The Coen Brothers, James Franco and Hayao Miyazaki are all headed to the Big Apple.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the main slate of selections for the 51st annual New York Film Festival, and it’s another choice cross-section of top festival offerings from the year so far. Of immediate note, the Coens’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” and J.C. Chandor’s “All is Lost” will make the transition from Cannes to the City (via Telluride), but will skip Toronto, making their profile at this year’s NYFF all the more significant.

As Anne Thompson and I touched on in last week’s introductory Oscar Talk podcast, the vast scope of Toronto has become a place where some films that might have made a bigger splash elsewhere have gone to either die or be drowned out by the glut. Some might argue that this trio of small films isn’t well served by the Toronto marketplace atmosphere, so they’re looking to ride the waves of somewhat smaller ponds this year.

But New York is by no means insignificant. Quite the opposite, in fact, as a changing of the guard in recent years has seen an influx in glitzy (exclusive) premieres like “The Social Network” and “Life of Pi,” while head-turning “secret” screenings like “Hugo” and “Lincoln” have set the late-September fest up as a proving ground for starting awards season buzz more than ever. (Might we see Martin Scorsese show up in that capacity again this year with “The Wolf of Wall Street?”)

This year’s line-up, which also features Cannes holdovers such as Palme d’Or winner “Blue is the Warmest Color” and James Gray’s “The Immigrant,” as well as Berlin award winner “Gloria,” join previously announced premieres from Paul Greengrass (opening night gala selection “Captain Phillips”), Ben Stiller (centerpiece selection “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) and Spike Jonze (closing night selection “Her”).

Films also slated at other fall fests that will play New York include James Franco’s “Child of God” (Venice), Ralph Fiennes “The Invisible Woman” (Toronto) and Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises” (Venice, Toronto).

“Cinema is a vast terrain with a complex ecology, encompassing a mindbending array of species and habitats,” NYFF Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said. “There are multiple approaches to the question ‘What is a movie,” from the industrial to the hand-made, from the carefully written to the poetically assembled. I love the level of diversity in the main slate selections, which includes documentaries, biographies, comedies, adventures, epics, chamber pieces, elegies, explorations and affirmations. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.”

Check out that diverse slate below. For more, visit the Film Society’s official website.

The 51st annual New York Film Festival runs Sept. 27 – Oct. 13.

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“About Time”
Director: Richard Curtis

“Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse) :
Director: Catherine Breillat

“Alan Partridge”
Director: Declan Lowney

“All is Lost”
Director: J.C. Chandor

“American Promise”
Directors: Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson

“At Berkeley”
Director: Frederick Wiseman

“Bastards (Les Salauds)”
Director: Claire Denis

“Blue is the Warmest Color (La vie d”Adèle)”
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche

“Burning Bush (Horicí Ker)”
Director: Agnieszka Holland

Opening Night Gala Selection
“Captain Phillips”
Director: Paul Greengrass

“Child of God”
Director: James Franco

“Gloria”
Director: Sebastián Lelio

Closing Night Gala Selection
“Her”
Director: Spike Jonze

“The Immigrant”
Director: James Gray

“Inside Llewyn Davis”
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

“The Invisible Woman”
Director: Ralph Fiennes

“Jealousy (La Jalousie)”
Director: Philippe Garrel

“Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian”
Director: Arnaud Desplechin

“The Last of the Unjust (Le Dernier des injustes)”
Director: Claude Lanzmann

“Like Father, Like Son (Soshite Chichi ni Naru)”
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

“The Missing Picture (L”image manquante)”
Director: Rithy Panh

“My Name is Hmmm… (Je m”appelle Hmmm…)”
Director: agnès B

“Nebraska”
Director: Alexander Payne

“Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon)”
Director: Hong Sang-soo

“North, the End of History (Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan)”
Director: Lav Diaz

“Omar”
Director: Hany Abu-Assad

“Only Lovers Left Alive”
Director: Jim Jarmusch

Centerpiece Gala Selection
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
Director: Ben Stiller

“The Square”
Director: Jehane Noujaim

“Stranger By the Lake (L”Inconnu du lac)”
Director: Alain Guiraudie

“Stray Dogs (Jiao You)”
Director: Tsai Ming-liang

“A Touch of Sin (Tian Zhu Ding)”
Director: Jia Zhangke

“Le Week-End”
Director: Roger Michell

“When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Când se lasa seara peste Bucuresti sau metabolism)”
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu

“The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu)”
Director: Hayao Miyazaki

GOTHENBURG, Sweden – Every film festival comes with its own set of perks and difficulties, but I’ve only been to one so far where my chief scheduling challenge has been squeezing a Public Enemy gig in between a screening and an interview, wading in wellingtons across muddy parkland, through a sea of lanky twentysomethings in impossibly skinny jeans and Doc Martens, to do so. (It’s still easier than traversing the Croisette in full flow, I’ll have you know.)

Or where the evening’s festivities have ended not at a midnight premiere or cocktail-suited industry party, but at a beery bolthole at 3am, watching the aptly named New York punk outfit Pissed Jeans tear the tiny stage a new one. Or, indeed, where you run into Alexander Skarsgard at the bar, and the off-duty star for once has nothing to promote but his love for Swedish electro-eccentrics The Knife. (Their daftly thrilling set later that evening, all boiler-suited dance troupes and disembodied vocals, more than justifies his enthusiasm.)

Such are the spontaneous charms of Sweden’s Way Out West festival, to which I was invited last week. A three-day music festival that was founded in 2007, Way Out West takes place every summer in Gothenburg’s sprawling, verdant Slottsskogen public park, and has swiftly become a destination festival for discerning music fans of all persuasions across Europe — this year’s something-for-everyone lineup ran the gamut from Alicia Keys to the Alabama Shakes to Cat Power to Kendrick Lamar. (Planned headliner Neil Young, sadly, was a last-minute dropout in a roster that’d have been enviable enough without his presence.)

It was in 2011, however, that the festival expanded to include a film programme — an unassuming but fast-growing sidebar intended to give Way Out West something of the fashionable dual-purpose appeal of its American near-namesake South By Southwest. It gives the festival a unique status among its European counterparts, and with screenings this year brought into the festival grounds — in the appealingly casual, Moroccan-styled Bedouin Cinema tent — as well as nearby local cinemas, music and the movies felt happily integrated, with cheerfully buzzed festivalgoers in rain-washed denim popping in for a screening and a breather between gigs.  

Svante Tidholm, the director of the festival’s film section, knows exactly what he’s aiming for. Smart, eager and suitably tattooed, he’s a journalist and filmmaker whose debut feature, the documentary “Dream World: The Biggest Brothel,” actually played South By Southwest in 2010. He’s realistic about his plans to cultivate the film lineup in future year, but still ambitious: “Awareness of the movies at the festival was higher than ever this year, and I want to build on that,” he says. “It’s never going to be a conventional film festival, and it’s for the public first. But the lineup will keep getting bigger and bolder; it’s a chance to show people things they’re not expecting.”

Tidholm showed both a keen eye for audience-pleasers and a cool experimental streak in this year’s selection of 36 features, plus a scattering of shorts. The lineup included the Scandinavian premieres of such established international festival hits as “Frances Ha,” “Behind the Candelabra” and “Before Midnight,” as well as an appropriately strong contingent of music-related documentaries, among them Shane Meadows’ Stone Roses tribute “Made in Stone” and the irrepressible US hit “20 Feet From Stardom.” The two best films I saw there, both Swedish-made, fell into that bracket: Håkan Lidbo’s “Ström At Folket,” a short, sharp history of Swedish dance music from ABBA through to Robyn, wittily structured like a DJ mix, and Ada Bligaard Søby’s “Petey and Ginger,” a sepia-melancholic tracing of personal narratives behind San Francisco band Thee Oh Sees.

