In Contention

Category: Daily

  • The toys hit a billion

    Anne and I discuss “Toy Story 3” as the Best Picture category’s best bet coming out of the summer movie months in today’s Oscar Talk.  Much of that has to do with critical approval, yes, but plenty has to do with the monstrous box office take the film has generated.

    I’ve already written about the potential impact of something like that, but it’s worth pointing out that today the film will cross $1 billion worldwide, the second Disney film to do so this year (the other being “Alice in Wonderland,” which, well, wasn’t as well received critically, to put it mildly).  And both films, by the way, are 3D efforts, so that crap isn’t going away for a while.  I can’t wait for them to retrofit “True Grit” so we can see bullets whizzing at us off the screen.

    Anyway, big news and a big congrats to this franchise for hitting virtually every mark perfectly on the way to assumed awards season glory.

    [Photo: Walt Disney Pictures]

  • First foreign Oscar submissions

    I was waiting for news of these to begin trickling in… in my memory, the flood of official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar usually begins earlier than August. Anyway, we’re there, so expect a lot more of these updates between now and October 1, the Academy’s formal (if not entirely inflexible) deadline for participating countries to enter their films.

    The first three confirmed entries come from Taiwan, Romania and Iraq — the latter two countries awaiting their first nominations in the category, while Taiwan seeks to return to the race for the first time since its sole win, with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a decade ago.

    The most high-profile of the three is Romania’s pick: Florin Serban’s debut feature “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle,” was one of the few critically embraced Competition titles at February’s Berlin Film Festival, where it scooped the runner-up Silver Bear prize. As is my wont at festivals, it seems, I missed it both at Berlin and at Edinburgh, though I’ve heard glowing reports from colleagues of the film, a character study of a teenager, on the brink of release from a detention center, whose rehabilitation is disrupted when his neglectful mother re-enters his life.

    (More, including trailers for all three films, after the jump.)

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  • Hello, goodbye

    If any of you are wondering why we haven’t written anything about the tragic passing of anime director Satoshi Kon at the unripe age of 46, it’s because I’ve been struggling to think of something meaningful to say about a filmmaker I felt I was still getting to know. Truth be told, I’ve only seen two of the four features the man directed, one of them shamefully recently at that; I had long meant to catch up with 2006’s “Paprika,” but only got round to it last month, after the (wholly warranted, as it turns out) talk of “Inception” parallels began swirling.

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  • Deadline for Oscar docs looming

    As we enter the fall festival season with an Oscar prediction sheet still covered in question marks, there is at least one category where almost all the viable contenders have already been seen. I speak, of course, of Best Documentary Feature, a race already crowded with possibilities from earlier fests and the summer release calendar, and with a submission deadline less than a week away.

    Over at The Odds, Steve Pond informs us that filmmakers have until September 1 to enter their docs for Oscar consideration, having completed qualifying theatrical runs (one week minimum) in the past 12 months. Sifting through the titles in play, Pond likes the chances of such heavily-buzzed titles as “Restrepo,” “Inside Job” and “A Film Unfinished.”

    All three films take on weighty subjects — respectively, the conflict in Afghanistan, the global economic crisis and (a well-known pet theme of the Academy) the Holocaust — which should stand them in good stead with a voting branch not renowned for its sense of humor.

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  • ‘Tamara Drewe’ trailer

    This afternoon I received a copy of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel “Tamara Drewe,” which has been adapted as a film by director Stephen Frears.  A nice bit of promotion, though I must admit, this has been way off my radar all year.  Guy was no fan at all when he saw it at Cannes, but it’s set to hit the festival circuit in the coming weeks.  The trailer just launched via Yahoo! Movies.  Check it out by clicking the image below or watch the embed on the jump.

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  • Ving Rhames would like to thank the Academy

    “This is for ‘Lilo & Stitch.’”

  • Back to Monday for Oscar?

    Some of our younger readers may think of the Academy Awards as a weekend-capping tradition, having taken place on a Sunday for the last 12 years running. However, seasoned Oscar-watchers will remember the days when, rather than rounding out the week, the ceremony kicked it off, falling on Monday so as not to interfere with the weekend box-office.

    Now, Variety reports that we may be returning to a Monday night Oscarcast, this time to scoot out the way of the NFL:

    The league’s players and owners are negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that will add two games to the regular season — a decision that could theoretically land Hollywood’s biggest event and the Super Bowl on the same day. The move from 16 to 18 games, according to sources, is a fait accompli and will go into effect for the 2012-13 season.

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  • Gérard vs. Juliette

    A couple of weeks ago, Emma Thompson ruffled a few feathers when she dismissed the talents of one Audrey Hepburn, so it’s apparently open season on knocking gamine screen beauties off their perch. Today serves up another actor-on-actor fight, this time between two living legends of French cinema. It may be a fairer fight — in this case, the victim is alive to defend herself — but it’s a considerably less polite one.

    In short, if you’ve ever wondered why Gérard Depardieu and Juliette Binoche, arguably the two most ubiquitous French stars of the past quarter-century, have never worked together, we now have our answer. Depardieu, to put it mildly, doesn’t think much of his beloved, Oscar-winning compatriot.

    Never the most discreet of interviewees — as those who recall his self-sabotaging remarks during his 1990 Oscar campaign will know — he has now taken it upon himself to share this opinion with the world.

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  • Paging Jean-Luc Godard

    After deciding to give an Honorary Oscar to Jean-Luc Godard, it seems the Academy is having trouble tracking the auteur down:

    The motion picture Academy has spent almost 24 frantic hours trying to reach the iconoclastic filmmaker (“Breathless”) to inform him he’s getting an honorary Oscar — and by late Wednesday they still hadn’t been able to find him.

