Jeff Bridges at the Four Seasons. Woody Harrelson at the London. Jim Sheridan’s latest. Slow on content. Back in force tomorrow. Now, for no reason whatsoever:
Category: Daily
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Copycat alert: Globes switch to five animated nominees
As with the PGA’s switch to 10 Best Picture nominees, the ‘Simon Says’ power of the Academy continues to prove irresistible. Shortly after definite confirmation that the Oscars will be expanding the Best Animated Feature category from three nominees to five, comes news that the Golden Globes are following suit:Members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association voted last week to expand this year’s number of nominations for Best Animated Feature to five.
The amended rule now reads: Eligible films must be feature-length (70 minutes or longer) with no more than 25% live action. If less than eight animated films qualify, the award will not be given, in which case the films would be eligible for Best Picture. If less than twelve animated films qualify, the category will be limited to three nominations per year.
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‘Star Trek’ under the stars
The swank, spare-no-expense shin-dig last night at the historic Griffith Observatory was officially a DVD release party for one of the summer’s biggest critical and fiscal hits. But with nearly the entire Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s membership on hand, the general vibe of awards season in the air and the obvious implications of a fall DVD release for an early-year hopeful, it’s fair to say it was ostensibly a call to Oscar arms for a film that has a pretty good shot at one of this year’s 10 Best Picture slots.Most of the “Star Trek” cast was on hand — Zachary Quinto, Bruce Greenwood, Karl Urban, John Cho, Clifton Collins Jr. — but Leonard Nimoy and Walter Koenig were the ones causing the biggest stir, as of course they would. A specialty drink menu (Spock’s Mind Meld Mojito, Red Matter, Romulan Ale), little red matter balls in giant flower vases, telescopes trained on Jupiter, bright in the Southwest sky (including one of the big ones in the Observatory), the Observatory itself lit up by projected galactic imagery, the whole thing had a nifty, novel, interstellar vibe.
And it might pay off. After all, it only takes a little wining and dining to get the HFPA on your side, right? But seriously speaking, there are a couple of Best Picture slots that, to my mind, are up for grabs. Should the big anticipated films miss with the awards constituencies, then it’s just as well for a film like “Star Trek,” still one of the year’s best films.
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Kickoff for The Auteurs World Cup
I must say, The Auteurs is rapidly becoming one of my favorite film-related sites out there. I can take or leave the social-networking side of it, but it’s an increasingly useful (and beautifully designed) source of world cinema and critical discussion, not least in the must-read Auteurs Daily blog.Recently, they also launched a fun novelty exercise, The Auteurs World Cup. Structured like the football tournament for which it is named, it’s a cinematic knockdown contest between the world’s assorted filmmaking nations. Each represented by three film classics selected by a team captain, countries go head-to-head in a series of match-ups — the results determined by the votes of Auteurs users.
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11/17 Oscarweb Round-up
• “Avatar” to hold its world premiere in Leicester Square, London, December 10. [Deadline Hollywood Daily]• Nathaniel Rogers isn’t phased by his signed non-disclosure agreement, breathlessly (but briefly) enthuses about “Nine.” [The Film Experience]
• Johnny Depp becomes Hollywood’s highest paid actor with a £21 million ($42 million) salary for “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.” [Daily Telegraph]
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‘Crazy Heart’ trailer
An absolutely beautiful collection of images and moments from the film. Pitch-perfect, really. And featuring the original track “The Weary Kind,” by the way:
Check it out in HD at Apple.
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Kate Hudson sings in new ‘Nine ‘trailer
The song “Cinema Italiano,” by the way, is one of the film’s original compositions vying for Oscar glory. Based on this snippet, I think some melody wouldn’t have gone amiss. But that’s me.
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And the lists just keep on coming
Between now and December 31, we’re probably going to read more “best ____ of the 2000s” lists than we know what to do with. But we like lists, don’t we? And this only happens once every 10 years. Let’s not get blasé already.So with the floodgates already open on “films of the decade” talk, there’s plenty more to fuel the discussion. Paste Magazine has a nicely balanced Top 50 that puts “City of God” in pole position, and wins extra cinephile points for putting Claire Denis alongside Peter Jackson in the top 10.
Meanwhile, The Times supplements their own collective with a (impossibly formatted) selection of Top Tens from assorted British industry figures, including Julian Fellowes and Richard Eyre. “An Education” scribe Nick Hornby wins top marks from me for a list that includes “Lantana,” “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” and “I’m Not There.”
But for my money, no list I’ve seen so far is as rich and well thought-out as Telegraph critic Tim Robey’s personal Top 100 — a corrective of sorts to the “films that defined the decade” list he compiled with his Telegraph colleagues, which took some flak on the web, these pages included.