It was as a showcase for local product, in fact, that the festival worked most effectively. Indeed, that goes for music as well as film: while global star headliners like Keys played predictably well-attended sets, no performer on the bill drew a bigger crowd than Gothenburg son Håkan Hellström, whose seemingly trend-averse brand of drive-time rock (to my ear, admittedly immune to his earnest-sounding Swedish lyrics, he sounded a little like a shaggier Bryan Adams) has made him such a generation-spanning icon in his homeland that a hit film adapted from his songbook, “Shed No Tears,” was released there earlier this summer. (Also drawing in the punters: 71-year-old folkie Rodriguez, whose recent revival via the Oscar-winning, Swedish-produced doc “Searching for Sugar Man” — a point of great pride in the industry — has made him something of a local hero by proxy. He’s not all yours any more, South Africa.)

The festival’s cinematic equivalent of Hellström, then, was “Easy Money 3,” the closing instalment of a down-and-dirty crime trilogy that has been vastly popular at home — and has made international inroads too. The first “Easy Money” film was made in 2010 and released Stateside last year by The Weinstein Company — using, incidentally, the same “Martin Scorsese Presents” banner that they’re trying this year on Wong Kar-wai’s “The Grandmaster.” It launched director Daniel Espinosa (“Safe House,” the upcoming Tom Hardy vehicle “Child 44”) and star Joel Kinnaman (TV’s “The Killing,” Terrence Malick’s upcoming “Knight of Cups”) on the international circuit, and is set to be remade by Warner Bros., with Zac Efron and producer Charles Roven (“The Dark Knight,” “Man of Steel”) attached.

If the franchise is a pretty hot property in Hollywood, you can imagine the level of buzz around “Easy Money 3” at home, where Way Out West hosted its world premiere to a crowd of festivalgoers that queued around the block for a seat. Series producer Fredrik Wikström also chose the festival to unveil “Easy Money 2” last year, and had no hesitation about returning. “It was extremely successful last year,” he tells me. “When you’ve got the public stood in line, it’s a good way both to get the buzz going and to give something to the hardcore fans. These are some of the few Swedish films these days that people will actually go to see in the cinema, so it feels right to let them see it first.”

The first two played a few select festival dates — including Toronto and London — but Wikström thinks they’re better suited to a public- and youth-oriented occasion than the more rigorous demands of the international festival circuit. He admits reviews have been better abroad than they were at home — “It was the same with the ‘Dragon Tattoo’ films… Swedish critics are harder on their own” — and doesn’t expect that to change with the third when it opens locally on August 30.

Nor, indeed, does he expect the selection committee charged with selection the country’s annual Best Foreign Language Film Oscar candidate to favor them. “With the first film, the Weinsteins were very keen for us to be the Oscar submission for Sweden, but it wasn’t to be,” he shrugs, noting that the committee has a habit of overlooking the country’s biggest international successes, “Let the Right One In” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” among them.

Perhaps the other top local attraction in the festival’s film lineup will be more to the Oscar selectors’ liking. Also given its first public screening at Way Out West, “Waltz For Monica” tied neatly into the musical atmosphere of the weekend: a biopic of Monica Zetterlund, a Swedish jazz singer who enjoyed massive local success in the 1960s and died tragically in a fire in 2005, it stars pixie-ish indie-folk star Edda Magnason (in her film debut) in the lead. I was unable to see the film, as a subtitled print was not yet ready, but got a taste of Magnason’s presence in the role at the festival’s film industry party hours after the premiere: dressed in character, she performed a bewitching live set of Swedish-translated jazz standards (including “Take Five”) in a dusky, mellow voice that recalled Astrud Gilberto and Dusty Springfield. I’m excited to see how it all plays on screen. 

“Waltz For Monica” producer Lena Rehnborg — whose previous credits include “Let the Right One In” — has a rock-band background herself, which drew her to Way Out West as the place to debut the film. “I’m so into music myself, and Monica has such an enduring legacy, so I thought this would be the perfect crowd for it — but I wasn’t aware there’d be such a fuss!” she enthused. “There was at least a 100-meter queue of people that didn’t get in. Which is a shame for them, but great for us.”

The film opens next month in Sweden, but Rehnberg has high hopes for its international prospects — even if Zetterlund remains a little-known figure outside her homeland. “Apparently it does travel,” she says cheerily. “We’ve sold it to seven or eight countries already, including France, Australia and Japan. We weren’t prepared for that.”

Rehnberg knows from experience not to underestimate the international market; “Let the Right One In,” she tells me, played far better abroad than it did at home. “It was a great surprise, since in Sweden, the target audience wasn’t clear, and it was hard to market,” she says. “Swedish films are usually so difficult to market abroad – it’s such a small language, and such a specific culture. It’s so difficult to survive as an independent producer in Sweden. I have to focus on films with broad appeal, otherwise I’ll disappear. But let’s not make excuses. When we have crappy films, no one sees them. A good film is a good film: it’s as simple as that. And as hard as that, sometimes.”

After the warm reception for “Waltz For Monica” at Way Out West, she seems confident that she has a good one. Meanwhile, Jessica Ask, head of production at Gothenburg-based regional film fund Film i Väst — a busy company whose projects range from Scandi smashes like “A Royal Affair” and “The Hunt” to British co-productions “Diana,” “The Woman in Black” and upcoming Nicole Kidman vehicle “Before I Go To Sleep” — agrees that the festival is becoming an increasingly useful platform for the local industry — connecting it to a public that is sometimes reticent when it comes to local fare, with Swedish films currently taking between 22 and 25% of the country’s box office.

“It’s important to generate a lot of good publicity here directly among the public,” she says. “If you can generate excitement about a film here, that translates to good word of mouth ahead of a more traditional theatrical premiere.”

Way Out West is a film festival that, however small, is gesturing toward a less rigidly defined multi-media future, taking tastemaking duties out of the critics’ hands. Who gets it, then? That’ll surely depend on the festival, but here it’s a coolly coiffed, Cheap Monday-clad crowd, capable of flipping receptively from an Angel Haze gig to a Steven Soderbergh film (or, indeed, a Scandi-crime blockbuster) with all the fluidity of switching tracks on an MP3 player. I look forward to seeing what’s in the mix next year.   

On a bit of a personal note this weekend, it’s been more or less 12 months since my wife and I said, “Hey, let’s try New York for a year.” The sheer luck of being able to make such a decision isn’t lost on us and the experience, one I’ve dreamed of for some time, was a fruitful and rewarding one. And in just a few days, it’ll all come to a close.

Personally, it was hugely necessary. The seven-year-itch really got to me in LA and I had to get out of there for a while. I’d recommend living in New York to anyone, particularly if you’re in your 20s (which are behind me). Certainly before you’ve settled anywhere that has you set in your ways at all. This is a living organism and you’re part of something much bigger here. That is never lost on you, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, day in and day out. At least that was my experience. That’s part of what makes it one of the most special places on the planet.

However, as much as I’ve loved this excursion, and as much as this reboot has been good for the spirit, it’s made me realize how much Los Angeles really is my home, how much my love/hate relationship with it had settled somewhere in my bones, like a family member. I’m very much looking forward to going back.

