Praise for "Project Hail Mary"; Predicting the Oscar Shorts; SXSW Preview

12:14Anne Thompson:We will move on from that. So Marcus Jones and I interviewed the show's executive producers, Raj Kapoor and Katie Mullen. And this is their second time around on their own. And a few days later, there was a press conference with the host, Conan O 'Brien, who's doing his second round. And I'm delighted by that, by the way. I loved him. I thought he was great. I think he'll be even better this time. They're talking a lot about how much more time he had to prepare and his great writer's room and all that. that good stuff. But he admitted that he's going to have to ride the rails of how to acknowledge the politics around us right now with everything that's going on in Iran and all that.

12:57Anne Thompson:And he's going to try to be comforting and entertaining and not, you know, that's going to be the sort of tightrope walk that he has to do. But I didn't realize, I forgot at least, that last year, At least he's home again this year because he was dislodged during the fires last year. He's back. He didn't lose his home, but he had to be temporarily dislodged. So the show is going to indulge in two elaborate musical celebrations of K-pop demon hunters and sinners, which they all obviously expect to win some things, which I'm sure they will. and they worked really closely with both, more than usual with both of the creative teams to mount those numbers.

13:42Anne Thompson:So that should be interesting. There's going to be reunions of bridesmaids and Marvel and some kind of alien will be present. I was positing that it might be Rocky if they were promoting Project Hail Mary, but maybe it's an old alien, a former alien.

13:57Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, well, hopefully we just don't get any jokes about the ballet or opera because... I bet we do. I'm tired of that, but I'm sure we will.

14:06Anne Thompson:Poor Chalamet is going to get a lot of ribbing. Poor fellow. But we're going to remind everybody that anything that happened with him came after the ballots were closed. The pylon did. It was after the ballots were closed. If he loses, it's not because of that specific thing.

14:25Ryan Lattanzio:The pylon will linger, but that just means that he is a star in the way that he is, right? It wouldn't linger for someone that wasn't important.

14:33Anne Thompson:Exactly right. Because if you're a star, it means that people can write about you and get clicks. And it's very tempting to do that. Okay, let's do the Oscar shorts.

14:44Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, you know, I looked at all the shorts across live action, animated and documentary short, and a lot of these were very good, actually. There's a lot of standout titles this year, but we can start with animation. there is one movie papillon or butterfly which is a kind of holocaust drama about an olympian swimmer who is a survivor of the holocaust it's gorgeously sort of water watercolor painted this is one that a lot of gold derby experts have pegged to be winning but the stop motion animated romance the girl who cried pearls from canada is actually very beautiful and this is one where I'm going to say that the one I think should win is The Girl Who Great Burles, and the one I think will win is the same.

15:28Anne Thompson:Well, this is very boring because I picked Butterfly as the one that will win. This Jewish competitive swimmer overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds is very moving. And it moves through time in a very beautiful, effective way. And I also adored the stop motion period short, The Girl Who Cried Pearls, which delivers twisty storytelling and enchanting animation. So we agree on this one. I think it will be the one that wins, though, will be Butterfly.

16:01Ryan Lattanzio:The other one that's very good actually is Retirement Plan, but I don't see that one necessarily winning. I liked that one, too. Yeah, me too. I really did.

16:09Anne Thompson:That's a beautiful, you know, very spare line drawing kind of thing. Yeah.

16:13Ryan Lattanzio:Very clever. So moving on to the documentary category, these are a lot of very depressing movies about heavy subjects. But the one that I think will win and I think probably deserves to also win is directed by sure to be documentary Oscar winner Gita Gunbeer, who also directed Perfect Neighbor. She co-directed this movie with Crystal and Hampton, and it follows a security detail in an abortion clinic after the overturn of Roe v. Wade as she's dealing with protests and various other incoming restrictions. It's a very tayy documentary, but it's done very well.

16:52Anne Thompson:That's my favorite also. So I found the woman who is, she tells it from various different points of view. It's very clever the way they do it because it's basically an observational verite over one day. So they start with the woman who opens it up in the morning and is worried about security. And you feel all the anxiety and the stress that they all have to go through. And you hear constantly this barrage of protesting outside. And they're trying to keep the women who are coming in safe. And this one woman, the one who starts it off and closes it up at the end of the night after a very long day, is very moving.

