…and is poised to have a good night.
(Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)
Blog
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Big night for ‘Black Swan’ at Spirit Awards
Kris was on the scene at the Independent Spirit Awards today, and will, I’m sure, have some first-hand commentary to add later. For now, let me lead the cheers for “Black Swan,” which finally had its moment in the sun this awards season.Two years after its sort-of-sibling “The Wrestler” nabbed the top prize, the surprise crossover hit took four awards, including Best Feature and Best Director for Darren Aronofsky — the third Spirit win of his career, though his first for directing.
The only other multiple winner of the ceremony was fellow Best Picture Oscar nominee “Winter’s Bone,” which took a well-deserved brace of supporting trophies for John Hawkes and Dale Dickey — the film’s only reward for a field-leading haul of seven nominations. “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” meanwhile, was a popular victor in the Best Documentary category.
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Who would get your write-in votes?
Here’s an easy one for serious Oscar trivia geeks: what’s unusual about Hal Mohr’s 1935 Best Cinematography win for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” I offer no prize, but pat yourself on the back if you knew that Mohr was the first and only person to win an Oscar on write-in votes — or in other words, that he won despite not being nominated.Mohr’s victory was the result of a groundswell of industry support for his work on the Best Picture nominee after he surprisingly failed to secure a nomination; the year before, Bette Davis was the beneficiary of a more famous, but less successful, write-in campaign for her acclaimed, un-nominated work in “Of Human Bondage.”
As it turned out, she received fewer votes than two of the three actresses who beat her to the nomination, but the legend stuck — and Davis got a blatant make-up Oscar a year later.
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‘Meek’s Cutoff’ trailer
If you’re feeling smothered by the whole Oscar rigmarole and can’t wait to start talking about some fresh movies, this trailer couldn’t have landed at a more welcome time. Of course, “fresh” is a relative term — it’s nearly six months since I was wowed by Kelly Reichardt’s studied, painterly Oregon Trail western (reviewed here) at the Venice Film Festival, which ultimately took the #2 spot in my Best of 2010 list. For those who don’t get to beat the festival track, however, the film hits screens in April.
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CINEJABBER: The light bulb’s getting dim
Catch up with the idea behind these weekend posts here.Well. Here we are. It’s probably going to be kind of difficult to use this weekly open thread for anything other than Oscar chatter, given tomorrow’s festivities, but here’s the space nevertheless.
The Oscar Guide has been another lovely success this year and I thank everyone for the discussion and voting. It’s come to be a nice way, for me, anyway, to fully consider things during phase two while ticking off the calendar days, eyes on the prize the whole way. Tomorrow I’ll post what would essentially be the In Contention readers’ ballot, the results of our daily polls. You can dive back in and revisit the categories here.
Today brings the Independent Spirit Awards, moving back to the beach in Santa Monica after trying downtown out for a year. I’ll be on hand, but it will be TV-delayed, so if you want the winners first hand, follow me on Twitter. Show begins at 2pm PT.
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Interviews with the nominees
I thought I’d bring this around one more time this weekend. We talked to 37 of this year’s Oscar nominees this season. A few more have been added since we first posted this last month:
Ethan Coen (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, “True Grit”)
Joel Coen (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, “True Grit”)
Tom Hooper (Best Director, “The King’s Speech”)
Jeff Bridges (Best Actor, “True Grit”)
Colin Firth (Best Actor, “The King’s Speech”)
James Franco (Best Actor, “127 Hours”)
Michelle Williams (Best Actress, “Blue Valentine”)
Geoffrey Rush (Best Supporting Actor, “The King’s Speech”)
Jeremy Renner (Best Supporting Actor, “The Town”)
Amy Adams (Best Supporting Actress, “The Fighter”) -
Ranking Oscar’s 41 features (minus one)
Every year, when I finally get around to everything, I like to toss up my arbitrary ranking of the year’s Oscar-nominated feature films (and invite you to do the same).There were 41 films nominated this year. One of them I didn’t see and won’t until some time this year, I imagine. But here’s the top 10. The rest after the jump. Feel free to rank what you’ve seen in the comments section if you like.
1. “Exit Through the Gift Shop”
2. “Another Year”
3. “Black Swan”
4. “The Social Network”
5. “Toy Story 3”
6. “The Way Back”
7. “Blue Valentine”
8. “True Grit”
9. “Inception”
10. “The King’s Speech” -
OSCAR GUIDE: Best Picture
And so we come to the end of this year’s Oscar Guide, and the category that has been the cause of more conversation than ever this year: Best Picture. And that can’t be overstated. I can’t recall the last time the debate around a Best Picture winner was so heated, and I’m tempted to say it was, in some way, good for us all.There was a lot of passion around favorites this season. A LOT. In some cases, it might even be considered oppressive passion, but it’s worth it to have such strong opinions about the films we love. We may choose to convey those opinions in different ways, modest or broad, but that the pulse of film adoration is this strong at a key moment in the medium’s progression is, indeed, heartening.
The nominees are:
“Black Swan” (Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin)
“The Fighter” (David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman and Mark Wahlberg)
“Inception” (Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan)
“The Kids Are All Right” (Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Celine Rattray)
“The King’s Speech” (Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin)
“127 Hours” (Christian Colson, Danny Boyle and John Smithson)
“The Social Network” (Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Ceán Chaffin)
“Toy Story 3” (Darla K. Anderson)
“True Grit” (Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen)
“Winter’s Bone” (Anne Rosellini and Alix Madigan-Yorkin) -
Reminder: Join our Picktainment Oscar pool!
