Julia, Gwyneth, and a long-awaited gossip matchup

Now that we are halfway through summer, with the fall film festivals just a few weeks away, it’s time to start looking ahead to awards season. What? No! Surely, it’s too soon! Alas, time is a relentless drummer. To that end, the trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt has arrived.

The film stars Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Chloe Sevigny, and Michael Stuhlbarg (an underappreciated That Guy). It’s about academics and students and accusations and generation gaps. The trailer is tense, maybe somebody is lying, maybe not, what lengths will a person go to in order to protect their life, livelihood, and reputation? After the Hunt looks less like Challengers and more like I Am Love. Guadagnino can do sexy better than almost anyone, but never forget he is also a master of paranoia and misery, too. 

After the Hunt is expected to premiere at Venice and we should know for certain shortly as Venice’s lineup will be announced next week. The fest is opening with Paolo Sorrentino’s La grazia, so it would be cool if Guadagnino’s latest plays, too, as that would give Venice two of Italy’s modern masters in the festival. And then, of course, we have to talk Oscar. After the Hunt has a plum October release date, and given the cast, we can expect a big push for the film from Amazon MGM, certainly bigger than Challengers got (for some reason, MGM never took that one seriously as a contender). After the Hunt is being positioned in prime trophy season real estate, a Venice premiere would go along with a big Oscar push. 

It's too early to take Oscar odds seriously, but would anyone be against an Oscar season that includes Julia Roberts? And don’t forget who’s waiting in the wings: Gwyneth Paltrow. She stars alongside Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme, which is slated for a Christmas Day release (a release date which worked out very well for A Complete Unknown). It’s Gwyneth’s film comeback, she hasn’t appeared in a feature film since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, she hasn’t had a starring role—or any role Not Pepper Potts—since 2015’s Mortdecai (lol). She did have a role in the 2019 series The Politician, produced by her husband, Brad Falchuk, but it’s been a long time since we’ve associated Gwyneth Paltrow with acting first.

But she’s got a big role in Marty Supreme, playing Chalamet’s character’s love interest, so she is probably going to be second billed just behind Chalamet. Once upon a time, Gwyneth Paltrow was considered among the best actresses of her generation. But between then and now there have been not only gossip revelations about her, but also about Harvey Weinstein. A lot of people—maybe most people—think her Oscar win for Shakespeare in Love is really Harvey’s win, tainting Gwyneth’s Oscar forever. 

Will she push for another trophy, one free from Harvey’s shadow? And how hard will Julia Roberts push back? At this point, Julia has more nominations, though she never shoved her acting career into the backseat in order to build a billion-dollar snake oil shop business. Gossip history has it that Gwyneth stole the script for Shakespeare in Love from Winona Ryder, but never forget, Julia Roberts actually got the role first (and left the project in rather spectacular fashion). Gwyneth and Julia were never really positioned as rivals like Gwyneth and Winona, though both women are tall and sanctimonious. Will this be the year when Gwyneth and Julia finally go toe-to-toe?