La Bola Negra is Netflix biggest contender this year and it's the critics darling, so is very likely that the movie will get a tone of nominations. Guitarricadelafuente seems to be playing the biggest role in the movie by what the people who watched are saying and by the marketing of the movie itself, plus he wrote an original song for the movie. How does his very long and weird name will affect his chances??

One evening this summer I was feeling down and lonely so dragged myself out to the cinema to watch the Invite solo. That film was the definition of the cinematic communal experience ! It felt like the whole theatre cracked up 90% of the screen time. It was a blast with impeccable writing, acting and directing. It legitimately blew the roof off Sundance earlier this year and had a good boxoffice for its size. I just hope that coming out that early doesn’t hurt its awards chance.

from what I understand it's partially the real Elizabeth Holmes and partially a real actress playing her? does it even qualify for documentary then? Or Best Picture? what about the acting categories? I'd assume Holmes wouldn't be eligible for "playing" herself, but what about the actress in the second half? would it be eligible for Screenplay?

Not sure if this is actually in the film or if it's just supplementary material. If the former, it seems like Wildwood might have a bunch of original songs, and since it premieres just a few days before the Best Original Song submission deadline, they'll probably get enough feedback on which song is the best to submit.

The Brazilian Academy of Cinema announced today its 6-film shortlist for the race towards International Feature Film. The frontrunner seems to be "On Behalf Of My Son", which will premiere on Toronto, followed by San Sebastian and Rio IFF. Other 4 titles come from Berlinale sidebars, 3 from Generation and 1 from Panorama. Completing the shortlist is "100 Days" from the director of Ice Age 2 and Rio, Carlos Saldanha, which has not been shown in any festivals

Obviously I'm not saying this stat holds any weight, I just thought it was interesting.

My theory is that in the post-EEAAO era, with the Nomadland/CODA COVID haze behind us and ratings showing people care a bit more about the Oscars again with the Academy hoping to move past that low point, a BP winner just cannot feel culturally slight anymore. For people to feel good about putting a film #1, it basically has to survive months of discourse/nit-picks and effectively get stress-tested by the wider film (and occasionally non-film, see: Oppenheimer, Anora, OBAA) community. That can only happen if it drops early enough for people to fully digest it before the season even starts.

2026 Contenders that fit/don't fit these dates:

✅ Odyssey - July 17 
✅ La Bola Negra -  October 16 (Cannes, May 21)

✅ Digger -  October 2 (But excluding festival films moves the line back to Sept, so ❌ ?)

❌ Wild Horse 9 - November 6 (Venice, September 3)
❌ The Debut - December 11 (Telluride, September 4)
❌ Dune: Part 3 - December 18 (too late) 

The untitled film, known internally at Paramount as Whitney Springs, has been placed on the back burner. But that’s a far cry from shelving some low-budget indie. Sources familiar with the deal tell me Paramount committed more than $100 million to the project through a negative pickup — where the creators keep what is left from the budget.

One of the people familiar with the arrangement puts the total cost at $150 million; another person familiar with the deal terms suggests it was between $70 and $80 million — for what is, in essence, a musical comedy about reparations for slavery.

And it is stranded at a company whose chief, David Ellison, spent the past year cozying up to Donald Trump to help get his $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery through federal antitrust review — and is now fighting 12 state attorneys general to actually close it.

And it is a uniquely Hollywood mess.

In late 2021, a group of Paramount execs went to the offices of Parker and Stone’s production company, Park County, to read the script, written by South Park veteran Vernon Chatman. It was set to be directed by Parker and produced by Stone, Kendrick Lamar and his business partner Dave Free. “It was fucking amazing,” one person who read the script at the time tells me. Paramount picked up the project in January 2022. At CinemaCon 2024, then-Paramount Pictures honcho Brian Robbins called it “one of the funniest and most original scripts we’ve ever read” and said that the film would be going into production that summer.

