In Contention

Category: Daily

  • BAFTA Rising Star nominees

    Tahar Rahim in A ProphetBAFTA has just revealed the five young actors in contention for this year’s Rising Star Award, the winner of which will be determined by a public vote. Previous winners include James McAvoy, Eva Green, Shia LaBeouf and Noel Clarke.

    The 12-member jury charged with deciding this year’s nominees was chaired by Oscar-winning producer David Parfitt (“Shakespeare in Love”), and I must say that — blinding snub for Katie Jarvis aside — they’ve chosen quite well.

    I’m surprised, though not unpleasantly so, that “Avatar” fever didn’t secure Sam Worthington a mention. Instead, Kristen Stewart gets the populist nod.

    Given that it’s a publicly voted award, Stewart is the one to beat, too — I highly doubt the fanbases of the other four can compete with the texting “Twilight” hordes, unless “A Single Man” star Nicholas Hoult’s popularity from TV’s “Skins” carries him over.

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  • Streep at NYFCC Awards

    Courtesy of Jeff Wells, here’s Meryl Streep accepting Best Actress from the New York Film Critics’ Circle. Streep should really offer tutorials in award acceptance — the format of a critics’ award dinner allows her to ramble more than at more formal ceremonies, but her wit and sincerity hits home every time. I loved this zinger:

    I’d like to thank Sony and Amy Pascal for sending me to REAL Paris, unlike Fox on “The Devil Wears Prada,” who sent me Midtown…

  • ACE nominees

    Sharlto Copley in District 9For me, “District 9” is the biggest and most pleasant surprise for me in this morning’s American Cinema Editors announcement.  If ever the film looked like a lock for a Best Picture nomination, now is that time, I have to say.  Getting in over presumed Oscar frontrunners “Precious” and, most especially, “Inglourious Basterds,” that’s a pretty big feather in its cap if you ask me.

    “Star Trek” also makes another fairly strong case this morning for getting into the Academy’s 10 over something like “Invictus,” which keeps missing with guild after guild and should, perhaps, finally be called a spade.  The drama field is then rounded out by what has become the rather definitive frontrunner trilogy of films.

    In the comedy field, we get veterans in Joe Hutshing and Richard Marks perhaps predictably recognized for “Its Complicated” and “Julie & Julia” respectively, while the Coen brothers get their third nomination from the guild to date.  The other two: Best Picture nominees “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men.” Round it out with two comedies that are tricking people into thinking they’ll be Best Picture nominees (with no mention of the dead and dying “Nine”) and voila, the ACE Eddie nominees.

    Check out the full list after the jump.

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  • Delayed

    I haven’t been able to even sit down and think about today’s Off the Carpet column, let alone write it, and I’m off to Sony soon for what should be an interesting sound mixing demo on “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” I’ll have it for you later tonight.  In the meantime, the Contenders and sidebar predictions have been updated.

  • Makeup bake-off leaves seven

    Christopher Plummer in The Imaginarium of Doctor ParnassusVia AMPAS press release, the final group includes:

    “District 9”
    “Il Divo”
    “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”
    “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian”
    “The Road”
    “Star Trek”
    “The Young Victoria”

    Well, there was always one spot in flux for me here and most recently I was giving it to “Cirque du Freak” for some great work by a veteran of the branch.  If I were to hazard a guess as to which of these gets it, I guess I’d say “Parnassus,” its one and only nomination.  There is some good work in “Il Divo,” too (from the artist who brought the natives of “Apocalypto” to prosthetic life), so maybe that could come around.  Or “The Road.” The rest seem like non-starters to me.

  • An underground push for ‘Depression Era’

    Patterson HoodMaybe three months back we told you about Patterson Hood’s “Depression Era” from Scott Teems’s “That Evening Sun,” a soulful, gritty southern ditty that, for my money, is one of the best original songs in a movie this year.  We featured the track in our “listen to” series back in November.

    Thankfully the song made the cut for original song contenders last month, joining 62 other tracks.  But as I’ve been saying since I first saw the film, it’ll be a bit of an uphill battle considering the song plays over the film’s closing credits and not in the narrative of the film.  Voters screen clips of eligible contenders’ usage in the context of a film, so something like, say, “Cinema Italiano,” however awful, has a leg up over something like “Depression Era,” however brilliant.

    That’s not stopping an underground, no-budget Oscar campaign on behalf of the song by Freestyle Releasing.  The distributor has enlisted the help of Paste Magazine, which is exclusively hosting a video of Hood discussing the song and performing it from his Athens, Georgia home.  It’s a great little clip and well worth the effort for this underdog contender.

    One can only hope.  Check out the video after the jump.

