97th Academy Awards Preview & Predictions

It's Oscar time once again, folks!  And that means that for the TENTH time(!) my colleague Mike Drinan and I will regale you with our predictions for who wins what awards!

Best Picture

Anora

The Brutalist

A Complete Unknown

Conclave

Dune Part Two

Emilia Pérez

I'm Still Here

Nickel Boys

The Substance

Wicked

Justin: It's a solid field this year based on the seven films I've seen (you can click on my individual reviews above).  I'm hoping to cram the last three nominees in over the next five days.  I loved Anora, A Complete Unknown, Dune and The Substance (only the fourth horror film to garner a Best Picture nod), enjoyed Conclave, and had mixed feelings about Wicked and Emilia Pérez.  For months it felt like The Brutalist was primed to take this award, but then Anora seemingly came out of nowhere and snagged the PGA award.  Oddsmakers are also not sleeping on Conclave, which could pull off an upset.  But I'll go with the modern-day Cinderella story to take home the gold.

Pick: Anora

Mike: I’ve only seen A Complete Unknown out of the bunch this year but I’ve wanted to see the majority of these nominees, except for Wicked. When I saw trailers for The Brutalist I was certain it was going to be the Best Picture. It just checked all the boxes for your typical Oscar winner, but then Anora kept popping up in coversations with Conclave and now it seems as if The Brutalist has fallen out of favor. Can’t sleep on Conclave though since voters love a good Catholic church drama. Like you, I’m going with Anora. There’s too much consistency in the response.

Pick: Anora

WWE Elimination Chamber 2025 Preview & Predictions

It's February, er, March and that means it's time once again for WWE Elimination Chamber, the annual event where the world championship NOT being defended against the Royal Rumble winner gets a top contender for WrestleMania.  

Like Hell in a Cell, the Chamber was once one of WWE's most brutal gimmick matches, and like the Cell it was rather defanged during the PG era.  It almost seems redundant to have this match on the same PPV calendar as WarGames given how influenced by the latter was its inception, but whatever.  There have been some great Chamber matches over the years and some not-so-great ones (2002 I'm looking in your general direction), but it's usually a moderately enjoyable 35 minutes.  Having two on one show is taxing though, just like WarGames and the Rumble.

This year's lineup is only four bouts and on paper it's a decent enough slate.  Let's take a look.

Tiffany Stratton & Trish Stratus vs. Nia Jax & Candice LaRae

Okay I'm not sure why this is on here as it smacks of "free TV match," but here we are.  I'll keep saying it every time she's featured on a PPV, but if Triple H's decisions around who gets included on PPVs is all about talent regardless of ethnicity, then what in the blue fuck is Nia Jax doing on this show?  She stinks, period.  I don't imagine they brought Trish back to team with Tiffany just for them to lose, so they're my pick.

Pick: Trishany Strattonus

Oscar Film Journal: The English Patient (1996)

Welcome to another edition of the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  Still plugging away at some older films I missed when they were new...

Today's subject is The English Patient, an epic romantic war drama that pulled in a staggering twelve Oscar nominations and walked away with nine awards, including Best Picture.  This was a film I resented at the time due to the fact that it beat out Fargo (a film I still consider basically perfect), but you can't form an intelligent opinion of a movie without seeing it, now can you?

The English Patient was written and directed by Anthony Minghella (based on the 1992 novel), and stars Ralph Fiennes, Kristen Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche, and Willem Dafoe.  The story concerns both the lead-up to and aftermath of a plane crash, more precisely a biplane shot down by the Germans during World War II.  Of the plane's two passengers only one (Fiennes) survives, with severe burns all over his body.  He is taken to an Italian monastery and cared for by a French-Canadian nurse, who coaxes out of him some details of who he is and why he was in that plane.  Over the course of the film's 160-plus minutes we learn that although he speaks with an English accent, he is actually a Hungarian map-maker named Lazslo Almasy, stationed in North Africa in the late 1930s.  Almasy fell in love with another man's wife and the two had an affair, which the husband eventually discovered.  As this backstory is being recounted a wounded Canadian intelligence agent named Caravaggio arrives on the scene, showing great interest in Almasy and suspecting him of being the reason for Caravaggio's capture and torture at the hands of the Germans.  Meanwhile the nurse begins to fall in love with a Sikh bomb squad engineer stationed in the area.

Oscar Film Journal: Libeled Lady (1936)

Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal here at Enuffa.com, where I'm slowly chipping away at the 280-something Best Picture nominees I haven't seen....

