Culture Crash: Taking a Look at the Flurry of Oscar Contenders

With summer blockbuster season firmly in the rear-view, the moviegoing landscape is entering its most prized season of the year: Awards season. Already, Jennifer Lopez has earned a lot of Oscar buzz for her turn in the true-life crime story Hustlers and Quentin Tarantino’s fantastic Once Upon a Time In Hollywood is a strong contender in a number of categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.

But now a whole slate of Oscar-hopefuls are gearing up for release and what they hope are long tailwinds that carry them all the way into February 2020. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman re-teams the legendary director with stars Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, and early screenings indicate the movie could be a strong player in the awards conversation, though it does have to deal with the anti-Netflix sentiment among award voters that likely struck down Roma’s Oscar run earlier this year.

Noah Baumbach’s movie Marriage Story has earned rave reviews, along with its stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, for its portrayal of an agonizing divorce – though, Marriage Story, too, is a Netflix film. Among non-Netflix entries this fall, director Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood starring Tom Hanks looks to be on the hunt to earn Mr. Rogers the Oscar gold that alluded the documentary about the seminal children’s TV giant, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Greta Gerwig will follow up Lady Bird this year with an adaptation of Little Women that stars a very Academy Award-friendly cast, led by Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet. Meanwhile, Trey Edward Shults’ movie, Waves, has debuted to strong acclaim of its own.

I’m Evan Rook.

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