Steven Spielberg Hits, Tom Cruise Stumbles and What Else We Learned During This Wild Awards Week

Four days, two awards shows, 13 nominations announcements and nine lessons No images? [Click here]( ID=167008;size=700x180;setID=347001;uid={EMAIL}7200419;click=template_awards_beat [Awards Beat with Steve Pond] January 13, 2023 [- - -] Steven Spielberg Hits, Tom Cruise Stumbles and What Else We Learned During This Wild Awards Week Four days, two awards shows, 13 nominations announcements and nine lessons [- - -] By Steve Pond [Elvis Fabelmans Top Gun] “Elvis” (Warner Bros.), “The Fabelmans” (Universal), “Top Gun: Maverick” (Paramount) The alphabet soup of awards season hit with full force this week. ADG, MPSE and ASC on Monday. CAPE, CS, CAS, DGA and HFPA on Tuesday. MUAHS, SAG, DGA (again) and WGA on Wednesday. CDG, ICG, PGA and CEH on Thursday. Still to come: AFI on Friday, BAFTA on Saturday and CCA on Sunday. (Do you need a scorecard? Art Directors Guild, Motion Picture Sound Editors, American Society of Cinematographers, Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, Casting Society, Cinema Audio Society, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild of America, Costume Designers Guild, International Cinematographers Guild, Producers Guild of America, Cinema Eye Honors, American Film Institute, British Academy of Film and Television Arts and Critics Choice Association. Whew.)  What does it all mean? It means that the critics have stopped voting (give or take the stray HFPA and CCA) and the film professionals have started voting. And it means that we’re now starting to get real intel from the kind of people who are now casting ballots for the Oscar nominations. Over the course of four days, two awards shows, 13 nomination announcements and one list of recommendations, voters dropped clues as to where the season might be headed but also no doubt threw out a handful of misleading suggestions. Here’s what I think we learned. We have a Top 3. A trio of movies – Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin” – landed the week’s top prizes: nominations from the [Directors Guild]( and the [Producers Guild](, plus an ensemble nomination from the [Screen Actors Guild](. Todd Field’s “Tar” and Joseph Kosinski’s “Top Gun: Maverick” got two of the three (both missed SAG), and seven other movies got one: “Women Talking” and “Babylon” scored with SAG but nobody else, while “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Elvis,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and “The Whale” got only PGA noms among the big three. You can’t really use the Golden Globes as a yardstick for anything, but the fact that “The Fabelmans” and “Banshees” also won the top film awards at that show help reinforce the feeling that we do indeed have a Top 3 at the moment. ID=167008;size=300x250;setID=284833;uid={EMAIL}7200419;click=template_awards_beat A Top 3 might not mean anything. Last year’s Best Picture winner, “CODA,” didn’t get a DGA nomination. The year before, “Nomadland” didn’t get a SAG ensemble nomination, and neither did the 2018 Oscar winner, “Green Book.” Two of last year’s PGA nominees didn’t get Oscar nominations, and 40% of last year’s SAG nominees fell short with Oscar nominating voters. The new, expanded and international Academy doesn’t look like other voting bodies, so take precedent with a grain of salt. “Top Gun: Maverick,” yes. Tom Cruise, maybe not. The movie that brought people back to theaters in the summer is an unassailable Best Picture contender, and in recent weeks its star had seemed to be the strongest candidate for the fifth Best Actor spot. (The first four have been pretty convincingly claimed by Brendan Fraser for “The Whale,” Austin Butler for “Elvis,” Colin Farrell for “The Banshees of Inisherin” and Bill Nighy for “Living.”) But when the voters from SAG, a group that has always had a fondness for movie stars, bypassed Cruise and gave a nomination to Adam Sandler for “Hustle,” it sent a message every bit as uncomfortable as that Shelley Miscavige joke on the Globes. Granted, SAG uses a nominating committee of randomly-chosen members, so maybe the random choices broke the wrong way for Cruise. But you have to think that Sandler has a real shot, and so does the late-breaking Jeremy Pope for “The Inspection” and Hugh Jackman for “The Son.” “The Whale” might have more clout than we thought. Darren Aronofsky’s searing drama about a severely overweight man trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter is a tough sit, and the conventional awards-season wisdom had been that star Brendan Fraser was a lock but the movie itself was scaring off voters. But that wasn’t the case with the Producers Guild, which gave it a nomination over “Women Talking,” “The Woman King” and “Babylon,” among others. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is making history  … below-the-line. Edward Berger’s harrowing World War I film, based on the book that produced a Best Picture winner in 1930, was one of the big winners when the Oscars announced shortlists in 10 categories in December. And it has done extremely well with the guilds as well; on Tuesday, it became the first film not in English ever nominated by the Cinema Audio Society, on top of nominations from the Art Directors Guild and the Motion Picture Sound Editors (the last of which admittedly has a separate foreign-language category). The film was looking as if it, rather than “Glass Onion,” might have become Netflix’s best bet for a Best Picture nomination. But it has yet to cross over beyond the BTL categories, missing out on nominations at the DGA (where it was a huge underdog), SAG (ditto) and the PGA (where it seemed to have a chance). And that means … Read the rest of this column [here](. Read Steve Pond’s recent Awards Beat coverage [HERE.]( [- - -] [Follow us on Facebook]( [Follow us on Twitter]( [Follow us on Instagram]( [Follow us on Linkedin]( TheWrap 1808 Stanford Street, Santa Monica, CA, 90404 [Preferences]( | [Unsubscribe]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you are no longer interested you can [unsubscribe instantly](.