The Most Surprising Awards Movie of the Year

It’s Friday, and the Sexiest Man Alive is the one who can put together this goddamn IKEA desk.

Hello from Los Angeles, where some Oscar contenders are acting like real clowns, Robert Pattinson is definitely giving us a vibe, and it’s finally time to roll the presses for The Post.

CAN GENRE “LOSERS” WIN WITH AWARDS VOTERS?

When I was talking to Jordan Peele recently, I asked the Get Out writer-director which screeners he was looking forward to receiving in his first year as an Oscar voter. Peele mentioned a movie I hadn’t even thought of as being in the race, a film which has turned into the surprise of the fall: Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel It.

The New Line/Warner Bros. release surpassed even the industry’s most optimistic expectations for a movie where a creepy clown haunts some potty-mouthed tweens in rural Maine, grossing an astounding $685 million worldwide since it opened in September, and charming critics enough to earn an 85 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. This week, It has been screening for awards voters, a group who are traditionally blasé about horror, thrillers, science fiction, and all the genres that functioned as Hollywood’s B movies until baby-boomer directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had their say.

Now the generation who grew up watching Star Wars and E.T. are in the prime of their own filmmaking careers, and many are among the new classes of Academy members admitted in the last three years of the industry group’s expansion. Will awards voters be more open to this year’s genre movies, which also include Peele’s social thriller Get Out (don’t call it a horror movie or someone from Universal will slap your hand), Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Matt Reeves’s War for the Planet of the Apes, James Mangold’s Logan, and Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi? And what about Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, a romance starring a sea monster as its leading man?

Warner Bros., which won a makeup Oscar in 2017 for Suicide Squad, is hoping awards voters respond to It’s crafts, which include intricate production design by Claude Paré, menacing special-effects makeup by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, and spot-on 1980s costumes by Janie Bryant. Having missed the phenomenon upon its theatrical release in September, I attended an It screening at the Directors Guild this week, followed by a Q&A with Muschietti and seven of the film’s young cast members, the ones who lend the film so much of its appeal as It’s ragtag group of “Losers.” There’s no doubt this movie is an untraditional contender—surely this is the only film in the Oscar race with three New Kids on the Block references. And probably that was the only awards Q&A I’ll attend this season where one of the panelists simulates flatulence to answer an audience question. (There’s still time, though, Meryl Streep!)

Muschietti has just arrived in town after shooting the pilot for Hulu’s horror-fantasy adaptation Locke & Key in Canada, and he’s aware of how skeptical many of the industry’s elite are about horror. “I wasn’t thinking of other people’s expectations,” Muschietti said, when I spoke to him Wednesday. “In the horror genre, there are a load of movies made with just commercial purposes. That’s not me. Stephen King is not about that. The movies I really like are more elevated and tell a human story.”

General-release audiences responded to the chemistry of the child actors in It, and the frightful sight of Bill Skarsgård’s demented clown, Pennywise. Muschietti is hoping some will also notice the movie’s deeper, more topical themes. “Pennywise is a monster who uses fear as a tool to divide people,” Muschietti said. “It’s pretty much what’s going on in America. It’s Trump. The story is an analogy of what living in a culture of fear means. The Losers are a girl, a Jewish kid, an African-American kid, a stuttering kid, a big kid. Pennywise is trying to divide them to confront them.”

SMALL PLATES

-At Cannes this year, critics raved about Robert Pattinson’s performance as an erratic criminal in Good Time, calling the role a welcome career re-invention for the Twilight heartthrob. “I thought I already did [the re-invention],” Pattinson tells V.F.’s Nicole Sperling. “But that’s cool. If I can get a re-invention headline every couple of years, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do.”

-The Florida Project’s Willem Dafoe shares with V.F.’s Julie Miller how he handled working with first-time actors on the Sean Baker indie: “I was the one who had to fit in. I was the one who had to be challenged. I had to mix with them. I had to get rid of every trick or any bad habits; I had to be green.”

-Chile’s foreign-language entry, A Fantastic Woman, arrives in theaters for its Oscar-qualifying run today. The Sebastián Lelio film, which stars transgender actress Daniela Vega as a waitress and nightclub singer whose lover dies suddenly, was the movie most recommended to me on the gondolas of the Telluride Film Festival this year, which is as high altitude as it gets in the world of good buzz. The Los Angeles Times’ Tre’vell Anderson speaks to Vega.

HOT TICKETS

-FRIDAY: A Get Out party at Lombardi House will feature some of the fan art inspired by Peele’s film, with the filmmaker and his cast on hand. Come for the biting social commentary, stay for the piping-hot tea.

-SUNDAY: Steven Spielberg’s The Post is about to meet a group who may be its ideal audience: a bunch of journalists. Fox is unveiling the newspapering drama to critics in New York and L.A. this weekend, with Spielberg, Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Matthew Rhys, Sarah Paulson, and costume designer Ann Roth sitting for the Q&A in New York. Alison Brie, Bradley Whitford, screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, casting director Ellen Lewis, and producers Amy Pascal and Kristie Macosko Krieger will be on hand in L.A. Reviews and social-media sentiment are embargoed, so let’s all just make meaningful eye contact afterward in the Fox lot Galaxy parking structure.

-THANKSGIVING: Another anticipated year-end film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, will screen over Thanksgiving weekend. Based on the lusty trailer, featuring Daniel Day-Lewis with a sewing machine, this looks like it could be my Magic Mike. Here’s hoping.

LISTEN UP

In this week’s episode of V.F.’s podcast Little Gold Men, Richard Lawson interviews Darkest Hour director Joe Wright, Katey Rich, Joanna Robinson, and Mike Hogan air their Justice League grievances, and I deliver a dispatch from the Governors Awards.

That’s the news for this week on the Hollywood and awards beat. A programming note: next Friday I’ll be in a post-Thanksgiving food coma watching screeners from my growing DVD pile, so there will be no newsletter in your inbox. See you in two weeks. In the meantime, tell me what you’re seeing out there. Send tips, comments, valet-line gossip, big deals you overheard at the Polo Lounge, bad vibes you picked up on at Craft, good vibes you picked up on at the ArcLight, flattering hem lengths you saw at Milt & Edie’s, and terrifying clown-makeup jobs to rebecca_keegan@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter @thatrebecca.