17:30Anne Thompson:I was very moved by her. So I really think that will win. But a lot of other people think it will be all the empty rooms. And that's the one that involves this sort of obsessed journalist who tracks school shootings. Stephen Hartman. He ends up pursuing various, you know, various parents allow him and his photographer and his camera into the ghostly, ghostlike rooms where their children used to be. And it's very, very moving and I think could be a winner.

18:09Ryan Lattanzio:Almost all of these movies have a very relevant, timely political time in armed with only a camera. that's a kind of cinema memoir about a journalist who died covering the war in Ukraine. Children No More is about people in Israel protesting Israel's, you know, response to attacks from Hamas and the war on Gaza. And then there's a curious one called Perfectly Estrangeness that is about donkeys. And if EO didn't stave your craving to see them, because that will do it.

18:41Anne Thompson:But I do think donkeys wandering around the What are those things? Observatory. They're wandering around in observatories. Various different ones.

18:52Ryan Lattanzio:Aimlessly. But I do see the devil is busy as winning this one.

18:56Anne Thompson:Yeah. And so as far as the live action shorts are concerned, I think crowd pleaser singers could be the winner with Netflix behind it. And they even threw an Academy party for it after the Spirit Awards. So I would, but I would, if it were me, if I were picking myself, if I were voting, I would go for the stylized black and white sci-fi thriller, Two People Exchanging Saliva. What did you think of that one, Ryan?

19:23Ryan Lattanzio:Oh, I love Two People Exchanging Saliva. This is a movie that is - I thought you would. Yes. No, I adored this movie and it is begging for a feature adaptation, which apparently is already in the works. Throughout the season, we also saw Julianne Moore and Isabelle Huppert joining it as executive producers. Oh, good. Yeah. And this is a black and white movie that's set in a dystopian world where kissing is forbidden and where a form of payment involves slapping. So there is an erotic frisson between a woman who works in a department store and one of her most moneyed clients, who, of course, is covered in bruises from being slapped many times for a payment.

20:01Ryan Lattanzio:But they are not allowed to have this attraction because of, you know, the repression of women and the rules in the society. this movie is very good and it's the one I think should win and I'm also going to say it's the one that will win

20:16Anne Thompson:no it's too chilly I've spoken to people who didn't understand it who absolutely didn't get it you have to be aware of some of you have to take that leap into the sci-fi imagination you know this movie is you have to figure it out you have to go along with it you have to be willing to follow these strange it isn't apparent right away what those rules are and you have to figure it out so I just think it's a little too smart for for the room which is why something like singers which is it allows you to sort of discover these unexpected you know songbirds in a bar you know it's it's very it's very musical and very moving and and I that feels more uh like a crowd pleaser to me

21:03Ryan Lattanzio:it's definitely more accessible but i'm just trying to give the academy some mileage here and suggesting that they might be open to something that's a little more complicated but i agree singers is very good uh there's there's a number i mean any of these movies have a well not i wouldn't say all of them uh there's a movie called jane austen period drama uh where it's funny it's cute this woman gets her period in a jane austen world and her suitor thinks that the blood is an injury. I'm kind of tired of this kitschifying of Jane Austen, right? It's like, to me, her novels are very furtive. And they're sort of about exchanging gossip with your best friend behind closed doors.

21:43Ryan Lattanzio:But we're seeing all this sort of body fare that's being spun out of them, which you could argue Bridgerton is part of that. And finally, there's another one, A Friend of Dorothy with Miriam Margolis and Stephen Fry. It's very heartwarming, but I It didn't feel serious enough to win.

22:00Anne Thompson:I responded to that one, but it felt like something that could have been made 20 years ago. It felt like an old version of the story of the young man who discovers his sexuality and someone who allows him to find it. And she's great in it. I love Miriam Margulies. I know her well from the Graham Norton show where she can be really insane.

