The actress has already been nominated for an Academy Award in 2020 for Best Supporting Actress, but she may get at least a nomination this year for her performance in Black Widow.
The long-delayed but hotly anticipated “Black Widow” from Marvel Studios finally gets its bow before critics, garnering positive reviews so far.
However, with the Academy moving back to a guaranteed 10 nominees in the best picture, and seemingly open to more populist choices in Hollywood, so could there be hope for an award for the first lady of the Avengers? With the raves coming in for standout Florence Pugh, could there be an avenue for acting recognition?
The landscape of the 2021 film year is looking dense and hardy, as many films that were pushed back amid the pandemic are angling for huge box office earnings as theaters begin to reopen. As a result, there’s a very good chance that the spinoff story of Natasha Romanoff could get lost in the shuffle of big festival debuts and other populist entries coming down the pike, such as Marvel’s “Eternals” from recently crowned Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”).
If we search for feasible possibilities for attention, the three standard branches that Marvel has found traction over the years — makeup and hairstyling, sound and visual effects — are on the table. However, if we expand beyond that, we believe there will be a wide contingency of critics that will champion the performance of Florence Pugh as the scene-stealing Yelena Belova.
Already “in the Oscar club” after getting nominated for supporting actress as the youngest March sister Amy in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” (2019), her navigation into the MCU is effortless, as she demonstrates incredible acting techniques and has wonderful chemistry with co-stars Scarlett Johansson, David Harbour, and Rachel Weisz.
We would expect her name to pop up in discussions, even probably making a few regional critics’ awards shortlist along the way. Still, it will be a significant hurdle to overcome on the circuit. The good news for her is that, at this moment, this looks to be her only film in the calendar year, as Olivia Wilde’s anticipated “Don’t Worry Darling” from Warner Bros. is likely a 2022 bow. So who knows?
We all know that “Black Widow” was shot in Hungary, but that wasn’t the only movie with Florence Pugh on screen that was filmed there. She starred in Midsummer, which was also filmed in Budakeszi, Hungary.
The director, Ari Aster, said that although they were apprehensive about filming in Hungary, everything went well.
“It was great! We could never have made this film the way we wanted to if we had gone elsewhere. It would have been impossibly expensive to work in Sweden, the local labor law says you can’t shoot more than 8 hours a day. When we decided on Hungary, we were nervous at first because none of us had ever worked there, and we knew that almost the entire crew would be Hungarian.
We didn’t know what to expect. Our costume designer, Andrea Flesch, was also Hungarian and I can’t imagine anyone else doing a better job. The dolly master (who handles the camera trolley on the rails) didn’t speak a word of English, neither I nor the cameraman could communicate with him, but he was able to execute all the almost impossible camera movements we asked him to do.
And I must also mention Iván Pohárnok, who did the fantastic prosthetics. I loved “Taxidermy”, I’m a huge fan of the things he did in that film, and it was quite a treat to work with him. And without the entire art crew, we could never have built and decorated the village.”