Professionally, doing the circuit from New York, experiencing the Oscar madness in a completely different environment, it was eye-opening. The community is much smaller here, the gatherings full of the same handful of AMPAS faces, and that made for an interesting change of pace. On this beat, Los Angelenos and New Yorkers live in their own bubbles, and that tunnel vision is separately fascinating. But getting a different perspective on things (though it’s certainly quite similar in many ways) was weirdly rewarding.

More rewarding, though, was spending some time in the trenches with the media community and personalities out here, a number of whom I had never met. So many of us exist to each other as Twitter usernames, email addresses, commenter handles — not flesh and blood, not real stories and the eye-to-eye divulgence of who a person is. That’s the great irony of the internet, the lie that it brings the world closer together. It really just pushes us farther apart.

Anyway, with that bit of dubious philosophizing out of the way, I have to say it’s been a pleasure to meet and share the same air with Mike Ryan, Mark Harris, Stu VanAirsdale, Nathaniel Rogers (finally!), Matt Patches, Lane Brown, Chris Rosen, Glenn Kenny, Umberto Gonzalez, Matt Singer, Peter Labuza, Dave Gonzales and my HitFix colleague Josh Lasser, as well as the countless New York publicists who facilitated my work and made the transition a seamless one. The same goes for the New York area folks I had already met at this far-flung locale or that and with whom I could finally spend more than a few fleeting moments — Jordan Hoffman, Eric Kohn, Kate Erbland, Alan Sepinwall, Edward Douglas, Katey Rich, Tomris Laffly, etc.

And anyone I may have carelessly neglected to mention, know it was but a slip of the mind.

I’ll be gearing up for another cross-country trek back to LA in the next week, so Guy will be the dominant voice around here for a bit. By the time I’m back and re-established, it’ll be just about time for the Telluride Film Festival to give us an early glimpse at the circuit ahead. Until then, there are a handful of Big Apple bucket list items yet to check off. But boy has it been swell.

So long, New York.

EDINBURGH – As we sit down in the appealingly tatty coffee shop of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse – the stone-built base camp of the city’s venerable film festival – Chad Hartigan admits feeling pleasantly bemused at being interviewed for In Contention. As well he might do. It’s not that long ago that Hartigan’s name appeared in bylines rather than headlines on this site – one of several where he plied his trade as a box office analyst for five years, while laying the foundations of an independent filmmaking career. 

I’m half-tempted to ask Hartigan for a projected gross for his own film; after all, it’s not every scrappy indie writer-director who can boast such cool-headed commercial instincts, even (or perhaps especially) with regard to blockbusters fare a million miles from their own. “A lot of people wonder if all that work has given me some kind of like secret code,” he says, with a dry laugh. “Like I could make the failsafe blockbuster. After five years, I still don’t know what exact science makes a hit. But I do know that ‘This is Martin Bonner’ is not it.”

He’s being both modest and entirely honest: “This is Martin Bonner” is Hartigan’s second feature film, and you’d struggle to make a more thorough counterpoint to everything that contemporary studio cinema seems to stand for. A gentle but clear-eyed character drama predicated on unfashionable notions of faith, charity and humble human goodness, its title character is a lonely, middle-aged Australian expat, recently relocated to Reno, who finds purpose and companionship as a volunteer for a prison rehabilitation program.

Its narrative is one of small, significant gestures rather than dramatic incidents; the friendship that develops between Martin (Paul Eenhoorn) and weatherbeaten ex-con Travis (Richmond Arquette) surprises mainly through its lack of typical conflict. It’s that unassuming but confident serenity, its unsentimental but unusually positive human oulook, that made “This is Martin Bonner” stand out against conceptually flashier rivals when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, winning an audience award an initiating an international festival run – Edinburgh, where we meet in June, marked the start of its European leg – that has exceeded Hartigan’s wildest initial expectations for the project. Ditto a slow-burning theatrical release in the US that today reaches full fruition, with the film hitting theaters in New York and Los Angeles.

“It’s just been a dream,” says Hartigan, not a man given to gushing. And even without theatrical distribution, the film’s festival reception would still have floored him. “That’s something I aspired to more than any theatrical success. I felt, for this movie, dreaming about theatrical success would be a fool’s errand. But dreaming of festival success was attainable.”

Still, he wasn’t expecting the endorsement of the flagship festival for independent film. “Sundance absolutely made this movie. I don’t think it would be here if it didn’t get into Sundance. I feel like it could very easily have fallen through the cracks and nobody would have played it. It really needed somebody to stand up for it and say, ‘This is worth some attention.’”

Hartigan knows from experience how hard it is for films like his to get that attention. His 2008 feature debut “Luke and Brie Are on a First Date” – made while he was still on box-office patrol – was a smart, spiky romantic comedy of sorts, expressly based on one of his past relationships, that played some smaller festivals, but never found US distribution. Its greatest, and unlikeliest, success was spawning a faithful Argentinian remake after appearing in a festival there, a progression that Hartigan describes as “surreal but cool”: “It contains lines that were verbatim from that movie, which in turn were verbatim from my real-life date. They don’t really belong to my personal memory anymore. It’s kind of like a distant memory that has been usurped by the movie.”

While not as directly autobiographical as his debut, “This is Martin Bonner” is nonetheless a highly personal work for Hartigan, inspired as it is by the experiences of his Irish-born father Gerry. Like Martin, Gerry had to relocate and rebuild his life as a divorced man in his mid-fifties; a former Christian missionary, he also found work in a similar non-profit program.

“I started to think about what he was going to do all day; how he was going to spend this time, if he was going to try and make new friends,” Hartigan explains. “And then I started to think about how I couldn’t think of any films about people of that age trying to make new friends. So that seemed exciting. Anytime I think of an idea that I can’t immediately assign to a bunch of other films, I think maybe I should work on that idea. So I did.”

Hartigan himself can relate to that feeling of placelessness: his parents were both missionaries, meaning he spent the bulk of his childhood in Cyprus, before moving to the States at the age of 12. “I wrote the character and I wanted him to be foreign. I feel like it subconsciously immediately lends itself to an observer’s point of view, which I feel was right for that character.” Does he feel foreign himself? “Everyone assumes I’m an American, but I still feel like Europe is home. The first year in America was the roughest year of my life. I mean, it didn’t help that the seventh grade is already the worst year of anyone’s life.”

Hartigan’s upbringing factored into the film in other ways, though. “I deliberately set out to capture the religious environment that I was brought up in with a sort of respect. By high school, I already knew that I wasn’t that religious, but I respect my parents and the way they raised me. When I started writing the film, it was just about Martin acclimating to a new life. But the more I heard about the program my dad worked in, and the more I wanted to incorporate a character in it, I realized I’d have to either ignore or embrace the fact that it’s a faith-based program. So I embraced it, and accepted the challenge of trying to include those elements in a way that was different from most movies.”

Hartigan has heard others describe “This is Martin Bonner” as a Christian film; he doesn’t agree with that categorization, but doesn’t object to it either. “I didn’t set out to make a Christian movie, but anybody can claim it for what they want it to be now that it’s done,” he says. “Faith is a really rich topic for a film and it should be explored more. But it’s so loaded a theme that nobody really wants to. So when it’s done with some level of nuance, people respond to that.”

Hartigan can’t imagine making a film without the degree of personal reflection present in his first two features. “I don’t know how I would sit down and write a fantasy movie,” he admits. “It has to start with some kind of situation that I know well. And then I try and mask it with as many elements that are different to myself as I can. I’m trying to move away from that a little bit more. The next movie I hope might have some more fantastical elements, but it has to start autobiographical. There’s nothing off-limits from my life. Actually the next movie has probably one of my most embarrassing moments in my life.”

