In Contention

Category: Daily

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Music (Original Score)

    (from left) Wally Wolodarsky (voice) and George Clooney (voice) in Fantastic Mr. FoxFor years the composers of the music branch tended to be a bit insular. Impressive newcomer talent was often ignored while the usual suspects showed up year after year. Not long ago, there seemed to be a shift, yielding slates much like the one we have for 2009.

    There is one first-timer, but other nominees are only enjoying their second and third nominations, while the true veterans of the category haven’t been to the dance in six and nine years respectively. Usually the Academy at large springs for a Best Picture nominee with overwhelming consistency, most often films with cultural flavor or dramatic, sometimes whimsical heft.

    The nominees are:

    “Avatar” (James Horner)
    “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (Alexandre Desplat)
    “The Hurt Locker” (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders)
    “Sherlock Holmes” (Hans Zimmer)
    “Up” (Michael Giacchino)

    (more…)

  • 2/26 Oscarweb Round-up

    Cover of Detective Comics #27• Maria Puente on the wide array of villains represented by the year’s Oscar nominations. [USA Today]

    • Bill Mechanic tells Sharon Waxman that the Oscarcast will be “emotional.” [The Wrap]

    • Not movie related, but FYI, Batman’s is still bigger. [Hero Complex]

    (more…)

  • Better and better

    Two weeks ago, Kris expressed his (and, well, pretty much everyone’s) excitement over Todd Haynes’s HBO reimagining of “Mildred Pierce,” with Kate Winslet stepping into Joan Crawford’s Oscar-winning shoes in the title role.

    Today, The Playlist passes on two further reasons to anticipate the project, namely Guy Pearce and Evan Rachel Wood. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a smart get — assuming, of course, that she’s filling the place of Ann Blyth. The longer I think about it, the more easily I can see Wood as Winslet’s daughter.

    Does this have to be on TV? I’d watch four hours of this in a theater, frankly.

  • Costume Designers Guild winners…

    …have been announced.  Check out The Circuit for more.

  • Hans Zimmer’s ‘Discombobulate’ music video

    Earlier today we featured an interview with “Sherlock Holmes” composer Hans Zimmer, the first of a two-part piece on the nominated composers of 2009.  This music video just crossed my bow, I found it novel enough — thought I’d share:

  • There is no plot to thicken

    Guy Pearce in The Hurt LockerThis…

    No matter what happens in the short term, you can bet this will be a hot topic of discussion when the entire board of governors holds its annual postmortem on the show and the process. The academy does not take attempts to interfere with its voting process or to contact its members lightly, no matter how big a mea culpa the offender is offering.

    …is, I’m sorry, the biggest chunk of bullshit I’ve ever read in an Oscar season, and you get a lot of it this time of year.

    I suppose publicists “polling” members by telephone and insinuating this or that in favor of their films isn’t taken “lightly?”

    I suppose holding swanky, expensive events for films throughout the season and inviting members to show up and be glad-handed by talent isn’t taken “lightly?”

    Give me a f***ing break already.

  • Stunning fluid master

    I was reading through this Awards Daily post concerning the foreign language film race (wherein Sasha Stone is quite flattering) and a link in one of the comments caught my attention.

    I love fluid master shots.  “Touch of Evil,” “The Player,” “Boogie Nights,” I love them.  Sometimes they’re thematically relevant, other times they’re just a nice way to get through a lot of information quickly, but I’ve always had a geeky film school soft spot for them.  And this became one of the all-time greats for me (even if it is obviously enhanced by digital trickery in the first portion):

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Documentary Short

    Prudence Mabhena in Music by PrudenceMuch like the live action and animated short fields, in order for voters to cast their ballots for the documentary short category, they have to attend screenings of all the nominees. This tends to make these categories a bit tougher to predict, because they are frequently immune to noise in the media. You screen, you vote.

    However, if you’re aware of what the committee likes, you can eventually find the pulse. In all these fields, these committees tend to appreciate doing a lot within the time frame constrictions of a short film, which is why animated shorts that resonate, live action shorts with high production value and documentary shorts that succinctly tackle a subject always come out on top.

    The nominees are:

    “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province” (Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neil)
    “The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardener” (Daniel Junge and Henry Ansbacher)
    “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” (Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert)
    “Music by Prudence” (Roger Ross Williams and Elinor Burkett)
    “Rabbit à la Berlin” (Bartek Konopka and Anna Wydra)

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  • 2/25 Oscarweb Round-up

    Louie Psihoyos• Jamey Duvall catches up with Jeremy Renner and “Food, Inc.” director Robert Kenner. [Movie Geeks United!]

    • Louie Psihoyos asks what you would do with 45 seconds in the global spotlight. [Huffington Post]

    • Dave Karger and Missy Schwartz on four underdogs they love. [Entertainment Weekly]

    (more…)

  • A whole lotta Oscar talk

    Sandra Bullock in The Blind SideOne of my favorite annual Oscar-blog institutions kicked off last night: Nathaniel Rogers’s three-day Oscar Symposium, in which six awards “experts” (remove quote marks as applicable) gather to discuss, debate, dismantle and generally disrespect this year’s Oscar race.

    I’m on the panel this year, but don’t let that put you off — Sasha Stone, Karina Longworth, Tim Robey, Peter Knegt and, of course, Nathaniel himself are all on hand with abundant wit and insight. Join the fun here. As a taster, meanwhile, here’s Sasha’s frightening trip into the mind of a harried voter:

    Avatar – no, that one made me nauseous and dizzy. The Hurt Locker. What’s the Hurt Locker? What IS a Hurt Locker? Who’s in it? Who? Oh. Who’s he? It won all of those awards, that’s right. I remember seeing an ad about it last night. Huh. Up in the Air, I did see that. It has George Clooney in it. It wasn’t bad. Kind of depressing. The Blind Side – that was a really good movie. And Sandra is so beautiful. She was going to star in that film I almost made. Anyway, It was so nice to see someone do something positive. I think I’m going to vote for that one.

