So writes Vulture’s Lane Brown on “I See You,” the godawful (or “hilarious,” take your pick) theme song from “Avatar.” No reason for sharing, aside from the fact that I’m still laughing.
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Oh yeah, the IDA Awards…
We neglected to mention the International Documentary Association Awards happened on Friday night, but happen they did.Often an independent-minded group of on the precursor circuit, the IDA underlined the point this year by crowning a prominently Oscar-snubbed title as the year’s best.
The many fans of rock doc “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” will have been pleased to see it take Best Documentary Feature, beating Oscar contenders “Food, Inc.” and “Mugabe and the White African” in the process. That should be some consolation to the film, after failing to make the Academy’s documentary shortlist last month.
“Anvil!” also nabbed an award for Best Music Documentary (trumping “Soundtrack for a Revolution,” another film that made the Academy’s cut).
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‘Up in the Air’ wins with D.C. critics
Um, okay. So the list of nominations for the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association were announced this morning. The group’s official website notes that the winners will be announced tomorrow (so…why bother with day-before nominees?). And now The Wrap is reporting (sans attribution — so I guess via press release) that the winners are as follows:
Best Film
“Up in the Air”Best Director
Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”Best Actor
George Clooney, “Up in the Air”Best Actress
Carey Mulligan, “An Education”(more after the jump)
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‘Moon,’ Carey Mulligan, Tom Hardy take BIFA Awards
The British Independent Film Awards really spread the wealth this year, with only two films — “Moon” and “Fish Tank” — taking more than one award. In a slightly surprising result, Duncan Jones’s sci-fi debut claimed the night’s top prize, Best British Independent Film, as well as Best Debut Director honors.Meanwhile, “Fish Tank,” which entered the ceremony with the most nominations, took a well-deserved pair of awards: Best Director for Andrea Arnold (the first woman ever to receive the honor) and Most Promising Newcomer for 18 year-old sensation Katie Jarvis.
Jarvis lost the Best Actress award, however, to Carey Mulligan for “An Education” — one of the night’s few winners likely to figure prominently in the awards race across the pond. (This in stark contrast to last year’s BIFA awards, which were all about “Slumdog Millionaire.”)
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Danny Elfman meets Ennio Morricone
That’s what I’ve decided the Hans Zimmer score for “Sherlock Holmes” is. I’ve been listening to it all weekend. The themes present in that brief snippet we led off yesterday’s Oscar Talk are felt throughout in different ways, but mostly I keep getting a spaghetti western homage. Specifically, the mandolin picking of Morricone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” score gets a bold tip of the hat, mixed with a jaunty rhythm that just puts a smile on your face.I know when I brought this up last week a number of people thumbed their nose at Zimmer, and that’s fine. I get the animosity to an extent. But even with the homages, this is a pretty substantial, creative piece of work, in my book. And I can’t be pegged as being in the tank for bombast because my favorite score of the year is probably still Mark Bradshaw’s subtle work on “Bright Star.”
I thought I’d offer up the first track on the “Holmes” score, a bit called “Discombobulate.” Have a listen and tell us what you think:
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SUNDAY CENTS: ‘Brothers’ gloom
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.
As I already mentioned, the first weekend in December is a veritable dead zone at the multiplex as audiences start shifting more towards Christmas shopping and making vacation plans. Or maybe they are just too busy having sex. (More people are born in August than any other month.)
Whatever the reason, business slowed enough for Sandra Bullock and “The Blind Side” to take the top spot in its third weekend. A $20.4 million haul is off 49% from last week but that’s actually a great hold for this frame and the running total now stands at $129.3 million. $200 million seems all but certain at this point and that means it’ll pass the $208 million that “Speed” made to become Sandy’s all time top grossing film.
I don’t think Oscar will come knocking but she’ll probably land on Entertainment Weekly’s list of Entertainers of the Year and that’s just as desirable, right? Side note: How good is “Speed?”
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D.C. critics fire the starting gun, ‘Up in the Air’ dominates
The Washington, D.C. Area Film Critics Association has kicked off the critics’ kudos season with a most uninspired list of nominations. I say uninspired because, aside from a random nomination for Maya Rudolph in the lead actress category, there doesn’t seem to be a single damn original bone in the group’s body.“Up in the Air” led the way with 8 nominations and is pretty much on track to be the critics’ darling of the year, while “Precious” and “The Hurt Locker” each landed 7 each. I imagine a similar tally will be attributed to those films when the Oscar nominees are announced. Which raises the question: Are the D.C. critics trying to emulate AMPAS here? I never follow them closely, not beyond the requisite announcement posts each year (I tend to get REALLY burned out on all the critics’ awards, frankly).
