In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • ‘Social Network’ tops London Critics’ awards

    By having separate categories for British films and individuals — though Brits compete in the general awards too — the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards generally get to have their cake and eat it. So it was this year: “The King’s Speech” received obligatory recognition in the categories for Best British Film and Best British Director, but lost the night’s big prizes to “The Social Network.”

    Some will find it ironic that it took a group of limeys to put some wind back in Team Fincher’s sails, but it’s not that surprising: British or not, this is still a critics’ award, and “The Social Network” wove as a powerful a spell over journos across the pond as in the States. The film took a leading four prizes, including screenwriting honors for Aaron Sorkin and Best British Supporting Actor for Andrew Garfield — the Oscar snubbee’s second home victory of the week.

    No surprise that Colin Firth took Best Actor, while they spread the love by giving Christian Bale the Best British Actor award — I do wonder if that happened entirely organically. Less expected was Annette Bening’s Best Actress victory, breaking Natalie Portman’s recent sweep; I suspect the somewhat mixed critical reaction to “Black Swan” in the UK might account for this, but Bening does seem to be picking up steam lately.

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  • Pixar on growing up, and playing for the big Oscar

    As Kris noted in our Oscar Guide for Best Animated Feature (and whatever the Annie Awards would have you believe), the category doesn’t promise much of a race this year — as has been the case for the last three years running, Pixar faces an obstacle-free path to the award, despite quality competition. And with two-thirds of your votes in our “should win” poll, most of you are okay with that.

    But the thrill of winning the ghetto category year after year has to get old, and as their rather aggressive campaign for “Toy Story 3” has made clear, Pixar has designs on more substantial recognition. They certainly aren’t afraid to say so in this New York Times profile of the studio by Melana Ryzik:

    The Pixar team would dearly love to win a best picture Oscar. “I would be overwhelmed with emotion, I think, that our peers recognized how we make our films, and that we use the same tools and that we take ourselves so seriously,” said Darla K. Anderson, a producer of “Toy Story 3” who has been with Pixar for 18 years. Their painstaking approach “has been with this ferocity of intensity,” she added, “to make a great movie, plain and simple — not a great animated film, but a great film.”

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  • Hope for Meryl

    I didn’t post this still of Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady” that did the web rounds two days ago, largely because I didn’t have much to say about it — for all the “uncanny resemblance” claims being made by some excitable bloggers, she looks rather a lot like Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. (Which is fine, by the way.) But this amended still from reader/blogger Bradley Porter gave me a chuckle, so here they both are.

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  • Time Out names the 100 best British films

    Earlier today, I praised the Evening Standard Awards for drawing people’s attention to forms and flavors of contemporary British film beyond the dressy heritage cinema that so many associate with the country.

    This morning, London’s Time Out magazine posted a fascinating feature that does much the same for the past: a wide-ranging list of the 100 Best British Films of all time, compiled from the individual Top Tens of 150 industry figures, including directors, actors and critics.

    When I was invited to participate in the poll — check out my list here — I anticipated a familiar list of chestnuts to emerge from the project. But while the final Top 100 leans heavily (and necessarily) on the canon, there are some surprises in the mix, including such recent titles as “Fish Tank” and “Hunger.” That Powell and Pressburger have two titles in the top 10 won’t raise any eyebrows, but that Nicolas Roeg managed the same feat is rather less predictable.

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  • Evening Standard Awards go their own way

    “What is it about the British?” a reader asked in one of last week’s comment threads. “They can’t quite make a film of current topical interest or [sic] lacks some historical or classical literary backdrop to give it a sense of importance.”

    The comment is one of many “typical British film” jabs I’ve read since “The King’s Speech” asserted itself as the Oscar frontrunner, and it would have annoyed me no end even if I wasn’t part-British myself: to boil down an entire national cinema to awards-baiting prestige period fare is as unfair and ill-informed as suggesting that Hollywood only makes Michael Bay movies.

    In the last 24 hours, however, two sets of honors have acted as handy rebuttals to this narrow perception of UK cinema. I’ll devote an individual post to Time Out’s tremendous 100 Best British Films list later today, but last night’s London Evening Standard Film Awards, to which I was lucky enough to be invited, were a welcome celebration of the kind of diverse, adventurous British artistry — ranging from sci-fi to comedy to experimental indies — that idle BAFTA voters can’t be bothered to nominate.

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  • BAFTA honors ‘Harry Potter’ series

    The penultimate film in the series may only be up for two BAFTAs on Sunday night — ones it probably won’t win — but devoted “Harry Potter” fans have been given an extra reason to tune in, as the entire series is being honored by the British Academy with their Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema award.

    This annual honorary award has previously been presented to individuals like Mike Leigh, Derek Jarman and Kenneth Branagh, as well as studios like Pinewood and Working Title, but this is, to my knowledge, the first time it’s been given to an actual film franchise. Author J.K. Rowling and producer David Heyman will accept.