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  • ASC nominees

    The White Ribbon“Avatar” continues its guild steamroll with a mention from the ASC today, a mention I frankly didn’t think the film would get.  Then again, the guild is typically kind to digital photography where AMPAS is not (examples are “Collateral” and “Apocalypto”), so I wouldn’t say it’s a slam dunk in this category for Oscar.  Then again, maybe I’m blind to the writing on the wall here.  And “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” may have gone a long way toward dispelling digital bias in the Academy.

    I don’t get the love for Christian Berger.  I haven’t since day one.  There is nothing appealing to me about the way Michael Haneke visually captures his films.  There’s rarely anything appealing to me about his films period, truth be told.  But somehow going with black and white and employing his usual brand of tracking shots, long takes, etc., rarely with compelling composition (all my opinion, of course), it has managed to bring Berger laurel after laurel.  Critics awards are one thing, but an organization like the ASC, which I trust and respect, I don’t know.  Maybe I just missed the boat completely.

    “Nine” finally gets a guild mention and Robert Richardson, as always, is an ASC favorite once more.

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  • ‘Avatar,’ ‘Star Trek’ among WGA nominees

    Michelle Rodriguez in AvatarAnd, there we are. “Avatar” gets a nomination for best writing from a 10,000 member-strong guild and plenty will find reason to argue with it. But let’s look at the rest.

    “The Hangover” managed to get a nomination in the original screenplay field in the wake of a number of eligibility rulings on some top contenders. I’m most excited for Scott Cooper and “Crazy Heart,” because I’m getting the feeling he might turn this and his USC Scripter bid into something tangible for Oscar consideration. “District 9,” of course, was not eligible here and is still a threat, ditto “An Education,” but the race is a little more interesting now.  Especially when you consider Nora Ephron (also nominated today), who I’ve always felt was a threat with the Academy for navigating two sources and making some entertaining sense of it all.

    Elsewhere it’s the usual suspects, except for the appearance of “Star Trek” in the adapted ranks.  Yes, the writers of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” are WGA nominees.  But in my view, they deserve the pat on the back for this film, a high octane entertainment that was smartly conceived and remains one of the true gems of 2009.

    Check out the nominees after the jump.

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  • R.I.P. Éric Rohmer

    Eric RohmerIt is with great sadness that I read of the passing of Éric Rohmer, a titan of French cinema who remained creatively active almost to the end of his 89-year life.

    Boasting arguably the mellowest, most droll filmography of his New Wave brethren, the esteemed writer-director (and former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma) delighted in the literary and sociological possibilities of dialogue — he’s largely responsible for the “talky” tag that clings to French art film today, but that’s a virtue rather than a debit.

    Few writers in film could define a character through the patterns and concerns of their speech as precisely as Rohmer, his sphere of influence extending from Woody Allen to any number of figures in current American indie cinema.

    If you’re as keen on his work as I am, of course, you don’t need to be told this. If you haven’t yet made his acquaintance, begin with any of his Six Moral Tales (the most well-known of which, “My Night at Maud’s,” garnered him his lone Oscar nomination for writing), which mine rich humor and psychological insight from a series of anecdotal narratives.

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  • “Nothing that’s shitty is going to make $100 million.”

    Jennifer LopezJennifer Lopez, in an Elle interview, on why “Maid in Manhattan” and “Monster-in-Law” are actually “very layered movies.” Oh, Jennifer.

    I’m rather enjoying Lopez’s recent rewriting of her career history. Perhaps you caught her statement last week on her supposedly scandalous Oscar snub for “El Cantante”:

    I feel like I had that [Oscar worthy role] in ‘El Cantante,’ but I don’t think the Academy members saw it … It is a little bit frustrating. When the Oscars were on, I had just given birth on the 22nd, and the Oscars I think were a day or two later. I was sitting there with my twins — and I couldn’t have been happier — but I was like ‘How dope would it have been if I would’ve won the Oscar and been here in my hospital bed accepting the award?

    Just like those neglectful Academy members, I never saw the film, so I’m not judging. But the days of her really rather excellent work in “Out of Sight” feel very distant, don’t they?

  • Narrow their options

    Well, this is one way of getting around public indifference to a film. Snapped in London’s West End by Ultra Culture:

  • 1/11 Oscarweb Round-up

    The Hurt Locker• Dave McNary catches up with the thin WGA field story.  (Nominees will be announced later this morning.) [Variety]

    • The local rag continues to step up its crafts coverage, spotlights “The Hurt Locker” sound mixer (and sound editor) Paul Ottosson. [Los Angeles Times]

    • On the non-actor terminated from Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air.” [The Guardian]

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  • For the completists

    Better late than never. A reader emailed me to remind us that we never mentioned the winners of the Satellite Awards, which got lost in our holiday hiatus last month. Just in case you’ve been on tenterhooks, they’re after the cut — with “The Hurt Locker” again dominating, and a unique choice for Best Actress.