But seriously. They had to see more than 33 films this year, right? Because out of 70 possible nominees, that’s how many films were spread across the field. Kind of sad, really.
Check out the full list of nominees after the jump. And the group’s list of winners last year here.
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OSCAR TALK: Ep. 13 — NBR, awards season party circuit and ‘Complicated’ awards prospects
Welcome to a belated edition of Oscar Talk, your weekly kudocast featuring yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood.On the docket today:
• With the National Board of Review having kicked off the awards season, Anne and I discuss the big winners and implications for the season.
• Tis the season and the party circuit is alight, so with that in mind, we talk about a few of the taste-makers around town this week, including…
• Peter Jackson, Saoirse Ronan and Stanley Tucci in an intimate cocktail party for “The Lovely Bones.”
• Fox Searchlight’s holiday shin-dig in Century City with “Crazy Heart” principals in attendance.
• An “Inglourious Basterds” DVD release party at producer Lawrence Bender’s home.
• And a Summit holiday party with the folks from “The Hurt Locker” burning the midnight oil.
• Finally, no reviews of “It’s Complicated” are allowed yet, but Anne and I discuss how we think it will fare in the awards race.
Have a listen to this week’s podcast below, with a taste of Hans Zimmer’s score for “Sherlock Holmes” to start you off. As always, you can subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.
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Paramount FYC site goes live
One of the things I always look forward to each year has been the launch of VantageGuilds.com, an FYC site that was geared toward Paramount Vantage’s product and always had great interactive features and wonderful design. This year, with Vantage gone, we’ve got ParamountGuilds.com, which just went live.
You can check out some goodies related to “Star Trek” and “Up in the Air” right now. I’m told the content for “The Lovely Bones” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be available next week. For now, give the image below a click and have a look.
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WEEKLY WRAP: NBR winners, Spirit nods and Jeff Bridges
• The National Board of Review offered the season’s first major precursors, with “Up in the Air” sitting pretty.• The Independent Spirit Award nominations were topped by “Precious” and, more surprisingly, “The Last Station.”
• Indie award rivals the Gotham Awards, meanwhile, crowned “The Hurt Locker” as the year’s best.
• Fresh off his Spirit nomination, we served up an extended interview with the great Jeff Bridges.
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FRIDAY FORECAST: Thanksgiving leftovers and new turkeys
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.Sorry this is a little late, as I’ve been super busy this week. Luckily, it’s one of the slowest box office weeks of the year and there is little to look forward to.
You can bet the farm that “The Blind Side” will win the weekend for the first time on its third try and continue it’s epic run towards $200 million. “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” should be your runner-up and it may get as low as five or six before you see a new film.
Miramax is going for broke with the drama “Everybody’s Fine.” I thought the studio might start limited and try to trick people into thinking this would be one of those good, Oscar movies but they are sticking a Christmas tree on the poster and getting it into every Regal Cinemas in the country. Will it work? It should finish with $5 million for the weekend.
In case you don’t know, the weekend after Thanksgiving is always deadly at the box office and studios rarely open worthwhile product. Last year gave us “Punisher: War Zone” at $4.3 million and the year before gave us “Awake” with $6.1 million. How someone pitched an action movie with a catatonic lead character and got it made is pretty incredible and beyond me.
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Variety reflects on foreign Oscar history
The mark of a true Oscar geek is the self-assignment of nuttily completist viewing exercises. Only a select few understand the drive to track down every Oscar-affiliated titles in existence — however obscure, expensive or awful — all so one can say with absolute authority who should have won, say, Best Actor in 1952. (Alec Guinness, since you ask.)As small an achievement as it appears to the uninitiated, I remember the sense of triumph I felt upon excavating a VHS copy of “Cavalcade,” then the last remaining Best Picture winner I hadn’t seen. (Triumph soon turned to agony as I actually watched the film, but I prefer to forget that.)
So I doff my hat to Variety critic Peter Debruge. Inspired by a montage in the 2007 Academy Awards broadcast — see, the montages aren’t completely useless after all — Debruge set himself the task of watching every Best Foreign Language Film winner in Oscar history, encompassing 61 titles ranging from the canonized to the buried.
