Sigourney Weaver stopped by The Ed Sullivan Theater last night to talk “Avatar” with David Letterman. My jaw dropped when she explains that the Weta guys spend 47 hours of manpower per each 1/24th of a second in translating the data received from the motion-capture sensors. Wow.
Check out the clip below, and after the jump, Conan O’Brien has a bit of fun with the Na’vi language.
“Up in the Air” director Jason Reitman has been as diligent as he can be about taking a photo of each of the journalists who have interviewed him along the way as he’s been promoting his new film throughout the fall, beginning way back in early December (where I actually first sat down with him — read that piece here). He’s assembled the stills, along with some video here and there, set it to the sounds of The Clash’s “Janie Jones.” I show up around 1:55 (snapped in his West Hollywood offices when I spoke with him for that “Up in the Air” crafts piece a few weeks back), looking unnecessarily intimidating as always.
Have a look at “Lost in the Air: The Jason Reitman Press Tour Simulator”:
• Geoff Boucher sits down with “Crazy Heart” star Jeff Bridges (with an awkward accompanying photo to boot). [Los Angeles Times]
• Speaking of Boucher, congrats to him, Anthony Breznican, Susan King, Scott Mantz and Sharon Waxman on their ICG nominations. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Some desperately needed practical perspective on the “Moon” screener matter. [The Hot Blog]
Two weeks before revealing its nominations, BAFTA reveals longlists of 15 contenders in each category from which the eventual five nominees will be chosen. (Switch those numbers to five and three in the Animated Feature race.)
Vague as the lists are, a couple of telling trends stand out. It’s been clear for some time that “An Education” is the film to beat at this years BAFTAs. Like the group’s last three Best Film winners — “The Queen,” “Atonement” and “Slumdog Millionaire” — Lone Scherfig’s film is a mainstream British effort that has U.S. awards traction, allowing them to remain patriotic while fulfilling their recent Oscar-aping remit.
So it’s no surprise that “An Education” leads the longlists with 17 mentions — seven of them in the acting races. Close behind is “Inglourious Basterds,” with 15 bids, while “The Hurt Locker” manages 12.
For reasons I’ve never been able to determine, BAFTA chooses to reveal its nominees for Best Foreign Language Film two weeks before revealing their full nomination list. Way to make a ghetto category seem even more so, but … anyway. The nominees are:
“Broken Embraces”
“Coco Before Chanel”
“Let the Right One In”
“A Prophet”
“The White Ribbon”
The last three are both inevitable and deserving contenders, but the first two reek of autopilot voting. I bow to no one in my love for the man’s work, but most would agree that “Broken Embraces” is mid-range Almodóvar at best.
And then there were ten.
Before I wrap up the list that I’ve trickled out over the last five days, I suppose I should write a few words on the decade that was. I entered the 2000s as a 16 year-old boy in Johannesburg who thought he knew a lot about movies. I left it as a 26 year-old man in London who knows a lot more than he did then — but realizes that he knows a lot less. There is still so much to see that I’ve barely touched upon — from this past decade alone.
Probably no filmgoing decade in my lifetime will be as crucial to me as the one that passed, in terms of the shift and growth in my sense of how to read (and write) film.
I may have already known that I loved movies, but in the 2000s I gained a sharper sense of how to love them, what I really respond to in a film — and the 50 titles gathered here (along with many, many others) helped fine-tune that notion.
With that kind of personal learning curve attached to the decade, it’s hard to stand back and judge how it might stack against previous ones; strong, weak or average, it’ll always feel like my decade. As I compiled the list, however, did arrive at the conclusion that it started better than it finished. Sheer mathematics supports this personal view — the top 10 films I’m about to reveal all landed in the decade’s first half, and I don’t think that’s merely down to the advantage of distance.
With all the WGA casualties popping up this morning I thought I’d track down the eligibility concerns of a handful of other films in the mix and, lo and behold, some other high-caliber work doesn’t make the cut with the guild.
Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell’s “District 9,” for starters, is not eligible. It was not written under the guild’s guidelines and contracts and the writers are not WGA signatories.
Some people may have thought this mass clearing might have made way for “In the Loop” to show up, but, alas, it is not eligible either. Ditto (as you might have guessed) “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” along with Pixar’s “Up.” Animation companies do not sign agreements with the guild and are not signatories, even if sometimes the writers of animated films ARE signatories.
I’m still poking around to see what else might be ineligible, but at this rate, I’ll be damned if I know what the list of nominees will look like now. I guess we’ll suss that out in a few days when we preview the announcement.
Harmless, but she’ll probably get derided here and there. I laughed. What’s more interesting is the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen an awards presenter stick around and add commentary to an award recipient’s acceptance speech.
Anyway, have a look:
And here’s the AP story declaring this news.
Well, just after posting about the Weinstein titles that aren’t eligible for the writers, indieWIRE’s Peter Knegt reports that Nick Hornby’s wonderful work on “An Education” is also ineligible:
Hornby has been a member of WGA for 10 years, a representative for Hornby told indieWIRE today. But after production of “An Education” was completed, a new rule was instituted that Hornby also had to be a member of his local WGA Great Britain, which he was not.
*coughbullshitcough*
In any case, this should make for quite the, uh, unexpected list of nominees.