The next film of which he speaks will be set in Germany – “hopefully,” he qualifies – and focuses on a 12-year-old falling in love for the first time, so it’s easy to imagine where that moment of embarrassment might stem from. Hartigan describes it as another character-driven drama, though he’s looking to branch out stylistically: “I want it to feel kind of light and floaty, with lots of Steadicam,” he says.

Can he see himself making a more commercial film at some stage? “I’m interested in making a movie that lots of people will see, yes,” he says. “But there are so few that are made by Hollywood that interest me at all. And it’s difficult for me to see myself making anything on the terms that exist now. But it’s not impossible. I didn’t love the movie, but I’m glad ‘Argo’ won Best Picture, because I think at least they’ll try a few other things in a similar vein. I wouldn’t mind doing something like that.”

A keen soccer enthusiast, Hartigan describes his dream commercial project as being an “All the President’s Men”-style thriller about match-fixing scandals in the World Cup. It’s a long way from the world of “This is Martin Bonner,” but he cites David Gordon Green – an earlier graduate of Hartigan’s alma mater, the North Carolina School of the Arts – as an example of someone unafraid to subvert expectations.

Indeed, Hartigan mentions Green’s acclaimed 2000 debut “George Washington” as a film that was held up as a kind of aesthetic model to Hartigan and his fellow North Carolina students, who included Aaron Katz and Zach Clark. “It’s the kind of artistic, strange, regional film that we were all encouraged to strive for. It’s a very interesting movie. But being away from everything in this tiny town in North Carolina, you kind of have no choice but to kind of develop your own style, do your own things.”

That post-graduate discovery process, of course, led Hartigan straight to Los Angeles and, eventually, into the unlikely sideroad of box-office analysis – via a Craigslist ad. “I did what film school sort of teaches you to do: get a job as a PA and work your way up in the industry. But I hated being a PA. I hate working on sets if I’m not in a creative position. So I very quickly figured out that that’s not going to be my route.

“I loved the box office stuff for a while because it was interesting. It’s fun, and it’s not hard. But all these companies were started before the internet, letting you know information which is now readily available. So there’s another reason why I couldn’t stay there forever. I worked there for five years until I quit. By the end of it, though, I was so burnt out from the depressing box office figures that every Monday kind of bummed me out.”

He tries, however, to keep his inner industry analyst separate from his identity as a filmmaker. “It would be detrimental to the products if I thought about the practical sides of things too early. I try to, as much as I can, make the movie only for me. Once it’s near completion, then I start to worry about how it will be received, how to get it best received. It takes so long to make a film that by the time it’s out, that bit of zeitgeist has moved on and nobody cares about whatever you thought people cared about.”

For now, he’s happy to see “This is Martin Bonner” playing to theatrical audiences at all. “I think this is probably my last chance to ever have a movie play in a theater, unless I make a huge movie,” he says matter-of-factly. “I have been predicting for a while now that there’s just no place for small movies in theaters in the very near future, unless something radically different comes along. I’ll happily embrace VOD. So be it. But I did want to try and sneak this one in.”

NEW YORK – While attending film school at San Diego State University some years ago, Destin Cretton would always take note of an annual poster calling for script submissions. It was a contest held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called the Nicholl Fellowship. He never tried applying for it until a script called “Short Term 12,” which was inspired by his time working at a foster care facility for at-risk teenagers. He never thought there would be much of a chance at winning but he gave it a shot and went right back into working out the kinks of his script.

A short time later, he was incredibly frustrated with those kinks, as well as the rejections the script was getting at other outlets, and he was just about ready to throw in the towel. Then he received an email notifying him that he had landed in the quarterfinals of the competition. The good news gave him further encouragement to finish his rewrite (which, three years later, would finally make its way to the screen with him behind the camera). Before long, the circuit ended with “Short Term 12” being one of the 10 winning finalists for the honor, and Cretton still can’t believe that’s how it panned out.

“When I go back and think about that time of my life, it’s just outrageous,” he says. “That I was in a room with these people who were so nice and so encouraging and so passionate about the storytelling process, people like Eva Marie Saint and Bob Shapiro…my childhood was wrapped up in so many of the people in that room.”

During the experience, Cretton soaked in the work of his fellow finalists. He particularly took a shine to Andrew Lanham’s “The Jumper of Maine,” becoming fast friends with the writer, with whom he still bounces ideas back and forth to this day. At the ceremony, he listened to Shapiro talk about how Warner Bros. didn’t want to pay for the “Large Marge” claymation sequence of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” and how the crew just did it on their own in someone’s garage. But mostly he just tried to keep his head on his shoulders, as the entire experience was “just insane…crazy,” Cretton says.

Since then he’s cranked out a separate feature debut that he shot with fellow film school grads in San Diego (2012’s “I Am Not a Hipster,” which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January of last year), and now, “Short Term 12” has been lifted off the page and into reality with Brie Larson in the lead role. It has picked up awards at the SXSW and Los Angeles film festivals and will finally make its way to screens next week. The two films share a certain spirit and, of course, “Hipster” afforded valuable lessons that Cretton would take into his follow-up.

“From the title or the synopses they seem like very different movies,” he says. “But I think emotionally there’s still a lot of ties to a main character who is learning how to deal with something that they haven’t been dealing with and probably should be. But I think the easiest and most clear tie between the two are the people involved. A lot of the team from ‘Hipster,’ exactly one year later, started working on ‘Short Term,’ including Joel P. West, my composer, Brett Pawlak, my DP, Ron Najor, my producer. It just felt very natural and easy to create an environment that felt very safe and fun and easy to work together on.”

Though Cretton started out his higher education pursuits with an eye toward nursing, that’s not actually what led him to work at a foster care facility after graduating. It was, in so many words, the need to work and the one place that was hiring. He was making quirky shorts while working there, but it took a while before the idea of setting a story in such a place started to percolate.

“I was completely out of my element for the first few months,” he says of the job. “It was terrifying for me at the time and the place that I was at, with my naive kind of outlook on the world. It was a very terrifying first few months but it ended up being an extremely good thing for me.”

Indeed, “Short Term 12” was tackled from another place of fear: Cretton, who like the main character of “I Am Not a Hipster” grew up with three sisters, decided to tell his story from the point of view of a female. That decision opened up the entire experience for him creatively because of that fear and intimidation and, certainly, the feeling of being woefully unqualified. He was constantly — almost neurotically, he admits — having his sisters read new material to make sure he was at least somewhere near the mark. But what he discovered, ultimately, was a simple truth: a complicated character is a complicated character.

“What I’ve found is that I am Grace,” he says of the film’s main character. “I wasn’t trying to put myself into the shoes of somebody I did not relate to. I 100% related to that female. I also completely relate to the Mason character and my girlfriend really relates to the Mason character and also the Grace character. I think it was a nice lesson for me, to not be afraid of that, because a person is a person.”

As the film makes its way into the world, Cretton’s gears have been turning on how to expand the world of “Short Term 12.” At a time when television is often proving itself to be a better outlet for exploring story, he’s interested in developing the project as a series. “I think it’s a subject that is not just incredibly interesting and entertaining, but also very current,” he says. “I would love to be a part of something that brings the conversation of that system, and all the ways that it’s tied to other systems in our country, to the forefront a little more.”

When asked what kind of series has the sort of spark he’d be looking for, Cretton is quick to mention HBO’s “The Wire.” The David Simon series is “one of the most impacting pieces of moving pictures that I’ve ever seen,” Cretton says. “Just collectively, it taught me so much and also entertained me so much. If we can do anything slightly close to that, that would be incredible.”