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When one decade isn’t enough
Amid the plethora of “best of the 2000s” lists doing the rounds, the London Film Critics’ Circle has decided to go one (or two, rather) better.Since the end of this decade coincides with the organization’s 30th anniversary, they’ve rather oddly elected five standout films of the last three decades.
Take note that it’s not a comprehensive “best films” study. The five titles have been selected from the list of previous top-category winners at their own annual awards ceremony. (“The Wrestler” was their choice this year.)
Anyway, they made the most of their time span, going all the way back to 1979 for their #1 choice: Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” I find it hard to argue with that, personally. Anyway, for all you list junkies out there, their top five is after the cut.
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10 live action short films short-listed by AMPAS
The Academy announced today 10 finalists for the Best Live Action Short category. They are:• “The Door,” Juanita Wilson, director, and James Flynn, producer (Octagon Films Ltd.)
• “The Ground Beneath,” Rene Hernandez, director, and Kristina Ceyton, producer (Passion Pictures)
• “Hotel,” Tim Conrad, director-producer (Oyster Films)
• “Instead of Abracadabra,” Patrik Eklund, director, and Mathias Fjellstrom, producer (Direktorn & Fabrikorn)
• “Kavi,” Gregg Helvey, director-producer (Gregg Helvey)
• “Miracle Fish,” Luke Doolan, director, and Drew Bailey, producer (Druid Films)
• “The New Tenants,” Joachim Back, director, and Tivi Magnusson, producer (Park Pictures)
• “The Response,” Adam Rodgers, director, and Sig Libowitz, producer (Look at the Moon Productions)
• “Short Term 12,” Destin Daniel Cretton, director-producer, and Michelle Steffes, producer (Destin Cretton)
• “Sidney Turtlebaum,” Tristram Shapeero, director, and Daniel Jewel, producer (Third Man Films Limited)Check out excerpts/trailers for six of these films after the jump.
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Oscar Talk delay
Just an FYI, Anne and I are pretty much slammed today. Everything decided to bunch up at the end of the week. So we’re going to hold off on Oscar Talk until tomorrow morning. Stay tuned.
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Oh yeah, the ‘Nine’ embargo lifted…
It’s one of those things when you show a film early and hold everyone to an embargo for a number of weeks. I imagine there are people like me who run out of the passion and desire to write about some films, and over the last few weeks, “Nine” has been that film for me.I discussed the film, of course, with Anne in last week’s Oscar Talk and I think I said most of what I would write anyway. I will say that I’m probably 99.9% in agreement with what David Poland has written, especially his thoughts on casting, Marion Cotillard’s final number being one of the few moments of actual emotion in the film, the detriment of a central character’s frivolous motives and desires, etc.
Oscars? I think what you see in the sidebar, for the most part. I saw the SAG go wild for it, but I also know this is a film that could run into trouble when it comes to resonating. So a month from now, would the applause be so grand? I don’t know. Marshall could run into trouble with the directors, unless they just feel like honoring him for knowing how to stage a number (keyword: stage). Day-Lewis could miss. Dench could slide in over Cruz, given the more interesting throughline she represents for the main character, etc.
Below the line, of course, nods all the way across. But it’s a real question mark about how this film will ultimately settle when the high of the music is long gone and people are left with their thoughts on what they just saw, and whether it has the substance to keep reminding them. We’ll see.
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Listen to Leona Lewis’s ‘I See You’ from ‘Avatar’
We were going to be featuring U2’s track “Winter” from Jim Sheridan’s “Brothers” today, but we’ll hold off until Monday on that as the love theme from one of the most anticipated films of the year has crossed our path this morning.Leona Lewis was revealed a few weeks ago as the crooner responsible for “I See You,” the central tune of James Cameron’s “Avatar.” I imagine that, much like Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” in “Titanic,” the melodies of the track will be evident throughout James Horner’s score. No one has seen the film yet (December 10 is the date for me), so it’s difficult to say exactly how the song is implemented in the film. I do know it’s a closing credits tune, but again, it could have a presence throughout.
Dion’s song, of course, won the Oscar in 1997, so it’s fair to think “I See You” will be a formidable contender here, but in this brave new (arbitrary) world of Academy music branch voting, all bets are off. This is a bit, I don’t know, overly produced, a bit schmaltzy, but I’ll hold off full judgment on it until I saw how it’s used in the film. It has striking parallels to “My Heart Will Go On” here and there, though.
Have a listen to the song below and tell us what you think.
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