In Contention

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  • Carey Mulligan: “I was always jealous of the ingenues”

    This NYT chat with “An Education” star Carey Mulligan is weeks old, but for some reason I hadn’t seen it before. I love the conversational looseness of these Screen Test videos: topics on the menu include the demise of the one-liner, dressing as a hooker for “Public Enemies,” and her earliest movie memory of “The Land Before Time.” (Jeez, I’m old.)

    All the while, her quest to be the most adorable person on the planet is chugging along nicely. As for that voice … well, I’m not going to get tired of hearing her speak this awards season. (Just as well, really, since we’ll be hearing her a lot.)

  • What exactly is the gay/Jewish ‘Precious?’

    PreciousDavid Poland has written his first Oscar column of the season, and while it’s a typically interesting read, it features several eyebrow-raising statements that I really can’t square with.

    I’ll leave you to pick through its eccentricities — that he seemingly doesn’t believe Christoph Waltz is a contender, for example — for yourselves. (Sasha Stone has written an extensive riposte.) But there’s a pair of head-scratching (to me, at least) tags in his Best Picture chart that I feel like highlighting:

    “A Serious Man”: It’s the Jewish “Precious” … but funny!

    “A Single Man”: It’s the Gay “Precious” … but pretty!

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  • ‘Ponyo’ saves the world

    PonyoOkay, not quite the world, but a very small part of it. The small, picturesque Japanese fishing port that inspired the setting for Hayao Miyazaki’s “Ponyo” has been spared a drastic redevelopment (a landfill and bridge were on the cards, apparently) thanks to the film itself. Variety reports:

    Miyazaki conceived the idea for “Ponyo,” which earned $170 million at the Japanese B.O. last year, in a two-month stay at Tomonoura port and his animators used it as a setting for the toon. It has since become a mecca for “Ponyo” fans, boosting revenues of local businesses.

    The International Council on Monuments and Sites has named Tomonoura as an endangered historical area because of the project.

    I have yet to see “Ponyo” for myself (thanks, sleepy Brit distributors), so I can’t speak to its other virtues, but any film that keeps the world prettier is okay in my book.

  • From the ‘Last Station’ release

    The Last StationThe film, as you know, was revealed to be a Sony Classics acquisition earlier in the week.  It’s a slow day (being the weekend and all), so I figured I’d toss these quotes from the just-landed press release officially announcing the pick-up (the bold is mine):

    With THE LAST STATION, Michael Hoffman has crafted a film that is not only beautifully made but showcases some of the world’s greatest actors in roles of a lifetime. The film is also incredibly entertaining and moving and we look forward to working with our friends Jens Meurer, Chris Curling and Robbie Little to bring it to audiences.

    –Generically attributed to “Sony Classics.”

    After spending four years of my life making THE LAST STATION, it’s such a relief and a pleasure to be working with talented people you can trust. I love the guys at Sony Pictures Classics.  It’s a perfect home for our film.

    –Director Michael Hoffman

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  • Nick Hornby on writing ‘An Education’

    Nick HornbyAmid the swirl of hype for “An Education” that’s been building for eight months now, there’s been surprisingly little mention of the man who is easily the biggest name involved with the film: superstar novelist Nick Hornby, whose free adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoir looks certain to land him in the Best Adapted Screenplay pack.

    The film is only Hornby’s second successful stab at writing for film, 12 years after he adapted his own novel “Fever Pitch” for the screen. However, as he states in this Wall Street Journal interview, the gap between screen credits wasn’t for lack of trying:

    While several of his novels have been successfully adapted into movies, including “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy,” the 52-year-old Mr. Hornby has seen most of his screenplays fizzle in development, including a collaboration with actress Emma Thompson that “we just couldn’t get right.”

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  • Crunch time

    We’ve moved into October and I’m about a week, week-and-a-half away from eliminating any film without a distributor from our forecast.  It’s crunch time for the 15 titles in our Contenders section still seeking a domestic buyer.  I count five lead actors, 10 lead actresses and a handful of supporting campaigns that are looking like holdovers.  And who knows what will go the way of “Lovely, Still” (still distributorless over a year after playing Toronto)?

    Most puzzling straggler: “Leaves of Grass,” which seems to me like it could prove both commercial and a fun awards push (for Norton).  And what gives on “Mother and Child,” which was something of a Toronto darling?

  • ‘Paranormal’ experience and thoughts on horror

    Paranormal ActivityI finally got around to “Paranormal Activity” last night, which has been scaring audiences nationwide for about a week now.  The film sat on a shelf for two years, terrifying Steven Spielberg, awaiting a release of some sort, primed for a remake at one point, and finally made its way into the marketplace last week with an innovative, experimental distribution strategy.  All the inside baseball was covered well in this 9/20 John Horn piece in the Los Angeles Times.

