Awards season has begun in earnest. The Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals have premiered dozens of Oscar contenders and the AFI Fest in Los Angeles will begin next week, along with a plethora of regional fests. Voters from various groups are going to screenings and watching links, and titles like “Hamnet,” “One Battle After Another,” “Frankenstein,” “Sinners,” “A House of Dynamite” and “Sentimental Value” are jockeying for position.
And Oscar voters who want to start watching films in anticipation of nomination voting can go onto the members’ only Academy Screening Room portal and see …
Well, not very much.
As of Friday, Sept. 26, there are only 37 films in the Academy Screening Room: nine documentaries, two animated features and 26 live-action narrative films. The most high-profile films available to Oscar voters are the sequels “Mission: Impossible – the Final Reckoning” and “The Accountant 2,” along with “The Friend,” “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” “On Swift Horses,” “The Penguin Lessons,” “Steve,” “The Ballad of Wallis Island” and one certifiable smash hit, Netflix’s animated “KPop Demon Hunters.”
For the record, not one of those films is among the 70 top Best Picture contenders listed on the Gold Derby website.
The screening room, which charges $20,000 for films to be made available to Oscar voters but allows movies with budgets under $10 million to apply for a lower rate, opened on Aug. 15 with seven films, including “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” “How to Train Your Dragon” and “KPop Demon Hunters.” It has added additional films every Friday since then, with the new additions ranging from a low of one on Aug. 22 to a high of nine on Oct. 10.
So far, though, studios and filmmakers have shied away from placing major contenders on the platform, preferring that voters see those at in-person screenings or on private links sent via one of three Academy-approved mailing houses.
Three other AMPAS members-only screening rooms that do not charge for placement are also open. One is reserved for members of the Documentary Branch and currently contains 95 feature docs and 74 short docs in contention in those categories, one contains 20 of the approximately 90 qualifying films in the Best International Feature Film category and one includes seven animated features in the running for that Oscar.
On the documentary side, films in the screening room include a number of movies that have been nominated by the Critics Choice Documentary Awards and placed on the DOC NYC Short List of likely awards titles. Among those are “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” “The Perfect Neighbor,” “The Alabama Solution,” “Heightened Scrutiny,” “Mistress Dispeller,” “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” “My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay,” “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” “Riefenstahl,” “Deaf President Now!” and “Coexistence My Ass!”
Each member of the doc branch is given a list of about 10% of the eligible films as assigned viewing, but is free to watch and vote for anything else as well.
The screening room devoted to international features opened on Friday with 20 films that have been submitted by their home countries to the Best International Feature Film category. To date, 89 films have been announced as submissions, though it’s possible that some others will be in the running and some of the ones thought to be eligible will be found not to qualify. The screening room is expected to contain every eligible film by the end of the month, with voters in the category scheduled to receive their lists of required viewing on Oct. 24.
The first batch of 20 included films from Chile (Diego Cespedes’ “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo”), Denmark (David Borenstein’s “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”), Germany (Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling”), Jordan (Cherien Dabis’ “All That’s Left of You”), Morocco (Maryam Touzani’s “Calle Malaga”) and Switzerland (Petra Volpe’s “Late Shift”).
It also includes two films by directors whose films have won Oscars in the past: “Orphan” from Hungarian director Lazlo Nemes, who won in the international category for “Son of Saul,” and Ukrainian journalist/filmmaker Mystyslav Chernov’s “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” who won the documentary Oscar for “20 Days in Mariupol.”
The screening room for films competing in the Best Animated Feature category currently contains only seven films, with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Pixar’s “Elio” by far the highest-profile contenders so far.
Here are the films in the Academy Screening Rooms as of Oct. 13
ACADEMY SCREENING ROOM
“The Accountant 2”
“Ai Weiwei’s Turandot” (documentary)
“Apocalypse in the Tropics” (documentary)
“The Ballad of Wallis Island”
“The Baltimorons”
“Becoming Led Zeppelin” (documentary)
“Diane Warren: Relentless” (documentary)
“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight”
“East of Wall”
“Echo Valley”
“Elio” (animation)
“Eric Larue”
“Familiar Touch”
“The Friend”
“Hello Beautiful”
“How to Train Your Dragon”
“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”
“KPop Demon Hunters” (animation)
“Lily”
“A Little Prayer”
“The Luckiest Man in America”
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”
“Mistress Dispeller” (documentary)
“Oh Hi!”
