“What was the song of the sirens like?”
When it comes to Oscar voters, like Odysseus, the answer is: “All the things you wanted to be.”
The Oscar race for 2027 seems to have found its center of gravity, and its front-runner that will be shepherded under the Universal banner. Christopher Nolan‘s “The Odyssey,” the Homer adaptation that shattered the director’s own global opening record with $264 million worldwide, began its formal courtship of Academy voters this week with a series of member screenings on both coasts and abroad. If the early temperature reading is correct, and the buzz holds, the film enters the fall corridor as the one everybody else has to beat.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosted its first members screening on Saturday at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles, presented in 70mm. The roughly 1,000-seat house was near capacity, an early tell in a season where turnout becomes its own form of polling. The U.K. membership, which has become an instrumental voting bloc as AMPAS has gone more international, followed on Monday at the Soho Hotel. And for members in New York City, they enjoyed the journey back to Ithaca on Wednesday in 35mm.
Not surprisingly, the reactions from several members who were in attendance were borderline reverential.
