The year of MORE; Best Actress and Roma

For the past 4 years, having left the coasts and moved to Mississippi, I have played an interesting game of entitlement/begging hoping studios will toss me some scraps (aka: screeners) heading toward the end of the year. Yes, every year I manage to see everything I need to see before Oscar night, but producing a 10 Best List before the end of each year has verged on the impossible.

This time last year I hadn't received a single screener/link and was bitching that "Call Me By Your Name" was getting ready to enter its limited release and I felt like the only Oscar pundit yet to see it.

This year I have so many already I don't know where to start. There are the Oscar hopefuls - "Shoplifters," "The Marriage," "Wildlife," "Dark Money," "Eating Animals" "The Blaze" as well as many LGBTQ films, (including "The Marriage") such as "Lez Bomb" and "A Kid Like Jake" not to mention "We the Animals" and many other undiscovered films that could potentially make an already crowded Top 10 list.

When I saw "Annihilation" and  "Lean on Pete" earlier in the year I thought they would certainly make my list...now, I'm not so sure. Perhaps I will have a chance to see them again before the end of the year? We shall see.

Watching all of these films is going to be impossible. Figuring out what to watch and when is really the challenge. For years I have listened to my coastal colleagues "complain" about all the films they had to see and scoffed. Now, I get it.

This weekend brings us even more with Steve McQueen's "Widows" as well as the latest "Fantastic Beasts" film. This is the densest Oscar year in recent memory, and I can only do my best to do it justice, taking this process a week, and eventually a day at a time.

Best Actress
A perfect example of this density would be the Best Actress category. This weekend I saw the fantastic "Can You Ever Forgive Me," written by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, directed by Marielle Heller and starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant, both of whom should have a shot at the Oscars. But will they?

Let's just pretend that I've seen "The Favourite," something I don't like to do here at Awards Wiz...but alas... I already have a strong Top 5.

Glenn Close - The Wife
Lady Gaga - A Star is Born
Melissa McCarthy - Can You Ever Forgive Me
Olivia Coleman - The Favourite
Yalitza Aparicio - Roma

Can't we just stop right there? I wish!  Next you have some serious contenders whose films I have yet to see:

Viola Davis - Widows

Julia Roberts - Ben is Back

Rosamund Pike - A Private War

Nicole Kidman - Destroyer

Charlize Theron - Tully

Carey Mulligan - Wildlife
Keira Knightley - Colette
Saoirse Ronan - Mary Queen of Scots

And then there are the ones I have seen that I don't think make the cut:

Elsie Fisher - Eighth Grade

Kiki Lane - If Beale Street Could Talk

Toni Collette - Hereditary

This is a DEEP category. Very deep. Thank goodness Meryl Streep doesn't have a leading performance this year. Right? I used to hate predicting the Oscar nominations, but with a category like this, who wouldn't enjoy playing this unfortunate game of Oscar chess?

Roma
A few weeks ago I reached out to Netflix asking them if they might add Roma to my Netflix Media Center. I was hoping to write a piece on Netflix's role in this year's Oscar race.  I had already seen "Private Life" which I think will have a small shot at an Original Screenplay nod and was planning to watch both "A Kindergarten Teacher" and "22 July." But no piece about Netflix and the 2019 Oscars would be complete without seeing "Roma."

To my shock and delight, Netflix set up a private screening of the film for me. As I left the screening and in the days after I wondered how I would do this remarkable film justice.

"Roma" is a masterpiece. Let's start there.

I have only had one theatrical experience similar to this, and that was when I saw "The Godfather" in a theater last year. Having seen that film a few times in the past, there was nothing like seeing it on the big screen. Walking out of "The Godfather" I thought, they really don't make films like that anymore. I felt the same thing watching "Roma" even though, clearly, the do....

Alfonso Cuaron has made a film that seems of the past. There are long sweeping shots that somehow manage to be vast in their scope, but incredibly intimate in their detail to character and feeling. I would give you specific examples, but anything I say would spoil the majesty.

In what has become a theme for this year, I don't want to say too much about the plot of this film.  I knew almost nothing about "Roma" heading into it, and that is absolutely the way to see it.

Not knowing the plot allowed me a sense of concern for Cleo, played by the incredible Yalitza Asparicio, as she works as a maid for Sra. Sofia, played by the equally fantastic Marina de Tavira.

Everything I thought Cleo was, the employer Sofia was going to be, the outcome we were headed toward...Cuaron takes us elsewhere. He doesn't shy away from showing us much that we need to see in terms of class, civil discourse, and being a woman in that world (and in turn this one) - with or without a man/children. But in the end we are left with hope, a family of choice and love.

I loved "A Star is Born" and am still feeling high praise for "Suspiria," but "Roma" is now, for Awards Wiz, at least, the film to beat.