In Contention

Category: Daily

  • Ranking Oscar’s 41 features (minus one)

    Every year, when I finally get around to everything, I like to toss up my arbitrary ranking of the year’s Oscar-nominated feature films (and invite you to do the same).

    There were 41 films nominated this year. One of them I didn’t see and won’t until some time this year, I imagine. But here’s the top 10. The rest after the jump. Feel free to rank what you’ve seen in the comments section if you like.

    1. “Exit Through the Gift Shop”
    2. “Another Year”
    3. “Black Swan”
    4. “The Social Network”
    5. “Toy Story 3”
    6. “The Way Back”
    7. “Blue Valentine”
    8. “True Grit”
    9. “Inception”
    10. “The King’s Speech”

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  • Reminder: Join our Picktainment Oscar pool!

    If you haven’t joined our Oscar pool at Picktainment.com, you can do so by going here.  Sign up for an account if you’re new and then go back to this link and start making your picks.

    I’ve completed the weighting of the categories.  I had to settle on something because the poll stopped working randomly on that last suggestion thread, so I just went with a 1-4 point scale based on perceived difficulty to predict…

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: ‘Twas the week before Oscar

    • We made you wait for it this year, but finally: Kris’s Top 10 Shots of 2010, parts one and two.

    • This week’s Off the Carpet column surveyed where the season has brought us thus far, and began tying the loose ends…

    • …culminating later in Kris’s final Oscar predictions of the 2010 season.

    • Guy’s final Long Shot column of the season celebrated the season’s losers, while calling for a return to movie talk away from the subject of awards.

    • Our Oscar Guide feature stepped it up, covering Best Director, Actor, Actress, Foreign Language Film and Film Editing.

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  • Just walk away: final predictions

    While Guy is pulling his hair out (I know the feeling), I’m backing off.  At some point you have to put your pencil down and step away, and so I am.

    For me, the most difficult categories to pick — and the ones I found myself flip-flopping on down the stretch — were Best Supporting Actress and Best Documentary (Feature).  Interestingly, both proved nerve-racking for completely different reasons.

    In the case of supporting actress, you have a race that felt fluid (easily a three-way sprint) coming into phase two, and a situation later complicated by an advertising hiccup from the frontrunner and the charm factor going way up for a contender in the expected Best Picture winner.  In the case of documentary feature, you have five stellar films that are — no kidding — evenly favored among the committee voters.

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  • Césars for Polanski, ‘Gods,’ ‘Illusionist’… and Fincher

    When the nominations for the César Awards — known in glib terms as the French Oscars — were announced last month, I wrote that I anticipated a tight race between Roman Polanski’s widely acclaimed Euro thriller “The Ghost Writer” and Xavier Beauvois’s lofty Cannes prizewinner “Of Gods and Men,” with the latter just winning out.

    As it turned out, I was right. Beauvois’s film (the French Oscar submission, which surprised many by failing to make the Academy’s shortlist) took the top prize, but it was “The Ghost Writer” that netted the most wins, with four — including two for Polanski himself (Best Director and Adapted Screenplay), plus honors for editing and Alexandre Desplat’s score.

    Given that combination of awards, it’s tempting to call Polanski’s film the “Social Network” of the French awards circuit — except that title goes to, well, “The Social Network.” David Fincher’s one-time Oscar frontrunner beat a rum bunch of mismatched nominees, including “Bright Star,” “Inception” and “Invictus,” to be named Best Foreign Film.

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  • To the highest bidder

    As you know, Banksy has been all over town making his presence known in the lead-up to the Oscars.  All These Wonderful Things documentary know-it-all A.J. Schnack happened by one of the artist’s latest pieces 10 minutes before it was tagged and 20 minutes before the owner of the building started the inevitable removal procedure with an endgame that fully proves Banksy’s point in “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Here’s a photo:

    (Check out Schnack’s recently posted analysis of the doc feature fields for both the Oscars and the Spirits here.)

    [Photo: A.J. Schnack]

  • The five categories giving me hell

    With a little over 48 hours until the big night, I find myself in an uncommon state of disarray — my crammed Oscar weekend “To Do” list includes viewing all 15 short nominees in order to make an informed dart-throw of a prediction (stickler that I am, I held out for a theatrical screening), preparing copious supplies of food and alcohol for my second annual hotel-suite Oscar party (sorry, the guest list is full) and somehow finding time to write a final predictions piece.

    Before I can check off that last task, however, I actually have to settle on some final predictions — and despite the presence of solid frontrunners in most key categories, this year is giving me more trouble than most. For a race that, only a couple of weeks ago, seemed smothered in blanket affection for a single film, other possibilities have opened up that unusually equalize the possibilities of both a titanic sweep and a widely splintered share-a-thon.