    I wasn’t going to write about it.  It’s certainly not an awards film, of course, but I just kind of wanted to have a good time at a midnight screening and let it be that.  But I was still wide awake at 3:45am last night, demanding my girlfriend to stay awake with me on Skype (which actually made things creepier given the cinematographic composition of a Skype video chat).

    The film is repetitive on one hand, but that repetition lulls the viewer into a sense of foreboding that’s hard to measure.  I’m interested in seeing the alternate endings, especially the original, which seems more in keeping with the film’s insistence on a grounded scare.  But the Spielberg-suggested denouement (unfortunately featured in the trailer, leaving its truly jarring moment something to be anticipated rather than freshly experienced) is incredibly unsettling.

    I wouldn’t say filmmaker Oren Peli fully capitalized on the potential of his concept.  Like “The Blair Witch Project” (a film to which “Paranormal Activity” often finds itself compared), there are elements (specifically a moment involving a charred photograph) that feel forced and even betray a sense of anxiety on the part of the filmmakers (who do a remarkable job of letting practicality serve as visceral terrorist for the most part).  But for $20,000, it’s an impressive accomplishment all around.  And it got me thinking on the genre.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Foreign contenders and underdogs

    James McAvoy in The Last Station• The deadline for Best Foreign Language Film entries passed, as Israel and Italy bucked conventional wisdom with their selections.

    • Among the better-received contenders, however, were major festival prizewinners from Australia and Greece. A full list of submissions here.

    • As the smaller studios beef up their Oscar prospects, this week’s Off the Carpet column wondered if this could be the year of the underdog.

    • Speaking of which, Sony Pictures Classics acquired “The Last Station,” a potential awards vehicle for Helen Mirren amongst others.

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  • Who could say “Nein!” to a face like that?

    Not me.  And can we just give Dion Beebe his second Oscar now?  Talk about a race virtually sapped of intrigue (if we’re being honest):

    Penelope Cruz in Nine

    One more reason after the jump.

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  • Century man

    Manoel de OliveiraThroughout this week, I’ve been attending advance press screenings for the upcoming London Film Festival — a handy bonus the organizers provide to give journalists some breathing room when the fest actually begins.

    I’ll get to writing up the films once festival business actually begins on the 14th, but after watching “Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl,” the latest from Portuguese veteran (and I mean veteran) Manoel de Oliveira, I felt compelled to mention my sheer astonishment at the man’s achievement.

    The film itself — which went down well recently at the NYFF, if indieWIRE’s critics’ poll is any indication — is a beguiling curio, but the real story here is that de Oliveira, who made his first feature in 1942, will be 101 years old in December.

    100 years old, folks. And he’s busy working on his next feature as we speak.  That someone is out there making films at all at his age is laudable enough. That he’s making good ones is nothing short of heroic. Has any other filmmaker stayed active that long? Is this a record? Any helpful geeks out there with the numbers to hand?

  • A new, diminished Miramax era

    MiramaxI’ll have to just say it: this is sad.  Just from a movie-goer, awards-watcher standpoint.  Miramax has indeed been “folded-in” at Disney for about a year, as David Poland notes in his characteristic “nothing surprises me” fashion.  And Greg Ellwood has put together a nice analysis of the event over at his Awards Campaign blog at HitFix.  But beyond all that, it’s just…a bummer.

    After all, it’s something of an end of an era for awards obsessives.  Miramax dominated the 1990s under the Weinstein brothers who founded the company, acquired by Disney in 1993.  The run is legendary, of course, and changed the way awards campaigns would be structured for years to come.  But even with the brothers’ departure in 2005, it seemed there could be a spark of renewal in the brand.

    2006 saw the first post-Weinstein Best Picture nomination in Stephen Frears’s “The Queen,” and a year later, “No Country for Old Men” took the Oscar, the first Miramax win since 2002’s “Chicago.”  But the slate of upcoming releases was increasingly thin, and now, the company has been downsized considerably.  Anne Thompson also has more details.  In a nutshell, though, Miramax, as we’ve known it for two decades, is no more.

    And like I said, it’s sad.  The changing face of the industry right now was both inevitable and necessary, but it’s going to be a bit weird to see this former awards giant virtually (if not completely) absent from the Oscar landscape.

  • New ‘Shutter Island’ trailer

    See it HD at Apple.

  • Can Halle Berry turn it around with ‘Frankie & Alice?’

