Robert Pattinson Won’t Be the Only ‘Primetime’ Star to Generate Oscar Buzz

Coming off of a stellar summer of critically acclaimed fare like “The Drama” and “The Odyssey,” which also succeeded at the box office, there’s been a growing question of whether or not this could be the year actor Robert Pattinson finally earns his first Oscar nomination. This is why all eyes are now on his latest film “Primetime,” which just had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and features the out-of-the-box choice of casting the famous Brit as former Deadline NBC anchor Chris Hansen. His delivery of the “To Catch a Predator” host’s signature line “You see how this looks, right?” became a meme off of the trailer alone.

Pattinson is coming into awards season with already so much good will that all he would need to land a prime spot in the Best Actor Oscar race is for the film to be well-received. So will it be?

That’s honestly a tough question to answer. Director Lance Oppenheim, who makes his narrative feature debut with the A24 release, really spoke to the surreality of it all while speaking at the film’s festival press conference. 

“I love Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Close Up.’ It completely changed my life when I saw it, but I can probably go back and look at ‘To Catch a Predator’ as the first thing I ever saw on mainstream television that makes those two forms, truth and fiction, artifice and reality,” said the 30-year-old director. “And I think about Chris Hansen as a journalist, as an entertainer, but I also really think of him as an artist, and I see him and I thank him for basically making these things. Without it, I probably wouldn’t be making films the way I do today.”

Pattinson said of Hansen, “the more you watch the show there’s something magnetic about his presence,” and that’s something that is also true of the actor’s portrayal of him in “Primetime.” Much befitting an A24 movie, his performance is big swing in a way that will likely be divisive among Oscar voters, but it is sticky. Hence the memes, something Pattinson actually has a positive take on. “The more attached people are to the movie, the more re-watchability it has and the more endurance,” he said of the films instant virality.

Outside of Pattinson’s gonzo performance as Chris Hansen, “Primetime” contains two very strong supporting performances from Emmy winner Merritt Wever, as the lead producer of “To Catch a Predator,” and Skyler Gisondo as an actor they hire to be one of the decoys luring their marks into the house under the guise of him being underage.

Skyler Gisondo in ‘Primetime’.Courtesy of A24

During the press conference, Wever said she was attracted to her role because “I was coming off a string of parts where I was playing people who really cared a lot about the right things, used a certain part of their heart over and over and that part of my heart had kind of run dry. Then people kept asking me to use it and it wasn’t that I didn’t want to use it. It just needed time to kind of regenerate. The water in the well needed to rise a little bit. And this character has humanity but has a very different relationship to it and the color is very different. And I liked getting to find how to play a person who almost willfully wants to deny her own humanity and the humanity of people around her.”

If she at times is playing the devil on Hansen’s shoulder, Gisondo is the angel, a role Wever was quick to compliment. “The whole film wouldn’t hold if we didn’t have his character and his performance as kind of the center of it, the trunk of the tree,” said the actress of her young co-star. “Without the job he did, the film would not hold itself.” Both performances should really resonate with their acting peers especially, making both Gisondo and Wever real possibilities for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.

There have been far too many times where younger audiences have gotten their hopes up about the Academy embracing one of the A24 films that really feels fresh. Sometimes that results in a couple nods for “Past Lives” or Paul Mescal being nominated for Best Actor for “Aftersun.” More often, though, are the projects like “Uncut Gems” or “Sorry Baby” that make an impact in places like the Independent Spirit Awards, or even the Golden Globes, but end up snubbed in the end.

Screenwriter Ajon Singh is worth a mention as a possible Best Adapted Screenplay for his screenwriting debut, somehow mining a mystical quality from the Esquire investigative report the film is based on. Editor Daniel Garber would also be an inspired choice for Best Film Editing (fun fact, he was also an editorial consultant on the documentary “Predators,” which is also about the legacy of “To Catch a Predator”). But as an overall awards contender “Primetime” does, in a weird way, live and die by how long it can capture the attention of a worldwide audience. 

“We loved the idea of making something that felt more like a fever dream than a conventional biopic,” said Oppenheim. “It’s interesting that even parts of the trailer have been memed or turned into that form, but I actually find sometimes some of that encouraging. To me, it felt like we had done our work to try and capture the spirit of the show — which is endless and endless memes, I guess.”