    It’s an appropriate acknowledgement for a cultural phenomenon that has delighted millions for an entire decade, generated a fortune for the UK film industry and kept at least half of Britain’s acting stock in steady employment, but the timing of the award strikes me as odd — why not wait until next year, when the series is complete and running its final victory lap?

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  • Art Directors’ Guild wins for ‘Swan,’ ‘Speech,’ ‘Inception’

    In a busy night for industry awards, the Art Directors’ Guild also dished out their trophies yesterday. “Inception” claimed its second Guild prize in one night as it triumphed in the Fantasy category — fending off fellow Oscar nominee “Alice in Wonderland,” which would be a surefire winner for “most art direction,” in the process.

    I’m pleased the elaborate-but-ugly stylings of the latter film weren’t rewarded, though I’m struggling to get critic Mike McCahill’s description of “Inception”‘s production design as resembling a “revolving Best Western” out of my head.

    The other two categories were more predictable, as “The King’s Speech” took Period honors, while “Black Swan” triumphed in the Contemporary field — a win that places at least some balm on the wound of last week’s Oscar snub. (Rewatching Darren Aronofsky’s film a few days ago renewed my dismay that the Academy’s bias against modern-day work in this category struck again: I just can’t see how Stuart Craig’s work on the latest “Harry Potter” chapter is more inspired than Thérèse DePrez’s intricately coded melding of stage, domestic and psychological spaces.)

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  • Clean sweep for ‘Dragon’ at Annie Awards

    (Sorry we’re a bit late getting to this — Kris had more exciting plans for the evening and I like to sleep sometimes.)

    It’s a shame one can’t talk about “How to Train Your Dragon”‘s success at the Annie Awards without dragging politics into it. There are those of us who think it legitimately deserves to beat “Toy Story 3” on its own merits, and the sense of entitlement that comes from many of the protests on Pixar’s behalf isn’t appealing.

    But as when DreamWorks’s “Kung Fu Panda” upended “WALL-E” at the awards two years ago, there’s no way not to view this, to a large extent, as an anti-Pixar vote. If you’re not aware of the behind-the-scenes drama, this is it in a nutshell: last summer, Disney and Pixar withdrew from the International Animation Film Society-Hollywood, which organizes the awards, in protest at the voting procedures that enabled that aforementioned 2008 upset. (That Disney/Pixar had still taken the top prize in 13 out of 18 years, including last year’s win for “Up,” didn’t make them any less huffy.)

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  • Joyce Carol Oates on ‘The Fighter’

    On the occasions that they donate some space to the medium, the New York Review of Books can be a source of pretty world-beating film criticism — and from some unexpected voices, at that. A few months ago, I featured Zadie Smith’s matchless essay on “The Social Network,” but if that film’s media ubiquity made it an obvious topic for an intellectual outsider, it’s a delightful surprise to see the venerable American Joyce Carol Oates (herself the author of pugilism tome “On Boxing”) taking on “The Fighter.”

    Better yet, she addresses David O. Russell’s boxing biopic with more seriousness and sensitivity than many a well-versed film critic; the film opens today in the UK, and has been greeted by a disappointingly large number of polite but unenthused reviews, many of them carelessly citing a TV aesthetic.

    Oates argues for “The Fighter” as a “directorial homage” of sorts to “Raging Bull,” but sees an elegiac conflict in an underdog story that more have likened to the straight-up feelgood storytelling of “Rocky.”

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  • THE LONG SHOT: It was always you

    “Let me get this straight. The one’s about a precocious computer geek who’s also a bit of an asshole.”

    “Yeah.”

    “And the other’s about King George VI.”

    “Yeah.”

    “And King George VI has a disability.”

    “Well, he has a stutter. I mean, it’s not crippling or anything — ”

    “But it’s an obstacle that needs to be overcome.”

    “Yeah.”

    “And I assume, at the end, he does. And becomes King.”

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  • ‘Cold Weather’ trailer

    Here’s a welcome breath of fresh air amid the oppressive mechanics of Oscar season. Some of you might remember that my personal Top 10 of 2010 featured a few films only hitting US theaters this year — and here’s the first of them. Aaron Katz’s “Cold Weather,” a bracing fusion of gentle indie shuffle and playful noir leanings, opens on Friday, and I implore you to take a chance on it. Apple has a shiny new trailer that does a neat job of reflecting the film’s brittle atmospheric charms, if not its cockeyed humor. (It also offers a taste of the year’s most strikingly original score.) Check it out by clicking on the image, or watch the embed after the cut.

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  • Woody Allen’s latest to open Cannes

    The ever-informed insider Cédric Succivalli broke the news this morning that May’s Cannes Film Festival will kick off with Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” — an ensemble romantic comedy starring, among others, Marion Cotillard, Carla Bruni, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates, Michael Sheen and Léa Seydoux.

    It’s hardly a surprising choice. Cannes has been good to Allen over the years: recently, “Match Point,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and last year’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” all premiered on the Croisette, while “Hollywood Ending” also served as the festival’s curtain-raiser in 2002.