22:25Ryan Lattanzio:Oh, yeah. Yeah, she basically asked Alexander Skarsgård if he was gay. She did. She went right up to him and asked him. So that cleared up that question.

22:34Anne Thompson:She's clear. She knows that she's expected to shock everyone every time she goes on the show, and she usually does. But she's relatively demure in this one.

22:47Ryan Lattanzio:All right. Well, everyone should probably listen to Anne about this category. I'm just saying I think two people exchanging saliva is going to win, mostly because I'm hopeful. But finally, we can move on to some categories that we didn't talk about last week, which are pretty fait accompli and easy to get through, which are animated feature and best original song.

23:05Anne Thompson:And both are going to go to K-pop Demon Hunters, which also just announced a sequel that is coming to Netflix in partnership with Sony. So, you know, even the Oscar producers know that K-pop Demon Hunters and the music from Sinners are going to play very well on the show. So we shall see. Before we dive into our recommendations for next week, Ryan is going to talk about South by Southwest, but we need to figure out what Universal just did with the theatrical window for its films. So they were notorious during the pandemic. And this was under the direction of the guy who's under duress, by the way, over at Paramount.

23:54Anne Thompson:Jeff Schell was in charge at the time. So Jeff Schell is the one who made a deal with AMC to begin with and eventually all the exhibitors to have a three-week window and then go to pay-per-view. And that was a short window. And they believed in it and they followed it unless they had a really big hit, if it went over 50 million opening weekend or something, or unless it was a Christopher Nolan movie. Obviously, that was an exception. You will note that coming up in the next year, they have a Christopher Nolan movie, The Odyssey. They also have a Steven Spielberg movie. Disclosure Day. So there are reasons for them to suck up to those two filmmakers, if I may be so bold.

24:37Anne Thompson:But I think they would not be doing this if they didn't do the math. That's what all these studios do. They crunch the numbers. They have decided that this is going to get them more bang for their buck. To play the movie in the theaters longer for five weeks or seven weeks a year from now is going to be better for them. And it's certainly going to be better for the exhibitors. So I applaud this 100 percent.

25:01Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I mean, I'm sure he came out of discussions with those very directors that you just mentioned, Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg. These are people that are pushing for these kind of windows. And so, yeah, it's great. I mean, my insight's kind of in there. We need to kind of see how it plays out. There's obviously one studio where we don't really know what's happening with the windows, which would be paramount overtaking Warners, even though there is some promise of keeping fealty to how the windows have been. They'll do the 45. They'll do the 45 days. The other kind of asterisk in this story in the Times about Universal is that Focus Features is promising only 17 days in theaters.

25:39Ryan Lattanzio:They're sticking with the same model.

25:41Anne Thompson:And what the story said, which I found depressing. I don't know how you felt. It basically said that these movies don't last in theaters anymore. These art films, these specialty films. They used to play for a long time. That was the model. for, you know, you built up word of mouth over a long period of time. So I find that a little bit depressing, but they make money on pay-per-view with those movies.

26:05Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. I mean, it is depressing, but now you have Hamnet on Peacock, which, you know, my mom texted me, I saw Hamnet because she watched it there. So there's gains and losses, but we will see how it plays out. What did she think, Ryan? She found it to be as over-wrought as I did. So the apple didn't fall that far from the tree. but she's also someone has to um she gets tired and has to keep rewinding movies and going back the one that she hated was uh if i had legs i'd kick you she really did not like that that's a

26:36Anne Thompson:tough one for any parent to sit through i would i would admit that but i even if you found it difficult to sit through you couldn't miss what a great performance it was and even though jesse Buckley is going to win Best Actress, a lot of people are voting for Rose Byrne. She is the second one there.

26:54Ryan Lattanzio:She would be the spoiler. Yeah, totally.

26:56Anne Thompson:And I also want to say that as far as universal and theatrical and focus and everything is concerned, we want the theaters to survive. So, you know, let's see. Let's see. I wish the CinemaCon is coming up in April. That should be interesting this year. Yeah.

