In Contention

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  • ‘Hurt Locker’ producer locked out of the Kodak

    (from left) Niolas Chartier and Kathryn Bigelow at the 2009 Gotham AwardsI’ll just let the press release speak for itself, in part:

    Beverly Hills, CA — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that, should “The Hurt Locker” be announced as the recipient of the Best Picture award at Sunday’s ceremonies, only three of the picture’s producers will be present for the celebration. The fourth of the film’s credited producers, Nicolas Chartier, has been denied attendance at the 82nd Academy Awards® as a penalty for violating Academy campaigning standards.

    Chartier had recently disseminated an email to certain Academy voters and other film industry figures in which he solicited votes for his own picture and disparaged one of the other contending films. Academy rules prohibit “casting a negative or derogatory light on a competing film.” The executive committee of the Academy’s Producers Branch, at a special session late Monday, ruled that the ethical lapse merited the revocation of Chartier’s invitation to the Awards.

    The group stopped short of recommending that the Academy governors rescind Chartier’s nomination. If “The Hurt Locker” were to be selected as Best Picture, Chartier would receive his Oscar® statuette at some point subsequent to the March 7 ceremonies.

  • Going to war with Oscar

    Willem Dafoe in PlatoonOver at The Big Picture, Patrick Goldstein spent some time revisiting the three “bona fide” war films to win the Oscar for Best Picture (in the last 40 years): “Patton,” “The Deer Hunter” and “Platoon.” He notes that each of those films, when adjusted for inflation, grossed over $300 million, $280 million and $160 million respectively.  We all know where “The Hurt Locker”‘s tally sits.

    What he took away from another look was that each film captures modern day ambivalence toward war, which really, the best of war cinema does.  Which reminds me, I caught “Black Hawk Down” again on cable earlier this week (a brilliant film), and certainly the point is driven home there, though in more camouflaged strokes.  When Tom Sizemore sarcastically quips, “Just get it over with,” in response to a young soldier screaming, “They’re going to get us killed,” any notion that the film uses high octane tropes to drum up a sense of “duty” or American flag-waving quickly flies out the window.

    But I digress.  All of that is kind of inherent in the drive to make a war film, unless you’re talking about a golden age period that saw the likes of John Wayne (who Goldstein reminds “ducked out of the fighting himself”) standing up, larger than life, to the identity-less enemies of a nation.

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  • Shorts coming to the small screen

    Miracle FishI’ve received a lot of emails lately asking where people can see the Oscar-nominated.  Generally my answer is, get to a theater.  They have been released by Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International in select (domestic) markets.  But if that doesn’t work for some, never fear.  It looks like you can pop open the Pringles and watch them in your skivvies.

    The press release, in part:

    New York, Mar. 2 – The Academy Award Nominated Short Films are often difficult for film fans to find. Now, for the first time ever, “The Oscar® Nominated Short Films 2010” will be available via cable’s Movies On Demand (MOD), presented by Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures. The nation’s leading MOD distributor, iN DEMAND L.L.C., will make the films available to U. S. digital cable audiences through Movies On Demand (MOD) starting March 3rd in both standard and high definition. Nominees in both the Live Action and Animated categories will be available on Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks systems around the country.

    Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, and Bright House Networks will host the films within MOD in an “Award Nominees” category. Comcast customers will find the films within MOD and its “Top Picks” category under the subcategory “Oscar Nominees.” Comcast will also be presenting the top live action short film titles from 2009. The cost for these programs varies from $2.99 to $5.99.

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Costume Design

    Christopher Plummer in The Imaginarium of Doctor ParnassusFor three straight years the Academy Award for Best Costume Design has gone to a film that received no other Oscars. In each case, the films could be considered “period porn,” as it were, lavish productions with massive thread ensembles. “Most Costume Design” would be a more applicable moniker for the award, given how the Academy traditionally sees things.

    Of course, the unfortunate thing is that, lost in all this awardage is the fact that so many of these period pieces are buttressed by preexisting wardrobe collections, while truly creative and, in some cases, innovative work goes under-appreciated. I expect we’re in for more of the same this year.