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  • Oscar’s foreign race hasn’t found the fix

    How do you solve a problem like Best Foreign Language Film? I’m not sure you can, but in the Academy’s case, it’s certainly not for lack of trying.

    The voting process in this eternally dissatisfying ghetto category is now such a Frankenstein’s monster of stages, rules, committees, sub-committees, longlists, shortlists and more committees that it’s a wonder they manage to wind up picking a single film at the end of it all — and rather less of a wonder that said film usually carries the stale whiff of a compromise choice.

    This year’s race, thoroughly mapped out by Kris in this week’s Oscar Guide, looks headed for a typically imperfect outcome — opinions on the five films that make up the category may vary, but few would argue that the overall slate represents the key stories of world cinema in 2010. The trouble set in early, with several of the year’s biggest crossover critical hits ruled out at the submissions stage.

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  • Missing Ronni

    A few choice quotes from this New York Times profile remembering Ronni Chasen in this, what would have been the busiest week of the year for her.

    She was very smart…She would always get there early so her noncelebrity client would get on camera, before all the stars would arrive.

    There is not a day I have not thought of her; she was such an intrinsic part of this time.

    She was very, very, very devoted to her clients…She just really needed you to know that Hans Zimmer walked on water.

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  • Charting Oscar’s ups and downs

    Some of you may have been following Movieline’s Oscar Index. It has been a nice way to visually track the Oscar race all season, and now, they’ve put all of them together with the following time lapse video, showing all of Oscar’s ups and downs along the way:

  • How ‘Salt’ could surprise and win Best Sound Mixing

    I stopped researching somewhere in the 1970s, but as far as I can tell going back that far, the Best Sound Mixing (formerly Best Sound) category has never included more than three Best Picture nominees. In a number of cases there were two, a great many years saw one and often enough, there were none.

    So there’s a theory worth addressing. But before I get to that, first and foremost, the safe money in the category is on “Inception.” However, there should be a bit of pause because the film did not resonate with the Academy enough to land two key nominations (Best Director and Best Film Editing) and it flew over many heads. But it’s the loud blockbuster of the bunch and ought to be considered the frontrunner.

    That having been said, when you think of the reality of the Oscars, the winner ballots are largely filled out in blocks of support, sometimes even mandated from on high (no joke). So there are six Best Picture nominees that aren’t represented in the Best Sound Mixing category, and the last thing in-house supporters of those films will want to do is check off a box for a competitor and add to another film’s momentum. The only vote that wouldn’t put wind in anybody else’s sails? “Salt.”

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  • 2/25 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Carter keeps the season interesting, Gervais’s suggestion, Portman overrated?

    • 10 great things Helena Bonham Carter has done or said to spice up this year’s Oscar race. [Vulture]

    • Ricky Gervais humbly suggests an opening monologue for Oscar hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway. [RickyGervais.com]

    • TCM’s Robert Osborne (my sole company on predicting “Letters from Iwo Jima” four years ago) on Oscar campaigns. [Wall Street Journal]

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  • ‘Dragon,’ ‘King’s Speech,’ ‘TRON’ win with film music critics

    Check out the full list of winners at The Circuit.

  • Taking questions for Oscar Talk

    Alright, here’s the big push.  You know the drill.  PLEASE KEEP IT TO ONE QUESTION, and, as always, keep it fresh and please, don’t bore me.

  • Like rama lama lama

  • 2/24 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Hanks to present two off the bat, Elton John on Best Actress, Twitter Best Pic reviews

    • Pete Hammond reports that Tom Hanks will present Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography to start the show, so we’ll know very quickly if a sweep for “The King’s Speech” is afoot. [Deadline]

    • Glenn Kenny talks up the underrated “Shutter Island” a year after its release. [The Film Talk]

    • It’s been a week of celebrity Oscar picks, more than ever.  Here’s Elton John’s call for Best Actress. [Inside Movies]

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  • The model for this year’s acting presentations?

    I mentioned yesterday that the multi-presenter format used for the acting awards in the last two Oscar ceremonies is being scrapped this year. However, while we’re doing away with the five-way individual tributes, producer Bruce Cohen claimed they were adopting an idea from the “1970 Oscars” that would ensure every nominee gets duly celebrated.

    Looking at footage from that year’s awards, it wasn’t clear what he meant — though it seems he might have been misquoted, and actually said “1970s Oscars.”

    With that in mind, helpful reader Michael Amir Bina got in touch to inform me that this presentation format (embedding disabled, I’m afraid), from the 1979 awards, is what we should be expecting. Nothing groundbreaking, just brief rundown of each nominee’s career and achievements to date. Fine, I suppose, though it slightly steps on the notion of the Oscar being for a single performance. Meanwhile, how much telecast time will the show’s writers be able to wring from poor Hailee Steinfeld’s résumé?

    [Photo: Libero.it]

  • “I’m not dancin’ with no damn wolves.”