    Presumably he has no idea he’s received the honor.

  • ‘Biutiful’ goes to Roadside, ‘Good Things’ to Magnolia

    This announcement has been imminent for a couple of weeks now, but I guess the i’s (and lowercase j’s) and t’s are finally crossed and dotted.

    Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” will be distributed by Roadside Attractions and Liddell Entertainmnet.  Roadside also has indie “Winter’s Bone” in the mix this year and got its awards season feet wet for the first time last year with “The Cove.” There will, I imagine, be a considerable push for Javier Bardem in the lead actor race.

    The film was generally well received, but while there were rabid advocates, there were also a fair share of detractors, making for a tale of two movies.  Our own Guy Lodge called it “an effortfully solemn amalgamation of personal crises and social concerns” that “paints from too limited an emotional palette for its high-stakes story of parental duty, in the face of hovering mortality, to hit home the way it should.”

    The film will play the fall festival circuit.  I’ll have a look then.

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  • Wallach finally gets his

    One of the easiest Honorary Oscars to peg was probably Eli Wallach’s (the recipients were announced this morning).  Many have in fact been waiting and waiting for some kind of AMPAS recognition for the esteemed character actor, and finally, it looks like he’ll get it.  So in honor of that:

  • Disney tells the Annies where they can stick it

    Remember two years ago when “WALL-E” was on a destined crash course with awards glory throughout the season, then the Annie Awards (the animation community’s annual kudo fest) came along and shut the lovable robot out?  The benefactor was “Kung Fu Panda,” largely considered infinitely inferior to Pixar’s (some would say) crowning achievement.

    The immediate reaction was, “Something’s fishy here.”  And sure enough, a lot of fingers were pointed to a DreamWorks-heavy membership.  Disney, fed up with the unbalanced nature of the voting process, sought rule changes, which it received, but none of it was satisfying enough.

    So you can expect the Annies to potentially be Disney-free from here on out, as the studio has respectfully bowed out of the organization, refusing to support it or submit their titles for competition.  Annie chief Antran Manoogian says the studio’s titles can still compete, though it’s unclear how.

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  • Never…Let Me…Go

  • Honorary Oscars for Coppola, Godard, Wallach and Brownlow

    So, you’d think that five competitive Oscars — three for writing, one apiece for producing and directing — would count as an elegant sufficiency of awardage for even the most revered talent in the industry.

    Not so, apparently, in the case of a certain Francis Ford Coppola. In their wisdom, AMPAS brass have decided that Coppola needs a sixth statuette, this time the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for production excellence. I can only speculate that they still feel really bad about “Kramer vs. Kramer” beating “Apocalypse Now” in 1979. As well they should.

    Of course, this news comes minutes after I opined in our speculation thread that honorary awards for previous Oscar champs tend to feel a little superfluous. Goes to show why I’m not an Academy member. Still, from that point of view, I must applaud the most outré of this year’s choices: Jean-Luc Godard.

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  • Eric Roth on film noir

    Screenwriter Eric Roth, as ever, has a plate full of projects these days.  When he’s not working through an NFL-sanctioned Vincent Lombardi biopic with Robert De Niro, he’s perhaps working on his adaptation of Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City.”

    Then there are original scripts that have been lying around, waiting for filmmakers to step up.  The Brad Pitt-attached “Hatfields and McCoys,” for instance, which was one of a number of possibilities bandied about for Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart” follow-up.  And one of these days I imagine Roth and Michael Mann will get back to that western they’ve been talking about.

    In case you hadn’t heard, Roth’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” which he’s been working on for the better part of a year, recently landed a greenlight with Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock set to star.  Scott Rudin is producing.  The screenwriter also recently participated in AMPAS’s film noir interview series.  Callie Khouri, Scott Frank and Lawrence Kasdan are a few of the other writers offering up their thoughts on the genre.  Give them a look here.

  • Honorary Oscar recipients to be determined tonight

    So says Steve Pond at The Odds.  So let’s put the question out there: Who deserves their own consolation golden guy?

  • ‘127 Hours’ teaser trailer

    Set to play the fall festival circuit is Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours,” which could offer a tour de force opportunity for actor James Franco.  The recently released teaser trailer over at Apple indicates the kind of energy we’ve come to expect of filmmaker Danny Boyle but doesn’t give us much in the way of a thematic landscape to fully grasp.  Not yet, anyway.  I imagine future materials will pull the layers back further, but for now, check out the trailer by clicking the image below or watch the embed on the jump.

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  • David Lynch tapped as guest director for AFI Fest

    The press release, in part:

    AFI FEST presented by Audi announced today that award-winning filmmaker and artist David Lynch will serve as its first-ever Guest Artistic Director. AFI FEST 2010 will take place November 4 through 11 in Hollywood, California at the historic Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Mann Chinese 6 theatres, the Egyptian Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

    Lynch has also created artwork that will serve as the official image of the 24th annual festival. In addition, as Guest Artistic Director, Lynch will program a special sidebar of films that influence and inspire him and present these films at the festival in November. His film selections will be announced in October…

    “I said yes to being the Guest Artistic Director of AFI FEST 2010 because I love the AFI,” says Lynch. “AFI can do for others what it did for me. AFI gave me an opportunity and money to make a short film, THE GRANDMOTHER, and my first feature film, ERASERHEAD. AFI put me on the map.”

    Check out Lynch’s artwork for the fest after the jump.

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