• Kris boldly offered some early winner predictions … I (and you) followed.
• AMPAS unveiled the official list of 20 animated feature contenders, guaranteeing five eventual nominees.
• This week’s Off the Carpet column picked through the leading Best Supporting Actor contenders.
• In The Long Shot, we reflected on a handful of the Academy’s better moves this past decade.
I’m in San Francisco through the weekend and, having missed the week’s “2012” press screenings, I headed on over to the Van Ness AMC to settle in for Roland Emmerich’s two and a half hours of global destruction, and as overwrought, cheesy, painstakingly contrived (“Where’s the map!?”) and downright BAD as the film is — and it is all of those things — I ate it up.
Mainly, I salute Emmerich’s gargantuan, platinum cojones for giving us the exact…same…escape sequence not once, not twice, but THREE times. And make it four if we want to go ahead and trace the roots of the by now standardized moment back to “Independence Day.” I kept waiting on someone to open a laptop with a countdown clock. Oh wait, they’ve got one on the ark — we’re good.
Staggering. Every unconscionable drop of it. And you know what? Good. I want this movie in the marketplace right now. Sure, it’s a bastardized piece of “drama,” but squeezing damn near every 2012 theory into the mix, cranking the production up to 11 from frame one and STILL Tom McCarthy is able to keep a straight face? This is high art on some level. Has to be.
Michael Douglas was robbed.
The already Oscar-christened actor gave a career-best performance in 2000 in Curtis Hanson’s “Wonder Boys,” but he got no love from the Academy. Worse, his performance was easily among the five best of the year and won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Best Actor prize.
That having been said, I don’t think Douglas actually deserved the Oscar in 2000. That honor belonged to Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” for a performance that was nothing less than astounding. For two and a half hours Hanks commands the screeen, moving into silent film territory for a stretch, the actor using strictly his body and face for the performance. Anyone who has ever, and I mean ever, doubted his range needs to take a hard look at this film.
The five nominees for Best Actor in 2000 were Hanks, Russell Crowe for “Gladiator,” Ed Harris in “Pollock,” Geoffrey Rush in “Quills” and Javier Bardem in “Before Night Falls.” For me, Douglas was the most glaring omission, followed by George Clooney’s Gable-esque work in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” which I think remains one of the actor’s very best pieces of work.
A week after Patrick Goldstein rubbed some folks at Fox wrong for reporting false release information on “Crazy Heart,” he gets the poster exclusive. Go figure. Anyway, I love it. Have a look below. The trailer for the film will land Monday, by the way.
American audiences will have to wait until 30 December to see Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner “The White Ribbon,” but today marks the film’s UK release — and critically, at least, it’s off to a flying start.
The film has received unanimously glowing notices in the four major British broadsheets, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw and the Telegraph’s Sukhdev Sandhu both affording it five-star reviews. This reception should position the film well for the BAFTAs, whose foreign-language category has few rules and restrictions than the Academy’s, and tend to go for titles with the greatest balance of publicity and acclaim.
Bradshaw gushes:
It has chilling brilliance and icy exactitude, filmed in black and white with the lustre of liquid nitrogen, and its director, Michael Haneke, achieves a new refinement of mastery and audacity. He has created a film whose superb technical finish and closure seems to me in contrast to its status as an “open” text, a work which resists clear interpretation … This is a profoundly disquieting movie, superbly acted and directed. Its sinister riddle glitters more fiercely each time I watch it.
For those of you bored of reading the same ever-narrowing list of names in the assorted Oscar-speculation pieces across the web, David Poland’s latest column is a slight breath of fresh air.
Decrying the fact that many pundits are making ludicrous long-shot calls like “This Is It” for Best Picture, while ignoring more deserving contenders who could use the attention, Poland provides a list of less-hyped contenders in the top categories that he feels merit consideration.
His definition of the term “underdog” ranges from genuinely fanciful contenders (Catherine O’Hara and James Gandolfini for “Where the Wild Things Are,” “In the Loop” for Best Picture) to names still very much in the race who have lately lost a bit of steam (Matt Damon, Jeremy Renner and Viggo Mortensen, all in the Best Actor category).
A couple of things struck me as noteworthy on the list of nominees revealed yesterday by the International Documentary Association, which Kris mentioned briefly in this morning’s round-up.
The five films nominated by the IDA for Best Documentary Feature include “Afghan Star,” “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” “Diary of a Times Square Thief,” “Food, Inc.” and “Mugabe and the White African.”
Having admittedly only seen three of the five, I’d call that a pretty respectable list. Still, notably absent from the list is the film that many see as the prohibitive favorite for the Oscar: Louie Psihoyos’s environmental doc “The Cove.” (Certainly, when offering your own predictions earlier this week, only four of you bet on anything else.)
In a year that has lacked a crossover documentary phenomenon on the scale of last year’s “Man on Wire,” it’s been widely presumed that “The Cove”‘s vastly sympathetic cause and high-profile champions would be enough to seal the deal, particularly when Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” failed to catch on.
Welcome to Oscar Talk, your weekly kudocast featuring yours truly and Anne Thompson of indieWIRE’s Thompson on Hollywood.
On the docket today:
• Anne and I discuss the four perceived Oscar heavies that have yet to unveil — “Avatar,” “Invictus,” “The Lovely Bones” and “Nine” — and what being last out of the gate means vis a vis echo chamber buzz.
• Spinning off of that, we dig into the “Avatar” budget story of the week.
• With the list of qualifying animated features official, we take a brief survey of the category once more with thoughts on potential nominees.
• With Movie City News’s Gurus o’ Gold chart collecting supporting category predictions, Anne and I take the opportunity to profile those two categories.
