• Did you hear? The 2009 Academy Award nominations were announced. “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” led the pack.
• Days before, Kathryn Bigelow nabbed the Directors’ Guild Award — the first woman ever to do so.
• Back to the Oscars, we collected reaction statements from 44 of this year’s nominees.
• I rounded up some of the most pleasant surprises in the nominations, as well as the most unwelcome snubs.
As Steve Pond says in his round-up of Oscar news and notes today, he is most certainly guilty of “over-considering preferential voting.” And frankly, someone has to be, because as I mentioned yesterday, this new system could most cetainly shake the perceived two-horse race up something fierce.
Pond has offered his expertise on the matter to USA Today, which has put together a very helpful animated graph that shows a possible scenario (using phantom nominees, mind you). It demands your attention.
The field of visual effects contenders didn’t seem to need the annual bake-off reduction to know which way the wind was blowing this year. Three films seemed to be headed for recognition from the outset, and on nomination morning, the category made for one of the least surprising collectives of the day.
Furthermore, it has also become something of a foregone conclusion which film will ultimately take the win, and that hasn’t changed for months on end. At the end of the day, I think few will argue with the fact that this will be the least compelling “race” of the night. But each nominee is incredibly deserving of their invitation to the big dance and we are happy to spotlight them here.
The nominees are:
“Avatar” (Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones)
“District 9” (Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robret Habros and Matt Aitken)
“Star Trek” (Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh and Burt Dalton)
Every year AMC Theatres puts together a showcase of the five films nominated for Best Picture. I’ve been very curious to see how the chain will handle matters this year, given the small matter of, well, 10 films being nominated rather than five.
Today AMC has announced its plan. The showcase will be divided among the back-to-back weekends of February 27 and March 6. “Avatar” has been announced as one of the films set to play the first weekend, but fans can vote on the other four via an online poll at AMCEntertainment.com/BPS. That poll closes at midnight Sunday night and the schedule will be revealed Monday, February 7.
Passes for the showcases will be available at the same website on Friday, February 12. The online price for the package is $60.00. Some notes of interest from the press release after the jump.
So here we are. For the most part, the crafts category nominations weren’t surprising, and there is not a single film that fared drastically better – or worse – than I expected.
As for comments on individual categories? In Best Cinematography, Bruno Delbonnel’s nomination for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” has got to be one of the biggest surprises of the year. The other nominees were completely expected. Dion Beebe apparently couldn’t overcome “Nine”’s collapse.
On the other hand, John Myrhe managed to make it in for Rob Marshall’s musical in Best Art Direction after missing with both BAFTA and the guild. Nominations for “Avatar” and, in my opinion, “Sherlock Holmes” were to be expected. But the other nominees were slightly surprising.
“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” was richly deserving but still surprising. And “The Young Victoria” evidently had more support than I first thought. The real snub here, however, is David Wasco. If he can’t get in for “Inglourious Basterds,” I’m not sure what it’ll take.
When that’s the email subject, how the hell do I NOT check it out? I give you Martini Ranch’s “Reach” from 1988:
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.
“Avatar” has swept aside the entire January schedule with relative ease and is aiming for an eighth weekend at the top of the box office. Considering it dropped only 10% last week despite some direct male competition from Mel Gibson and it now has 9 Oscar nominations to brag about, you can expect another slim decline and $25 million+. That should be more than enough to secure victory against Channing Tatum and John Travolta.
Tatum headlines “Dear John” with Amanda Seyfried, from the author of “The Notebook.” It’s a date movie for the date crowd and hey, did we mention it’s from the author of “The Notebook?” The premise sounds like a 1940s film, writing letters to a soldier and all. Shouldn’t the title be “New Facebook Message, RE: Miss U Lots xo <3?” Anyway, that very fact mixed with the cast should satisfy women of all ages and help this one to $21 million or so.
The director of “Taken” is back and blowing more shit up with “From Paris With Love.” There are three reasons why this won’t be as successful. One: Mel Gibson’s movie may not have done well but it’s still out and still direct competition. Two: Lionsgate is releasing and there is a ceiling to what they can accomplish with an action film ($18 million). Three: Liam Neeson looked all sorts of badass in the “Taken” trailer. In this, John Travolta looks like the bouncer at the Jackhammer gay club in Tribeca. $13 million.
