar-buzzed performance in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, but also praised work in The Courier, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, as well as reprising Dr. Peter Strange in the uber-blockbuster Spider-Man: No Way Home. 

In Tre’vell Anderson’s L.A. Times piece “There is room for everyone: 14 film critics on making media more inclusive,” he states, “Those who work for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, among others, receive preferential treatment for talent interviews and screening access. And traditional publications tend to have traditional critics. The result is a community of discourse around film and art that is fairly homogeneous and ignores many members of the filmmaking and filmgoing communities across all demographics.”

The adulation for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” continues. After winning Best Film from both the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle, Japan’s submission for the International Film Oscar dominated the winner’s list from the National Society of Critics.

The National Society of Film Critics has named Drive My Car for its Best Picture Awards of 2021.