“On Swift Horses”
“Peacock”
“The Penguin Lessons”
“The Rose: Come Back to Me” (documentary)
“Rule Breakers”
“Steve”
“Tatami”
“The Ugly Stepsister”
“UnBroken” (documentary)
“Viva Verdi!” (documentary)
“Walk With Me” (documentary)
“The Wedding Banquet”
“Year of the Fox”
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE SCREENING ROOM
“14 Short Films About Opera”
“2000 Meters to Andriivka”
“76 Days Adrift”
“Ada—My Mother the Architect”
“Afternoons of Solitude”
“Ai Weiwei’s Turandot”
“The Alabama Solution”
“Always”
“American Sons”
“Among Neighbors”
“Animal”
“Antidote”
“Apocalypse in the Tropics”
“Art for Everybody”
“Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is my Muse”
“Becoming Led Zeppelin”
“Beyond the Gaze: Julie Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue”
“BTS Army: Forever We Are Young”
“Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media”
“Champions of the Golden Valley”
“Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie”
“Child of Dust”
“Coexistence, My Ass!”
“Complicated”
“Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution”
“The Dating Game”
“Deaf President Now!”
“Diane Warren: Relentless”
“Dog Warriors”
“Drop Dead City”
“The Encampments”
“Europe’s New Faces”
“Facing War”
“Folktales”
“From Island to Island”
“Go to the People”
“Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus”
“Grand Theft Hamlet”
“Heaven Poste Restante”
“Heightened Scrutiny”
“Holding Liat”
“I Was Born This Way”
“I, Poppy”
“I’m Not Everything I Want to Be”
“Imago”
“In Limbo”
“In Waves and War”
“Janis Ian: Breaking Silence”
“The Last Class”
“The Last Philadelphia”
“The Last Twins”
“The Librarians”
“Life After”
“Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story”
“Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore”
“Meanwhile”
“Men of War”
“Mistress Dispeller”
“Monk in Pieces”
“Mr. Nobody Against Putin”
“My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay”
“My Undesirable Friends: Part I 00 Last Air in Moscow”
“Natchez”
“Norita”
“One to One: John and Yoko”
“Paint Me a Way Out of Here”
“The Parish of Bishop John”
“Pavements”
“The Perfect Neighbor”
“Prime Minister”
“The Prince of Nanawa”
“Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk”
“Rebel With a Clause”
“Riefenstahl”
“The Rose: Come Back to Me”
“Schindler Space Architect”
“Secret Mall Apartment”
“Sensory Overload”
“Slumlord Millionaire”
“Songs From the Hole”
“Speak.”
“Swamp Dog Gets His Pool Painted”
“Third Act”
“Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on New York City Streets”
“Trains”
“Unbanked”
“UnBroken”
“Viva Verdi!”
“Walk With Me”
“Welded Together”
“The White House Effect”
“Who in the Hell is Regina Jones?”
“Worth the Fight”
“Writing Hawa”
“Yalla Parkour”
INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM SCREENING ROOM
Australia: “The Wolves Always Come Out at Night”
Austria: “Peacock”
Azerbaijan: “Taghiyev: Oil”
Bulgaria: “Tarika”
Chile: “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo”
Czech Republic: “I’m Not Everything I Want to Be”
Denmark: “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”
Germany: “Sound of Falling”
Greenland: “Walls – Akinni Inuk”
Hong Kong: “The Last Dance”
Hungary: “Orphan”
Ireland: “Sanatorium”
Jordan: “All That’s Left of You”
Latvia: “Dog of God”
Madagascar: “Disco Afrika: A Malagasy Story”
Morocco: “Calle Malaga”
Peru: “Kinra”
Switzerland: “Late Shift”
Turkey: “One of Those Days When Hemme Dies”
Ukraine: “2000 Meters to Andriivka”
ANIMATED FEATURE SCREENING ROOM
“Colorful Stage! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing”
“Dog Man”
“Dog of God”
“Dragon Heart – Adventures Beyond This World”
“Eilo”
“KPop Demon Hunters”
“Lost in Starlight”
