Possible Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director (Bennett Miller), Best Actor (Steve Carell), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo), Best Supporting Actor (Channing Tatum), Best Supporting Actress (Vanessa Redgrave), Best Original Screenplay (E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman), Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Hairstyling Foxcatcher was on many Oscar preview lists last year as the film was originally scheduled to release late in 2013. Bombarded by a myriad of successful prestige releases coming at the end of the year, Foxcatcher's producers blinked and decided to sit 2013 out in hopes for making a bigger splash in a possibly less competitive 2014. While it was probably a smart move given the hyper-competitive nature of last year's Oscar race, who knows, had the film released last year it may have very well been in the thick of the Best Picture race. The film tells the shockingly true story of John du Pont (Steve Carell), a mentally unstable inheritor of the du Pont fortune who had an obsession with wrestling. Du Pont hired the brother team of Mark (Channing Tatum) and David (Mark Ruffalo) Schultz, two former Olympian wrestlers, to set up a wrestling compound, but the partnership would end in tragic consequences. Directed by Bennett Miller, whose two previous films, Capote and Moneyball, both earned nominations for Best Picture, Foxcatcher sounds the prime Oscar material. The main wildcard for some may be the film's reliance on a straight up dramatic performance from comedian Steve Carell, but if there's anything the last few years performances from Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper have taught us, just because you haven't seen an actor do something, don't assume the he or she can't.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