  • Shankman and Mechanic on teamwork

    (from left) Adam Shankman and Bill MechanicIn last Friday’s edition of Oscar Talk, Anne Thompson alluded to something of an elephant in the room regarding the upcoming Oscar ceremony: that curiously matched co-producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic are “not getting along.”

    As whispers to this effect continue to circulate around the industry, the pair have clearly aimed to dispel that notion in this interview with USA Today’s Anthony Breznican. Still, while they play up the “odd couple” angle with good humor — Shankman the highly-strung showman balancing out the more pragmatic (and aptly named) Mechanic — they don’t make you read between the lines to see the strain:

    “It’s a meritocracy,” Mechanic says. “Whoever has the best idea wins. We haven’t had a blow-up. But we’ve definitely had disagreements, and definitely gotten heated a few times. He got me going one day, probably by mistake …”

    “With an e-mail,” Shankman says. “As it always is these days.”

    “At 5:45 in the morning, and I probably didn’t read it the way he intended it,” Mechanic says. “And I got (angry) and uppity.”

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  • Well…

    …it sure took long enough for the “Hurt Locker” smear campaign to get here, and boy is it robust.  More in tomorrow’s round-up (since relegating all of his silliness to a round-up is all it really deserves).

  • “It will put you in the hurt locker.”

    The Hurt LockerI don’t really know why Melena Ryzik is indicating over at The Carpetbagger that the title for “The Hurt Locker” hasn’t been explained.  I feel like that was in the water way back around release and even during the Venice and Toronto screenings of 2008, but nevertheless, if you weren’t aware, she got Mark Boal’s answer at a recent NYC event for the film:

    It’s a quasi-military term that also shows up around football fields and locker rooms — bro slang, essentially, that’s never mentioned in the film. Mr. Boal first heard it in Baghdad. “I was trying to interview a soldier about a bomb that was there, and I was trying to figure out how much explosive charge the bomb carried, how many pounds and how much damage it could do, and he just sort of said, ‘Put it this way; if it goes off, it will put you in the hurt locker,’ ” Mr. Boal told the Bagger. “And I’d never heard that before, and it really sunk in,” partly because Mr. Boal was close enough to be put in the hurt locker himself. Mr. Boal and Ms. Bigelow meant to tell the story in the movie’s marketing but never quite got around to it, possibly because the movie didn’t get much marketing until it began racking up awards.

    As a title, “it appealed to me because it gets to a central theme of the film, which is the cost of war and the brutalizing effects of combat,” Mr. Boal said. “And so more or less, to be really reductive about it, if you’re in Iraq, you’re in the hurt locker.”

    Read the rest, including how Boal’s college major informed Jeremy Renner’s character’s name, at The Carpetbagger.

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Actress

    Helen Mirren in The Last StationThis year’s Best Actress race is easily the most debated of the major categories. Though one can’t help but wonder why that is, as the writing has seemingly been on the wall for a number of weeks now, stretching back to before the nominations were announced.

    It was also one of the easiest fields to call, pre-nominations, as both lead acting categories had actually coagulated somewhat. The SAG slate was mirrored by the acting branch of the Academy, offering a nice mixture of young starlets and veteran standbys. The winner in the field, however, might be somewhere in the middle of that cross-section.

    The nominees are:

    Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side”
    Helen Mirren, “The Last Station”
    Carey Mulligan, “An Education”
    Gabourey Sidibe, “Precious”
    Meryl Streep, “Julie & Julia”

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  • 2/24 Oscarweb Round-up

    Ryan Bingham• Elysa Gardner catches up with Ryan Bingham in New York. [USA Today]

    • John Ratzenberger talks Pixar across the pond. [The Independent]

    • Steve Pond chats with “An Education” star Carey Mulligan, who seems to be hitting the pavement a bit late in the game. [The Odds]

    (more…)

  • Best Picture race, illustrated

    This is a terrific idea that the Academy really ought to steal, particularly in light of this year’s dismal official Oscar poster. BAFTA commissioned Dutch Uncle Agency illustrator Tavis Coburn to create designs for each of their five Best Film nominees, for use on this year’s official BAFTA programme covers. The retro-inspired results are quite gorgeous. My two favorites below; the rest here.

    Official BAFTA programme design for An EducationOfficial BAFTA programme design for The Hurt Locker

  • French trailer for ‘White Material’

    Regular readers will know that Claire Denis’s “White Material” topped my list of last year’s best films, and would have placed high in my end-of-decade list were it not officially a 2010 release. If you’ve been wondering what I’m on about, there’s finally a trailer I can show you — subtitle-free, I’m afraid, but you’ll get the idea. It opens in France next month; the rest of the world could take a while.

  • ‘Serious’ wheels

    How much do you love “A Serious Man?” Alternatively, how much do you love vintage American automobiles? If the answer to either or both of those questions is “a lot” — and if you have some cash to spare — you might want to take part in Focus Features’ charity auction of the rather awesome 1966 Dodge driven by Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coens’ latest.

    Bidding is currently under way on eBay, and all proceeds from the eventual sale go to Variety: The Children’s Charity of Southern California.

    1966 Dodge, as seen in A Serious Man