We're back in the 1930s with a romantic comedy called Libeled Lady, starring a pair of actors who were considered America's sweethearts back in the day, William Powell and Myrna Loy, plus Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow.  Powell and Loy starred in 13 films together, two of them in the year 1936, both nominated for Best Picture.  This particular film is about wealthy heiress Connie Allenbury (Loy), falsely accused by a newspaper of breaking up a marriage.  In retaliation she sues the paper, whose workaholic managing editor Warren Haggerty (Tracy) concocts a plan to stage an actual scandal in which to catch her, thus rendering the lawsuit easily dismissed.  Haggerty enlists his friend, former reporter Bill Chandler, to get married on paper to his own fiancée Gladys (Harlow) and then seduce Connie so Gladys can publicly discover the "affair."  But things don't go as planned, first because Connie initially doesn't show much interest in Bill, and later because the two of them actually start to fall in love.

Oscar Film Journal: Anora (2024)

Welcome to another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  Time for another 2024 nominee (only three more to go)!

Over the weekend I caught the unusual new comedy-drama Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker, about a high-priced stripper/escort who falls in love and elopes with the son of a Russian oligarch, only for things to go awry when the boy's domineering parents find out about the marriage.  That's about all the plot summary I can divulge without spoiling anything.

Mikey Madison gives a tour de force as the title character (who prefers to be called Ani), a stalwart, streetwise Russian-American living in Brooklyn.  Her work routine consists of flirting with her club's clientele and soliciting expensive private dances, occasionally offering more intimate services if the price is right.  Ani is presented not as a shame-filled woman desperate to improve her station, but as a confident sex worker fully in control of her craft, as it were.  She clearly enjoys what she does and mostly has loving relationships with her coworkers (one catty rival excepted).  But when she meets Ivan, a gentle and impressionable 21-year-old with seemingly unlimited cash, she jumps at the chance to make some serious bank while letting the kid fall for her, ultimately falling for him too.  The film initially feels like a modern Cinderella story of sorts, which is what I expected going into it.  But after the first act it takes a very (pleasantly) surprising turn.

Oscar Film Journal: Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  We're back in the 20-teens for this one...

Today it's the 2017 romantic drama Call Me By Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, directed by Luca Guadagnino, and written by James Ivory (who directed A Room With a View), from the novel by André Aciman.  CMBYN is the story of two young men who meet in 1980s Italy and reluctantly fall in love over the span of a summer.  Chalamet plays Elio, a precocious 17-year-old living with his parents.  His father invites one of his grad students, the 24-year-old Oliver (Hammer) to stay with them for the season.  Elio and Oliver initially don't seem to get along well but slowly they develop an almost brotherly bond, which gives way to an unspoken attraction.  Elio is the first to broach the subject but Oliver is reluctant to pursue anything, fearing the social implications.  Eventually the two give in to their feelings and share a very intense but sad romance in the short time remaining before Oliver has to return to the US.

Oscar Film Journal: The Big Chill (1983)

Welcome to another round of Oscar Film Journal shenanigans, here at Enuffa.com!

Heading to the 1980s once again for a film that I'd seen once a long time ago but needed to rewatch in order to write about it.  It's Lawrence Kasdan's ensemble piece The Big Chill, starring Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Berenger, William Hurt, Mary Kay Place, JoBeth Williams, Meg Tilly, and infamously an uncredited Kevin Costner as various unidentifiable body part closeups of a dressed corpse.  

The film takes place over a weekend in South Carolina, when a group of old college buddies reunites for a friend's funeral.  Alex Marshall committed suicide for reasons the film doesn't disclose, and the group decide to spend a couple nights at the summer home of Harold (Kline) and Sarah (Close).  During those two days they talk, reminisce, argue, and wonder how they all went from idealistic 60s college kids to disillusioned 80s thirty-somethings.  Each of them has their issues and personality quirks; Sarah had an affair with Alex five years earlier and feels guilty that it hurt their friendship, Harold has become a successful, sometimes unscrupulous businessman and rather conservative, Michael (Goldblum) is a womanizer who works for People magazine but hates it, Sam (Berenger) has a hit TV cop show but his marriage has recently ended, Nick (Hurt) is a former TV psychologist and veteran who is now impotent and addicted to cocaine, Karen (Williams) is in a loveless marriage and has long carried a torch for Sam, Meg (Place) is chronically single but wants to have a baby, and Chloe (Tilly) is Alex's girlfriend who seems too emotionally immature to deal with the loss she's just experienced.  

