In Contention

Category: Daily

  • ‘A Prophet’ tops International Cinephile Society honors

    One last set of kinda-critics’ awards to see out the season — the International Cinephile Society is an online group of journalists, academics and industry professionals that, true to their name, offers a slightly more global outlook in their measuring of the year’s best.

    It’s a small organization, but I mention their awards here for two reasons: 1) I’m one of the voters, and 2) despite that hindrance, they’ve assembled one of the best winners lists I’ve seen all season. Jacques Audiard’s long-lingering prison drama “A Prophet” evidently still weighs heavily on people’s minds, as it took the group’s top two awards, plus an acting win for Niels Arestrup.

    Its tally was equalled, however, by “Another Year” and “The Social Network,” making for a pretty generous spread of choices — few of which we’re likely to see echoed on Sunday night. Vive la différence, and all that. Full list of winners after the cut.

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  • Overkill

  • Prediction conundrum of the day

    You may have heard Anne and I get into it over the design categories in Friday’s Oscar Talk.  For costumes, she maintained that the great (and deserving) Colleen Atwood is likely to win for “Alice in Wonderland.” Yet, as best I can tell, the only true fantasies to win the award — ever — are “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (a bona fide sweeper) and “Star Wars” (I’m considering “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” a period entry).  And no Tim Burton film has won here when nominated, unfortunately.  I’m thinking “The King’s Speech.”

    She also contended that Tim Burton’s film and “Inception” are more likely to win Best Art Direction than the period frontrunner.  You know where I stand on what’s deserving, but I don’t think the Academy at large is savvy enough to go there.  History is on the side of “Alice in Wonderland” when you consider the fact that no Tim Burton film nominated for Best Art Direction has ever lost (going all the way back to my beloved “Batman”).  So suddenly I’m leaning in that direction more than I was for costumes.  Additionally, fantasies have historically fared better here than in Best Costume Design.

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  • BERLIN: ‘Nader and Simin’ wins big

    Unlike large voting bodies such as the Academy, the decisions of rotating festival juries are rarely easy to anticipate — when only six people are determining the awards, as was the case at this year’s Berlinale, who knows what idiosyncratic personal tastes might come into play?

    So it is that the only truly surprising thing about this year’s Berlin Competition winners, announced at a ceremony last night, is just how unsurprising they are. As I predicted in my Friday review of both films, Isabella Rossellini and her fellow jurors sided with the critics, as it came down to Béla Tarr’s imposing survival study “The Turin Horse” and Asghar Farhadi’s intricate moral drama “Nader and Simin, a Separation” for the Golden Bear.

    As expected, it was Farhadi’s more accessible, though no less deserving, film that came out on top — two years after the filmmaker took the festival’s Best Director award for “About Elly” — while a seemingly surly Tarr had to settle for the runner-up Grand Prix. (The severe Hungarian auteur was there to pick up his award, but refused to give an acceptance speech.)

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  • ‘True Grit’ wins CAS

    The second industry organization of the night has announced, and as a tip of the hat to the SoundWorks Collection (which reported the news via Twitter), I figured I’d offer up their custom profile of the film. I knew there was some complaining about the “Inception” mix in the sound community, but I don’t know that it’ll stretch to the Academy at large, which will still likely go the route of the big blockbuster. But it’s very much between these two films.

    Our Oscar Guide on this year’s Best Sound Mixing category can be found here.

  • ‘Social,’ ‘Alice’ win ACE awards

    Alright, so I should have gone with what I said was the safe bet for the ACE drama Eddie.  Rather than making history by awarding a film not nominated for the editing Oscar and giving it to the truly deserving contender, “Inception,” the editors decided to rethink it and go with “The Social Network” instead.  Fair enough.

    I was, however, correct in assuming “Alice in Wonderland” had a better play on the win than the other comedy hopefuls.  “Toy Story 3” triumphed in the animated field as expected, while I was also on the money with “Exit Through the Gift Shop” winning in the doc category.  I’ll take three out of four.

