Belleville weighs in on Hollywood’s film awards season

By Kayla Haggett

BELLEVILLE – The Golden Globes are over, but Hollywood’s film awards season is only beginning and Belleville film buffs are already making predictions.

Jon Keeble, board member of Quinte Film Alternative, said that he wasn’t surprised by the Golden Globe winners and that he expects the Oscars nominations will be similar.

“La La Land” received the most awards at the Globes Sunday night, winning in all seven of the categories it was nominated. Keeble said he thinks it will do well at the Oscars in February as well.

“It has a strong appeal to the people who are in the Academy, because of the fact that there are so many craft skills shown in it,” he said. “The techniques that they used harken back to older-time film making.”

Overall, Keeble said that the Globes did a reasonably good job of picking from the pool of films, and that “everybody’s relatively impressed with the films of 2016.”

However, Keeble said that he thinks “Loving” should have been nominated for best picture and hopes he sees it nominated at the Oscars.

For him personally, he said some of the films he’s most interested in seeing look at characters that aren’t as glamorous as the leads in “La La Land”.

“Small-scale film that looks at individual people, right up nice and close – those are the kind of films I’ve been looking at.”

According to Keeble, some of the films from 2016 he most wants to see are “The Fits“, “Paterson“, “Toni Erdmann” and “American Honey“.

He said he likes “American Honey” “simply because it looks at the idea of what happens when all goes wrong and you don’t have any resources to deal with it.”

Keeble said he hopes that it also shows up on the Oscars nomination list.

However not every film lover in Belleville is interested in the awards season.

Paul Papadopoulos, Television and New Media Production professor at Loyalist College, said that he doesn’t pay much attention to award shows.

Though he said he has more respect for the Golden Globes, he thinks the Oscars are a marketing machine and “a bunch of glamour over nothing.”

“I love film, I love the pretenders, the actors, but I think we overdo the celebration a bit,” said Papadopoulos. “We’re putting these people up way beyond where we should.”

He said that award shows push certain films to the public and make them believe they are the best, but he doesn’t think films are great just because they’ve won awards – he decides that for himself.

“I think it’s just a question of seeing good film and seeing great film, and see it for yourself and you’ll realize right then and there why it’s great.”

Papadopoulos said one of his favourite films of 2016 was “The Lobster”, which he thinks many people dismiss, however he said the message is simple.

“It’s so off-the-wall, but I think the statement it makes is so powerful. It’s about this forced idea of sexuality and marriage and how we have to conform a certain way.”

The awards season continues with the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars all happening in the next two months.