Leonardo DiCaprio in "Django Unchained"

Credit: The Weinstein Company

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The Weinstein Company is bursting at the seams with possibilities for this year's awards season, as I'll detail further when I write up the year's first Off the Carpet column next week. One of those films is Quentin Tarantino's hotly anticipated "Django Unchained," which gets a nice, shiny trailer today on the heels of some footage that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last month.

It looks like an exciting western romp, as we might have expected. Leonardo DiCaprio appears to be having a blast. Everyone does, really. There are lots of immaculately crafted frames throughout, proving what we already figured: the material is a showcase for lenser Robert Richardson. Indeed, all the design elements in the film appear to be top notch.

I like that Tarantino is stretching his work into the realm of period with this and "Inglourious Basterds" before it. And I have rather high hopes that the western genre will get a healthy injection by the box office success this is sure to have (a nice compliment to the success of "True Grit" two years ago).

With this and the recently revealed "Les Miserables" trailer, it's clear studios are beginning to get their prestige/potential awards fare out there in the consciousness. Disney did the same thing with that mid-summer "War Horse" teaser last year and more and more, using opportunities like Cannes and Comic-Con to unveil this and that and get the conversation going is becoming the norm.

Drew McWeeny offered a very thorough write-up on the footage presentation of The Weinstein Company's year-end product, including "Django Unchained," out of Cannes. (I don't know how he remembered all of that.) "It was so confident, so alive, and so very, very funny in execution that I have to believe Quentin's on his way to another monster hit here," he wrote at the time. "The cinematography by Robert Richardson looks great. The production design is lush and period-accurate.  The soundtrack choices were great.  And Christoph Waltz appears to be well on his way to his second major awards season in LA next year."

Indeed, we can now gather as much for ourselves from the new trailer. Check it out below and feel free to rate it up there in the space provided above. "Django Unchained" hits theaters Christmas Day.

Kristopher Tapley
Editor-at-Large

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Kristopher Tapley has covered the film awards landscape for over a decade. He founded In Contention in 2005. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London and Variety. He begs you not to take any of this too seriously.