• And Anne breaks down the impromptu Mike Tyson bout that went down at LAX Wednesday and whether it could hurt James Toback’s documentary feature on the fighter.
Have a listen to this week’s podcast below. And as always, you can subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.
[display_podcast]
Thanks to AwardsDaily for pointing out this tiniest of glimpses of Penélope Cruz singing and dancing her perfectly formed butt off in “Nine.”
With such a cluttered field, I’d been leaning towards the idea of none of the actresses from the film’s formidable ensemble making the Best Supporting Actress cut, but this hints at the kind of onscreen barnstorming that is catnip to the actors’ branch.
• Jeffrey Wells grills New York waitresses on their knowledge of the mere existence of “The Hurt Locker.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Oscar hopefuls “Anivl! The Story of Anvil” and “Food, Inc.” among IDA Award nominees. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Tim Gray gets quotes making a case against The 10. [Variety]
As much as John Hillcoat’s filmization of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” didn’t work for me, I think it remains one title that could spring a surprise or two this awards season. Though the film has some high-profile detractors including Todd McCarthy and Roger Ebert, many have been profoundly affected by the film, while its prestigious cache is beyond dispute.
Helping the cause is that Cormac McCarthy, the estimable author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning source novel, is fully behind the film.
Today’s online must-read is an extensive Wall Street Journal interview with McCarthy, in which he discusses his own personal investment in the novel — much of which is directly inspired by his own relationship with his son — and the decade-long relationship between Hollywood and his writing.
McCarthy has a healthily hands-off approach to adaptations of his work, bluntly stating that once the rights have been sold, “you don’t embroil yourself in somebody else’s project.” Claiming to have had confidence in Hillcoat from the outset, he goes on to say that the filmmakers “absolutely” caught the spirit of his novel.
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.
(This is the first of a new series of columns splitting the weekly Sunday Cents column in half. We’ll cover the weekend box office on Sundays and save the forecasts for Thursdays from here on out.)
Roland Emmerich returns this weekend to popular landmark destruction for the fourth time in his career. He has experienced gargantuan openings in each previous attempts, so there’s little reason to think that “2012” won’t win the box office weekend by a mile.
Sony has spent a fortune on the making and advertising of this film, although the studio seems to have saved some money by not hiring an editor as the finished product clocks in at a totally gratuitous 158 minutes. Squeezing in less showtimes may factor microscopically in the grosses, but theaters will be playing this sucker around the clock beginning tonight at midnight.
“Independence Day” opened with $81.6 million during the fourth of July weekend in 1996 for a venue average of $28,311. “Godzilla” earned $67.4 million during Memorial Day of 1998 for an average of $20,373. “The Day After Tomorrow” also bowed on Memorial Day, in 2004. with $79.5 million and an average of $23,206. Clearly, audiences have a taste for the Emmerich touch when it comes to disaster flicks. His various attempts to make films outside this micro-genre have been met with relative shrugs at the box office (“The Patriot” and “10,000 B.C.”).
It’s a bit, I don’t know, irritating…disgusting…to see the story of my friend Tom Sparks’s tragic recent passing plastered with the tag “Exclusive” in Daniel Frankel’s story at The Wrap. I don’t really know what “exclusivity” there is to claim here. The story is the story. But I’m a bit close to matters, obviously. And this is to say nothing of the misleading aspect of the story, painting controversy for the sake of a headline.
I haven’t written about Tom, mainly because it’s been too difficult to think about, truly one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known, struck down freakishly and unfairly a mere 33 years into his life, two months after marrying his longtime sweetheart, his life only starting…and then, gone. And I can’t think about it now. Too many funerals.
I said goodbye to Tom last night in West Los Angeles and I do it again here. You should still be here. Certainly more than a guy like me. And everything in my heart goes out to you, Kate. Everything.
As a recap from the last time we covered this field, the category of Best Sound Mixing (formerly known as merely Best Sound) rewards re-recording mixers — individuals who mix music, dialogue, effects and everything else into the soundtrack we ultimately hear — as well as production sound mixer — those responsible for capturing the sounds on set as they are recorded.
As we’ve noted, LOUD films tend to be rewarded here. Blockbusters, either science-fiction or action-based, are also cited frequently. War films and musicals also tend to show up, especially when they are in contention in the Best Picture race.
Two big contenders are still unseen: Rob Marshall’s “Nine” is very likely to score here, given the branch’s love of musicals. Barring the film being a disaster, I just can’t see it missing. Last year’s winner in the category, Richard Pryke, is on board.
The other big title that is still unseen is James Cameron’s “Avatar.” I’m still not sure how the film will ultimately perform. However, it cannot be denied that Cameron’s films have excelled here. I’m sure the film will have an interesting soundscape, and mixing legends Gary Summers and Andy Nelson are on board.
I’ve been a good less obnoxious than usual boy this year. And if you’re a devoted reader of our site, you might know that “Gone With the Wind” is my favorite film of all time.
The end-of-decade reflective mood is obviously catching. In yesterday’s Long Shot column, I looked back on the last ten years of the Academy Awards, singling out some of their most inspired choices and positive developments. You responded in great numbers, rare goodwill towards the Academy dominating the comments thread for a change.
Of course, however, we all know that it’s more fun to bury the Oscars than to praise them. So today, indieWIRE’s Peter Knegt has compiled something of a flipside to my piece, listing the 50 most egregious snubs in the past decade of Oscar nominations.
It’s an eclectic list, Knegt’s only requirement for inclusion being that a nomination for the film or individual in question had to be at least within the realm of possibility.