With the 95th Academy Awards slated for Sunday, March 12, Nashville’s beloved arthouse theater is giving moviegoers one last chance to see some of this year’s nominees on the big screen before the ceremony. The Belcourt’s OscaRRR Picks and Best Picture Marathon series will run March 3 through 11 — a lineup of Oscar contenders, along with, as the Belcourt folks put it, “a corrective of our own” — before the nonprofit’s annual Red Carpet Evening fundraiser and watch party on the 12th.
You’ll have more than a dozen opportunities to catch Best International Film nominee Close, an emotional coming-of-age tale from Belgian director Lukas Dhont. While Indian epic RRR somehow isn’t nominated for Best International Film, the “exhilarating, action-packed spectacular mythologizing two real-life freedom fighters” is up for Best Original Song — and that’s enough to get it a pair of screenings. That “corrective” of which the Belcourt speaks is director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Viola Davis-starring Woman King, snubbed by the Academy but presented in conjunction with the Belcourt’s ongoing Beloved: A Spotlight Series on Black Female Directors. (Also showing as part of that series’ closing weekend is Eve’s Bayou, director Kasi Lemmons’ 1997 family drama.) Other Oscar Picks screenings will include Turning Red and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (both up for Best Animated Feature Film), To Leslie (whose lead Andrea Riseborough garnered a mildly controversial nomination for Best Actress) and Irish Best International contender The Quiet Girl.
With the exception of James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water — still omnipresent at the megaplexes — the Belcourt will also show every Best Picture nominee: Tár, with its exceptional turn from star Cate Blanchett; Baz Luhrmann’s absolutely outlandish Elvis; director Edward Berger’s World War I epic All Quiet on the Western Front; Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking; the fun-as-hell populist nominee Top Gun: Maverick; Steven Spielberg’s masterful The Fabelmans; the widely beloved Everything Everywhere All at Once (leading the field with 11 total nominations); Martin McDonagh’s tender, funny and heartbreaking The Banshees of Inisherin; and Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s dark-horse satire Triangle of Sadness. The Belcourt is also continuing its run of Oscar-Nominated Short Films.
Also still playing at the Hillsboro Village cinema this week is Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, which our own Craig D. Lindsey recently called “another melancholic, mature, beautifully constructed feather in the cap of Hansen-Løve, one of the most personal (and most human) filmmakers out there.” Creed III opens this weekend at cineplexes (read our review of that here), as does survival-horror flick Hunt Her, Kill Her, while the more-than-a-meme Cocaine Bear and the MCU’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (which has fetched more than $350 million at the box office despite spotty reviews) continue their runs. Also still in theaters are Magic Mike’s Last Dance and the aforementioned Avatar sequel.