And they are, via AMPAS press release:
“Avatar”
“District 9”
“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”
“Star Trek”
“Terminator Salvation”
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”
“2012”
And the three I still expect to get in are in the mix, so, whew. I think we all know what will eventually win here, but if there’s a surprise nomination waiting to happen, I’d say it’s “2012.”
“On Thursday, January 21, all members of the Academy’s Visual Effects Branch will be invited to view 15-minute excerpts from each of the seven shortlisted films,” the release reads. “Following the screenings, the members will vote to nominate three films for final Oscar consideration.”
What are your visual effects predictions?
It seems Steve Pond was willing to track down the real reason The Weinstein Company hasn’t sent screeners of its Oscar season hopefuls to the WGA, reacting to a story initially run by Kyle Buchanan at Movieline: three of them aren’t even eligible, and one of them (which is all but dead this season) is better viewed on the big screen anyway.
Writes Pond:
The Weinstein Company didn’t send out “Inglourious Basterds” screeners because “Inglourious Basterds” isn’t eligible for the WGA Awards.
Neither is “A Single Man.”
And neither is “The Road.”
“Nine,” written by WGA member Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella, a member of the WGA, East during his lifetime, is the only Weinstein film that’s eligible, according to a spokesperson for the guild. And “Nine” plays much better on a big screen, it’s still in theaters, and it doesn’t really have much chance for a writing nod anyway.
So Harvey Weinstein didn’t send out screeners to the WGA not because he dropped the ball, but because he understands how the guilds work and didn’t feel like wasting money.
The reasons? Keep reading…
…who just popped up in my DGA predictions, in case you’ve missed it, do yourself a favor and give Geoff Boucher’s three-part interview with the “District 9” director a look. Boucher did a similarly all-encompassing series with Christopher Nolan last year, and this one is every bit as insightful.
What we get is a profile of a fresh-faced filmmaker (just 30 years old) who, at least so far, hasn’t taken the Hollywood, sell-your-soul bait. He was only interested in returning the investment of “District 9” to investors in exchange for the room to be creative, rather than eyeball a big profit margin (though boy did the film turn a HELL of a profit). And he’s clearly savvy enough to understand the caveat of tent pole filmmaking and how to hang on to creative control of his projects with modest budgets.
I’ve gone through and pulled some talking points from the interview, which you can breeze through after the jump. But definitely give the full series a read. Here is part one, part two and part three.
Tomorrow the Directors Guild of America will chime in with its list of nominees for the 2009-2010 film awards season. Long considered to be the best “predictor” of the Oscar game (as in, the DGA winner typically wins the Oscar for Best Director, and Best Director often matches up with Best Picture), this guild’s shenanigans makes for a heavily anticipated harbinger of the season.
Then again, maybe not. In the last few years, names like Christopher Nolan, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel and Bill Condon have popped up on the list, almost as if the guild was concerned with predicting the Best Picture race as it had done, five-for-five, for four straight years prior. Those picks reflected the buzz of the early-year hour in each case, but ultimately, the Academy went a different direction with its Best Picture slate.
That said, “the 10” makes for an entirely different dynamic. I actually expect (or maybe “hope” is the word) tomorrow’s announcement to inject some intrigue into the proceedings. I think there will be someone shortlisted who catches a great many off guard. But who will it be?
Check out the full list of winners at our Precursor Circuit page.
• Sam Mendes could clearly use a paycheck, signs up for the new Bond. [Heat Vision]
• Navigating the season in “For Your Consideration” ads. [Vulture]
• Rodrigo Perez points out some buried points in another outlet’s coverage, namely that Apparition is aiming for a Cannes bow for Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” [The Playlist]
Okay, so I wasn’t expecting “Wolf Creek” to be the most popular inclusion — though in putting it out there, I was glad to see the number of fellow cheerleaders I have for that one. Such sharing is the principal joy of doing such lists.
I doubt that any titles in today’s group of ten are quite as contentious, though one received a far rougher ride from some major critics upon release than I think it deserved, and has rather disappeared from view in recent years. Keen-eyed readers will also notice my list’s first overlap with Kris’s best-of-decade collective — ironically, on a film that tends to divide opinion rather than unite it.
Several of you have asked, in comments and via email, about the films that would fill out my Top 100. I thought 50 films more than enough for me to write up, but since some readers are treating the project as the kind of playlist I had hoped for, I could be persuaded to offer an alphabetical, titles-only list of the also-rans.
The list continues after the cut.
The USC Libraries has announced its list of contenders for the Scripter prize, which honors adapted screenplays, their writers and the source materials and authors that spawned them.
So, with that in mind, I’m not sure how the “District 9” nod is justified here in the slightest, given the stated intention of the award.* But that’s another feather in the film’s cap regardless. It could be picking up a big head of steam here. More on that when we preview the DGA nominations tomorrow.
A big congrats to Scott Cooper for finally getting some love of his own this Oscar season. I had a hunch he might show up here. Maybe this can help turn the corner for a film too many are quick to chalk up as “performance only.”
I guess we can probably expect Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner to walk away with the award, but as always, it’s a refreshingly out-of-step line-up from the USC Libraries. Fight on.
Anyway, check out the nominees, via press release, after the jump.