Oscar Film Journal: Brooklyn (2015)

Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  We're heading back to the mid-20-teens....

And from there back to the early 1950s for John Crowley's romantic period drama Brooklyn, about an Irish immigrant starting a new life in America.  Saoirse Ronan stars as Eilis Lacey, a young woman with a go-nowhere job at a local grocery store in a small Irish town.  Eilis lives with her mother and sister and has basically no prospects, professional or romantic.  A priest who has already emigrated to New York sponsors Eilis's relocation and sets her up at a boarding house, arranges a department store job, and also enrolls her in night classes to learn accounting.  She meets an Italian-American boy named Tony and they immediately hit it off.  Everything is going well for Eilis in America, but a sudden family issue summons her back to Ireland, where her mother and friends and a well-to-do neighborhood fella named Jim Farrell all pressure her to stay, leaving her torn between her successful new life and her Irish roots.

Oscar Film Journal: Tender Mercies (1983)

And we're back with another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com, once again revisiting an 80s film that got the big nod (With this one under my belt I've now watched half the 1980s nominees).

Today it's the 1983 drama Tender Mercies, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Robert Duvall as a Mac Sledge, a former country & western singer, now a penniless drifter.  Mac stays with a friend at a roadside motel one night, they get drunk, and the friend beats him up and ditches him there.  The next morning instead of running out on his bill, he goes to the owner, a lonely widow named Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) and offers to work it off.  That leads to him becoming her employee, and later the two get married.  Mac develops a fatherly relationship with Rosa's son, filling a void left by the daughter he's no longer allowed to see.  One day a traveling young country band stops by for gas, having read a story about Mac in the local paper.  The band are big fans of his work, and over the course of a few weeks, coax him back into the music business.  At the same time Mac's daughter Sue Anne pays him a visit and the two begin to reconnect.

Oscar Film Journal: A Room with a View (1986)

Welcome to another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  

Today I'm traveling back to the 1980s, and from the 1980s back to the turn of the century, via James Ivory's 1986 romance film A Room with a View, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Julian Sands, Maggie Smith and Daniel Day-Lewis.  Based on E.M. Forster's 1908 novel, ARWAV tells the story of Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman who meets and becomes interested in a free-spirited fellow countryman named George Emerson while on holiday in Florence.  The two share a conversation and an awkward kiss, but Lucy's older cousin Charlotte witnesses the incident and swears Lucy to secrecy.  Back in England Lucy agrees to marry an uptight fop named Cecil Vyse, but things become complicated when George and his father move into the neighborhood, and Lucy must decide which gentleman's company she'd prefer.

This film was released to universal acclaim and was nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture, and, well.....I don't get it.  A Room with a View felt to me like what popcorn filmgoers think of when they think "stuffy award-winning period piece."  The source material was meant to be kind of a satirical look at well-to-do British society in the early 1900s, but for me the film didn't convey much of this humor at all, aside from Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal being amusing; he's a hopelessly prim and proper dandy who isn't even able to kiss a girl without knocking the glasses off his face.  But other than that I didn't feel much of anything throughout this film.

Oscar Film Journal: The Red Shoes (1948)

Welcome back to another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, 2025!  

Today I'll be reviewing a classic early color film from 1948, a British production entitled The Red Shoes, co-directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  This whimsical film is about an up-and-coming ballet dancer who becomes an overnight sensation but is quickly forced to choose between her art and her love life, by her domineering company director.  The narrative is simple and familiar, but the storytelling is handled so artfully, particularly in a stunning 17-minute ballet centerpiece, that the film defies genre and has become a favorite of many lauded directors.

Oscar Film Journal: Pygmalion (1938)

Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  Still making my way through the 1930s to fill in the gaps....

Today I'm talkin' about the 1938 Best Pic nominee Pygmalion, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw, itself inspired by a Greek myth about a sculptor who falls in love with one of his creations, causing her to come to life.  The play and film however are about a professor of linguists named Higgins, who as a social experiment takes a poor flower girl Eliza under his wing and teaches her to be classy and sophisticated, hoping to pass her off to his contemporaries as a duchess.  Eliza agrees to the arrangement as a way to advance socially but Higgins is very callous in his training and sees her as subhuman, often brutal in his dismissiveness.  As she becomes more and more educated the two of them develop chemistry together, but Eliza also begins to assert her independence, with Higgins both annoyed and intrigued by her newfound confidence.