But, he warns, there are no official discussions being held yet. “I’m in the early creative stages in my brain,” he says.

For now, “Short Term 12” — after coming off the festival circuit and with plenty of kudos already — is ready for its close-up. Will it be able to push past sure-fire recognition at various independent film awards ceremonies and into an even bigger spotlight? After all, it has already been recognized by the Academy in one form.

“Short Term 12” arrives in theaters Aug. 23.

As a critic, it’s my job to see most major releases that come down the pike — but everyone’s allowed a few passes, and when it became clear to me that I wasn’t required to review “Kick-Ass 2” for any outlet, I had no regrets about skipping all screenings. That may be my loss. But the first big-screen outing for self-made superhero Dave Lizewski rubbed me the wrong the way in 2010, and I can’t imagine warming to its smugly ironic violence and queasy fetishization of Chloë Grace Moretz’s Hit Girl this time round, particularly when reviews, by and large, have been less enthusiastic than those of its predecessor. (HitFix’s Drew McWeeny, however, found plenty to enjoy in it.)

Still, I know the franchise has plenty of fans out there, and many may be curious to see what Jim Carrey brings to the equation in the sequel. After a summer where many superhero films have taken flak for being too po-faced, perhaps the timing is right for a jokier effort. Either way, we want to know what you think. Once you’ve seen the film, come back here to share your thought, and be sure to vote in the poll below. 

Well, after a hard fought title dispute and a wave of passes from critics, the wait is over for audiences who might be eager to take in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” I’ve more or less had my say on this one. Whitaker is good. Winfrey is great. The film itself is a bit soft but lands its share of emotion here and there. The curiosity right now is box office. Will it turn the corner and beat out some of the higher concept competition? Will it start out quietly and build steam with legs? Or will it just be a whispered memory by the time the awards season really kicks into gear? Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised by any of those outcomes. But now it’s your turn to speak up. So when and if you see the film this weekend, head on back here with your thoughts and feel free to vote in our poll below. And if there’s something else you’ve seen recently and want to discuss, go right ahead — open thread.

Welcome to Oscar Talk.

In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is broadcast in special installments throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

On the docket today…

– CHANGES: Oscar Talk is scaling back to a roughly monthly-ish schedule of 9-10 specials.

– LOOKING BACK: 2013 so far. It’s been months since last we spoke.

– FALL FEST PREVIEW: Venice, Telluride and Toronto are set to kick off the season.

– LOOKING AHEAD: An interesting and diverse season lies on the horizon.

Have a listen to the new podcast below. If the file cuts off for you at any time, try the back-up download link at the bottom of this post. You to subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here. And as always, if you have a question you’d like us to address on a future podcast, send it to OscarTalk@HitFix.com.

“Here I Come” courtesy of Stuart Park.

Over the past few months, we’ve had a lot of queries from readers as to the release plans for Bennett Miller’s star-studded, stranger-than-fiction biopic “Foxcatcher.” The film has long looked like prime Oscar fodder, but it wasn’t clear who would be distributing it, or whether it would be released this year at all. Back in June, Kris pondered its prospects, mentioning the possibility that the film could wind up as part of Sony Pictures Classics’ 2013 awards slate.

And so it is. The speculation ended today with Sony Classics’ announcement that they will be distributing “Foxcatcher,” with a release date set for December 20.

You may wish to adjust your Oscar predictions accordingly. Both Miller’s previous features wound up in the Best Picture race: his 2005 debut “Capote” was also a Sony Classics property, while 2011’s “Moneyball” was distributed by Sony’s larger studio, Columbia. Clearly, it’s a happy partnership, as Miller acknowledged in his official statement:

“I’ve been discussing ‘Foxcatcher’ with [SPC heads] Michael [Barker] and Tom [Bernard] since I began researching the story in 2005 and it’s always been my hope and expectation that they would distribute the film. Their passion and understanding of what ‘Foxcatcher’ could be and their ability to market unique and complex films makes SPC the ideal home for me. They were great partners on ‘Capote,’ and I’m thrilled to be back with SPC,”

The news puts the film in rather a desirable awards-season position. It has the prestigious exclusivity of a leading independent label, but with the profile and cast — Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Steve Carell, Vanessa Redgrave and Sienna Miller — of an A-list studio feature. Its other credentials are similarly impeccable: the prodigious Megan Ellison produced, Dan Futterman (an Oscar nominee for “Capote”) co-wrote the screenplay, while remarkable Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser (“Bright Star,” “Zero Dark Thirty”) is behind the camera.

Tatum and Ruffalo play brothers and Olympic wrestling champions Mark and Dave Schultz, whose relationship with eccentric chemical company heir John du Pont (played by Carell) ends in murder. It’s fascinating material that presents rich dramatic opportunities for all its principals — particularly Carell, cast conspicuously against type here.

Sony Classics have every reason to feel bullish at the moment, what with surprise hit “Blue Jasmine” (a surefire Best Actress vehicle for Cate Blanchett) and “Before Midnight” being the two art house stories of the summer. They now have a heavyweight Christmas prestige release to look forward to, but is this bad news for their smaller properties? For the record, the company’s recent Best Picture nominees include “An Education,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Amour” — which last year turned a late-December release to its advantage.

Are you happy to see “Foxcatcher” making the 2013 calendar? And do you smell an Oscar threat? Tell us in the comments.

As a rule, I don’t tend to report on the shortlists of films being considered by individual countries for their Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submission — the process is protracted enough without dwelling on the films (many of them low-profile) that might enter the race. However, when the shortlist presents a choice as intriguing and diverse as the one revealed by Denmark’s selection board this year, it’s worth making an exception. The Danish Film Institute today announced that the final three films in the running are Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Hunt,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” and Michael Noer’s “Northwest.”

Ever since “The Hunt” premiered at Cannes last year, winning Best Actor for Mads Mikkelsen, I’ve been saying that it has all the makings of a heavyweight contender in this race. The moral melodrama was released domestically too late for the Danes to enter it in last year’s race — just as well, since they scored a nomination for their eventual submission, “A Royal Affair.” The advantage of this delay is that the film would arrive in the race with nearly two years’ worth of accumulated buzz.

Not that it would really need it: my guess is the film’s worthy but accessible social agenda, combined with the crossover star power of Mikkelsen, would already make it highly appealing to this branch of voters. (It’s a softer lob than Vinterberg’s “The Celebration,” fruitlessly submitted by Denmark in 1998.) Last month, I even wondered if Mikkelsen could figure into the Best Actor race as a (very) dark horse — probably not, but stranger things have happened. In any event, “The Hunt” would enter the foreign-language race as a widely predicted nominee, and even a potential winner. Why look any further, right? 

Well, the shortlisting of a very different festival sensation, “The Act of Killing,” makes things interesting. This one-of-a-kind documentary from Copenhagen-based American filmmaker Oppenheimer has been startling audiences since premiering at Telluride nearly a year ago, racking up a daunting pile of festival prizes, inspiring some of the year’s most extravagant critical superlatives and building a healthy head of controversy — inevitable for a film with the simultaneously powerful and outlandish premise of inviting Indonesian death-squad leaders to cinematically re-enact their past massacres.

It’s a film that will surely receive significant attention in the year-end documentary awards, though it remains to be seen whether the Academy’s doc branch is brave enough to shortlist it. It goes without saying, however, that it hardly resembles a typical Best Foreign Language Film player. “Waltz With Bashir” is a rare (if not the only) example of documentary cracking this category, and while the Academy has relaxed its rules about the national identity of submissions, it’s safe to say that Denmark submitting an Indonesian-language co-production with Norway and the UK, from a US-born director to boot, would raise eyebrows in some quarters. 

