Thoughts on 'Lion' and Others [Updating...]

Within minutes of this posting the Critics' Choice Awards will start, the first televised awards show of the season. But since it's happening a month earlier than it normally does, it will hardly count as the most significant awards news of the upcoming week. Tomorrow will see the unveiling of the Golden Globe nominations, followed by SAG nominations on Wednesday.

As all this happens, more contenders begin creeping out of their limited release hidey holes. I caught up with one such contender this afternoon, The Weinstein Co.'s big hopeful Lion, which hasn't been that healthily represented in first half-dozen-or-so critics awards, but the Academy will rectify that.
The movie is pretty great.

October Recap

So October is a wrap! As I was cobbling together my last-minute Doof Warrior costume in time for last night's frivolities, I figured now was the best time to start taking note of how the 2015-16 Oscar race is shaping up.

I realize that for many, the September festival circuit is the official kick-off of awards season. But for those of us without press credentials or travel time to burn, October is when we actually get to see the buzzy titles we've been reading about for a month or more. And this October was chalk full of them.

Early Oscar Predictions: Adapted Screenplay

I've sounded off on some original screenplay possibilities, so here are my wild guesses at the adaptations:

Review - Flight

Denzel Washington owns the screen in Robert Zemeckis' Flight, a “sobering” portrait of alcoholism and the agonizing journey towards making that all-important first step towards recovery: Admitting there's a problem.

Airline pilot 'Whip' Whitaker has such a drinking problem. We first meet him downing beers and snorting cocaine the morning of a passenger flight to Georgia. A mechanical malfunction (a frequently alluded to “act of God”) causes the jet to nosedive into the much talked about crash sequence that whitens knuckles and stretches physics. Even though he's bombed on vodka and cocaine, Whip manages – in a gambit only an intoxicated man would dare attempt – to invert the plane and glide it upside-down in order to restabilize in time for a crash landing. For the time being, Whip is a hero for saving 96 of the 102 souls on board, but when toxicology reports emerge indicating his drunk condition at the time of the crash, he becomes the subject of a criminal negligence investigation that drives him even further to the bottle.