Oscar Film Journal: Emilia Pérez (2024)

Welcome to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  Chipping away at this year's nominees....

With that in mind, let's talk about the new crime musical Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard and starring Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon and Selena Gomez.  Emilia Pérez concerns a hardworking but unappreciated Mexican lawyer named Rita, whose clientele mostly consists of sleazy businessman types for whom she manages to get acquittals despite thinking they're obviously guilty.  One night she receives a mysterious phone call offering millions of tax-free dollars to arrange an unspecified favor.  She is blindfolded and thrown in a van, and it turns out her strange benefactor is a powerful drug lord named "Manitas" Del Monte.  Manitas enlists Rita to procure a secret gender reassignment procedure so he can disappear and assume a new, fulfilling life as a woman, and also to move his wife and sons to Switzerland to ensure their safety.  The plan goes off without a hitch, but things become complicated when Emilia Perez, as Manitas is now known, wants her family back by her side in Mexico.  Rita helps Emilia establish the subterfuge that she is Manitas's wealthy distant cousin, now a philanthropist helping the families of drug cartel victims.  

Oscar Film Journal: Marty (1955)

And it's time for another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com!  With this film under my belt I'm down to only five remaining calendar years where I haven't seen any of the Best Picture nominees: 1935, 1936, 1949, 1956 & 1959.

Today's subject is the 1955 Best Pic winner, which at 93 minutes holds the distinction of being the shortest film to ever take home the big trophy, Marty, starring Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair.  This light-hearted dramedy directed by Delbert Mann and written by Paddy Chayefsky (based on his own teleplay) is about a lonely bachelor in his mid-thirties whose siblings have all gotten married.  Marty works as a neighborhood butcher and despite pressure from his family and customers, has more or less accepted that he'll never find a nice girl to settle down with.  We learn very early in the film that it's not for lack of trying; at his friend Angie's suggestion he makes a phone call to a woman he met at a movie theater a month earlier and asks her out again, but she turns him down flat.  Marty lives with his widowed, old-fashioned mother who all but pushes him out of the house that night to go to a singles dance, and after striking out all night he notices a sad girl sitting by herself, her blind date having ditched her.  Marty and Clair spend the evening dancing, talking, walking around the neighborhood, and form a rather sweet, innocent connection despite their shared social awkwardness.  But by the next day his mother and his friends discourage him from calling her up again, entirely for their own selfish reasons.

Oscar Film Journal: Awakenings (1990)

Time for another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!

Here's an early-90s drama that I was interested in at the time but just never got around to seeing.  Awakenings, starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro and directed by Penny Marshall, is a medical drama based on true events, about a young, curious doctor assigned to the neurological disorder wing of a hospital in the Bronx.  The year is 1969, and Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Williams) discovers that all the patients in this particular group had suffered a specific form of encephalitis that rendered them catatonic.  But it turns out this catatonia can be momentarily broken by specific stimuli, for example tossing a patient a tennis ball to catch, or playing a piece of music that speaks to them.  With one patient Leonard Lowe (DeNiro), Sayer is able to communicate via the letters on a Ouija board.  He theorizes that the shared disorder of these patients is similar to Parkinson's, that their tremors became so severe they caused the patients to simply freeze up.  A Parkinson's drug called L-DOPA is administered to Leonard, and overnight he can move and speak again, after spending three decades as a prisoner in his own body.  The drug is used on the rest of the ward with similar results, but unfortunately the disease isn't such a simple one to cure.

Oscar Film Journal: The Substance (2024)

Welcome to another Oscar Film Journal entry here at Enuffa.com!  Time for a wacky one....

Today I'll be talking about the outrageous body horror/black comedy film The Substance, written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat.  This often funny, often nauseatingly disgusting social commentary stars Demi Moore as an aging former movie star turned TV fitness host Elisabeth Sparkle.  Elisabeth has just turned fifty and is informed by her producer Harvey (a gleefully slimy Dennis Quaid) that she's being forced into retirement and replaced by a younger model.  She then learns of a new miracle medical breakthrough that allows an older person to become "a more perfect version" of themselves on a weekly part-time basis.  Elisabeth then assumes the mantle of "Sue" (a glowing Margaret Qualley) and lands the TV fitness host gig, but things start to go awry when Sue doesn't want to go back to being Elisabeth.  More plot details I will not spoil here, as it's best to know as little as possible.

Oscar Film Journal: Dead End (1937)

Time for another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  Still chipping away at the catalogue of Best Picture nominees....

