In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Ebert names ‘Synecdoche’ the decade’s best

    Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New YorkI’m happy to see the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert is bold enough to tap something like Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” as the best film of the decade.  His list on the whole is rather singular, I found, which is also refreshing.

    Of his number one pick, he says:

    “Synecdoche, New York” is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not furnished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

    That’s a wonderful way of summing up the work of Charlie Kaufman, who I recently called the “filmmaker of the decade.”  His is perhaps the most penetrating and insightful work in the medium today.  Check out the rest of Ebert’s list here.

  • Rendered irrelevant

    At the start of the decade, movie stars were hit by a giant tidal wave. By the end, they had been stomped on by giant robots and kicked into a flaming abyss. Over the past 10 years, digital spectacles have become a bigger draw than famous actors.

    The lede on Anthony Breznican’s USA Today story wrapping up the decade in movies.  Great minds think alike.

  • 12/31 Oscarweb Round-up (NEW YEAR’S EVE EDITION)

    Neill Blomkamp on the set of District 9• Tom O’Neil serves some crow up to a few colleagues while failing to understand that his prize pony needed a few films to underwhelm in order to be in the position it’s in. [Gold Derby]

    • David Poland crunches the “Avatar” numbers yet again.  The film is still…almost…breaking records. [The Hot Blog]

    • Neill Blomkamp don’t need no stinkin’ big-budget blockbusters. [Hero Complex]

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  • Baldwin on Letterman

    This is from the holiday episode, which aired 12/23.  Early in the interview they touch on the Oscar hosting gig and later, of course, there’s “It’s Complicated” talk.  And a great story mid-way through about when Baldwin met Burt Lancaster in an elevator.  Hilarious stuff.  Here’s part one, part two after the jump.

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  • On the sound of ‘Transformers’

    A few weeks back we told you about a new site called SoundWorks Collection, which has been doing a great job of featuring the sound mixing and sound editing on a number of the year’s contenders.  Using brief video pieces to illustrate an element of the industry that is still somewhat mysterious to many, I think they’re grounding it for general audiences quite well.

    Most recently, the site featured the sound of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” which was mixed by Gary Summers and Greg P. Russell and features an all-star sound crew that is sure to be recognized again.  Take a look:

    We’ll be featuring Russell once again here in a couple of weeks via our Tech Support interview series.  As you know, he is the second-most nominated individual to never receive an Oscar (12 nods and counting).

  • Good point

    I’d also suggest that the resurgence of women as box office makers or breakers is not to be under-estimated. Yes, women went to the movies before “Sex and the City: The Movie” last year (18 months ago), but it seems that since then there have been more women-oriented hits that can be solely claimed as being hits BECAUSE of women (and not “women taking their boyfriends” or whatever). “Julie & Julia”, “The Proposal” and, obviously, “Twilight: New Moon” and so on. Plus, so many people were saying “will Avatar get women audiences?” and I think the answer is most definitely YES.

    –Reader/commenter Glenn, in our “moments of the year” discussion yesterday.

  • ‘Up in the Air’ gets EW’s first Oscar cover of the season

    Cover of Entertainment WeeklyI think I have a few Entertainment Weekly Oscar special issues dating back to, oh, 1995 or so.  I used to relish in the odds, the Oscar articles cooked up by the magazine’s staff, and, obviously, Dave Karger’s work throughout.  Yeah, I’m a bit jaded on the circuit now, but once upon a time, I was excited to see who’d get the Oscar cover.

    Ah, who am I fooling?  I still get very curious.  For the eventual post-nominations cover, that is.  For a couple of years, it seemed that designation was a harbinger.  Then “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was featured in 2000 and things didn’t go that film’s way for Oscar.

    This year, I thought it would be one of two films on the early race issue, the two films I think are duking it out for Best Picture.  And sure enough, one of them got it: “Up in the Air.” We’ll see who gets the post-nod cover.

    EW’s Pop Watch blog has more of the early scoop.  The issue hits stands Friday and will include Karger’s predictions.  Click here for a slightly bigger version.

  • 12/30 Oscarweb Round-up

    (from left) Penelope Cruz, Daniel Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard in Nine• Weinstein scales back the “Nine” expansion in the wake of low box office, bad reviews. [Reuters]

    • “Avatar” effects guru Joe Letteri sure is making the rounds.  Next stop: Steve Pond. [The Odds]

    • On Oscar’s consistent rule changes. [Variety]

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  • December winner predictions, part 2: Yours and mine

    Melanie Laurent in Inglourious BasterdsAs I like to do when Kris boldly throws out a set of winner predictions, I thought I’d follow up with an indication of which way our readers are leaning — as well as an update of my own previous guesses.

    The conclusion: well, what a difference seven weeks makes. Of course, it’s inevitable that things would go topsy-turvy in this of all months, when multiple question marks have been answered — some becoming unexpectedly insistent exclamation marks in the process.

    Still, I’m surprised by how dramatically my own picks have shifted, largely due to my overestimation of “Precious”‘s pop-culture sway, and my misplaced hunch that “Avatar” would disappoint. (Well, it disappointed me, but that’s hardly the deal-breaker I’d like it to be.) Today, I’m not even predicting a nomination for the man I (rather rashly) backed to win Best Director last month … such is the fickle nature of the game.

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  • “Dull, dull, dull”

    As is usually the case when British outlets offer Oscar analysis, there are few fresh insights to be found in Jeremy Kay’s assessment of the current race in today’s Guardian.

    Well, there is his unusual offhand assertion that “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Star Trek” are locked-in Best Picture nominees, with “Julie & Julia” and “The Blind Side” jostling for slot #10. (Well, it can’t eventually be the same 10 titles everyone else is predicting, can it? Can it?)

