This Had Oscar Buz‪z‬ Joe and Chris

After the success of The Hours in 2002, author Michael Cunningham was a hot commodity in prestige cinema. At the same time, Colin Farrell emerged as the next big thing and was seemingly inescapable at the movies. The two converged in 2004 for A Home at the End of the World, an adaptation of Cunningham’s novel delivered by celebrated stage director Michael Mayer. Also starring Robin Wright, Sissy Spacek, and a breakthrough Dallas Roberts, the film follows a bisexual throuple that forms their own unique family unit outside the societal norms and their struggles to maintain their delicate balance.

Released in the summer and met with lukewarm reviews, A Home… was mostly forgotten by year’s end despite the strong work of its cast. This episode, we revisit an early THOB bet about Colin Farrell’s long-term Oscar prospects and discuss the beginning days of both Warner Independent and Farrell’s career.

Topics also include Oscar’s recent history of straight actors in LGBTQ roles, Sissy Spacek smashing plates in the aughts, Michael Mayer’s Broadway directing credits, and “pentathalon bangs”. And we tease this year’s May miniseries!

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Joe: @joereid


Chris: @chrisvfeil

After becoming a Broadway sensation, landing the Tony Award for Best Play and lead acting nominations for each member of its acting quartet (including a win for Marcia Gay Harden), Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage looked primed to become yet another stage-to-screen adaptation with Oscar in its sights. But when the movie version arrived, it eschewed the play’s lauded, starry Broadway cast (not to mention the many famous names that starred in hit productions around the globe) for a miscast foursome: Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz, and Kate Winslet. The film, abreviated to simply Carnage, failed to capture the play’s humor and precise bourgeois target, on top of being directed by Roman Polanski.

This episode, we compare the missteps of the film to the successes of its stage version, including one major mistake that bookends the film. We also discuss Marcia Gay Harden’s Tony speech, map Winslet’s long road to Oscar starting with Sense and Sensibility to the category maneuvering of The Reader, and play another round of Alter Egos.

Topics also include American Express commercials, Broadway bootlegs, and the infamous barf scene.

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@Had_Oscar_Buzz


Joe: @joereid


Chris: @chrisvfeil

We’re finally getting around to one of the most notorious of aughts era failed awards plays, Steven Zaillian’s All the King’s Men. A remake of the former Best Picture winner and originally heavily predicted in the 2005 season, the adaptation was unceremoniously punted into the following year. The next September, the film had a disastrous debut at TIFF and was in and out of theatres within a month. Incoherent and uninspired with a barking Sean Penn at the center, the film is a soup of accents and flat convolutions that makes for a flop that is more boring than cringeworthy.

Zaillian has yet to direct a film since, but we look back at his other directorial efforts like Searching for Bobby Fisher, as well as a writing career that’s paired him with a top tier of directors. This week, we look at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival packed with successful Oscar plays and remembered for its thwarted Borat premiere. And we discuss The Departed and Scorsese’s winding road to Best Picture, almost again blocked by a stealth Clint Eastwood. Mark Ruffalo quiz alert!

Topics also include Kate Winslet’s odd lineup of 2006 titles, why Jude Law is better when not playing a traditional leading man, and the traumatic cinema experience that is Jack the Bear.

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@Had_Oscar_Buzz


Joe: @joereid


Chris: @chrisvfeil

It’s finally here: our This Had Oscar Buzz Class of 2020! Even in a COVID-impacted Oscar year that saw a longer eligibility calendar and much fewer trips to the theatre, we still have a slew of movies with Oscar hopes that were left out in the cold on nomination morning. And we are here to celebrate (or at least in the case of The Little Things commemorate) them! We get into our favorites and yours from the year of Unprecedented Times, and we break them into several categories, from the movies we were happiest or saddest didn’t make the Oscar cut, the most forgettable, and the ones we can’t wait to give the full THOB treatment to first!

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@Had_Oscar_Buzz


Joe: @joereid


Chris: @chrisvfeil

After landing a Best Picture winner that famously left him without a Best Director nomination for Argo, Ben Affleck made his director-star return in 2016 with Denis Lehane adaptation Live By Night. Affleck cast himself as a criminal caught between the Irish and Italian mobs in Tampa (with an ensemble that included Chris Messina, Zoe Saldana, and Elle Fanning) and is a muddied mess of mob movie tropes. The film shuffled release dates and opened with a whiff at the end of the year, failing to catch audiences amid a packed Oscar season and its own floundering reviews. Live By Night was forgotten and out of theatres once nominations arrived.

This episode, we talk about Affleck’s successes and stumbling blocks, including our own conflicting feelings about him as an actor, director, and celebrity. We also look back at Affleck’s shocking Best Director snub, his habitual casting of himself shirtless, and Warner Bros. disappointing 2016 which also included the introduction of Batfleck.

Topics also include our Top 10 films of 2016, Affleck’s meta casting in Gone Girl, Sienna Miller facial blindness.

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@Had_Oscar_Buzz


Joe: @joereid


Chris: @chrisvfeil

Pfor this week’s episode, we’ve invited The Film Experience creator and Michelle Pfeiffer superpfan Nathaniel Rogers back to discuss one of our listeners most requested films, 2002′s White Oleander. Based on the beloved novel by Janet Fitch, the film stars Allison Lohman as the teenage Astrid, who is plunged into the foster care system after her manipulative artist mother Ingrid (a phenomenal Pfeiffer) kills her boyfriend and is sent to prison. The film suffers from moving too briskly between Astrid’s foster homes (with Robin Wright and Renée Zellweger cast as various mothers) and met poor anemic reviews that left the film and Pfeiffer’s work forgotten in a backloaded awards season.

This week, we talk about the 2002 Supporting Actress race including who we think placed fifth in the nominations and the performance Nathaniel thinks derailed her chances. We also look at Oprah’s Book Club, Pfeiffer’s reticence with doing press, and personal Oscar grudges over Pfeiffer’s best work.

Topics also include Melissa McCarthy as an EMT, Robin Wright pronouncing the word “virus”, and Sheryl Crow’s The Globe Sessions (which, yeah, Chris misremembers instead of C’Mon C’Mon).

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@Had_Oscar_Buzz


Joe: @joereid


Chris: @chrisvfeil


Nathaniel: @nathanielr