Today's entry is the 1937 crime drama Dead End, based on the 1935 play of the same name.  Dead End was helmed by acclaimed director William Wyler (Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives) and stars Sylvia Sidney (who you might remember as Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis's chain-smoking caseworker in Beetlejuice), Joel McCrea, and a young-ish Humphrey Bogart.  The story all takes place in a run-down Manhattan tenement neighborhood, at a time when wealthy developers were beginning to take advantage of the view of the East River and building ritzy high-rises right next to poor riverfront property.  Drina (Sidney) and Dave (McCrea) are lifelong friends who clearly have feelings for each other, but Dave has been seeing well-to-do neighbor Kay, who is also attached to a rich fellow.  Drina's brother Tommy is part of a juvenile street gang involved in petty crime and bullying, but she dreams of getting out.  An old acquaintance of Dave's shows up after a long absence, Hugh "Baby Face" Martin (Bogart), and we find out he's wanted for multiple murders and has been on the run for years, having changed his name and gotten plastic surgery.  Martin is back in town to visit an old flame in the hopes of taking her on the road with him.

Oscar Film Journal: Conclave (2024)

Welcome to another entry in the Oscar Film Journal - hey this one's a current nominee!

The Pope dies.  The Dean of the College of Cardinals must oversee the election of a new Pope, and somehow remain impartial and sequestered with the other Cardinals, while also taking into account any information that might disqualify a particular candidate, including dirty secrets the previous Pope may have kept hidden.  Such is the dilemma facing Thomas Lawrence in Edward Berger's followup to his superb All Quiet on the Western Front, a mystery thriller entitled Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini.

Oscar Film Journal: Wicked (2024)

Welcome to another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  We have another current nominee for ya!

Today it's the smash-hit from last Thanksgiving season, the much-anticipated film version of the smash-hit Broadway show Wicked!  Or Wicked: Part 1, more accurately.  Yes, the FIRST ACT of the two-and-a-half-hour stage show was stretched out to 160 minutes for the screen.  Jesus, Hollywood, do ya not believe in editing rooms anymore??

Anyway, this Wizard of Oz prequel was directed by John M. Chu of Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights fame, and stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as the two main characters, Elphaba Thropp (or The Wicked Witch of the West as she would later be known) and Glinda the Good Witch of the North.  But of course this film takes place before either of them earned their famous monikers, when they were just students at Shiz University ("This school is the shiz!").  Galinda Upland as she was known then was a well-to-do, popular, entitled young woman, while Elphaba was an outcast of modest means, gifted in magic but isolated from her peers due to her green skin (one of two very on-the-nose metaphors in this film).  One of the school's prominent professors (Michelle Yeoh) takes an interest in Elphaba and thinks she shows enough promise to meet the celebrated Wizard (Jeff Goldbum, playing Jeff Goldblum).  This sparks jealousy from Galinda, who has been assigned against her will as Elphaba's roommate.  The two have an Odd Couple-esque relationship before finally becoming friends, and Galinda comes to support Elphaba's visit to the Emerald City.  But all is not what it seems....

WWE Royal Rumble 2025 Review: Jey Uso Yeets the Odds

The 38th WWE Royal Rumble is in the books, and it was a solid show, better than it's been in a handful of years anyway.  There wasn't anything great on the show I didn't think, but nothing bad either.  Picking a best match and worst match is tough because everything was in the 3.5 to 4 star range.  I had some gripes about some things but we'll get to that.  It was definitely too long a show, that's for sure.  Four hours and eighteen minutes is a long time for any PPV.

The show kicked off with the women's Rumble, and I think this was the most fun match for me.  Despite less star power than the men's, this match had a lot of exciting young talent, many of them from NXT, and the match cut a good pace that kept everything moving.  Iyo Sky, Ivy Nile, Lash Legend, Jordynne Grace, and Stephanie Vaquer all looked very good.  Nia Jax got to be the Kane of this match and eliminate 9 women.  I was surprised Becky Lynch didn't return, but instead we got Alexa Bliss.  As expected Charlotte Flair ended up winning, last eliminating Roxanne Perez of all people.  Also Iyo, Roxanne and Liv Morgan all beat Bayley's record from last year, which as I said in my preview has gotten out of hand.  If you keep breaking the longevity record it becomes pretty meaningless.  They certainly didn't need to do it three times in this one match.  Both Rumbles went excessively long, this one at 70 minutes.  But it looks like Tiffany vs. Charlotte for Mania most likely, unless the plan is a rubber match with Rhea Ripley.  ***3/4