Seventh Row is a nonprofit Canadian film criticism publication and publishing house. We're dedicated to helping you expand your horizons by curating the best socially progressive films from around the world and helping you think deeply about them. This newsletter is run by Seventh Row (http://seventh-row.com) but features exclusive content not found on the website.
Spoiling my awards ballot, yet again
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Every year since I started voting in critics’ awards, I’ve engaged in the time-honoured tradition of effectively spoiling my ballot. In other words, I vote for my favourite picks, even if they have zero chance of being nominated by anyone else. For an insight into my proclivities, in 2023, this was my Best Actor lineup: Alessandro Borghi, The Eight Mountains (Italy/Belgium) Scott was the only actor who had anything close to an Oscar campaign. And if you don't have an Oscar campaign, it's pretty hard to even get critics to vote for you. (They have to have seen the movie to vote for it!) I nominated The Eight Mountains and All of Us Strangers in pretty much every other category, including film, editing, sound, screenplay, direction, and cinematography. That year, I also had the cheek to put American documentarian Frederick Wiseman down for Best Editing and British documentarian Sophie Fiennes down for Best Director (for a film she made of her brother Ralph’s one-man T.S. Elliot poem show). (Frankly, it's criminal that Wiseman doesn't already have an Oscar for Editing and Documentary. He does have an honorary one, though!) I’ve been putting Joachim Trier and his collaborators in every single category I could since it was an option — the first time I recall voting was in 2017 with Thelma — back when I could count on one hand the number of members who had also nominated it. In fact, I remember the two other people who voted for it for editing. (The same editor he's been working with since the beginning, Olivier Bugge Coutté!) These days, as the academy diversifies and the gatekeepers of the industry shift, someone I would have voted for anyway will sometimes even have a shot at a nomination — in my critics’ groups and at the Oscars. I remember getting to vote for Joachim Trier in the final ballot in 2021 for The Worst Person in the World because it had been nominated in multiple categories, and it felt like: Whoa, something has shifted. So before the Oscar nominations come out tomorrow morning, here are some highlights of the various critics’ group ballots I submitted this year: Best Picture(The top 5 also got my Best Director votes)
Best LGBTQ Film
Documentary
Lead Actor
Lead Actress
(If I’d seen it in time, Nicole Beharie in Love, Brooklyn would have usurped one of them!) Supporting Actor
Supporting Actress
Cinematography
Editing
Sound Design
Caught by the Tides is one of the few films here I haven’t covered yet, but it’s an incredible work of editing — stitching together outtakes from Jia’s films over the years into a coherent narrative — and sound design. My other hobby is spoiling my ballot in the Visual Effects category for things nobody would vote for, because it’s the subtle stuff that matters. E.g., I voted for All of Us Strangers in 2023 for all the wind-in-the-trees effects. This year, I voted for the in-camera floating orb of light in The New Boy and the visual effects to bring the house to life across eras in Sentimental Value. Finally, on Oscar morning, I’m rooting for One Battle After Another for Costumes. If, like me, you fell in love with Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women 30+ years ago, you may have also fallen in love with the costumes in it by Colleen Atwood. She’s also behind the costumes in One Battle, and they’re iconic. If you had a ballot, what would you spoil it with? Alex P.S. Curious why Sentimental Value appears in almost every category? We'll start unpacking that in The Deep Focus: Oslo, August 31st — where we’ll use Trier’s Oslo, August 31st as a lens to view Sentimental Value. More soon! |
Seventh Row
Seventh Row is a nonprofit Canadian film criticism publication and publishing house. We're dedicated to helping you expand your horizons by curating the best socially progressive films from around the world and helping you think deeply about them. This newsletter is run by Seventh Row (http://seventh-row.com) but features exclusive content not found on the website.
I’m running something new in April. It’s called The Deep Focus. We’ll spend three weeks with two films by Joachim Trier — Oslo, August 31st and Sentimental Value — following how they’re put together. We'll look at specific moments, trace patterns within and across the films, and see how those choices shape what you feel. If you’ve ever felt a scene hit — and weren't quite sure why — this is a space to stay with that question long enough to find an answer. I won’t tell you what to think.But I...
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to Bill Hader, the SNL star-turned-writer-director, on the Team Deakins podcast. He was talking about rewatching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, hitting a moment that felt like an emotional gut punch — and literally pausing the film to ask:“Why did that hit me?!” That kind of moment — where something lands harder than you expect —and you feel something strongly before you know why… You’ve probably had that, too. Even Hader — who thinks about directing...
Last week, Joachim Trier took home his first Oscar for Sentimental Value — after 9 nominations. (The only films with more nominations were in English and had movie stars in them.) Before that, Sentimental Value had already earned Barack Obama’s seal of approval and most of the European Film Awards. There’s never been a better time to dig into what makes Joachim Trier's films so good. Sentimental Value is a masterpiece, but it's not Trier's first. That was Oslo, August 31st. And Sentimental...