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Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

Oscars | Emmys | Grammys | Tonys

2024 Oscars Predictions:

Best International Feature Wim Wenders’ ‘Perfect Days’

Weekly Commentary: The United Kingdom is poised to win its first Academy Award with Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” and what a deserved win it will be.

But while I have the floor: it’s time for the...

Following the news that Mendes will direct four fab films about the Fab Four, our critic picks his fantasy lineup

Just when we were getting sick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe … Sam Mendes comes along with the Beatles Cinematic Universe. It’s a quartet of interlocking movies about the Fab Four, each centred on one band member, and with the fascinating promise of overlaps and Pov shifts, perhaps inspired by Lucas Belvaux’s triple-decker Trilogy pictures or Joao Canijo’s mirror image films Bad Living and Living Bad. Mendes’s moptop movies may tag quadrilaterally around key moments … Shea Stadium, the Maureen Cleave interview, Lennon’s death? But who to cast? Here is my fantasy lineup.

Source: Beata Siewicz

Matthew Byrne, Screen Ireland

Inis Mór, the largest of Ireland’s Aran Islands, is the winner of the seventh edition of the Eufcn Location Award, the award for best European location in the film and TV industry organised by Eufcn – The European Film Commissions Network.

The award was accepted by Michael Byrne, an inward production and sustainability executive from Screen Ireland on Sunday (February 18) at a ceremony in Berlin.

The isolated island on the west coast of Ireland was a key location for filming Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees Of Inisherin.

The Banshees Of Inisherin is a Searchlight Pictures production,...

by Cláudio Alves

Portugal's Bad Living is an actressexual feast, but it's unlikely to get shortlisted.

The Academy will announce its shortlists for various categories tomorrow, including Best International Film. For the past few months, I've been writing about a lot of these movies and have, so far, watched 44 of the 88 submissions. So, it seems logical that I'd have something to say before the race gets whittled down to 15 titles vying for five nomination slots and, inevitably, one little gold man. While predictions are important, I'll start by expressing more movie love, naming what films would make my shortlist. Undoubtedly, it'll be very different from the Academy's selection. If that's for better or worse, you decide…...

Shortlist of 15 films to be announced December 21, nominations out on January 23, 2024.

The Academy has announced eligible features in the categories of international feature film, animation, and documentary for the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024.

The shortlist of 15 films will be announced on December 21, and the nominations announcement is January 23, 2024.

International

Eighty-eight countries or regions have submitted films eligible for consideration in the international feature film category. An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (more than 40 minutes long) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track. Namibia is a first-time entrant.

Academy members...

Taking home the Jury Prize at the 2023 Berlinale, Portuguese auteur João Canijo‘s latest Bad Living (Mal Viver) is the director’s masterpiece, examining the lives of five women tied to a seaside hotel which also happens to be their prison. Notably, the film is a diptych with the filmmaker’s other 2023 feature, Living Bad (also premiering in Berlin), which utilizes playwright August Strindberg in examining the equally dysfunctional guests of the hotel. I spoke with João Canijo about Bad Living, Portugal’s official submission in the category of Best International Feature for the 96th Academy Awards. Canijo discusses his filmmaking techniques as well as the narrative subtexts of the film.…...

Predicting the eventual five Oscar nominees for Best International Feature is made difficult by the three-step process that begins after the October 2, 2023 deadline for countries to submit entries. To be part of the selection process for this category, which was called Best Foreign Language Film before 2020, requires a great deal of dedication. (Scroll down for the most up-to-date 2024 Oscars Best International Feature predictions.)

In the days following the deadline for submissions, the academy determines each film’s eligibility. Then the several hundred academy members who serve on the International Feature screening committee are divided into groups and required to watch all their submissions over a six-week period that ends in early December. Their top 15 vote-getters will make it to the next round. That list of semi-finalists will be revealed on December 21, 2023.

These 15 films will be made available to the entire academy membership who can cast ballots for the final five...

Leonor Teles’ feature fiction debut Baan will close the festival.

Wang Bing’s Man In Black will open the 21st edition of Portugal’s documentary film festival Doclisboa (October 19-29).

Bing’s latest feature explores the life of Wang Xilin, a Chinese composer and dissident. The film had its world premiere at Cannes, in Special Screenings, where the Chinese director’s other film Youth (Spring) screened in competition.

‘Man In Black’: Cannes Review

Closing the festival is Leonor Teles’ feature fiction debut Baan which follows a young architect’s love life across Lisbon and Bangkok. The film premiered in competition at Locarno.

Screen is profiling every submission for best international feature at the 96th Academy Awards.

Entries for the 2024 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 96th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 10, 2024 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between December 1, 2022, and October 31, 2023. The deadline...