• Scott Bowles writes up the forthcoming Leo/Marty thriller “Shutter Island.” [USA Today]
• Charting the piracy of this year’s Oscar nominees. [Waxy]
• Pete Hammond gets James Cameron to puff his chest out on “Avatar”‘s box office potential, among other notes on the town. [Notes on a Season]
Glad to see this has been sorted out. You might recall that when the Best Picture nominations were read out on Tuesday morning, “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” were both slapped with the vague “nominees to be determined” tag — a stopgap the Academy issues wen there are admin issues to be ironed out.
“The Hurt Locker” initially fell foul of the Academy’s arbitrary (and, for my money, rather misguided) recent rule that permits a maximum of three nominated producers per film. Exceptions, however, can be made: as was the case last year, when “The Reader” was allowed four nominees, including the late Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack.
So I’m happy that the powers that be at the Academy have been equally reasonable about “The Hurt Locker,” ruling that its quartet of producers all have a legitimate claim to a nomination.
Should it win on the big night, then, Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro will go up on stage to claim the statuette. (This, of course, makes both Bigelow and screenwriter Boal double nominees this year.)
With the “exes” angle seemingly set to run and run in this year’s Oscar media coverage, The Guardian at least took a slightly sideways approach in their weekly podcast by roping in a third ex — “Terminator” star and James Cameron’s fourth wife Linda Hamilton — for her thoughts on the matter. (She has a new movie to promote, so it’s not as tacky as all that.)
Regarding the Oscar race, Hamilton semi-jokingly claims to be cheering the “ex-wives’ club,” but she also offers some interesting personal perspective on the 12-year gestation of “Avatar”:
After “Titanic,” there were quite a few things he was getting ready to do: he was was going to do the “Spider-Man” franchise, he was going to do a really great script about multiple personality disorder, “Avatar” to me was, like, the third favorite. I read it and was, like, “Hmm, yeah, uh” … and that just goes to show you that I should never be directing or making movies. I wasn’t sure that it was going to have an audience … It didn’t necessarily say anything to me, but Jim obviously saw something way beyond what was on the page.
Enterprising young distributor Oscilloscope was obviously hoping for an Oscar nomination when they scheduled a February release for Denmark’s terrific entry, the wickedly off-kilter thriller “Terribly Happy.” It would have been sly timing, if only the Academy’s foreign-language branch hadn’t killed its hopes at the shortlist stage.
No matter. Oscar nod or not, it remains a delight, alternately echoing the Coens, Lynch and Hitchcock while maintain a mordant streak of deadpan Scandinavian humor. (I interviewed director Henrik Ruben Genz — a former Oscar nominee in the short film race — in December.)
The film goes on limited release tomorrow — check it out, and be ahead of the game when the rumored U.S. remake comes along. If you won’t take my word for it, at least take that of Oscilloscope founder and sometime Beastie Boy Adam Yauch:
I love this film. It is just further proof that Danish people are clearly out of their minds.
U.S. trailer after the cut.
A whole 31 days ahead of the 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, the race already feels like it’s winding down.
Of the precursors, only BAFTA and the lesser guilds (sorry, WGA, but you brought irrelevance upon yourself) lie in wait to distract us from a month of wafty speculation and idle editorializing. Trust me, you’re going to get very sick of the phrase “battle of the exes” before the month is out … if you aren’t already.
For me, a trip to the Berlinale next week couldn’t be better timed – a few days of seeing and discussing some new films, including several of this year’s hot Sundance titles, will be a welcome vacation from the ever-dwindling pool of names and titles we’ve been talking about since the fall.
But if you’re not one of the lucky few who can make it to a festival – or if you’re as uninspired as everyone else by the new releases of the last few weeks – fresh perspective needn’t come only from fresh films. I recently had the pleasure of rewatching “The Hurt Locker” and getting happily reacquainted with it as a movie, rather than as the industry story it has grown into over the months.