27:19Ryan Lattanzio:There's always something, right? Well, before we close off, we normally talk about something we want to recommend to listeners. And I'm going to use this moment to talk a bit about South by Southwest, which is launching on March 12th. That would be today. But by the time you hear this, it's tomorrow. I would be remiss not to acknowledge it. And this is also a festival that is owned, partially owned by Penske Media Corporation, which also owns IndieWire. But curiously, they are not interested in subsidizing journalists to attend. So therefore, I am not going. So with this festival, there are seemingly hundreds of movies across various sections that don't have any distinction.

28:02Ryan Lattanzio:And God bless all the publicists out there, but I get a lot of emails and I don't know how... to parse them. There really is no curation here. I have seen the opening movie, I Love Boosters, which Neon releases on May 22nd, which is directed by Boots Riley and is a kind of zany socialist stoner movie with very good performances from Kiki Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylor Page. But it does kind of start spinning its wheels late in the film with a lot of high concept sci-fi allegories about anti-capitalism. I don't know that your standard fare audiences are really going to go for this movie, especially one where you kind of need to be a little stone to enjoy it.

28:43Ryan Lattanzio:But my other word of caution for this festival is that it desperately needs to get off Oscars weekend. You have first time filmmakers that are really trying to make an impact, which is basically impossible when you have journalists and the industry. Basically, everyone is tied up in the Oscars. So I just, I don't know.

29:01Anne Thompson:That makes no sense to me.

29:02Ryan Lattanzio:They need to not have this event the same week as the Oscars. It needs to end if it's going to survive.

29:08Anne Thompson:It used to be huge. But there used to be this whole, you know, tech side of it. And then there was this whole music side of it. And then the film side was really small all along from the beginning. It was never huge. And it was always more commercial movies, more mainstream studio movies than independent films. Really. I mean, there were some... If you're an independent film launching at South By, it means you didn't get into Sundance, basically.

29:36Ryan Lattanzio:No, it's the end of the road, unfortunately. No, the ones that don't get into

29:40Anne Thompson:South By go to Tribeca.

29:44Ryan Lattanzio:Okay, well, that's the end of the road. No, I went last year, and there is no movie I saw that was better than, like, a C+. It was a really... It was rough offerings.

29:54Anne Thompson:Okay, well, on that note, I'm going to recommend a television movie, which is on Nat Geo. So that's on Disney Plus. And it's Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Ghost Elephants, shot on location in Namibia and Angola. And it's about this obsessed guy. It reminds me a little bit of the...

30:15Ryan Lattanzio:Burden of Dreams, right?

30:17Anne Thompson:Well, there's a part of it that's like Burden of Dreams, where you see these people carrying all this stuff through the forest and over the rivers and, you know, onto their various, yeah, they start with trucks and then they get onto motorbikes and then they get onto boats, you know, that part of it where they're lugging everything reminded me of that. No, it reminded me a little bit of Grizzly Man, where you have this sort of obsessed guy looking for these giant elephants from another strain of old elephant DNA. And, and he, he's, he's got, he's got like crazy blue eyes and he's trying to, you know, and eventually, you know, hopefully they're going to find them.

30:59Anne Thompson:I could, I could listen to Werner Herzog narrate anything. It's a lot of fun.

31:05Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I know. I'm excited to watch that one. I love everything that Werner Herzog does, except for Queen of the Desert with Nicole Kidman. That was a mistake, but.

31:13Anne Thompson:Narrative films are a different matter, although I will always vouch for Bad Lieutenant.

31:18Ryan Lattanzio:Bad Lieutenant is amazing. I love that movie. That is one of my favorite movies ever. All right. Well, on that note, Anne, I hope you have fun at the Oscars. Thank you. I'll be covering from home, but I'll be looking for you on the television.

31:31Anne Thompson:You'll be doing the heavy lifting. I'm going to have a good time. I'm going to have fun. And then the next day, I will write up whatever happened. And if you're curious for my final Oscar picks, they're out there on the site somewhere. Don't get mad at me later if I don't turn out to be right. Yeah, same. Because this year, it's a big crapshoot, right?

31:53Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I agree. It's almost done. So we'll talk to you after.

31:57Anne Thompson:Okay, bye-bye.

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