Neon Sets ‘Paper Tiger’ Awards Categories, Plans First Real Push for a James Gray Film (Exclusive)

Paper Tiger, James Gray’s crime-thriller starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, which premiered to strong notices at May’s Cannes Film Festival — including a rave from The Hollywood Reporter — 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, The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively report.

THR 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.

Paper Tiger, like many of Gray’s films, is semi-autobiographical. It tells the story of how a blue-collar family man (Driver) 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’s wife (Johansson) and children, in the crosshairs of the Russian mafia.

Made 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 has 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.

Paper Tiger‘s 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 moderated by a fellow chronicler of New York and one of his vocal admirers, Martin Scorsese.

After that, the film will play at a host of fall film festivals — 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 — en route to its U.S. theatrical release in select theaters on Nov. 13 and wider release on Nov. 20.

Will it all be enough to finally land Gray — a longtime darling of critics and Cannes, but never a nominee of the Academy — and/or his film in the Oscar race?

For a variety of a reasons, none of Gray’s prior films with awards potential received a fully-realized awards push. 2013’s 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’s demands for edits. 2016’s 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’s 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’s Armageddon Time after it underperformed commercially.

Neon, which acquired the film last April, after it was completed but before Cannes, is said to be firmly committed to breaking that streak.

A full breakdown of the awards categories for which Paper Tiger will be pushed appears below.

BEST PICTURE
James Gray, p.g.a.
Anthony Katagas, p.g.a.
Rodrigo Teixeira, p.g.a.

BEST DIRECTOR
James Gray

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
James Gray

BEST ACTOR
Miles Teller

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Scarlett Johansson

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Adam Driver

BEST CASTING
Douglas Aibel, CSA

BEST FILM EDITING
Scott Morris

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Joaquin Baca-Asay

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Happy Massee, Production Designer
Kendall Anderson, Set Decorator