The people dotting Leonor Teles’ shorts are all caught in the midst of seismic transformations, drifters who watch their home turfs push them away and change at mind-blowing speed. Her Berlinale-winning Batrachian’s Ballad (2016) offered an incendiary study of the Romani experience in present-day Portugal filtered through the prism of Teles’ own roots in the local Ciganos community; Ashore (2018) tailed an aging fisherman from a riverfront village perched between tradition and modernity; and Dogs Barking at Birds (2019) followed a working-class family wrestling with the capital’s rampant gentrification. Thai for “home,” the title of Teles’ feature debut literalizes a preoccupation that’s been at the cornerstone of all the director’s films. In its barest terms, Baan is a chronicle of a tumultuous romance stretching across weeks and time zones, but it’s also and most significantly a snapshot of 21st-century restlessness, a portrait of two young wanderers for whom...

The 2023 edition of the Berlin International Film Festival has come and gone (we got plenty more to insert here), but here are some of the reviews and future interviews for a huge swath of films from the prestigious film fest.

20,000 Species of Bees (read review)

Afire (Roter Himmel) (read review)

Bad Living (read review)

The Beast in the Jungle (read review)

BlackBerry (read review)

Disco Boy (read review)

Le grand chariot (The Plough) (read review)

Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert (read review)

Limbo (read review)

Living Bad (Viver Mal) (read review)

Manodrome (read review)

Music (read review)

Past Lives (read review)

The Shadowless Tower (read review)

She Came to Me (read review)

Silver Haze (read review)

Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (read review)

The Survival of Kindness (read review)

The Teachers’ Lounge (read review)

Till the End of the Night (read review)

Tótem (read review)…

Continue reading.

The 73rd Berlin International Film Festival came to a close this past weekend, and despite speculation that Sundance import “Past Lives” or Lila Avilés’ “Tótem” would take the Golden Bear, the jury, led this year by Kristen Stewart, awarded it to the French documentary “On the Adamant.” Directed by Nicolas Philibert, the movie follows operations at the Parisian Centre de jour l’Adamant, a floating medical facility on the Seine that offers its patients innovative forms of art therapy.

Jordan Mintzer (The Hollywood Reporter) writes, “While documenting the daily routine of a small clinic that most Parisians walk by without ever noticing, ‘On the Adamant’ ultimately becomes a moving testament to what people are capable of, if they could just find the right place to do it.” Guy Lodge (Variety) compares the film to Philibert’s “To Be and To Have,” which is set inside a single-room schoolhouse in rural France,...

’Suzume’, ’On The Adamant’, and ’Art College 1994’ all land in joint fourth place with a score of 2.7.

Celine Song’s feature debut Past Lives has finished top of Screen’s 2023 Berlin jury grid after the final five titles failed to match its average score of 3.6 from seven critics.

The romantic drama has the highest score of a Berlin jury grid winner since 2017’s The Other Side Of Hope by Aki Kaurismaki, which scored 3.7.

Click top left to expand

Past Lives stars Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro, and follows two childhood friends from South Korea who reconnect...

The gender-neutral acting prize was won by Spain’s Sofía Otero for ’20,000 Species of Bees’.

Nicolas Philibert’s documentary On The Adamant, about a floating care centre in Paris, was awarded Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival tonight (February 25).

The film, which is being handled internationally by Les Films du Losange, is the fourth documentary to take top honours at the Berlinale.

German films found particular favour with the jury, presided over by Kristen Stewart, with no less than three of the Bear statuettes going to local productions: the Silver Bear Grand Jury award for Christian Petzold’s Afire,...

The documentary “On the Adamant” has been named the best film of the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin organizers announced on Saturday.

The film from director Nicolas Philibert follows life in a daycare center located on the Seine in Paris for adults with mental disorders. It is the first documentary to win the festival’s top prize since “Fire at Sea” in 2016.

German director Christian Petzold won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, essentially the runner-up award, for his drama “Afire,” while Philippe Garrel won the directing award for “The Plough.” The gender-neutral acting prizes went to Sofia Otero for “20,000 Species of Bees” in the leading performance category and Thea Ehre for “Till the End of the Night” in the supporting category.

The jury president was actress Kristen Stewart. The other jurors were actress Goldshifteh Farahani, directors Valeska Grisebach, Radu Jude and Carla Simón and Johnnie To and casting director Francine Maisler.

On The Adamant Photo: Courtesy of Berlinale

Nicolas Philibert’s documentary On The Adamant, about a floating mental healthcare facility on the Seine, has won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Gerrman director Christian Petzold took the Silver Bear Grand Jury for his tale of a writer struggling to forge connections on a beach retreat Afire. French director Philippe Garrel won the Silver Bear for best director for The Plough, which tells the tale of a family of puppeteers. The Silver Bear Jury Prize went to Portugal’s Joao Canijo for drama Bad Living.

The award for best leading performance - now a gender neutral prize - was won by Spain’s Sofía Otero for 20,000 Species Of Bees, directed by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren.

