{"id":857519,"date":"2026-09-23T07:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T07:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857519\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T07:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T07:32:09","slug":"james-grays-paper-tiger-oscar-campaign-plan-set-by-neon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/857519\/","title":{"rendered":"James Gray’s Paper Tiger Oscar Campaign Plan Set by Neon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPaper Tiger<\/a>, James Gray<\/a>\u2019s crime-thriller starring Miles Teller<\/a>, Adam Driver<\/a> and Scarlett Johansson<\/a>, which premiered to strong notices<\/a> at May\u2019s Cannes Film Festival \u2014 including a rave from The Hollywood Reporter<\/a> \u2014 and is set to open the New York Film Festival on Friday night, will be given a full-fledged awards push this fall by its U.S. and U.K. distributor Neon<\/a>, The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively report.<\/p>\n

\n\tTHR can confirm that as part of the campaign, Neon will promote Teller for best actor, Driver for best supporting actor and Johansson for best supporting actress, ending months of speculation about where the trio of A-listers would wind up.<\/p>\n

\n\tPaper Tiger, like many of Gray\u2019s films, is semi-autobiographical. It tells the story of how a blue-collar family man (Teller) is enticed by his more ambitious brother (Driver) into an ill-advised business enterprise that ends up landing the two of them, as well as the man\u2019s wife (Johansson) and children, in the crosshairs of the Russian mafia.<\/p>\n

\n\tMade on a $15 million budget cobbled together from a wide variety of sources (it has 24 executive producers listed in its credits), Paper Tiger is the sort of mid-range budget, adult-targeted American movie that almost never gets made anymore. Since its debut in Cannes, enthusiasm for it\u00a0has been cultivated at the Locarno Film Festival, where Gray collected a special achievement award; and at numerous private screenings in Los Angeles, Manhattan and the Hamptons, which have attracted dozens of Academy members.<\/p>\n

\n\tPaper Tiger\u2018s entire principal cast and all of its department heads will join Gray at its big Alice Tully Hall premiere on Friday night, and then on Saturday afternoon Gray will participate in a Walter Reade Theater conversation about the film<\/a> moderated by a fellow chronicler of New York and one of his vocal admirers, Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter that, the film will play at a host of fall film festivals \u2014 among them Mill Valley, Hamptons, London, Newport Beach, Chicago, Virginia and Savannah, with Gray set to collect directing honors at Mill Valley, Virginia and Savannah \u2014 en route to its U.S. theatrical release in select theaters on Nov. 13 and wider release on Nov. 20.<\/p>\n

\n\tWill it all be enough to finally land Gray \u2014 a longtime darling of critics and Cannes, but never a nominee of the Academy\u00a0\u2014 and\/or his film in the Oscar race?<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a variety of a reasons, none of Gray\u2019s prior films with awards potential received a fully-realized awards push. 2013\u2019s The Immigrant, which was highlighted by a standout Marion Cotillard performance, was buried by Harvey Weinstein after Gray, who had final cut on the film, refused to acede to Weinstein\u2019s demands for edits. 2016\u2019s The Lost City of Z played on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, but then Amazon and Bleecker Street released it not that fall or the next, but rather the following spring, and it promptly disappeared. Gray did not have final cut on 2019\u2019s Ad Astra, a big-budget studio film starring Brad Pitt, and it was taken away from him and re-edited by 20th Century Fox, resulting in a version that Gray has disavowed. (It did become the only Gray film to land an Oscar nom, best visual effects.) And Focus largely scrapped its campaign for 2022\u2019s Armageddon Time after it underperformed commercially.<\/p>\n

\n\tNeon, which acquired the film last April, after it was completed but before Cannes, is said to be firmly committed to breaking that streak.<\/p>\n

\n\tA full breakdown of the awards categories for which Paper Tiger will be pushed appears below.<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST PICTURE
James Gray, p.g.a.
Anthony Katagas, p.g.a.
Rodrigo Teixeira, p.g.a.<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST DIRECTOR
James Gray<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
James Gray<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST ACTOR
Miles Teller<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Scarlett Johansson<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Adam Driver<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST CASTING
Douglas Aibel, CSA<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST FILM EDITING
Scott Morris<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Joaquin Baca-Asay<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Happy Massee, Production Designer
Kendall Anderson, Set Decorator<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST COSTUME DESIGN
Amy Roth<\/p>\n

\n\tBEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Christopher Spelman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paper Tiger, James Gray\u2019s crime-thriller starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, which premiered to strong notices…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[35657,88,261087,8655,23243,279316,4114],"class_list":["post-857519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-adam-driver","tag-entertainment","tag-james-gray","tag-miles-teller","tag-neon","tag-paper-tiger","tag-scarlett-johansson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}