    He does, however, offer the kind of forthright, subjective opinions on the contenders that some Oscar prognosticators shy away from, as when he witheringly dismisses Gabourey Sidibe in favor of Abbie Cornish.

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  • The math

    AMPAS ballotI Tweeted about this yesterday, but in case you missed it, Steve Pond has painstakingly revealed the craziness of Oscar’s math once more, but this time, with added detail and some new bits that will either clear things up for you or make them much, much more confusing.

    I know which of those camps I’m in.

    Anyway, here’s a taste, just to get you started.  But go to The Odds to get the full fuzzy picture:

    The math is simple: You take the number of nominations up for grabs, add one, and use the resulting number to divide the number of votes. Then you add one, or any fraction of one.

    For instance, if you have 5,500 Best Picture ballots and you’re looking for 10 nominees, you divide 5,500 by 11, giving you a magic number of 500. Now, it’s theoretically possible that 11 different films could each receive 500 votes – but if you add one (or any fraction, if that magic number isn’t a whole number), you’ll get the number that will automatically put you in the top 10, and thus guarantee you a nomination.

  • ‘Avatar’ and ‘Thundercats’

    ThundercatsRandom, I know.  But allow my inner 6-year-old to have a moment here.

    I guess there was a report somewhere over the holiday about how Warner Bros. had scrapped plans to film a live action “Thundercats” movie.  As a child of the 1980s, and speaking as a guy who may have had more He-Man action figures than Thundercats, but still liked the adventures of Third Earth a bit more than those of Eternia, I have to say, I’d love to see it happen.  I’ve just never had my hopes up.

    But remember when the “Avatar” trailer first hit and everyone was saying the Na’vi looked like blue Thundercats?  It was obviously used as a pejorative at the time, but it didn’t click for me that, hey, you know what — we could do this now.

    Let’s be real.  No one is going to spend “Avatar” money on a Thundercats film, and “Avatar” money is what you need to make it work.  But if the effects were as refined as they were on James Cameron’s epic, then I have to say, I’d be pretty stoked.

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  • 12/29 Oscarweb Round-up

    Stephen Lang in Avatar• John Campea talks to “Avatar” star Stephen Lang. [AMC Entertainment]

    • Scott Feinberg spotlights 50 performances that “shoulda been contendas” in the 2009 Oscar race. [And the Winner Is…]

    • Nikki sez Warner Bros. has broken the studio’s own domestic box office record by crossing $2 billion across the States.  Wowsers. [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

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  • Well said

    Love Actually

    Curtis essentially took the climactic moment from every romantic comedy and distilled it into one delectable stew and somehow came up with a product that works. In a way, by focusing solely on the crowd-pleasing moments it almost becomes experimental. Not every story hits but enough does to ensure that I felt warm and gooey from literally the first frame to the last.

    From our own Chad Hartigan’s on-going list of the 100 best films of the decade, re: “Love Actually.” I thought it would be a nice festive mention, to say nothing of the fact that I agree with every word.

    Incidentally (and belated), my list of the top 10 perennial must-watch Christmas movies, originally posted last year.

  • AFI’s moments of significance in 2009

    James Cameron on the set of AvatarThey should add an “L” between the “F” and the “I.”  American Film List Institute.  Anyway, this just arrived via press release.  The criteria is apparently “accomplishments of considerable merit; influences with either a positive or negative impression; trends, either new or re-emerging; anniversaries or memorials of special note; and/or movements in new technologies, education, preservation, government or other areas that impact the art film, television and digital media.”

    It leads off with the obvious choice.  More after the jump:

    AVATAR – JAMES CAMERON’S MILEPOST IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE ART FORM

    James Cameron’s pioneering effort to unleash the human imagination was fully realized in 2009 with the release of AVATAR, a film that firmly established itself as a landmark in the way stories are told.

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  • New ‘Inception’ trailer

    (Thanks to ThinkHero for the embed.)

  • Hey, remember Zeusefer? Who was that masked man?

    OscarThe Oscar coverage game has obviously blown up in the eight years that I’ve been doing it.  What started out as old media writing annual, singular columns dedicated to the race at hand (and generally right just before the show or nominations announcement) eventually gave way to niche-oriented sites headed up by passionate individuals who just wanted to write about movies and the Super Bowl of film.

    The early names were obviously Tom O’Neil, Pete Hammond (via Tom’s site), Sasha Stone and Nathaniel Rogers.  I jumped on board in 2000-2001 and soon, already established writers like David Poland and Jeffrey Wells began to offer up Oscar coverage (seeing the remunerative prospects, no doubt).  Today, any and everyone covers the Oscars, from the amateur fan-site trenches to major media outlets looking to capitalize on advertising potential.

    But there was one guy doing all of this nonsense long, long ago who made a splash then suddenly disappeared.  He ranked the major categories in ever-changing lists of 30 and had studio publicists at their wits end trying to locate and, obviously, influence him.  His name, as we knew him, was Zeusefer, and veteran publicist Reid Rosefelt has written something of a letter to his shenanigans.

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  • December winner predictions

    Meryl Streep in Julie & JuliaI gave this an initial stab nearly two months ago.  I thought I might as well re-visit things.  (And hopefully there won’t be anyone getting their panties in a twist over something as harmless as this.  You know who you are.)

    Best Picture: “Avatar”
    Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”
    Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, “Crazy Heart”
    Best Actress: Meryl Streep, “Julie & Julia”
    Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”
    Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, “Precious”
    Best Adapted Screenplay: “Up in the Air”
    Best Original Screenplay: “Inglourious Basterds”

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