Costume Designers Guild Nominees

Yep, with Cyrano as alt.

I really thought this would be a lay-up guild.

stupid fucking guilds. not even Durran can break the curse

Nightmare Alley rises brother.

What do you all make of this huge disconnect between critics and the industry on Spencer? I mean, even if you dislike the film itself, it seems really hard to deny the beauty of its production values and Stewart's performance... Jackie did quite well with the guilds, so there doesn't seem to be a precedent for this...

Agreed.

I think there might be a few things to it.

Spencer is obviously not an everyday biopic, and it's clear that a lot of people went into the film expecting one thing and experienced another. I was seeing this in my own theater after I had left it. Spencer has far more in common with something like The Shining than, say, The Queen, and that was a film that wasn't exactly embraced at the outset, either. Critics are more receptive to something more outre and daring, but industry people are by and large not as adventurous.

I do think there also has to be something said for the fact that it was Kristen Stewart, an actress who has long been trying to prove her bonafides to major audiences that she isn't just the Twilight girl, and the critics wanted to be behind that momentum. And it would make sense, as it is certainly a transformative performance and the film really does hinge on her work in it, and it's arguably the showiest performance of her career in that regard. But I do wonder if the rapturous response to Stewart might have seemed even more hyperbolic because of that stigma, and it was done in such a way for people to take notice. This is also going to be a situation where we look back at pundits and online hype trains as potentially convincing themselves of a narrative and trying to will it to happen, and regional critics' bodies trying to fight for relevance as Oscar prognosticators by giving her the win. Yes, it's probable that most of them gave her the win because they honestly believed her to be the best of the category, but there also is likely a chicken-or-egg scenario in place where some places gave her the win because they expected she would eventually win and they wanted to be part of the momentum that caused it. This is why BFCA is going to be interesting because, if we go by what critics have done up to this point, Stewart should still be in a reasonably good position, if not necessarily a frontrunner, but if she loses, will it be because that frontrunner momentum was all an illusion bolstered by Film Twitter and pundits? (Note that this has no bearing on Stewart's actual quality of performance, but more on how Oscar season clouds judgment and has people convince themselves of narratives and "undeniability.")

As for the tech guilds, I think Spencer missing here is a massive blow, but it's not like any of the films that got in over it are that egregious, at least to me. I think it's a matter of, as with all things, them just picking the films they liked the most. And Parasite/Janney aside, Neon is still a reasonably small studio in comparison. They put all their eggs in one basket this year and it looks like it's not panning out.

This and also it's that her film was so dependent on theatrical - which is another reason the "cinema experience" (yeah, whatever) is dead.........

TpoTD was similar in how it initially received - and similar in general - like what kind of "Western" was that? ......... but being on Netflix it had time to linger or get rewatches - it went up in every metric as it played - RT score, metacritic, audience score across the board ............people could say "Oh maybe I didn't get it - I should rewatch" - I was expecting something ELSE

With Spencer they could just say hey didn't like it and tell people to avoid it and the movie was more defined at that point........

I think Spencer would have benefited in general if it had been on Hulu for the last 2 months. There would at least have been more convo around it.

Yeah,  I've said this about Stewart for a few years now. She's one of the most obvious critics hype trains around, so a situation like this was always inevitable. They tend to go overboard praising her work to correct what they perceive to be an imbalance (that general audiences think she is a mediocre or sub-par actress thanks to things like Twilight and Charlie's Angels).


I've got nothing against Stewart. She's not particularly charismatic or interesting performer  to me, but she can be serviceable in the right role. And she may one day well grow into an actress I like within her limitations. But she is not some genius acting savant as some critics would desperately want you believe since she switched Twilight for indie/auteur or Euro arthouse movies. Critics and Film Twitter tried a Gambit to bluff people that her work on Spencer was untouchable this year, and it didn't work with regular degular audiences or her peers. 

The whole "Stewart as a great actress" thing has never been remotely organic, and that is the problem. It's been pushed by a minority of critical elite. Critics need to stop coddling her, and Stewart herself could do well to do stronger work in more mainstream fare. I think she may just eke out the Oscar nod this time, but she needs to win the crowd over on merit afterwards.

I think one also shouldn't perhaps discount that there could be a kind of unpleasant whiplash for many viewers in terms of the revisionist depiction of the royals as these cold fiends compared to the popular depictions that most are exposed to via the popular Peter Morgan penned works of The Queen and The Crown.