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Listen to Adam Lambert’s ‘Time For Miracles’ from ‘2012’
Okay, it’s a stretch under the new voting scheme to think that Adam Lambert’s closing credits track “Time For Miracles” from Roland Emmerich’s blow-stuff-up-good entry “2012” would be an Oscar contender, but with the film hitting theaters over the weekend (and with the just-announced news that another big sci-fi entry will have an original tune in the mix) I thought it would be worth it to showcase Lambert’s first single, as we’ve been doing the rest of the year’s Best Original Song contenders.And let’s face it — 10 years ago, this would be a sure-fire nominee. And speaking personally, it’s somewhat nostalgic for that. It has that epic, Diane Warren-like scope of songs like “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and “How Do I Live.” Cheese-fests, sure, but guilty pleasures are allowed in this life.
The track was written by Alain Johannes and the late Natasha Shneider, each formerly of the Los Angeles indie rock band Eleven. It’s positioning in the film is clearly a liability, but it’s the kind of thing that would most certainly grab more ratings for the Oscarcast, should it find itself in the mix.
Have a listen to the song below, which we featured less formally a few weeks back, and tell us what you think.
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Leona Lewis to sing ‘Avatar’ theme
Chalk up another contender for Best Original Song. British pop diva Leona Lewis is to sing the (presumably multi-octave-scaling) theme song from James Cameron’s “Avatar.”Best known Stateside for her megahit “Bleeding Love,” the 24 year-old chanteuse rose to fame as the 2006 winner of “The X Factor,” the UK’s “American Idol” equivalent — thus making “Avatar” the year’s second sci-fi blockbuster (after “2012”) to turn to a reality-show star for musical duties.
Empire reports that Lewis is currently shooting the video for the song, a James Horner-penned closing-credits effort titled “I See You (Theme from Avatar).”
If this all sounds a little 1997, I guess that’s the idea. Lewis is, after all, a latter-day answer to Celine Dion, whose ubiquitous Oscar-winning theme for Cameron’s last film — what was the title again? — was part and parcel of its success. (Of course, times have changed since then, and the Academy looks a lot less kindly on closing-credit tracks these days.)
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Almodóvar, Tarantino to present at Oscars, five-presenter system scrapped
A few weeks ago, The Film Experience’s Nathaniel Rogers invited alternative presenter ideas for next year’s Academy Awards ceremony. Among the suggestions I made was a more diverse roster of recognizable filmmakers deemed worthy of presenter status, naming Pedro Almodóvar as an example.Once again, Oscarcast producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman and I seem to be eerily in sync, as Pete Hammond has just revealed that that the great Spanish auteur and Quentin Tarantino are the first confirmed presenters for the ceremony.
Meanwhile, last year’s five-presenter innovation for the acting categories will not be continued, a move that will probably disappoint as many people as it pleases. (I’m in the latter category.)
Speaking to Hammond at last night’s Governors’ Awards, Mechanic instead promised presenter pairings with “real significance,” beginning with Almodóvar and Tarantino, who will hand out the Best Foreign Language Film award together.
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Preview?
So yeah, I cropped poor Gordon Willis out of the photo to end up with the image to the right here, but I can’t help wondering whether it’ll be a familiar sight come March 7.Of course, some folks have their panties in a twist at the gall of predicting winners this early, so I won’t go there again. But it really does feel like things are going to go Bridges’s way this Oscar season. It’s all just…too difficult to argue with.
Jeffrey Wells recently saw the film in New York and is on board. Steve Pond, Anne Thompson, Gregory Ellwood, Patrick Goldstein, there is little resistance. No one likes an obvious race, but let’s call it what it’ll likely be: a Jeff Bridges victory lap, ebbing and flowing waves of applause for Duane Jackson, Lightfoot, Kevin Flynn, Terry Brogan, Preston Tucker, Jack Lucas, Max Klein, The Dude, Jackson Evans, Charles Howard, Ted Cole and finally, Bad Blake.
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11/16 Oscarweb Round-up
• Catch video highlights of Saturday night’s Honorary Oscars celebration. [Oscars.org]• Baltimore Ravens OT Michael Oher on his life’s inspiration for Hollywood. [CNN]
• Hoping “Avatar” is the new face of filmmaking. [Los Angeles Times]
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AMPAS chief Sherak promises “more fun” Oscars
As a former Fox chairman with a background in marketing, it’s unsurprising that Tom Sherak, who recently replaced Sid Ganis as president of the Academy, wants to bring a more populist approach to the Oscars.In this LA Times interview, he makes it clear that the primary objective of the move to 10 Best Picture nominees is to get more blockbusters into the race — having himself voted for “The Dark Knight” last year — but admits that they may not succeed:
The point of it was to do something … We need to not be afraid to try things. We need to be positive. The people who are against the idea say, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ Then we won’t do it again.
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Welcome to the club
Roger Corman, Lauren Bacall and Gordon Willis show off the Oscars they received at last night’s Governors’ Awards. (The fourth honoree, John Calley, could not attend.) More pictures and video footage of the presentations are at the official AMPAS site here.
(On a side note, one pic on the Academy site is captioned “Honorary award recipient Lauren Bacall and fashion designer Tom Ford.” Given that they’re likely going to be nominating Ford’s debut film in at least one or two categories come January, might they not do him the courtesy of adding ‘director’ to his description?)