    Halle Berry in Monster's BallPoor Halle Berry has become something of a communal punchbag in recent years among critics seeking examples of the age-old post-Oscar curse; with every disappointing film she makes, the comments about her career (and even her winning performance) get progressively snarkier.

    Look no further than this rather odd (and somewhat out-of-nowhere) piece in today’s Guardian — in which Benjamin Lee makes the curious claim that it is color-blind casting (which others might see as progress of a sort) that has sunk Berry’s career following her Oscar win.

    Lee’s argument essentially boils down to this: non-white actresses are better off sticking to roles (such as Berry’s breakthrough parts in “Monster’s Ball” or the TV film “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge”) that are dependent on their race.

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  • Kate Beckinsale: Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive

  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 4 — Foreign submissions, PGA’s 10, ‘A Single Man’ a Best Picture possibility?

    Oscar TalkRecorded yesterday, here’s the fourth installment of Oscar Talk with yours truly and Anne Thompson of indieWIRE.  We took the week off last Friday due to traveling conflicts, but we’re back on today.

    On the docket:

    • Anne and I discuss the foreign language film submissions, up to 62 entries so far (61 at the time of this recording).

    • The PGA’s copy cat move to 10, which leads of course to further discussion on the Academy’s move to 10.

    • Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” which has opened to glowing reviews.  Odds on Oscar, box office potential, etc.

    • Sony Pictures Classics’ shucking and jiving with their Oscar schedule, grabbing “The Last Station” (confirmed today) and moving “Get Low” (as reported here last week).

    • Anne wonders whether Weinstein pick-up “A Single Man” could be an under-the-radar contender for Best Picture.

    • The weekend’s releases: “A Serious Man” (covered extensively last time) and “Zombieland” (to steer away from awards talk for a moment).

    • Anne talks Alain Resnais’s “Wild Grass,” which recently opened the New York Film Festival.

    • And the distribution strategy for “Paranormal Activity,” hardly an Oscar contender but right in line with Anne’s recent column on studios missing an opportunity to experiment with release paradigms on modestly budgeted films.

    Check out the podcast below, with a musical lead-in from Mark Bradshaw’s “Bright Star” score.  And as always, you can subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.

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  • Confirmed: ‘The Last Station’ goes to Sony Classics

    (from left) Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer in The Last StationA few days ago there were whispers on the winds that “The Last Station” had been picked up by a specialty division with a number of art house releases primed for the season.  All signs pointed to Sony Pictures Classics.

    Today we get a confirmation (and I’ve independently verified) that, indeed, the film is a new awards hopeful in the Sony Classics stable.  This has been the natural fit, in my view, since I saw the film at Telluride.

    So, expect lead acting campaigns for Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, the latter being a definite possibility.  Also, I’m sure supporting campaigns for James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti will be in store, odds on the former more than the latter.

    And cngrats to Michael Hoffman for finding a home for his film, a tight, warm, well-made piece of work that deserves a look if only to see these wonderful actors working off of one another.

    Thge film will hit theaters in limited release on December 23.

  • On acting

    Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black PearlWhat constitutes a great performance?  What makes it something that puts it head and shoulders above the rest?  What does an artist do to go to that level of art and achieve something that is both extraordinary and rare?

    Does the Academy, or rather the branch that nominates the actors, look as closely at performance as critics do?  Is a performance considered great because it is an Oscar-winning piece of acting or nominated for one of the acting prizes?

    An actor reads a script and likes both the character he or she is being offered and the story on the page. The actor accepts, and begins (we hope) work on the character.  A year or so later, after shooting and cutting the film, on the screen in front of us the actor’s work will be seen and judged, commented on, praised, perhaps showered with accolades or negative comments, perhaps winning an Oscar or a Razzie, maybe becoming discussed for years to come, or forgotten moments after seeing it.

    I doubt, seriously, that an actor accepts a role with any of that in mind. Perhaps I am overly idealistic, but I hope actors accept roles because they are trying (always) to evolve as an artist, to discover something different in their acting and themselves, and to do something they have never done before. Of the many actors I have interviewed over the years, most of them take a role based on something that speaks to them in the screenplay.

    Meryl Streep once told that me she seeks something that “touches my soul” while Robert Duvall looks for a character that is “real, something that will challenge me, but he has to be real.” Tom Cruise said he “likes to try different things each time out, and hopes he does the part justice”, while Hilary Swank looks “for something that speaks to me, as though the character were whispering to me.”

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  • ‘Up’ stunt at London’s Tower Bridge

    (Courtesy: @UP_dates)