    “Inception” could, however, take the Cinema Audio Society award for sound mixing, which is what most are expecting.  More on that when those awards wrap up shortly.

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  • Weekend polls

    FYI, I’ve reloaded the short film live action poll for today, since they were just released last weekend and many may have been able to see and vote.  Tomorrow I’ll reload the docs (last weekend we reloaded the animated shorts).

  • WEEKLY WRAP: BAFTA ‘Speech’ sweep, ASC upset, Berlinale coverage

    • To the surprise of precisely no one, hometown favorite “The King’s Speech” reigned supreme at the BAFTAs.

    • Before you go basing your Oscar predictions on the BAFTA outcome, Kris pointed out a crucial caveat.

    • “Inception” added another guild award to its mantel, as Wally Pfister beat Roger Deakins to the American Society of Cinematographers’ top prize.

    • Guy hobbled off to the Berlinale, where his festival coverage included an early 2011 Oscar prediction for Vanessa Redgrave in Ralph Fiennes’s “Coriolanus.”

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  • James Franco joins the Twitterfolk

    After viewing his art exhibition yesterday, I suggested James Franco might want to remove one string from his bow, but the man apparently thinks he hasn’t been busy enough lately: he can now add “celebrity Twitterer” to his increasingly long list of occupations. There’s not much yet on the @jamesfranco account to prompt discussion — just two introductory tweets to a rapidly accrued 45,000 followers (and counting, of course) — but I have no doubt he’ll mold his entertaining odd persona to the medium soon enough. His online hello is below. (Meanwhile, while we’re gathering Franco videos, he and Judd Apatow kid about Oscar hosting after the cut.)

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  • BERLIN: Béla Tarr and Golden Bear favorites

    The Berlinale competition drew to a close this morning, with Joshua Marston’s “The Forgiveness of Blood” — more on that in a final roundup this weekend — wrapping up a selection that’s been a typically mixed bag for the festival. Healthy critical argument has flared up over a number of titles — including lone Asian entry “Come Rain, Come Shine,” a bare-bones day in the life of a separating couple that struck some as delicately affecting and others merely as attractively vacant. (I’m one of the others, sad to say.)

    Meanwhile, films the critical majority has sided against include “Lipstikka,” a reportedly bananas Israeli melodrama that Telegraph critic Tim Robey warned me off with this choice dialogue sample: “You play games with me, like you used to do with your men, with your sex and boobs.” Part of me regrets missing this one.

    Amid the splinters of the Competition, however, a pair of critical favorites have moved comfortably ahead of the pack in terms of general approval and all-round buzz — they screened three days ago, eons in festival time, yet I’ve barely heard anyone talk about any other films since. I’m afraid to say that my own top film of the fest, Cameroon-set German drama “Sleeping Sickness” (reviewed here), isn’t one of them.

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  • 2/18 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Buchareb on ‘Outside the Law,’ biggest lies in Oscar contenders, sound editing vs. mixing

    • Larry Rohter talks “Outside the Law” with director Rachid Bouchareb, who calls the film “a historical continuation” of 2007’s “Days of Glory” and mentions a third part is in the cards. [The Carpetbagger]

    • The biggest lies of this year’s Oscar contenders. [The Race]

    • As “The King’s Speech” dusts off its mantle, this taxing conversation keeps getting play. [Entertainment Weekly]

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  • Predict the weekend in societies

    Anne and I will be briefly previewing the American Cinema Editors and Cinema Audio Society awards in tomorrow’s Oscar Talk, and maybe a little Motion Picture Sound Editors thrown in to boot.  All three will be announcing winners this weekend, while members of the Costume Designers Guild will put a bow on the guild season Tuesday night when they present their awards.

    So, let’s start with the editors.  It’s one of the oldest industry organizations, going all the way back to 1961, and this year marks its 50th anniversary.  In that 50 year existence, the Society has awarded the eventual Oscar winner for Best Film Editing 35 times.

    Additionally, 20 times their choice was also reflected in the Academy’s selection of Best Picture of the year (including four instances where the Society awarded a film that did not win Best Film Editing at the Oscars but still won Best Picture).