“The Act of Killing” wouldn’t be the most strategically sound of choices — it certainly wouldn’t win — but it could well be an attention-grabber. If it winds up as a surprise submission, it’s not impossible to imagine the branch’s executive committee stumping for its novelty.

If the Danish selectors feel like neither the safe choice nor the overtly dangerous one, their third (and lowest-profile) option is “Northwest,” a reportedly gritty crime drama about an 18-year-old boy who enters the Copenhagen criminal underworld to fend for his family. I haven’t seen it, but festival reviews out of Rotterdam and Gothenburg (where it won a FIPRESCI prize) were warm. It would appear to be the long shot in this particular contest.

Denmark, incidentally, is shooting for its fourth straight year of making the nine-film Oscar shortlist in this category: “In a Better World” won the 2010 award, “A Royal Affair” was nominated last year, while 2011’s football comedy “SuperClasico” missed the nomination cut in between. 

Ever since it landed slightly softly at the Berlin Film Festival back in February, it seems The Weinstein Company has been doing its best to re-engineer “The Grandmaster” less as an art house item than as a crossover piece. It”s probably for the best. Wong Kar-wai devotees, hungry for the film after years of protracted waiting, will catch the film regardless, whether or not its critical reception improves upon its US release. Genre enthusiasts, however, will need more persuading on a film that, given Wong”s trademark flourishes of woozy romanticism, is still far from conventional martial-arts fare. 

First came the film”s Comic-Con appearance, which generated buzz from a very different corner of the internet to the usual film festival crowd. Then came the Academy showcase screening, creating the impression of accessible prestige fare rather than remote art cinema. And now, just over a week before the film hits US cinemas, comes an opportunistic new marketing angle: it’s being released under the banner of “Martin Scorsese Presents ‘The Grandmaster.’”

It”s a move that will probably annoy some of Wong”s more ardent devotees, who might feel that his should be the chief directorial brand associated with the film. It’s not a new tactic, of course: Quentin Tarantino’s name has been welded onto a number of Asian releases for the English-language market, Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” among them. 

You could hardly ask for a more sincerely passionate advocate than Scorsese, however. Explaining his attachment to the film, the legendary director stated: “Wong Kar Wai has turned martial arts into a modern dance. Every movement hit with precision, every emotion drenched with underlying honor. ‘The Grandmaster,’ arranged with both elegance and fury, left me mesmerized.”  

Harvey Weinstein responded, “Marty Scorsese”s reaction to ‘The Grandmaster’ couldn”t have been more enthusiastic. When Marty champions a film, nothing is better; it is the ultimate seal of approval. I look forward to audiences seeing this wildly entertaining and artistic film.”

I wasn’t quite as enthused as Scorsese about the film, but it certainly has dazzle to spare. Here’s hoping US audiences take the leap.

One of the films I’m most looking forward to seeing at Venice in a couple of weeks’ time — and I’m not pretending this is a particularly original choice — is Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises.” Miyazaki is the rare animation director who has ascended to A-list auteur status, but while his last feature, “Ponyo,” arguably found him (literally) treading water, this ambitious new project represents an exciting creative leap for him. Dropping the fantasy that has dominated most of his features, the film is a fictionalized biopic of WWII fighter plane designer Jiro Horikoshi, as told in the work of renowned writer and poet Tatsuo Hori.

The film has already opened in Japan, where it has been, unsurprisingly enough, a smash. Trailers have therefore already been around for some time, offering tantalizing glimpses of visual spectacle that seems no less extravagant for being rooted in reality. Today, shortly after it was confirmed in the Toronto Film Festival lineup, we got a lengthy one with English subtitles; feast your eyes below.

When can we expect an English-dubbed version, you might ask? Well, it hasn’t been produced yet, and won’t be released in US theaters this year. (Disney, the company usually responsibly for releasing Miyazaki’s films in the States, hasn’t yet officially acquired the film.) However, we have word that Studio Ghibli will be giving the Japanese-language version a one-week Oscar-qualifying release this year.

That’s good news for this year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar race, which so far is looking a little short on quality candidates. Ghibli has twice landed nominations in the category, “Spirited Away” (which, of course, won the Oscar) in 2002 and “Howl’s Moving Castle” in 2005. Both were nominated in their English-language incarnations, but in a year heavy on sequels and studio filler, it’s as good a time as any for a foreign-language original to make the grade.

Meanwhile, it’s entirely possible that Japan could submit the film as their Best Foreign Language Film entry: they tried it with Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” in 1997, and the new film’s serious subject matter and domestic success could lead them to take the risk again. With Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Academy-friendly Cannes hit “Like Father, Like Son” also in the mix, it’ll be interesting to see which way they go.

Check out the trailer below and share your thoughts in the comments.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhHoCnRg1Yw?rel=0&w=640&h=480]

This week’s report about Meryl Streep potentially being campaigned in the supporting actress category for her performance in John Wells’ “August: Osage County” reminds of a slew of actors in a similar boat this year, dancing with category selection with arguments to be made on both sides.

At the top of the list is Bruce Dern, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes for his work in Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.” But it’s a performance that could be viewed through the prism of supporting, given that Dern’s turn as an elderly midwesterner is somewhat passive next to Will Forte’s, but the truth is it’s a movie more concerned with Dern’s character than Forte’s. Dern gives what is, to this viewer’s mind, the only kind of leading turn an actor like him would give. It’s the residual shade of a real person, not a broad performance of a character.

The idea that Dern would have a better shot in the supporting ranks has been floated by some pundits, who point to Christoph Waltz’s similar Cannes victory four years ago for his work in “Inglourious Basterds.” The Weinstein Company successfully campaigned the unknown for Best Supporting Actor and landed him an Oscar. But Dern is far from an unknown. He’s a living legend with a lot of industry friends who want to see him recognized as a leading man for a change. Perhaps on that cue, Paramount will indeed be pitching him in the lead category…and I think they could get him in there.

Also at Paramount is Jason Reitman’s “Labor Day,” a Joyce Maynard adaptation in the vein of Clint Eastwood’s “A Perfect World.” The film stars Josh Brolin as an escaped convict who takes a woman and her son hostage one weekend, but isn’t everything he appears to be. It’s the kind of work that could, like the others on this list, be argued as a supporting performance, particularly for a film with a young actor in the true leading role. But, while not set in stone quite yet, it’s mostly settled at this juncture that Brolin will be campaigned in supporting.

There are echoes of an early year critical and box office hit in “Labor Day”: Jeff Nichols’ “Mud.” The film stars Matthew McConaughey (having another banner year) as the eponymous ne’er-do-well. But for a film told from young Tye Sheridan’s perspective as the coming-of-age Ellis, and perhaps with a cautious eye on McConaughey’s heavily anticipated leading work in “Dallas Buyers Club,” Roadside is sticking with supporting for his work here, with Sheridan in lead.

Speaking of early year successes, there is also Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines,” buzz on which Focus was looking to swing back around as the film arrived on DVD and Blu-ray last week. Viewing the film as an ensemble without an overt point of view, the studio has chosen to pitch all performances — from Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Dane DeHaan and Eva Mendes — in the supporting categories. It’s the right call for a film this ensemble-driven.

Cooper also has David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” on the way, and he’s set to compete with himself in “Pines” here as a supporting push for Russell’s film. His character is really the villain of the piece in a lot of ways, I’m told, abusing his power after pulling a con artist team (played by Christian Bale and Amy Adams) into the scheme that drives the drama of the film.