Competition

Golden Bear for Best Film - On The Adamant, dir. Nicolas Philibert Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize – Afire,...

After the misery of the 2022 Berlin Film Festival, held toward the tail-end of the pandemic and with strict social distancing and Covid testing regulations still in place, it was back to normal at this year’s 73rd edition.

Festivalgoers were so pleased to return to a proper, physical event that they were remarkably tolerant toward a competition programme that was very patchy, at least by comparison with those found in rival events like Cannes and Venice.

The Berlinale launched with Rebecca Miller’s quirky new romantic comedy, She Came to Me, starring Peter Dinklage as an opera composer with writer’s block, Anne Hathaway as his neurotic therapist wife, and the scene-stealing Marisa Tomei as a salty, seafaring but very amorous tugboat captain. This was a film with such oddball charm that it was easy to overlook its self-indulgence. Festivals can take themselves far too seriously. She Came to Me...

Winners have been announced at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival, with On the Adamant by Nicolas Philibert scooping the coveted Golden Bear prize as the best film of the festival’s International Competition. Scroll down for the full list of winners, which were revealed Saturday evening at the Berlinale Palast.

The film chronicles a unique day-care center in the heart of Paris that welcomes adults suffering from mental disorders, offering the kind of care that grounds them in time and space and helps them to recover or keep up their spirits.

Introducing the film, jury head Kristen Stewart said the pic is “masterfully crafted” and acts as “cinematic proof of the vital necessity of human expression.”

Other winners in the International Competition included Philippe Garrel, who picked up the Silver Bear for Best Director for his latest pic Le grand chariot (The Plough). Garrel dedicated the award to the late filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

On the Adamant, a documentary by French director Nicolas Philibert that gives an intimate look at the patients and caregivers in a mental health center located on the Seine River in the heart of Paris, has won the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear for best film.

For his 11th feature, the 72-year-old Philibert spent months aboard a barge anchored on the Seine in Paris, chronicling a mental health care facility that caters specifically to its patients’ creative needs. His documentary explores issues of creativity and art, of sanity and madness, but does so without applying labels or clear-cut distinctions.

“I don’t like partitions or labels,” Philibert said. “In this film on psychiatry, we were always [careful] to not always distinguish very clearly between patients and carers. I tried to reverse the image we always have of mad people [which I see] as discriminating and stigmatizing. I wanted us to be able,...

As the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival drew to a close, the first of the three major international film festivals began giving out its awards. This year’s Berlin jury was headed by Kristen Stewart, and the selections promised to reflect the actress’ famously good taste in movies. But a strong lineup featuring a variety of innovative films from the world’s top directors ensured that their job was never going to be easy. From a timely documentary about the war in Ukraine to a variety of dramas about men trapped in small spaces (see: “Inside” and “Manhole”), the eclectic collection of films had something for everyone.

At last year’s festival, Carla Simon’s Spanish Drama “Alcarras” won the coveted Golden Bear. Several of the biggest names in global cinema also walked away with big prizes, as Claire Denis won the Silver Bear for Best Director for “Both Sides of the Blade...

Veteran French docmaker Nicolas Philibert was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, taking the prize for his film “On the Adamant,” a poignant observational study of a Paris mental health care facility.

He received the award from jury president Kristen Stewart, after the star offered an extended and plainly heartfelt ode to the film’s humanity and simplicity: “People have gone in circles for thousands of years trying to pin down what can be deemed art, who’s allowed to do it and what determines its value,” she said, citing the boundary-pushing nature of the festival, and namechecking such opposing philosophers on the matter as Aristotle, Barthes, Sontag and Beavis & Butthead, before concluding, “For all of us, you just know it when you see it.”

It was an apt way to introduce a film that stood out in this year’s Competition...

Misery loves company, which may account for Portuguese director João Canijo’s decision to split his angst-ridden hotel-set project into two complementary films. Both were selected for the Berlinale, with the half centered on the hotel guests (“Living Bad”) landing in the Encounters section, and “Bad Living,” which revolves around the hotel staff, taking a main competition slot. It makes reviewing one without reference to the other something of an exercise in shadowboxing, especially when, as in “Bad Living,” the minute observation of its deteriorating female relationships could have used some kind of counterpoint, if only to make an unremittingly bleak, fractious 127 minutes pass a little faster. They may work in hospitality, but the women of “Bad Living” live in a draining, near-permanent state of hostility.

The heartbreak hotel location is perhaps the film’s biggest star. It’s a large, modern building, though not so modern that it doesn...

The Mirror Has Two Faces: Canijo’s Customers Are Always Blight with Inverse Melodrama

“Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and presentiment of its end destroys it at is very peak,” wrote Swedish playwright August Strindberg, a master iconoclast who excelled in creating harrowing psychological warfare between despairing characters in his effort to obtain a semblance of true naturalism. João Canijo mainlines this process with Viver Mal (Living Bad), a counterpoint film to Bad Living (read review), which brings to the fore all the nasty soundbites in the background and heightens the anxiety between the five hoteliers whose misery dominates the previous chapter.…...