    Moreover, the strong French flavor of his new project all but assured it a Cannes berth, while all that star power — plus the possibility of a certain Mr. Carla Bruni tagging along — guarantees maximum media coverage on opening night.

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  • ‘Incendies’ trailer

    While some pundits are assuming that Javier Bardem’s Best Actor nomination makes “Biutiful” the film to beat in the foreign-language category — despite the fact that recent Oscar history doesn’t favor the biggest name in the contest — my instincts tell me the real race is between Susanne Bier’s “In a Better World” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Incendies,” both of which Sony Pictures Classics will release in April. I haven’t caught up with either yet, though this new trailer for the latter is making me even more annoyed at myself for sleeping past an early-morning screening at Venice last year. Click on the image to watch the trailer at Apple, or check out the embed after the jump.

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  • Someone’s campaigning for Banksy

    Following its semi-surprise Oscar nomination last week, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” has received a nifty publicity boost from this prominent Banksy-honoring mural (pictured right, and in more detail after the jump) that went up recently in Los Angeles. Although some were quick to assume it’s the work of the man himself, all signs point instead to Mr. Brainwash — the Banksy-mentored street artist who emerges as the hapless protagonist of the documentary.

    The resulting is-it-or-isn’t-it discussion neatly echoes the conversation around the film as a whole — and since Banksy can hardly work the campaign circuit himself, at least someone’s doing on behalf of the film.

    Meanwhile, the more I think about this particularly Oscar race, the more I think there’s something to Kris’s prediction that it’s the inevitably absent Banksy who will emerge victorious on February 27. This is, after all, a category on which voters are required to see all five nominees before checking off their ballots — a situation where the film’s eccentricity could work in its favor.

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  • Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue cover

    Fluffy as it is, this is one of my favorite Oscar-season traditions. While they’ve played around with the formula in past years, this is a straight-up glamor spread, and all the better for it. I’m particularly pleased to see a smooth-looking Anthony Mackie in the mix with the bigger names. On another note, I wonder if the magazine’s editors assumed Robert Duvall was a shoo-in for an Oscar nod when they cast him as the lord of this ensemble.

    You can check out an embiggened version at the VF site. Nathaniel Rogers, meanwhile, has more detailed musings on the matter.

  • Until Oscar do us part

    A few days ago, a reader responded to a trivia note by Steve Pond, about the number of Best Actor nominees whose Christian names begin with the same letter, with the question, “Is this the point at which we are officially over-saturated with Oscar stats?”.

    Well, if we weren’t there then, we might be now.

    Yesterday, the Huffington Post ran an interview with an academic who has invested far too much time looking into the so-called “Oscar Curse” — the unfortunate trend that has seen many a star headed for divorce court shortly after winning the Best Actress Oscar. Recent examples include Sandra Bullock, Kate Winslet, Reese Witherspoon, Hilary Swank and Halle Berry, but a University of Toronto research project (!) suggests the curse goes further back than that.

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  • What will be this year’s Sundance story?

    I must confess, this year’s Sundance Film Festival kind of passed me by. Admittedly, I’ve been distracted by a busy couple of weeks on the awards circuit, but the Sundance coverage I did follow suggested a high-quality if nonetheless rather quiet festival, one with fewer noisy breakout films than usual.

    In the last few years, it’s been worth keeping an eye (or an ear, rather) on the Sundance buzz, as the festival has birthed a number of future critical hits, and even awards-season success stories: recent Best Picture nominees “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Precious,” “An Education” and now “The Kids Are All Right” and “Winter’s Bone” all premiered there, as did “Frozen River,” “Blue Valentine” and a plethora of Oscar-nominated documentaries. (No fewer than four of this year’s Best Documentary Feature nominees are Sundance babies.)

    So it’s easy to assume at least one film from this year’s Sundance crop is something we’ll still be talking about a year from now — but where the crossover potential for a film like “The Kids Are All Right,” or a performance like Jennifer Lawrence’s, was immediately evident, this year’s potential Sundance “stories” don’t seem quite as obvious.

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  • ‘The King’s Speech’ takes top honors at SAG Awards

    Well, if you didn’t get the message after last night’s DGA result, SAG’s Best Ensemble award just underlined it for you — the Best Picture race is over. In the 16 years that the three Guilds have co-existed, only one film has taken the big prize from the DGA, PGA and SAG and not won the Best Picture Oscar — and “Apollo 13” was handicapped by its lack of a Best Director Oscar bid. No such obstacle in this case: “The King’s Speech” has it in the bag.

    So, it seems, do a couple of other folks. It was a highly predictable night, as the de facto frontrunner prevailed in each of the four individual acting categories.

    Colin Firth, of course, continued his march to the Oscar podium with another impeccably wry, self-deprecating speech — “I’d like to thank security for letting me into the building,” he quipped, earning the night’s biggest laugh. With his victory, “The King’s Speech” becomes the first film to take Best Ensemble and a lead acting gong since “Chicago” eight years ago; this time, however, it won’t lose the latter on February 27.

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