On the Beat

Emilia Pérez has set an Oscars record with thirteen nominations, the most ever for a non-English language film—perhaps indicative of a more diverse Academy and an expanding appetite for international cinema. (The previous record holders were Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Roma, which earned ten nominations each.) Like many of us, I had wondered if the viral parodies on the internet would affect Emilia Pérez’s chances. But as we learn time and again, the internet is not real life: Emilia Pérez clearly continues to resonate deeply with offline awards bodies after taking home top prizes at the Golden Globes.

Among the film’s nominations are two for Best Original Song, Best ing Actress for Zoe Saldaña, and Best Actress for Karla Sofía Gascón, who becomes the first openly transgender performer to be so honored. That latter category has been fascinating and wildly unpredictable this year; if you’d asked me three months ago, I would have confidently told you that Nicole Kidman, Saoirse Ronan and Angelina Jolie all had to watch out for Marianne Jean-Baptiste. (All missed out, and Jean-Baptiste’s snub cuts the deepest).

ing Gascón is Fernanda Torres for I’m Still Here and fellow Golden Globe winner Demi Moore, plus Mikey Madison and Cynthia Erivo. Omissions aside, it’s a delightful and surprising quintet, most evidently with Torres’ recognition. She’s the second Brazilian to be nominated in the category; the first was her mother Fernanda Montenegro for Central Station in 1999. (Gwyneth Paltrow took that award.) Though a surprise on the night, Torres’ Golden Globe win was no flash in the pan. Letterboxd , especially our Brazilian community, have known this all along, with I’m Still Here still sitting at an incredible 4.4 average on Letterboxd. (The film also landed a much-deserved spot in the Best Picture ten, and an International Feature Film nomination.)

Last point on the acting categories: though the Oscars feels more open to international cinema every year, it is important to once again recognize the continuing phenomenon of nominees with majority non-white casts being shut out of the acting races. Nickel Boys’ Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay nominations are outstanding, but in a just world, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor would be nominated in ing Actress, and Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson both deserve to be counted into the conversation. No cinematography nom for Jomo Fray is a crying shame, too.

That category nonetheless is an embarrassment of riches; the great Ed Lachman, a regular Todd Haynes collaborator, earns Maria’s sole Oscar nomination (and Lachman’s fourth). Greig Fraser is nominated for the visual spectacle of Dune: Part Two, three years after winning for the first, and I’m never not thinking about what Denis Villeneuve told us about how he and Fraser decided to shoot Giedi Prime in infrared. Regular Robert Eggers collaborator Jarin Blaschke earns his second Oscar nod, for Nosferatu, which showed strongly in the craft categories, gaining recognition for production design, make-up and hair, and costumes.

Letterboxd is Obsessed With...

After one of the best limited openings of 2024 (which Deadline very kindly attributed to the attention of dedicated Letterboxd ), The Brutalist goes wide this weekend in the US, as well as UK, Irish, Australian and NZ cinemas (with more regions to come). Brady Corbet’s film, about Hungarian immigrant architect László Toth (Adrien Brody), holds one of Guy Pearce’s best performances of his career as the charming but tempestuous Harrison Lee Van Buren. Pearce’s first-ever Oscar nomination, at 57, is long-overdue recognition. Not only has he starred in numerous iconic films—The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Memento among them—but also, over the past decade, he has lent his star power to many independent films and shows at home in Australia and internationally.

The actor has been a delightful presence this awards season, charming his way across red carpets with frank self-deprecation in the face of wall-to-wall acclaim for his performance. Pearce’s Mr. Van Buren was immediately among your favorite parts of The Brutalist—Rcellisu saying he is “acting at Daniel Day-Lewis levels here”—and within that, his wonderful delivery of: “I find our conversations persuasive and intellectually stimulating”. (Many of you have borrowed that as an apt descriptor of the film itself.)

The actor says he enjoys the different identities that a character’s grooming can invite, recalling his facial hair in Todd Haynes’ 2011 Mildred Pierce adaptation (for which Pearce won a Best ing Actor Emmy).

“Mildred Pierce, that was more of a pencil-thin sort of mustache,” he recalls. “I keeping it shaved from my nose, halfway down, and then this thin line of the mustache. It’s always funny when you have to do things like that—during the shooting, you have to go out into the real world, and you might have a perm, or blue-black hair, or some weird facial hair, and you’re apologizing to people as you’re buying something from their shop. It definitely changes people’s interaction with you.”

Carpet Check

The coming days see the Satellite Awards on Sunday, the Writers’ Guild’s voting deadline on Monday, and Producers’ Guild voting closing Thursday January 30. Until then, let’s pull apart the Oscar nominations the best way we know how—lists! September 5 s the ranks of May December and First Reformed as a lone screenplay nominee; podcast host Matthew Anderson has compiled a list of all such films, and an accompanying list of those that went onto win, including last year’s American Fiction. Meanwhile, awards-list regular Léo Barbosa has the full list of all this year’s nominees, with detailed notes. Using our Stats for Lists feature gave me the fun reminder that Kodi Smit-Mhee is in two Oscar-nominated films this year.

In honor of Pearce’s mustache, I fell down a rabbit hole of mustache lists, and you guys delivered. Barbora will not be judged for their collection of movies where there’s a guy with a mustache and I have a crush on him (Colin Farrell in The Lobster being a shining example). Tentin Quarantino has ranked Kurt Russell’s mustaches from Tombstone to The Christmas Chronicles, while Emma’s journalistic opus, movies where actors who normally do not have mustaches have mustaches, includes (some) notes on whether said mustaches were real. Meanwhile, Pixiegirl has created a master list of crimes against facial hair, titled I’m shaving his mustache.

Your Consideration

Voters and awards bodies decide how awards season ends, but the conversation starts on Letterboxd. Here’s this week’s crop of the best reviews of 2024 awards season films. If you’d like to be featured here, tag your reviews best in show for consideration.

Eric on Nickel Boys:

“A work as formally inventive as this one usually sacrifices character and interiority in service of that artistic leap. Nickel Boys miraculously manages to do the opposite, actually bringing the viewer closer to the eponymous black youths of the film’s title. Director RaMell Ross hasn’t necessarily created a new filmic language (he’s at least beholden to Terrence Malick's equally impressionistic style), but the ‘first person’ vantage point gives it an added intimacy that would be annoying if it wasn’t so poetically implemented.”

Movie Good or Movie Bad? on The Substance:

“The Substance balances sleek presentation and grotesque body horror, as we witness Elisabeth Sparkle reckon with the objectifying gaze of male executives and the public as she is a star that is being forgotten and pushed out. And maybe I missed it from trailers, but I quickly understood how Elisabeth would reconnect with her younger self, and the result is deeply upsetting. Body horror [recently] has felt so tame to me and I felt like The Substance just continuously delivered. It’s never trying to be more deep than the lens it is presenting and I think that may turn off some, but I was beyond happy. Icing on the cake for sickos at the movies this year!”

Anabel on A Real Pain:

“So deftly put together, each moment looping back to reflect on another. All of it making such a cohesive whole. Kieran Culkin is such a knockout of a dramedic actor, whew. Embodies precisely that fragile, dickish charisma, half compensating, half being honest. And then you've got Jesse Eisenberg, the perfect foil: always the tour guide and never the attraction. Always the attraction but also the mess. We’re all just stopping by in each other’s lives, iring or else commiserating the view. You can be told facts but what do they mean for experience? How do you practice empathy without commonality—how far are two lives really the same? Is sympathy enough? How is any of this fair?”