The 56th New York Film Festival has come and gone, and as previously said, this year didn’t bolster any new entries into the Oscar race. Instead, we have six films that already premiered continuing their run into awards season with an extra film festival in their back pocket. So here’s what happened.
The opening film was The Favourite, and while the Yorgos Lanthimos film entered into NYFF with a 96% from Rotten Tomatoes, it only dropped one percent from one additional bad review, so that’s pretty great. The film continues to be a likely bet for the top categories, including Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, and a fair share of tech nominations. Also, late word from Fox Searchlight is that they have officially decided to push star Olivia Colman in Lead Actress and drop both Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz down into Supporting Actress. While Colman could arguably have won the Supporting Actress category from word of mouth alone, this still points to Stone and Colman landing nominations in different categories, which makes sense and prevents in-fighting in the same category.
Next up is Wildlife, the Paul Dano drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan. It’s not really at the top of the heap yet for any categories, but as it opens this weekend, maybe a nice haul at the independent box office could recharge its chances. One side note, the film entered the festival with a 100% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes, but someone didn’t like it, so now it’s down to 98%.
The Coen Brothers showed up with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and the Netflix anthology film has dropped two percent from its initial Rotten Tomatoes score, now at 91% instead of 93%. Like Wildlife, Scruggs is not being touted very early on. That may have to do with another film that Netflix has coming up: Roma, which also screened here at NYFF. Alfonso Cuaron’s film has done nothing but further impress audiences, and now it’s up from 98% to 99%. I know, these numbers might sound tedious, but further good reviews are better than an onslaught of negative reviews. Roma leads the odds at Gold Derby, Indiewire, and a few others as the early Best Picture frontrunner.
My pick right now to win Best Picture was also here at New York, If Beale Street Could Talk. The film jumped up one percent from 92 to 93, and remains one of the more heavily anticipated films of November. The film is likely, at this stage, to score nominations in Picture, Director, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, and possibly sneak into the Lead Actress and Supporting Actor categories, as well as a few tech nods.
And finally, the new Willem Dafoe film At Eternity’s Gate was here as well. It entered NYFF with the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score at 80%, and unfortunately dropped 3 percent to 77. Right now Dafoe is starting to gain traction in the very heated Best Actor race, and if the critic’s groups in early December really go for him, he could easily land a slot, but he’s gonna be about it for the film at the Oscars.
So, a quick little wrap-up here, but at this stage, we’re waiting on AFI Fest next month to show off the next group of contenders that didn’t screen early on, and we’ll also see a few films that skipped the festival circuit release sight unseen, so there’s still a lot to consider when predicting this year’s Oscars.
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