Out of all the awards season contenders this year, Nightcrawler has had perhaps the strangest trajectory of them all. Premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, Nightcrawler received good reviews from The Great White North, but the film was mostly overshadowed by the crowd pleasing antics of other Toronto Film Festival attendees such as The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game. When the movie released wide to the general public in late October, it made a tidy sum at the box office, but the numbers were certainly nothing to demand the immediate attention of Oscar voters. Then something funny happened. As the year's end awards started trickling in, Jake Gyllenhaal's name continually kept popping up as a Best Actor nominee. At first it looked as if this would simply boost Gyllenhaal's Best Actor nomination chances, but then Rene Russo received Best Supporting Actress credit, then writer/director Dan Gilroy's script started getting attention too, then finally, the film itself started receiving Best Picture nominations as well. Cut to the present day and the film is a PGA nominee for Best Picture. Apparently, Nightcrawler, which chronicles the disturbing career of a sociopathic news photographer, has played very well with Academy members who have watched it from the luxurious confines of their own homes with the screeners Open Road Films has sent out. The harsh critique of the media and the film's familiar Los Angeles setting are also likely to appeal to the Academy, so as long as there are enough slots in the Best Picture category this year, expect Nightcrawler to make the final cut.
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.