Awards season can sometimes smother the movies it celebrates, turning them into representations of competing social and artistic ideals that they were never intended to be. As the competition narrows, these definitions get progressively more binary – and the side-taking more vicious. (You only have to look at Roger Ebert’s online opposition of “Avatar” to see what the season can make us do to movies we even like.)
Later this afternoon I’m off to Santa Barbara for a week of light film-going, heavy tributes and plenty of events, not to mention some much-needed relaxation.
This year’s 25th anniversary fest will be welcoming the likes of Mark Boal, Pete Docter, Geoffrey Fletcher, Alex Kurtzman, Nancy Meyers, Scott Neustadter, Jason Reitman, Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow, Todd Phillips, Lawrence Bender, Jon Landau, Ivan Reitman, the list is endless. Tributes for Julianne Moore, Sandra Bullock, James Cameron and many more are also in place. It should be a grand ole’ time.
Meanwhile, Guy will be crossing the channel to Germany for this year’s Berlin fest next week, so there will be a variety of content on the way. I’ll be pulling in to Santa Barbara in a few hours and try to make the opening night screening of “Flying Lessons,” but for now, the floor is yours.
Alright. It must be said. I’m as guilty as anyone, perhaps more than most, at positioning this year’s Oscar race as a two-horse sprint to the finish between “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker.” But slowly it’s occurred to me that this Oscar race has been boiled down so quickly because it makes for such a sexy headline. There’s David and Goliath, there’s the exes thing, there’s plenty of meat in the idea that these two films are out in front of the pack.
And now I see it once again with Entertainment Weekly’s cover query: “Can anything beat ‘Avatar?’”
Has the press (again, guilty) been lazy in allowing things to be positioned as such? Well, yes and no. The usual indicators tell us that these are the two films in question for obvious reasons. Guild support has been rampant for both, after all. And the list of Oscar nominations had each out in front, tied with nine nominations apiece. But there is a crucial point that many a journalist (again, guilty) is failing to consider when calling this thing.
This year the Best Picture category (and only the Best Picture category) will use the preferential voting system rather than the standard one-vote system to determine the winner. In so many words, the answer becomes: Which film is the most acceptable to the group, regardless of passion pockets?
This is one of the few times the animated short category doesn’t have an American in the bunch. One of the big snubs, in fact, was probably Pixar’s “Partly Cloudy.” So I wouldn’t bank on any domestic bias this time around.
The animated short films feature a wide array of creative prowess, but it almost seems unfair to have such brief exercises up against longer-form narratives. The shortest entry of the bunch is roughly six minutes long, while the longest is nearly 30. You get vastly different pros and cons when you get that mixture of pace and comedic (since most animated shorts are comedies) timing. Nevertheless, none of them stands out as outright bad, so that’s certainly a plus.
The nominees are:
“French Roast” (Fabrice O. Joubert)
“Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” (Nicky Phelan and Darragh O’Connell)
“The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)” (Javier Recio Gracia)
“Logorama” (Nicolas Schmerkin)
“Wallace & Gromit in ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’” (Nick Park)
• China censors Oscar nominations announcement due to documentary short nominee. [Daily Telegraph]
• Dave Karger and Missy Schwartz run the numbers on the Best Picture and Best Actress categories. [Oscar Watch]
• Jeffrey Wells ponders the possibility of the home video release of “All About Steve,” starring Razzie-nominated actress Sandra Bullock, hurting her Oscar chances. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
UK film mag Empire has polled its readers and assembled a list of the 50 worst films of all time, and the results make for fun reading, even if it would have you believe that hardly any bad films were made before the 1980s.
Anyway, the multiple Bat-fans around these parts will no doubt relish the appearance of Joel Schumacher’s universally derided “Batman and Robin” at the top of the list — apparently winning more than three times as many votes as the runner-up.
Empire describes it as follows: “From the neon design to the overblown script to the infamous Batnipples, it’s become a byword for franchise-killing and bad movie-making.”
Some of the inclusions strike me as a little hyperbolic — ridiculously so, in the case of Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” which I actually have a lot of time for. Sometimes the legend overshadows the actual film. Check out the full list here; their top (or bottom) 10 is after the cut.