Speaking of Adams, I’m told there is a lot of confidence for her in the lead actress category opposite Bale as every bit his partner and equal, helping to run cons as an expert at pretending she’s someone she’s not. It promises to be a “big” performance of a very sexy, very tough character.

Circling back to child actors, there’s another one who could be worth paying attention to: Sophie Nélisse in Brian Percival’s “The Book Thief.” We really don’t know yet how this film will figure into the awards landscape, but Fox won’t be relegating the young star of the film to supporting just because she’s the kid in a movie with two well-known actors. Like Sheridan in “Mud” and Hunter McCracken in 2011’s “The Tree of Life,” she’ll go lead.

Then there is the idea of “co-leads,” which is territory “August: Osage County” sort of finds itself in this year. In Ron Howard’s “Rush,” Daniel Brühl stars as Formula One sensation Niki Lauda, who in 1976 suffered extensive scarring to his head when his car burst into flames following a racing accident. But while a lot of time is spent with both Lauda and his rival James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) in the film, and though the real Lauda appears in a denouement to give a monologue (that is nevertheless about Hunt), Universal is pushing for supporting placement for Brühl, with Hemsworth in lead.

The Weinsteins have Stephen Frears’ “Philomena,” which is an obvious lead actress play for Judi Dench. But as the author upon whose book the film was based, Steve Coogan (who also co-wrote the script) has an argument for lead placement. It’s Martin Sixsmith’s tale in many ways — it begins with him, we meet “Philomena” through him, etc. His is a story of a skeptic reevaluating his faith and hers is one of a woman searching for the son she was forced to abandon. But conceptually, it’s akin to something like “The Devil Wears Prada” or “The Last King of Scotland,” with the character driving the story likely to be relegated to supporting while the showier turn from a star gets the lead love. And after all, The Weinstein Company already has a lot to work with in lead, from Forest Whitaker to Idris Elba to Michael B. Jordan.

Tom Hanks is a huge star with a pair of performances in the hunt this year: the true lead of “Captain Phillips” and the potential lead of “Saving Mr. Banks.” But I’m told there’s no “potential” to it in the case of the latter; it’s to be a supporting campaign of a true supporting performance.

Finally, I’ll close with one of my favorite performances of the year that I really hope finds some footing in the upcoming awards race: James Franco in “Spring Breakers.” Franco’s inked-up yo-boy “Alien” is a big, broad piece of work that, as a result, could be argued as a lead. But it’s definitely going to be positioned as supporting by A24, and I hope that comes complete with “Look at my SH*T!” (as opposed to “For Your Consideration”) ads.

Something important to keep in mind with all of this is that, yes, a studio can try and direct the conversation on a performance by campaigning it in one category or the other. But at the end of the day, the Academy decides for itself how to nominate. If they don’t feel like Kate Winslet gave a supporting performance in “The Reader,” they’ll chalk her up as a lead, as they did in 2008. Ditto Keisha Castle-Hughes in 2003’s “Whale Rider.” So while these on-the-bubble contenders might have their hearts set on supporting or lead, it won’t be their call at the end of the day.

Okay, I’m just going to put this out there: I would really, really like Hans Zimmer to get an Oscar nomination for his tremendous score to “The Lone Ranger.” The film may already be a punchline in industry circles — undeservedly so, I think — and the film’s makers haven’t done themselves any favors with their silly complaints of critical conspiracy. But it’s one of the most remarkable crafts showcases Hollywood has produced this year (yes, the production budget is ludicrous, but at least it’s evident), and Zimmer’s elaborate orchestrations are among its foremost virtues.

Few mainstream composers these days do “big” quite as inventively and wittily as Zimmer, whether it’s his booming foghorn soundscape for “Inception” or the wild gypsy-esque clatter of “Sherlock Holmes.” His “Lone Ranger” score, mixing whistling Old West motifs with Golden Age bombast, not to mention the infectious gallop of his robustly arranged take on the William Tell Overture, is right up there with his best work. I wouldn’t expect the Academy’s music branch to agree — not least because they’d probably see fit to DQ it on the basis of that William Tell interpolation.

In any event, there’s no guarantee he’ll even enter the race. Two years ago, he refused to submit his score for “Rango” (also, of course, a Gore Verbinski collaboration) to the Academy, claiming he found awards campaigning “disruptive” and that “it would be more interesting to observe it for a year.” For those keeping score, Zimmer has nine Oscar nods, and won the 1994 Oscar for “The Lion King.”

Anyway, to get to the (very) buried lede, Zimmer will be accepting at least one award this season: the Outstanding Contribution to Music honor at this year’s Classic BRIT Awards in London. The awards, obviously enough, are the classical division of the BRITs — the UK’s answer to the Grammys — and take place on October 2 at the Royal Albert Hall.

This is the third year in a row that the Classic BRITs have given their top career achievement honor to a composer known for his film work: John Williams accepted it last year, and John Barry in 2011. It’s not the first time that Zimmer has been honored at the ceremony, either: in 2009, he and James Newton Howard accepted the Soundtrack of the Year award for their thundering score to “The Dark Knight” — for which they also won a Grammy. (Yes, the same score that was disqualified from the Oscar race, but let us not reopen old wounds.) 

Awards committee charmen Dickon Stainer and Barry McCann said of the selection: “We are absolutely delighted to be honouring the outstanding talent of Hans Zimmer with this award. “Hans Zimmer’s recent work, including ‘Inception,’ has been a dominant force for classical music specifically in the digital-download era. It is only appropriate that four years on from his 2009 win for Soundtrack of the Year for The Dark Knight he should receive the Outstanding Contribution to Music at this year’s ceremony.” 

Jeff Nichols’ “Mud” may be fresh in everyone’s mind this summer, but the film — which premiered at Cannes almost a year before its eventual release — is old news for its eager writer-director, who’s already at work on his fourth feature.

And if you thought the Southern-fried coming-of-age tale found the maker of “Shotgun Stories” and “Take Shelter” embracing a slightly brighter shade of indie, you’ll note that his flirtation with the mainstream has become a commitment: backed by Warner Bros., the supernatural adventure “Midnight Special” will be his first studio production.

Nichols himself describes the project as a “sci-fi chase film,” and names John Carpenter as a major influence on the script — reinforcing the notion, established in “Mud,” of Nichols as a kind of modern American classicist. The plot, still vaguely defined at this point, concerns a family man who goes on the run with his eight-year-old son when it becomes apparent the boy has superpowers.

The fantasy element may be unfamiliar, but otherwise, this is all sounding consistent with Nichols’ previous work — right down to the casting of Michael Shannon in the lead. The Oscar-nominated character actor has starred in all three of Nichols’ films to date, and played the lead in two, so the director isn’t letting go of this particular lucky charm just yet. 

As in “Mud,” meanwhile, Nichols is bringing in some extra star ammunition. Joel Edgerton was confirmed recently to co-star, while news landed yesterday that Kirsten Dunst is joining the cast to play an unspecified role. Nichols has said that the film is driven by its father-son dynamic, but it’d be nice to see a well-rounded part for Dunst in it — and not only because “Mud” took some critical stick (reasonably so, I think) for giving short shrift to its female characters, particularly Reese Witherspoon’s girlfriend figure. Jessica Chastain was given significantly more to work with in “Take Shelter,” so we know the director can do right by a gifted actress.

Does this casting news get you excited? And are you happy to see Nichols taking the studio path?