    The nominees are:

    “Bright Star” (Janet Patterson)
    “Coco Before Chanel” (Catherine Leterrier)
    “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” (Monique Prudhomme)
    “Nine” (Colleen Atwood)
    “The Young Victoria” (Sandy Powell)

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  • 3/2 Oscarweb Round-up

    Carey Mulligan in An Education• Pete Hammond says the Best Actress race is close, pats himself on the back for the fact that one of the countless early ideas he threw at the wall actually stuck. [Notes on a Season]

    • Rachel Abramowitz notes Carey Mulligan’s rise to stardom via Julian Fellowes, well, via an assistant friend of an assistant to a casting director who knew Fellowes’s wife.  You follow? [24 Frames]

    • The 20 best Oscar night dresses of the last 20 years. [Entertainment Weekly]

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  • Stumping for (or against) Mauro Fiore

    AvatarThis year, one of the biggest trip hazards for those filling out their office Oscar pool sheets is the Best Cinematography awards. A race with four potential victors (sorry, “Harry Potter” fans) and wildly mixed signals from the precursors, there’s less consensus over this one than any of the feature categories.

    We’ll put the debate to you when we cover the category in our Oscar Guide series on Thursday. Vanity Fair’s Claire Walla, however, seems to think she has it sussed out, declaring Mauro Fiore’s work on “Avatar” without peer in the race, given that it “completely redefined what it means to make an image.” To this end, she discusses with Fiore the challenges of lighting a film produced mostly by technologies with which the DP was uninvolved:

    “The most difficult part is marrying those two images,” Fiore said of working with a physical set that exists in a virtual world. For a scene that takes place outside a research laboratory on one of Pandora’s floating mountains, for example, the physical set consisted of two structures and scattered Pandoran shrubbery. The entire backdrop—including the light source—was represented on set only by a green screen. Fiore thus had to light the characters and structures on set according to where the sun would be had the characters actually been on Pandora and not on a soundstage in New Zealand … “It was tricky because every scene involved some sort of interactive light,” he added.

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  • ‘Rabbit à la Berlin’ trailer

    You might recall Kris and Anne disagreeing in last week’s Oscar Talk over the relative merits of this oddball nominee in the Best Documentary Short race. If you were wondering what they were on about, here’s an idea. (Thanks to The Auteurs for the tip.)

  • I had no idea that…

    … “Navi” is Hebrew for “A Prophet.” Presumably, you all did, and I’m just behind the curve. What can it all mean?

  • Agree to the letter

    Although it’s important not to place too much weight or emphasis on a single television show, it was fairly shocking to see that Jay put so little effort in tonight into winning America back. Outside of a few potshots at NBC, he never took the time to address any of the issues that have been making headlines since early January. Nor did he do the classy thing and thank Conan O’Brien for his (admittedly brief and largely forgettable) contributions to the institution that is the Tonight Show. Nor did he make a spirited appeal to his audience, promising that he still has a passion for comedy and for the program and will work tirelessly to return the show to its past glories. Instead, he totally phoned it in this evening on every conceivable level, leaving media critics and audiences alike to wonder whether or not Leno has anything even resembling a competitive spirit left, or if the trials and tribulations of the last year have simply caused permanent and irreparable damage to his spirit and psyche.

    From Mark Graham’s postmortem at Vulture.

  • Stab me in the eye

    I’m over the moon that “Minority Report” and “Collateral” are finally making their way to Blu-ray, and I look forward to owning “Up in the Air,” but I don’t understand why home video departments feel a need to rape and pillage well-considered and often times singular marketing materials in favor of such generic nonsense as this, the kind of artwork you’d expect to find at the bottom of the $5 bin at Wall Mart.

    Alright, no, I get it. Let’s make sure the star’s face is as apparent as humanly possible. But how many more dollars are they really making by sacrificing the visual identity of these films, anyway?

    CollateralMinority ReportUp in the Air

  • OFF THE CARPET: Back and forth…forever

    (from left) Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard in An EducationThe Circuit has run its course.  With the Visual Effects Society‘s awards gala last night and the press release announcement of the International Film Music Critics Association’s list of winners this morning, it’s on to the big show.  But the excitement is ever so slightly dampened, given the drama of the final stretch.

    I recently delighted in reading David Poland and Steve Pond take the overall tone the season eventually developed to task. The former may have his head in the sand vis a vis dirty campaigning, and the latter might be (as he admits) naive to ask for a spirit of togetherness when, the fact is, jobs are on the line. But the overall gist, I’m with it.

    The Oscar season is, by its nature, reductive and combative. But let’s say it together: It’s a pointless exercise with the original and still stated intent of drumming up awareness of an industry’s product. And it is, indeed, unfortunate that what appeared to be one of the cleanest seasons I’ve ever seen was sullied in the fourth turn by the inherently craven nature of those involved — on all sides, I might add.