‘Music’, ‘The Plough’, ‘20,000 Species Of Bees’ and ‘Bad Living’ have also been scored.

Christian Petzold’s Afire has landed second on Screen’s 2023 Berlin jury grid with a strong 3.4 average.

The German drama received a mix of four-star and three-star ratings from the critics and is just behind Celine Song’s Past Lives which remains leader of the pack on 3.6.

Petzold’s fifth entry at Berlinale’s competition follows a group of friends holidaying by the Baltic Sea.

Next in line for the new titles is Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 Species Of Bees which received a 2.6 average from critics.

The Best Exotic Portugal Hotel: Canijo Examines Motherhood as Misanthropy in Masterful Familial Miasma

The women handling the specialty boutique hotel in Joao Canijo’s Mal Viver (Bad Living) have inadvertently created their own inescapable prison. Like the cursed souls inhabiting the metaphorical hell of The Eagles’ “Hotel California, which eerily asserted “You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave,” three generations of women careen towards self-destructive implosion, predatory insects tangled in a web of their own making.

For fans of Canijo, who often operates in the same vein as Mike Leigh in the lengthy collaborations of his scenarios with the same coterie of performers over the past several decades, it’s a return to the acidity of his best traveled title, 2011’s Blood of My Blood, another agonizing familial epic which is more sensationally perverse.…...

Joao Canijo’s newest cinematic venture Mal Viver had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). The film revolves around a family of women trying to save their relationships and the family hotel and stars Anabela Moreir, Madalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida, Vera Barreto, and Rita Blanco.

Mal Viver starts with an establishing shot on a backyard pool, with Angela (Barreto) cleaning, and Piedade (Moreir) lounging poolside, when suddenly, Piedade’s mother Sara (Blanco), daughter Salome (Almeida), and Raquel (Almeida), show up. All the women exchange confused glances until Piedade and Salome awkwardly embrace because they haven’t seen one another in a long time. Apparently, she wasn’t aware her own child was visiting, and she’s pissed no one told her. The women sit down for dinner and have a catch-up conversation in the hotel restaurant they manage, and although it’s a lively albeit graphic discussion,...

Portuguese auteur Joao Canijo (Blood of My Blood) arrives at the 2023 Berlinale with not just one but two films — a diptych shot in the same hotel location with overlapping characters. Bad Living (Mal Viver) focuses largely on the women who own and run the hotel, while its companion, Living Bad (Viver Mal), centers on some of the hotel’s guests. (Both films unfold within the same time frame.) Full disclosure: I have not seen Living Bad, but given that Bad Living was selected for the festival’s main competition presumably it was deemed to be the stronger work. One can only shudder to imagine what an ordeal Living Bad must be to endure. Punishingly slow, grandiloquently depressing and ultimately not even especially convincing psychologically, Bad Living feels like the work of people who sincerely believed they were making great art. Sadly, they were mistaken.

Bad Living assembles a procession of mostly static,...

Portuguese auteur João Canijo (San Sebastián winner “Blood of My Blood”) has a brace of films at the Berlin Film Festival in 2023. “Bad Living” is in competition while its companion piece “Living Bad” is in the Encounters strand.

“Bad Living” follows five conflicted women who are operating an old family-run hotel, trying to save it from going under. The unexpected arrival of a granddaughter to this oppressive space stirs trouble, reviving latent hatred and piled-up resentments. “Living Bad,” which plays out like the reverse shot of “Bad Living,” follows the stories of three groups of guests in the same hotel with glimpses of what transpires in the first film.

The genesis of the films go back to “Blood of My Blood” (2011), where the lives of a family living in the outskirts of Lisbon are disrupted within a short period of time.

“‘Blood of My Blood’ was supposed to be two...

One of the most fascinating, ambitious cinematic projects premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival this month comes from Portuguese director João Canijo, who will be debuting a pair of connected films in different sections. First up, his Competition selection Mal Viver (Bad Living) draws inspiration from the plays of Strindberg and films of Rivette in telling the story of five women who are running a decaying hotel. Then the Encounters election Viver Mal (Living Bad) is set in the same location, but from the viewpoint of the guests. Ahead of the premieres, we’re thrilled to exclusively debut the first trailers.

With the same creative team behind both films, including cinematographer Leonor Teles, editor João Braz, sound team of Elsa Ferreira and Tiago Raposinho, production designer Nádia Henriques, and costumer designer Silvia Siopa, the cast of Mal Viver features Anabela Moreira, Rita Blanco, Madalena Almeida, Cleia Almeida, and Vera Barreto,...