Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley has officially entered the award season chat. He’s an Oscar-winning director. He directed an Oscar Best Picture (The Shape of Water). So insiders were always leaving open room in the awards race for this film. Nightmare Alley screened last night for the first time simultaneously in New York and Toronto. Toronto because that’s where it was filmed and most of the crew and some cast members are based here. Guillermo works almost exclusively out of Toronto so it was a way to involve the 6 in the premiere with multiple screenings and a livestream of the Q&A from NYC, which is where Guillermo and the film’s lead male actor, Bradley Cooper, were last night. Early reviews that I’ve read of Nightmare Alley from some of the major outlets seem to average out at a solid B+. The film opens on December 17 so we have time to consider its Oscar chances once more people have seen it and start reacting and whether or not it can get any traction during the holiday box office and on social media.
This was Bradley’s first red carpet in a long time, since just before the pandemic started in North America. And it’s actually been a while since he’s been on a red carpet for a film he stars in. He was one of the producers on The Joker, so he was around for some of the promotion for that movie in the back half of 2019 and early 2020 during that film’s Oscar run, and a few months before that he attended the Avengers: Endgame premiere but we might have to go all the way back to the A Star Is Born campaign that Bradley was last fronting a project this prominently. And back then he and Irina Shayk were still a thing. It was a couple months after the Oscars in 2018 that they ended their relationship…
And while it was mostly an amicable split, with both seen together regularly co-parenting their daughter, two weeks ago they were photographed happily arm-in-arm and they spent Thanksgiving together in New York and she was also at the premiere last night. In a black suit and bodysuit. I mean, it’s not hard for Irina Shayk to look good – but she looks f-cking good.
They walked separately, no photos of them together, at least not officially, but the fact that she was there… just as there’s been speculation that they’ve reunited, so this only adds to that, non? I don’t know that we can say, obviously, for sure that they’re back together but this is doing nothing to convince anyone that they’re not.
