Heartland Film artistic director talks Indy’s Oscar connection, shares top Oscar picks
Hollywood’s biggest night is happening this Sunday, and the 94th Annual Academy Awards is creating so much buzz that Greg Sorvig of The Heartland Film Festival joined us to break it all down and share his thoughts on this year’s contenders. Here’s more from him:
Heartland Film hosts the Academy Award-qualifying Indy Shorts International Film Festival in July and the Heartland International Film Festival in October.
This year’s Oscar Nominations include three short films from Indy Shorts and six feature films from the Heartland Film Festival that received a total of 33 nominations!
The Heartland International Film Festival is known to host premieres of films! This past year we hosted the Midwest Premiere of six Oscar-nominated films. This means that if you came to our festival, you got to see these films before they were ever released in theaters or on streaming platforms.
Most nominations:
“The Power of the Dog” with 12 nominations
Just because they have the most nominations doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily take home the most Oscars. Greg thinks Dune (10 nominations)
“The Power of the Dog” Power of the Dog had the Midwest Premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival
Best Picture:
Gregs’s Pick is “Coda”
“Coda” won the Truly Moving Picture Award from Heartland Film
Best Actress:
Greg’s Pick is Kristen Stewart in “Spencer”
Out of all the categories, this might be the hardest one to predict and has caused the most buzz in the film industry.
Kristen Stewart has not received many accolades yet for this role (like a Golden Globe or SAG Award), that would be good indicators that she would be taking home the Oscar. But her performance was incredible and many people are hoping this will be Kristen’s year.
This past year we hosted the Midwest Premiere of Spencer, so our audience saw this film in October, but it wasn’t released to the public until November.
Best Actor:
Greg’s Pick is Will Smith in “King Richard”
This category might be the most clear cut, but incredibly strong
Will Smith appears to be the frontrunner. When I first saw the film last summer I thought he should be nominated
The Heartland International Film Festival also hosted the Midwest Premiere of King Richard in October. We honored Will Smith with the Pioneering Spirit Award and he thanked our audience with a record video that we showed before the film started.
The road to the Oscars® comes through Indy for short films too!
Indy Shorts is an Academy Award Qualifying Film Festival in all three short film categories.
This means our Grand Prize Winners in Narrative, Animation and Documentary categories can qualify for the Academy Awards. So the films you see at our festival can go on to the Oscars.
This year we had three short films from Indy Shorts go on to receive nominations.
- Please Hold
- The Queen of Basketball
- When We Were Bullies
MovieMaker Magazine also just honored Indy Shorts as one of the Top 20 Best Short Film Festivals in the World for 2022.
The Oscars air Sunday, March 27 at 8 p.m. on ABC.
You can see advance screenings of Oscar-contending films every year right here in Indy by attending the Heartland International Film Festival in October and the Indy Shorts International Film Festival in July!
For more information, visit HeartlandFilm.org.