AwardsWatch Podcast Ep. 257: New York Film Festival Wrap-Up and the Post-Fall Fest State of the Oscar Race

On episode 257 of The AwardsWatch Podcast, Editor-In-Chief Erik Anderson, Executive Editor Ryan McQuade and Associate Editor Sophia Ciminello talk about some of our favorite (and not so favorite) films we saw at 62nd New York Film Festival and then look at them through the lens of the pending Oscar race.

Kicking things off we start with The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s sprawling epic about a Hungarian architect, played by Adrien Brody, who emigrates to the United States post-World War II. Corbet won the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival. You can read Sophia’s review of that film here. Next we go into the Venice Golden Lion winner for Best Film, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, the director’s first major festival top film win. Ryan’s review of the maestro’s festival favorite can be found here. The conversation here, about older directors creating films now that stand up against their best early work, moves to what we felt as a far less successful version of that, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (read Ryan’s review here) but then we’re back to the festival high of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, his adaptation of the 1985 William S. Burroughs short novel starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, a drug-induced story of gay love and longing set among the lives of American expats in Mexico City in the late 1940s. You can read my review of Queer here. We also venture into some quick talk of other films we saw and loved at the festival, including Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths and David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s The Friend, starring the biggest attention getter of the fest, Bing the great Dane.

From there we look at how looks at these films have shaped or changed our earlier Oscar predictions, what’s out in front, what is falling off and the complete unknown entities coming up that could change race completely.

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This podcast runs 1h16m. We will be back in two weeks to discuss AFI FEST and update our Oscar predictions. Till then, let’s get into it.

Music: “Modern Fashion” from AShamaleuvmusic (intro), “B-3” from BoxCat Games Nameless: The Hackers RPG Soundtrack (outro)