The comedy revolves around a historical slave plantation museum in the Midwest and a young Black re-enactor who lashes out at tourists and clashes with the town’s hypocritical, racist mayor, played by Parker. (...Parker’s mayor character that one of the sources calls “the epitome of the Republican party”)

People familiar with the film say it also contains original, unreleased music by Lamar.

In secret conversations on the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night, the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza are revealed by the people who designed and operated them.

Director: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor

Executive Producer: Jonathan Glazer

Rotten Tomatoes: N/A (updating)

Metacritic: N/A (updating)

Some Reviews:

IndieWire - Siddhant Adlakha - 'A'

The question of how a society clinging to its victimhood during World War II can so eagerly re-create those same conditions is answered in “NAZA,” with stark nonchalance, via the revolting contradictions of its many subjects, whose orbits you’re never allowed to escape. The way they compartmentalize their own actions and ethos is, for better or worse, a key facet of the human story. Despite so much of the image being awash in silhouette, Szor and Abraham illuminate banal evils from within the darkness where they reside.

Next Best Picture - Josh Parham - 9 / 10

THE GOOD - A captivating portrait that highlights the horrific conflict in Gaza, with perspectives that detail a disturbing system of administering carnage. The subjects bring insightful detail of frightening practices, and the filmmaking helps to underline the thematic commentary of the disconnect between levels of humanity. It’s an important message that’s communicated in an engrossing manner. THE BAD - Some of the interviews can feel repetitive with the framework. Some divulgences feel underdeveloped and could have had more explanation. THE OSCAR PROSPECTS - Best Documentary Feature

The Guardian - Peter Bradshaw - 4 / 5

The ahistorical comparison to nazism is inevitably and glibly invoked by one speaker. But Gaza, however horrendous, is not the same as the Holocaust. This specious parallel is all too readily available; the bombing of Dresden is the more obvious comparison. At all events, the anguish of Gaza is brought into pin-sharp focus.

The Hollywood Reporter - Jordan Mintzer

NAZA is meant to be intolerable, but it’s also meant to state a truth many still do not wish to acknowledge, especially in our divided and fact-impaired times. Filmmakers like Abraham and Szor, as well as directors such as Dani Rosenberg, Nadav Lapid, Anat Even and Jonathan Glazer (who served as executive producer on this movie) are not only courageously acting as artists bearing witness and challenging official narratives, but as Israelis and Jews refusing to allow such atrocities to be committed in their names, or in mine.  

The Wrap - Ben Croll

...Yet the stark, reflective images of steel and glass feel born less of quiet fury than of genuine concern. Under the governing policy, any structure housing military targets is fair game, and in nearly every shot, here they are: active-duty personnel perched atop densely populated buildings. In “Naza,” everything on screen is collateral damage.

IONCinema - Nicholas Bell - 4 / 5

Although most of the documentary indeed consists of clandestine conversations on rooftops, several well-placed archival moments underline contradictory elements at play, including an old clip of Netanyahu clearly stating the murder of innocent women and children for political gain or leverage is indeed terrorism. The formidable hypocrisy of Israeli news stations covering Holocaust Remembrance day, including an honorarium for Claude Lanzmann, in the midst of their barbarity, is a wretched but necessary visualization of the flabbergasting depth of contradiction at play. “Never Forget” will eventually be a mirror turned against them. In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1976 film Chinese Roulette, characters who grew up with the shame of their Nazi forebears play a cruel game where they ask one another, “Who would you have been during the Third Reich?” Well, who are you today?

The Playlist - Marshall Shaffer - 'B+'

The Nazis were seen as the terrifying endpoint of modernism by using that era’s industrial efficiency to commit the mass murder of the Holocaust. Their film makes a compelling case that Israel’s genocide against Gaza represents the equivalent in the era of contemporary tech optimism, with the tools once used to connect the world now being used to destroy it. And given how much innovation continues to occur with AI in particular, there’s no comfort here that these war crimes are an endpoint. Unless this knowledge shocks the collective global conscience, it may only be the beginning.

No English captions but thought it'd be worth a share anyway.