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  • ‘If I Rise’ music video

    One of the earliest installments of this season’s Oscar Guide covered the Best Original Song category. It could be a tight race, though most are betting on Randy Newman (who we spoke to earlier today) taking his second Oscar, for “We Belong Together.”

    Another strong possibility, especially given its Best Picture nomination, is “127 Hours” landing the win for Dido and A.R. Rahman’s “If I Rise.” It would be Rahman’s third win to date and he’s also nominated for Best Original Score. It seems unlikely for the film to score anywhere else, so it’s not a bad call if you feel like going out onto a limb.

    Fox Searchlight has provided us with the official music video for the film. It’s not the most creative video ever cobbled together, but it gets the word out a little more. Check it out after the jump.

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  • Presenter ideas to spice up the show

    Over at his indieWIRE blog The Lost Boy, Peter Knegt expresses some displeasure with what he calls a “boring” list of Academy Award presenters announced so far.  So he’s compiled a list of suggestions that could spice things up on Oscar night.

    For instance, what a howler it would be to see Bono and Julie Taymor, the creative minds behind the disastrous Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” (which is currently being rewritten at the last minute) present Best Original Song?  Or how about notorious David O. Russell rivals George Clooney and Lily Tomlin (who is actually close friends with Russell now, it should be said) presenting the clip for “The Fighter?”

    I think he’s on to something by suggesting Armie Hammer present the Best Visual Effects award with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, but I’d tweak that a bit and say Hammer should present, via video, AS Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

    Anyway, head on over to The Lost Boy to read up on Peter’s suggestions.  Any ideas from the peanut gallery here?

    [Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures]

  • Natalie Portman training for ‘Black Swan’

    This video has been making the rounds this week.  I keep forgetting to pass it along:

  • Why some BAFTA winners shouldn’t get their hopes up

    A number of people asked about the BAFTA outcome in our solicitation for Oscar Talk queries this week. We’ll be discussing last weekend’s awards on the show, but I thought I’d address those questions separately here.

    A sample:

    With the BAFTA below-the-line awards not all going to The King’s Speech (even things like Art Direction and Costume), as expected, is the extremely well-covered supposed sweep of the film still holding strong?

    My answer: Yes, it is. Something the BAFTA does (which, frankly, the Academy should do, but more on that in a moment) is relegate all categories except Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film and the acting fields to branch-specific voting. That means production designers decided that “Inception” deserved to win Best Production Design at BAFTA, costume designers decided that “Alice in Wonderland” deserved to win Best Costume Design and, indeed, directors decided David Fincher deserved to win Best Director.

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  • Livin’ the dream

    As a nice break from the cynicism of Oscar season, I’ve been following “God of Love” director Luke Matheny on Twitter and delighting in his head-in-the-clouds, it’s-all-happening ride.  At his blog he’s been posting some nice candids from the Nominees Luncheon.  Godspeed to him, however the short film race turns out.

  • BERLIN: The art of James Franco

    James Franco obviously had to sleep for a couple of hours between rehearsing for the Oscars, campaigning for the Oscars, filming one of his four films set for release this year, preparing to direct two prestige literary adaptations, planning his Broadway revival of “Sweet Bird of Youth” opposite Nicole Kidman, writing the Great American Novel and solving world hunger — since amid those distractions, he didn’t have a film to premiere at this year’s Berlinale. The man’s slacking.

    Still, he isn’t entirely absent from the city over the festival period: his first solo European art exhibition, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” opened last week in a private gallery in Berlin’s hipster-saturated Oranienburger Strasse district. As a welcome distraction from a second consecutive day of mostly unfulfilling filmgoing (the festival schedule is very much in the winding-down stages, though I still have some crackers to review), I went along to check it out — and as much as I like Franco, I must admit that if, amid his legion of other activities, “visual artist” got dropped from his résumé, it wouldn’t be the most crushing of losses.

    (Note: depending on your sensitivities, pictures after the cut may not be suitable for the office.)

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