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  • Mea culpa, ‘1974’

    Andrew Garfield in Red Riding: 1974With a resurgence of talk about the “Red Riding” trilogy of films ahead of their U.S. release next month, I’ve been reminded of a critical omission I made in my Best of 2009 list a few weeks back.

    As I wrote when the films premiered on British TV around 10 months ago, they are wholly cinematic works and deserve to be considered (and distributed) as such — but because they were introduced to me as television, my mind keeps skipping over them when I think back on the year in film.

    All of which is terribly unfair on Julian Jarrold’s “1974,” the first of the three tonally and structurally separate films, which I described as follows in the spring:

    Following Andrew (”Boy A”) Garfield’s swaggering rookie journalist as he investigates the link between three missing girls and rapidly finds himself in over his head, it’s an astonishingly textured, sensory film, awash in dusk-coloured light and a gorgeous Northern soul soundtrack, that recalls “Zodiac” in its measured narrative approach and even shades of “Twin Peaks” in the alluring strangeness cast over its very ordinary locale.

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  • African-American critics’ group splits after voting scandal

    Gabourey Sidibe in PreciousYou may well disagree, but I’ve never really understood the point of awards bodies that define themselves along racial lines.

    Perhaps I’m missing the point, but when an African-American critic like Armond White is head of the NYFCC, or a film like “Precious” is receiving mainstream awards attention, the existence of a group like the African-American Film Critics’ Association seems a little self-marginalizing to me.

    In any case, The Carpetbagger’s Melena Ryzik reports that the stature of the group has taken a knock after a number of AAFCA members left its ranks to form a rival group, the Black Film Critics’ Circle. This follows dissent within the group after AAFCA president Gil Robertson IV allegedly rigged the Best Actress vote to deny top vote-getter Gabourey Sidibe, in favor of “American Violet” star Nicole Beharie.

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  • Oscars in The Times

    Stephen Lang in AvatarFresh on the heels of a page one Mo’Nique story, The New York Times has unleashed its annual Oscar package, great stuff as always.

    Manohla Dargis leads the girl-power charge with an appreciation of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker.” It’s a solid piece of analysis that spends a few graphs discussing the art of the zoom and is accompanied by a novel “anatomy of a scene” interactive feature.

    Next up, A.O. Scott stumps for Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” once again (also with interactive accompaniment), while Stephen Holden waves the flag for Oren Moverman’s “The Messenger” (following a Woody Harrelson appreciation in the pages of the LA Times yesterday).

    Going broader, Michael Cieply addresses the 10 once again and gets one anonymous Academy governor to admit what we all know, that the expanded Best Picture field is likely an experiment that might not last more than one or two years.  And Douglas McGrath (rather out of the blue) calls for Doris Day to receive an honorary statuette.

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  • Cahiers, Sight & Sound offer decade lists

    Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning in The War of the WorldsThe recent barrage of end-of-decade collectives has probably been enough to sate the appetite of even the keenest listoholic — but having consciously avoided most such lists while I worked on my own, I’m still wallowing in them.

    So I can’t resist mentioning out the lists of two of the world’s leading film magazines — the eccentric, über-cinephilic Cahiers du Cinéma, and my own favorite, Sight & Sound. The Cahiers list is exactly what you’d expect from them, with a cineaste’s twisted valentine to Hollywood atop the pile, while its one concession to populist commercial cinema is a typically perverse choice:

    1. “Mulholland Drive” (David Lynch)
    2. “Elephant” (Gus van Sant)
    3. “Tropical Malady” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
    4. “The Host” (Bong Joon-ho)
    5. “A History of Violence” (David Cronenberg)
    6. “The Secret of the Grain” (Abdelatif Kechiche)
    7. “West of the Tracks” (Wang Bing)
    8. “War of the Worlds” (Steven Spielberg)
    9. “The New World” (Terrence Malick)
    10. “Ten” (Abbas Kiarostami)

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  • Woody Harrelson gets some quality ink

    Woody HarrelsonOf course I’ve been singing Woody Harrelson’s praises in “The Messenger” since day one, and thankfully, after a shove into the race with National Board of Review recognition, he’s been on a relatively solid track as of late.  And as I mentioned in Friday’s Oscar Talk, there is some chatter around his potential for a win in the Best Supporting Actor race.

    The best thing about that scenario?  Few would argue with it.  He is one of our most under-valued actors, on a trajectory similar to the career of Jeff Bridges, lurking with solid work, both as a character player and in a leading capacity if need be.  Wouldn’t it be quite the breath of fresh air if they both walked away with Oscars this year?

    In this today’s LA Times, Harrelson gets the flattery treatment from critic Betsy Sharkey, quite the commodity in the thick of an awards race, with ballots in hand and a Screen Actors Guild ceremony a couple of weeks away.  This is how it happens, especially in a race that is a bit more up in the air than many seem to think.

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