A couple of weeks ago, Kris and I cast an eye over a number of upcoming prestige films still seeking US distribution as they head into the fall festival season. One of the longer shots for awards consideration on that list was “MARY Queen of Scots” (no, I don”t know what the capitalization is about either), a French-made take on the life of the ill-fated 16th-century royal, in which the eponymous Mary Stuart is played by relative newcomer Camille Rutherford. It”s a role that landed Vanessa Redgrave a Best Actress Oscar nomination for 1971″s rather stodgy “Mary Queen of Scots,” and the Academy”s taste for British royalty hasn”t waned since.

We”ll know at Toronto whether Thomas Imbach”s film has any crossover potential or not. If it doesn”t, however, you won”t have to wait too long for another version of the story to come down the pike – called, wait for it, “Mary Queen of Scots” – and this one has far baitier credentials. Heavyweight British production company Working Title announced today that Danish director Susanne Bier is in talks to direct the film, with 19-year-old Irish star Saoirse Ronan already attached to play the title role.

Working Title know their onions in this department. In 1998, they had significant success with “Elizabeth”: despite a (then) little-known star and director, the lavish, sexed-up biopic landed seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress. (Cate Blanchett repeated the feat nine years later for the less successful follow-up “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.”) The Virgin Queen, of course, plays a vital role in Mary Stuart”s own story; the role hasn”t been cast yet, though by hiring “Elizabeth” scribe Michael Hirst to co-write the screenplay with acclaimed British playwright Penelope Skinner, Working Title appear to be aiming for some measure of continuity between their Elizabethan biopics.

Ronan is an interesting choice to play this tragedy-laden historical figure, who was imprisoned for 18 years, and finally executed, by Elizabeth I after an unsuccessful attempt to seize the throne. It”s not clear yet which period of her life the film will focus on, but Ronan is the approximate age Mary Stuart was when she was widowed for the first time, six years before her reign as Queen of Scotland came to an end. The young actress has the right kind of limpid intensity for the role, and this presents a meaty opportunity for her to establish herself in the adult sphere – even if, nearly six years after her Oscar-nominated breakthrough in “Atonement,” she”s still a strikingly precocious presence.

Bier also stands to gain much from this project. The melodrama-inclined director, whose film “In a Better World” took the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar three years ago, has been chasing an English-language career for some time now. Despite commendable performances, 2007″s “Things We Lost in the Fire” sank largely without trace. Her latest, “Serena,” also featured in our list of homeless prestige projects: that the Depression-era drama hasn”t yet shown up on the festival calendar, despite the red-hot star pairing of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, makes it something of a question mark. Could working in Britain do the trick? It worked for her compatriot Lone Scherfig (“An Education”). It”d be interesting to see how Bier, who has an appropriately mainstream sensibility, fares on a large-scale costume drama: she”s not an extravagant stylist in Shekhar Kapur vein, but has the human interest necessary to keep history from getting lost amid the ruffles.

Working Title is readying “Mary Queen of Scots” for a 2014 shoot. More as we know it.

Last year, BAFTA inaugurated its Conversations with Screen Composers series, which proved a popular one: it’s always nice to see industry groups highlighting its artists outside an awards context, particularly in a forum that’s open to the public. Rachel Portman, the first woman to win a scoring Oscar, was the most prominent of three composers whose work was discussed and performed in a showcase at London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall. The format was successful enough that it’s being repeated this year with two significant film composers: Dario Marianelli and George Fenton.

Of the two, Marianelli has been in the spotlight a little more of late. Earlier this year, the 50-year-old Italian composer racked up his third Oscar nomination for his ornate orchestrations in Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina,” which also landed him his second BAFTA nod. Yes, the American Academy has been a little kinder to Marianelli than the British one: BAFTA passed over his lovely “Pride and Prejudice” score in 2005, and while he won the Oscar for his clever, typewriter-interpolating “Atonement” score in 2007, he’s still waiting for his first win from the Brits. (BAFTA’s music branch, somewhat surprisingly, preferred “La Vie en Rose” that year.) 

Anyway, BAFTA’s making up for it now: on November 25, he’ll take the stage at the Albert Hall’s Elgar Room to discuss his career at an evening event punctuated by live performance and film clips. Count on hearing his Joe Wright collaborations in some detail, but I hope room is made for his less widely celebrated work — including what I maintain is his career-best (if wholly unrewarded) score for Cary Fukunaga’s 2011 “Jane Eyre.” Among other titles, Marianelli’s upcoming work includes the score for Paul Haggis’s Toronto-bound “Third Person.”

It’s been a little longer since George Fenton’s golden period. The 62-year-old, London-born composer racked up five Oscar nominations — for “Gandhi,” “Cry Freedom,” “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Fisher King” — in the decade between 1982 and 1991. There have been fewer notable film credits of late (can you hum the score for “The Bounty Hunter,” by any chance?), though Terry Gilliam’s Venice-bound “The Zero Theorem.” Some of Fenton’s most distinguished recent work, however, has been on the small screen, with his scoring of assorted David Attenborough series (most recently “Frozen Planet”) earning him Emmys. TV has earned him three BAFTAs; he has yet to win one for film. His BAFTA event, meanwhile, will be on September 23.

More details on the events can be found on the BAFTA website here.

Anyone who’s seen “August: Osage County” on stage knows that the role of Violet Weston, originated by Deanna Dunagan in the Steppenwolf Theatre production of Tracy Letts’ play in Chicago and later reprised in a Tony-winning turn on Broadway, is catnip for any actress. Full of broad strokes and opportunity for chewing the scenery, it’s a role that would have put whoever ended up with the film gig — certainly Meryl friggin’ Streep — right in the middle of the Oscar race.

It’s a clear leading role in a play with two of them (the other being Violet’s daughter Barbara, originated by Amy Morton on stage and played by Julia Roberts in the film). Both, in fact, were nominated for Tonys, but the “bigger” role of Violet naturally brought in the attention and, ergo, the awards. So I don’t quite know how you shuffle that performance, particularly coming from Streep, over to a supporting actress campaign, as Gold Derby is reporting, unless there has been some tinkering done with the script to make Barbara more of a fulcrum for the thing (which she kind of already is to an extent).

If the move is true — I was only told “not finalized” by a Weinstein rep — then that’s too bad for Margo Martindale, an amazing character actress who got the meaty supporting role of Mattie Fae Aiken that brought Rondi Reed a Tony Award and is absolutely perfect for it. With Streep in the mix, a lot of the attention would be pulled away from her. It’s a shame because it happens a lot, a big star sucking up all the air in a category where lesser-known actors are pulling off incredible (true) supporting performances.

But maybe there’s room for two supporting nods from the film. After all, there is a long history of double nominees from a single film showing up in the Best Supporting Actress category and this is an ensemble with a lot of moving parts. This would also give Roberts a clearer shot at recognition, and it certainly makes strategic sense given how uniquely competitive the lead actress race seems to be this year. So while Gold Derby is using flattering language like “Streep has agreed to drop down to the supporting race,” maybe it’s just recognition from Streep, her reps and those at TWC that she has a better shot to win in the less competitive supporting field?

And that’s if all of this even pans out. Again, I’m told it’s not finalized and that they are still trying to figure out the best course. We’ll bother with a chart update when an actual decision is made on this. But it’s worth noting that top contenders in the supporting actress field already include Octavia Spencer in “Fruitvale Station” and Oprah Winfrey in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” both Weinstein films. Maybe Harvey is just looking to stack the deck?

But even then…remember “The Reader?” The Academy makes up its own mind in these situations.

“August: Osage County” will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month. It arrives in theaters in limited release on Christmas Day.