As we speak, the Hollywood Foreign Press are filling out their ballots. They have until the end of January to vote on which films they believe are the best of the year. That means, in these next two weeks publicists will have to get to them somehow, through a global pandemic and a country at war with itself, to make sure their clients are remembered. I've been doing this for quite some time, over two decades now, and the only thing that has really changed is that the Golden Globes used to be mostly laughed off by celebrities, many of...

A lot of the characters in Julia Hart's I'm Your Woman live in a grey area. Rachel Brosnahan's Jean lives in a cloudy state since her husband, Eddie, is seemingly never home and doesn't give her information on his business. She knows it's bad but she doesn't ask. These are characters that are traditionally written off the margins, but Hart allows them to breathe and feel pain. Marsha Stephanie Blake's Teri is not like any character we've seen in a crime thriller before, and she takes ample opportunity to infuse her with nuance and fire. Teri seems to choose her...

Oscar season proper has just started. You might have noticed the For Your Consideration ads springing up. As it's been almost every day for the past four years, to paraphrase Springsteen, our lives have been "one long emergency." By the end of it, by now, most of us - Oscar voters included, are spent. We're feeling tapped out emotionally. We're exhausted by the news cycle, social media, and the utter absence of normal life due to a global pandemic. How do you get both? How do you get the Trump era AND Covid? Well, we did. But the powers that...

Awards Daily's Megan McLachlan talks to Palm Springs director Max Barbakow about when to steer clear of Groundhog Day references, whether Roy (J.K. Simmons) gets out of the loop, and what that first screening at Sundance was like. Palm Springs is the rare time-loop movie that starts when the character is already in the loop. When we meet Nyles (Andy Samberg), he's already been at the wedding he's attending many times. If you watch the film without knowing about the time-loop scenario, Nyles comes across as just an extremely intuitive life of the party, one who's very aware of everything...

When you watch Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, you will notice that this cast is unlike anything we've ever seen in a live action, original musical. There hasn't been a predominantly Black cast like this ever, and this movie is such a joy. Not only is it stuffed with unbelievable music, but it has so much heart. This is director David E. Talbert's passion project for nearly two decades, and it was so worth the wait. Doing a musical film is tricky enough to pull off, but Talbert achieves the impossible with the size and scale of Jingle Jangle. The...

Nate Parker was a star on the rise back in 2016. Although the country hadn’t yet felt the impact of the Me Too movement or how the movement devolved into something else entirely. Parker's film, Birth of a Nation, had been celebrated at Sundance and Fox Searchlight paid $20 million for distribution rights. Then a painful incident from his past, for which he had been acquitted in a court of law, erupted again in the court of social media outrage. We won't go into those details here. But those of us who remember it vividly know that even bringing it...

I first saw Nicole Beharie in the 2011 film Shame. There was and still is an electricity that she brings to every performance. Nicole gained larger fame as Abbie Mills in the Fox drama Sleepy Hollow. This past year, Nicole gained critical notoriety across the board with her illuminating performance in the film Miss Juneteenth. Nicole gives a breathtaking performance in this independent film about a small town in Texas celebrating a scholarship pageant for young black women. More and more folks are learning about Juneteenth, whether it be in connection to a sitcom doing an episode about the topic...

Awards Daily's Megan McLachlan talks to actress/screenwriter Mary Holland about Happiest Season's passionate fans and what she thinks of the discourse around the film. When Twitter has something to say about your movie, you know you've arrived. And this past fall, during the weekend in which Happiest Season dropped on Hulu, many fans took to social media to vent their same thought: Why didn't Abby (Kristen Stewart), the girlfriend who was forced to stay in the closet with Harper (Mackenzie Davis) for a family holiday, end up with Riley (Aubrey Plaza)? Co-screenwriter Mary Holland, who also plays Jane, couldn't have...

Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7 features some of the best actors working today. Telling the story of 8 defendants on trial for conspiracy to incite riots around the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the film boasts an ensemble cast for the ages. Frank Langella. Sacha Baron Cohen. Eddie Redmayne. Jeremy Strong. John Carroll Lynch. Mark Rylance. Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Michael Keaton. It's the kind of cast that feels tailor-made for the SAG Ensemble award. But amongst all of that high wattage star power, you absolutely cannot take your eyes off of the great Yahya Abdul-Mateen. Abdul-Mateen plays Bobby Seale, the...

With Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director seemingly mostly settled, that leaves Best Actress as one of the most competitive races this year. There are others, of course. The Screenplay categories appear to be competitive, as well as Animated Feature, and Documentary. This may or may not be true. The Oscars are still months away but at the moment, the consensus is with Nomadland and Chloe Zhao, along with Chadwick Boseman for Best Actor. But let's assume for the moment that our instincts are reliable, and that the most competitive category remains Best Actress. Here are the names I...

I was not prepared for the emotional intensity from Rod Lurie's The Outpost. Based on the 2012 nonfiction bestseller by Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, Lurie's film is breathtaking in its ambition and ferocious in its execution. The first half of the film introduces the men stationed at PRT Kamdesh in 2006 but the second half is an adrenaline rush as the Taliban invades the outpost. Lurie doesn't hesitate to put every single viewer on the ground during the Battle of Kamdesh. I can't stop thinking about the end of this film for several reasons....