    But when the dust settles, what are we left with? The movies. And the movies are why we’re all here.

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  • Problems with podcast?

    I got a second complaint today that the Oscar Talk podcasts are cutting short at six minutes both at iTunes and on the site.  They seem to work well for me on Firefox and Safari, but is anyone else experiencing anything similar?  Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to understand why the iTunes feed only shows 10 podcasts, to no avail, though.  Sigh…

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

    Peter Capaldi in In the LoopIn most cases, the adapted screenplay category of a given Oscar race is packed with Best Picture nominees or contenders. This year, however, there was a nice balance of adapted and original screenplays in the Best Picture category, and in fact, of the “top five” films that trickled down throughout the season, three were original and two were adapted, a rarity.

    Regarding the adaptations, things seemed to firm up for a while, but with the various WGA ineligibilities, one couldn’t shake the feeling that a surprise was in the works. At the end of the day, Scott Cooper’s run on “Crazy Heart” came to an unfortunate end, while a fan-fave British comedy found support.

    The nominees are:

    “District 9” (Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell)
    “An Education” (Nick Hornby)
    “In the Loop” (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche)
    “Precious” (Geoffrey Fletcher)
    “Up in the Air” (Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner)

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  • The Dude on The Dude

    (from left) Jeff Bridges and Jeff DowdPatrick Goldstein got Jeff Dowd on the record last week, vis a vis Jeff Bridges, and the result is a wonderful dedication to a guy who is frequently considered an American treasure.  Bridges, of course, took on the role of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski in the Coen brother’s 1998 comedy “The Big Lebowski,” the character largely based on the colorful Dowd.

    There are some lofty turns of phrase throughout, but it’s a beautiful ode, I have to say.  Here is a taste:

    For movie-goers, who have been cinematically blessed watching Jeff Bridges for nearly four decades in 65 movies, “I used to be somebody, now I’m somebody else” is a reminder of how Jeff Bridges has fully inhabited such a wide array of characters and authentically captured their essence with a full palette of shades from light to dark. Bridges has taken us through a mosaic of perspectives of the uniquely American experience.

    Check out the rest at The Big Picture.

  • Giacchino dominates IFMCA Awards

    Kris was wondering what became of the last precursor of the season, the International Film Music Critics Association Awards. Right on cue, you can check out their choices at The Circuit. No surprise that they’re all about Michael Giacchino this year, but nice to see some love for “A Single Man” too.

  • Siding with Sidibe

    Gabourey Sidibe in PreciousAny discussion of this year’s Best Actress category can get so heated, so quickly, I almost hesitate to point you to this, but Nick Davis’s meticulous review of the five nominees is too good not to recommend. No critic I know analyzes performance with quite such consideration and generosity.

    Here’s his case for why Gabourey Sidibe should (not will) take the gold on Sunday:

    [T]he first sign that Sidibe was capable of more arrived in her bored but exasperated truth-telling to her school principal about how she got pregnant: “I had sex, Mrs. Lichtenstein,” she deadpans, illuminating Sidibe’s potential for combing out subtle gradations and conjuring real personality from within the character’s perma-gloom. The obstacle and the near-miracle of the performance from this point forward emerge from the fact that Sidibe has a fairly narrow emotional range in which to work (and she holds with conviction to that narrow range, refusing, for example, to be incongruously elated by the arrival of her child), and yet she nonetheless manages to broadcast when Precious is being mischievous, insolent, self-doubting, superior, distractable, suspicious, morbid, or unrelievedly depressed.

    As for those of you who care only about the battle between Hollywood’s current two favorite leading ladies, he falls on the side of Streep. Wonderful stuff; read the rest here.

  • Bigelow does 60 Minutes

  • 3/1 Oscarweb Round-up

    Vera Farmiga in Up in the Air• Geoffrey Fletcher writes up what Precious (and “Precious”) means to him. [Huffington Post]

    • Donna Freydkin talks to Vera Farmiga, who, by the way, has a lot of support for her nominated performance in “Up in the Air.”  (Just sayin’…) [USA Today]

    • Maggie Gyllenhaal offers a soundbite concerning the whirlwind campaign behind “Crazy Heart” (the campaign that netted her a nomination, mind you). [Vulture]

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