Oscar Podcast #44: Viola Davis, Moonlight, Billy Lynn and Oscar Predictions with special guest Joey Nolfi

On this 44th podcast, I am joined by a special guest,  Entertainment Weekly’s Joey Nolfi.

We cover a lot of ground in this podcast (which hits the 2-hour mark): from Viola Davis’s submission in Supporting for Fences and what that means for the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories now to Moonlight and if its critical impact will equal Oscar nominations. Best Actress, as usual, gets heavy rotation as we talk about our likely nominees; Emma Stone in La La Land, Natalie Portman in Jackie and Annette Bening in 20th Century Women but also those who round out a very rich category this year – Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Ruth Negga (Loving), Amy Adams (Arrival), Jessica Chastain (Miss Sloane) and of course, Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins).

We dig into Best Picture and its frontrunners and wonder if there’s something on the outside that we’re missing. With former heavy hitters like The Birth of a Nation and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (which Joey talks extensively about) falling by the wayside, it means other contenders like Arrival and Hidden Figures become stronger while ‘steak eater’ films like Sully or Hell or High Water must be considered.

UPDATE: There is a spoiler regarding Manchester by the Sea at around the 1hr 20m mark that I forgot to edit out. I recommend that you skip forward to about 1h24m to keep from being spoiled on a specific plot aspect of the movie. I apologize to anyone who listened to the podcast and is upset by hearing the spoiler.

Check out the monthly 2017 Oscar Predictions from the Gold Rush Gang right here and the up to the minute updated predictions starting here.

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The podcast closes with an ‘original’ piece by Joey featuring Beyoncé and Diane Ladd.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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