If you haven’t joined our Oscar pool at Picktainment.com, you can do so by going here. Sign up for an account if you’re new and then go back to this link and start making your picks.
I’ve completed the weighting of the categories. I had to settle on something because the poll stopped working randomly on that last suggestion thread, so I just went with a 1-4 point scale based on perceived difficulty to predict…
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WEEKLY WRAP: ‘Twas the week before Oscar
• We made you wait for it this year, but finally: Kris’s Top 10 Shots of 2010, parts one and two.• This week’s Off the Carpet column surveyed where the season has brought us thus far, and began tying the loose ends…
• …culminating later in Kris’s final Oscar predictions of the 2010 season.
• Guy’s final Long Shot column of the season celebrated the season’s losers, while calling for a return to movie talk away from the subject of awards.
• Our Oscar Guide feature stepped it up, covering Best Director, Actor, Actress, Foreign Language Film and Film Editing.
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Just walk away: final predictions
While Guy is pulling his hair out (I know the feeling), I’m backing off. At some point you have to put your pencil down and step away, and so I am.For me, the most difficult categories to pick — and the ones I found myself flip-flopping on down the stretch — were Best Supporting Actress and Best Documentary (Feature). Interestingly, both proved nerve-racking for completely different reasons.
In the case of supporting actress, you have a race that felt fluid (easily a three-way sprint) coming into phase two, and a situation later complicated by an advertising hiccup from the frontrunner and the charm factor going way up for a contender in the expected Best Picture winner. In the case of documentary feature, you have five stellar films that are — no kidding — evenly favored among the committee voters.
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Césars for Polanski, ‘Gods,’ ‘Illusionist’… and Fincher
When the nominations for the César Awards — known in glib terms as the French Oscars — were announced last month, I wrote that I anticipated a tight race between Roman Polanski’s widely acclaimed Euro thriller “The Ghost Writer” and Xavier Beauvois’s lofty Cannes prizewinner “Of Gods and Men,” with the latter just winning out.As it turned out, I was right. Beauvois’s film (the French Oscar submission, which surprised many by failing to make the Academy’s shortlist) took the top prize, but it was “The Ghost Writer” that netted the most wins, with four — including two for Polanski himself (Best Director and Adapted Screenplay), plus honors for editing and Alexandre Desplat’s score.
Given that combination of awards, it’s tempting to call Polanski’s film the “Social Network” of the French awards circuit — except that title goes to, well, “The Social Network.” David Fincher’s one-time Oscar frontrunner beat a rum bunch of mismatched nominees, including “Bright Star,” “Inception” and “Invictus,” to be named Best Foreign Film.
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To the highest bidder
As you know, Banksy has been all over town making his presence known in the lead-up to the Oscars. All These Wonderful Things documentary know-it-all A.J. Schnack happened by one of the artist’s latest pieces 10 minutes before it was tagged and 20 minutes before the owner of the building started the inevitable removal procedure with an endgame that fully proves Banksy’s point in “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” Here’s a photo:
(Check out Schnack’s recently posted analysis of the doc feature fields for both the Oscars and the Spirits here.)
[Photo: A.J. Schnack]
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The five categories giving me hell
With a little over 48 hours until the big night, I find myself in an uncommon state of disarray — my crammed Oscar weekend “To Do” list includes viewing all 15 short nominees in order to make an informed dart-throw of a prediction (stickler that I am, I held out for a theatrical screening), preparing copious supplies of food and alcohol for my second annual hotel-suite Oscar party (sorry, the guest list is full) and somehow finding time to write a final predictions piece.Before I can check off that last task, however, I actually have to settle on some final predictions — and despite the presence of solid frontrunners in most key categories, this year is giving me more trouble than most. For a race that, only a couple of weeks ago, seemed smothered in blanket affection for a single film, other possibilities have opened up that unusually equalize the possibilities of both a titanic sweep and a widely splintered share-a-thon.
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Oscar’s foreign race hasn’t found the fix
How do you solve a problem like Best Foreign Language Film? I’m not sure you can, but in the Academy’s case, it’s certainly not for lack of trying.The voting process in this eternally dissatisfying ghetto category is now such a Frankenstein’s monster of stages, rules, committees, sub-committees, longlists, shortlists and more committees that it’s a wonder they manage to wind up picking a single film at the end of it all — and rather less of a wonder that said film usually carries the stale whiff of a compromise choice.
This year’s race, thoroughly mapped out by Kris in this week’s Oscar Guide, looks headed for a typically imperfect outcome — opinions on the five films that make up the category may vary, but few would argue that the overall slate represents the key stories of world cinema in 2010. The trouble set in early, with several of the year’s biggest crossover critical hits ruled out at the submissions stage.
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Missing Ronni
A few choice quotes from this New York Times profile remembering Ronni Chasen in this, what would have been the busiest week of the year for her.She was very smart…She would always get there early so her noncelebrity client would get on camera, before all the stars would arrive.
There is not a day I have not thought of her; she was such an intrinsic part of this time.
She was very, very, very devoted to her clients…She just really needed you to know that Hans Zimmer walked on water.
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Charting Oscar’s ups and downs
Some of you may have been following Movieline’s Oscar Index. It has been a nice way to visually track the Oscar race all season, and now, they’ve put all of them together with the following time lapse video, showing all of Oscar’s ups and downs along the way: