In Contention

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  • LOL

    How did I miss this? From the Guardian’s Oscar wrap earlier this week:

    When Miley Cyrus told news media that Angelina Jolie is her “favourite figure from history,” was it because she thinks that Jolie is Alexander the Great’s mother, Colin Farrell the King of Macedonia and Brad Pitt Achilles? Sure, why not?

    Priceless. But let’s not be too hard on Cyrus … she is young, after all. With time, she’ll hopefully come to realize the full scale of the mighty struggles and triumphs endured by true historical heroes who changed the world for the better. You know, like Jennifer Aniston.

    (PS. Changing the subject, but sticking with the theme of foot-in-mouth moments from Sunday’s proceedings, did anyone else shift uncomfortably in their seat when Michael Douglas gushed that Frank Langella far outstripped previous interpretations of Richard Nixon … all the while standing next to Anthony Hopkins? Late to bring it up, I know, but it’s been nagging at me.) 

  • “Nine-toe-havinest, limpinest…”

  • Year-in-advance winner predictions

    Yes, I’m insane, but before I leave off this year’s year-in-advance week, by request, I thought I’d throw up a random set of winner predictions and see if I was close to the target next February.  Last year I managed three correct guesses (four if you count Winslet for the wrong movie), two of them in the tech categories, so maybe I can at least up that tally.  I really want to predict Clint’s movie for Best Picture, but I have some weird sense of irritation at predicting an untitled movie.  Oh well, who cares?

    Best Picture: “Nine”
    Best Director: Rob Marshall, “Nine”
    Best Actor: Morgan Freeman, “Untitlted Nelson Mandela Project”
    Best Actress: Michelle Pfeiffer, “Chéri”
    Best Supporting Actor: Matt Damon, “Untitlted Nelson Mandela Project”
    Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, “Precious”
    Best Adapted Screenplay: “Nine”
    Best Original Screenplay: “Up”
    Best Art Direction: “Amelia”
    Best Cinematography: “Nine”
    Best Costume Design: “Chéri”
    Best Film Editing: “Nine”
    Best Makeup: “The Wolf Man”
    Best Music (Original Score): “Broken Embraces”
    Best Music (Original Song): “Nine”
    Best Sound Editing: “Green Zone”
    Best Sound Mixing: “Nine”
    Best Visual Effects: “Avatar”
    Best Animated Feature Film: “Up”

    Those will all be wrong.  Each and every one of them.

    (And in case you missed it: OFF THE CARPET: Handicapping 2009 a year in advance!?)

  • Great point

    This would’ve been a great opportunity: If Nicholson were a supporting-actor presenter and spoke about Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker.

    Longtime Oscar hound Wayman Wong to Tom O’Neil in O’Neil’s recent Gold Derby blog entry on the conspicuous absence of Jack Nicholson from Sunday’s Oscar telecast.

  • ‘Hunger’ poster

    Hunger

  • TECH SUPPORT: Postmortem

    Tech Support at In ContentionWhat can I say? It was a big night for “Slumdog Millionaire” at the 81st Annual Academy Awards on Sunday.

    While I do like the film a great deal, I found its dominance this awards season unnecessarily monotonous.  For instance, I preferred Thomas Newman’s work in both music categories this year, but I was nonetheless very happy with A.R. Rahman’s triumphs. The music branch needs to be seriously rewired, though.  Their choices in recent years have often been bizarre and at times terrible.

    Anthony Dod Mantle’s deserved victory in the cinematography feield means that Roger Deakins is still waiting for that first statuette. (Though, might I add, as effective as the work is in “The Reader,” I would have found it slightly disappointing if Deakins had finally won this year, considering Chris Menges shot most of the movie.) I would also like to think that Wally Pfister will eventually triumph in this category, considering Pfister has received three nominations in the last four years (all on Christopher Nolan projects).

    Chris Dickens winning Best Film Editing was probably the easiest call of all the tech categories. Though I would say Angus Wall, Kirk Baxter, Elliot Graham and especially Lee Smith have built up good will with their fellow editors, while Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley must be considered in contention whenever they make a prestigious film with Ron Howard.

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  • More than one ‘right’ choice

    Waltz with BashirIn the largely good-natured responses to a largely good-natured Oscar ceremony, only one result has been greeted with any real rancour from critics or pundits –- the “upset” (anticipated by some clever folks at the eleventh hour) in the Best Foreign Language Film category. But as much sympathy as one feels for the disappointed team behind the upended frontrunner, “Waltz With Bashir,” I can’t help feeling a little bad for the ultimate victor, “Departures,” whose moment in the sun is being somewhat tainted by the amount of resentment being cast its way.

    David Carr describes “Bashir’s” loss as “the biggest miss of the year,” adding that the Japanese film’s victory signals a triumph of convention over innovation. Meanwhile, Sasha Stone, who is usually at pains to be the most disinterested of Oscar bloggers, suggests that the win is “the worst of this year.” But these are mild jabs compared to Scott Foundas’ furious rant over the affair, in which he dismisses “Departures” as a “relentlessly mediocre tearjerker” and rages that “Bashir” was simply too sophisticated for the voters:

    Folman’s film was simply too innovative for the Academy’s notoriously calcified tastes … While Waltz builds to a conclusion that many (including this critic) counted among the most emotionally devastating in movies last year, it is a moment that is earned by the film rather than cheaply calculated, and which raises more questions than it answers. That’s something that many viewers of Folman’s film have found thrilling to behold, but which may well have inspired paroxysms of rage in Academy voters who stand by the belief that a movie should have a clear beginning, middle and end and send people out of the theater feeling better about “humanity.”

    I must admit to having mixed feelings about the whole business. I must emphasise that I have yet to see “Departures,” so I can make no statement about whether or not it’s an undeserving winner –- though I confess I’d be surprised if it’s as striking or provocative a piece of work as “Bashir.” And while I’m not as ardent a devotee of Folman’s film as many critics, I can’t deny that I was excited by the possibility of an animated documentary breaking new ground in a frequently conservative category. (On another tack, as I’ve said before, I agree with Foundas that the film’s omission from the ceremony’s ‘Animation 2008’ montage was inexplicable.)

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  • To the Oscar grouches

    Hugh Jackman at the 81st annual Academy AwardsAlright, we already we handled the “Slumdog Millionaire” backlash and overall sense of hatred toward the film from movie-goers who simply couldn’t handle the boredom of an awards season that was written.  Today, it’s time to take the folks to task who couldn’t get to their computers quickly enough to bemoan the Academy’s presentation of 25 honors Sunday night.

    Patrick Goldstein and Mary McNamara were two of the first to cut loose, leaving their own LA Times colleague T.J. Simers to wonder if they thought they could have done a better job.  And we all knew Nikki Finke was going to breathe fire because that’s what crotchety dragons do.

    And yet, despite the sniping — ratings were up.  And they’ll probably go up again next year just due to the anticipation created by this year’s telecast, which was the plan all along.

    Pete Hammond, in his final installment of Notes on a Season this year, addressed the issue with this wrap-up of the reaction to the reaction:

    It was fitting that it all ended Sunday night with an Oscar ceremony that was one for the ages — a beautifully produced show by Bill Condon and Laurence Mark that captured everything we still love about movies and the Academy Awards. Those bloggers, columnists and critics out there who were panning it before it was even over have had to run back into their holes and take cover from the vociferous reaction, in and out of the industry, to their ill-conceived attack.

    “I don’t get the criticism,” one longtime academy member told me Monday. “This was an amazing show. You could just feel it in waves as it went along. Those guys [Condon and Mark], they are really good.”

    I’m told the academy itself was fielding numerous calls complaining about the complainers — but, hey, everyone is entitled to an opinion even if it was formed before the show made it to the air. You can’t please everyone, but with this production the Academy got back on track — and the 13% increase in ratings was the cherry on top. Here’s hoping this team returns next year. Clearly, the public still has a jones on for the Oscars when they are produced with smarts and style.

    Smack down.

  • Eddie Murphy + Richard Pryor = Oscar?

    Eddie Murphy at the 81st annual Academy AwardsUPDATE: Condon apparently has said he wants an August 2010 release for the film and Fox Searchlight has agreed to it.  See note below regarding Condon’s desire to stay away from anything resembling an Oscar season.

    EARLIER: I’ve known about Eddie Murphy being attached to Bill Condon’s Richard Pryor movie for weeks but, you know, you kind of have to keep quiet with secrets in this town and watch the news be broken elsewhere.  David Poland seems to think this is Eddie Murphy’s Oscar power play without offering a shred of copy to the fact that one of Condon’s stipulations when it came to this film is a release date far away from the Oscar season fray, which left the director dizzy and probably disenchanted during the 2006 run for “Dreamgirls.”

    Anyway, I wasn’t immediately interested in the casting decision but I think it’ll be intriguing to watch Murphy work through this character.  He and Pryor were close friends, of course, so it’s almost serendipity.  Anyone here as into “Harlem Nights” as I am?  A late-80s classic.  And I love Murphy’s bit in “Raw” (or was it Delirious?”) when he talks about Bill Cosby taking umbrage with his use of foul language in his bits.  He called Pryor, a little upset, and Pryor said, “Tell Bill Cosby I said suck my d—.”  The emphasis on the “my” is intentional, another layer of the joke’s humor — cracks me up every time.

    But back to Condon and Oscar.  I’m sure Fox Searchlight will be a wonderful home for the project, but seriously, a late summer release is the kind of thing the director has in mind.  None of this October, November, Oscar glut stuff.  Maybe the studio can change his mind but I doubt it.  Anyway, I’m quite looking forward to the film, which has been thoroughly researched by Condon for the last two years and should be a wonderful lasting impression of one of the greatest comedians of all time.

  • Commenter quote of the week

    “Can I just say, if Hilary Swank beats Meryl Streep to three oscars…that might be the most frustrating thing ever.”

    So says JAB in the year-in-advance Off the Carpet post from Monday.

  • Thank you, Nick Hornby

    Nick HornbyAs many of you already know, one of my central irritations of this year’s Oscar season has been the “Slumdog” backlash, an unnecessarily cruel response to a brilliant film’s rather boring sweep of all the major film awards over the past three months.  I understand it on one level, because no one wants a predictable circuit.  But Danny Boyle’s film has been unfairly maligned if only because it is such a masterful achievement in the face of the mediocrity to which it has been compared.

    Thankfully, those of us who share in this irritation have author Nick Hornby on our side.  Here is what he had to say (via Awards Daily) in response to a letter published in the London Review of Books:

    There’s a lot packed in here: the snobbery, the smug and unexamined assumptions, the writer’s apparent pride in his utter ignorance of the independent film-making process, the nonsensical contradictions (can something be both “garish” and “gaggingly photogenic”?) It’s perfectly possible not to enjoy Slumdog Millionaire, of course – nothing appeals to everybody, and I didn’t have enough invested in the love story for the film to lift me as much as it seems to have lifted others. But typically, when the success of a book or a film or a piece of music baffles the liberal intelligentsia, then that success will usually be put down to the cynicism of the makers, or the depressing ignorance of the consumers. (Sometimes, when these critics are trying to be nice, they make a plea for better arts education. “It’s not the public’s fault that they enjoy the paintings of Jack Vettriano. They just don’t know any better.”) This letter is a prime example of that attitude: you loved Slumdog? You’re a moron…

    In film people tend to talk about films “working” or “not working”, and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ clearly works – just as ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘Shallow Grave’, two of Danny Boyle’s other films, worked – in fact, Boyle’s ability to turn forbiddingly unpromising material into movies that people actually want to see is remarkable. If his films are commercial, it’s because he wants them to be seen by a mainstream audience; the money-making that ensues is a by-product, rather than a goal in itself…

    It would be nice to think that our artier film-makers and more literary novelists could look at ‘Slumdog’ and steal a few of its underpinnings. Is energy, for example, as vulgar an attribute as many of them seem to believe? And is coherent structure really such an awful thing? On the evidence of the LRB letter, though, our intellectuals are more likely to sneer. I’m sure they’re all very clever people, but they can be terribly dim sometimes.

    Amen, brother.  Hornby, by the way, is likely to be in the thick of the awards season this year with his adaptation “An Education.”

  • Mike Leigh on Hollywood, Mickey and losing an Oscar

    Mike LeighIf, like yours truly, you’re one of those who believe that British auteur Mike Leigh was robbed on Sunday night, you’ll thoroughly enjoy his Oscar diary. Ever the Hollywood outsider, Leigh attended the Academy Awards with his two adult sons as his guests, and he reflects on the ensuing madness with all the droll, dry humour present in so many of his films.

    As you would expect, he’s not all that bothered about losing the Original Screenplay award for “Happy-Go-Lucky,” not least because he learned shortly before the ceremony that the bookies had him as a 54-1 outsider. (He mordantly notes that his son Toby then placed £20 on him, “just in case.”) In any case, he professes to liking “Milk” a great deal, and rather enjoyed the ceremony as a whole, describing it with typical British reserve as “far less tacky and schmaltzy than usual.” What I really liked, however, is his candour on the awards themselves:

    The truth is, you only get the loser’s hump about the winners if you think that they’re crap, and tonight I get a real buzz out of nearly all the awards. Chuffed for jolly Michael O’Connor (best costumes, The Duchess), who assisted Lindy Hemming on Topsy-Turvy, and delighted that Benjamin Button got only technical awards!

    Wanted Mickey Rourke to win best actor (I voted for him) and, no disrespect to Kate and the other girls, I desperately miss Sally (Hawkins). I genuinely can’t see how any of their performances are as original, creative, profound, witty or versatile as hers. But there you go.

    Sure, most directors would probably say that about their leading ladies, but in this case, he happens to be right. I’m also interested to hear that he’s on Team Rourke — I recall sitting behind Leigh at “The Wrestler’s” first London screening back in October and observing his evident enthusiasm for the film then.

    (more…)

  • The stillness

    It feels good to slwoly make my way to the computer this morning without the usual onslaught of Oscarweb tid-bits.  Sure, I could link to all the bitching about the show (really, the Times is embarrassing itself with the insular sniping), but why bother?  It’s a done deal.  “Watchmen” is on the way.  It’s going to warm up soon.  We’ve conquered the season.

    Smells like…victory.

    We still have some year-in-advance nick-knacks to toss up by the end of the week, so never fear on that front.  Soon it’ll be the slow transition to the usual film coverage.  For now, the quiet is nice.

  • Jon Stewart’s Oscar recap

  • Freida Pinto, Woody Allen and muse have been used in too many headlines

    Freida PintoBut I guess that’s the truth of the matter.  The gorgeous “Slumdog Millionaire” star has been pegged to star alongside an increasingly talented ensemble in Woody Allen’s next flick.  Variety reports:

    Freida Pinto will follow up her performance in the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” with a role in Woody Allen’s latest project.

    This year’s Cinderella at the Oscar ball will join the long list of Allen’s muses as she takes on the ingenue role in the helmer’s still-untitled pic.

    Naomi Watts has also signed on to star in the film, joining the already-announced Josh Brolin and Anthony Hopkins.

    Mediapro, the Spain-based company behind “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” is financing the as-yet-titled pic, which will be produced by Letty Aronson, Steve Tenenbaum and Jaume Roures.

  • Bennett Miller’s opening montage sees the light of day

    Apparently the following montage, which played for the audience at the Kodak Theatre Sunday night but was ultimately pulled from the televised rundown, has popped up as a Vanity Fair exclusive.  It’s directed by Bennet Miller and I have to say, it’s nice, has a good flow, but is a little film festival-esque.  Not “big enough for an opening Oscar number, I’d say.

    Lots of interviews: William Friedkin, Robert Evans, Danny Boyle, I think I saw Scarlett Johansson in there, Roger Deakins, Janusz Kaminski, Flea (rocking out a Gus Van Sant T-shirt), Brett Ratner (ugh), Michael Stipe, etc.  Click on Kid Notorious below to have a look:

    Robert Evans

  • ‘Slumdog’ sweep joins Oscar’s actorless trio

    Simon Beaufoy at the 81st annual Academy AwardsUPDATE: Okay, this is what happens when you skim emails too quickly and don’t do the research on your own.  I’ve corrected the statistical errors on my part.  THIS should be on the money:

    Not sure if this bit of trivia has already been consumed and digested, but thanks to Jeremy who sent it in weeks ago.  We’ve already talked at length about “Slumdog Millionaire”‘s Cinderella season marking the winningest awards streak of all time (Oscar, BAFTA, PGA, DGA, WGA, SAG Ensemble, ACE, ASC, CAS, ADG, CDG, USC Scripter — hell, even an MPSE honor).  But the film’s Oscar victory Sunday night also marked only the the fourth time a film won Best Picture, Best Director and a screenplay award without a member of the cast being nominated. The others were “Gigi” in 1958, “The Last Emperor” in 1987 and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” in 2003.

    I’ll read more carefully next time, I swear.

    Other interesting stats contributed by Speaking English and The Z:

    • “Slumdog” is the first film to win Best Picture and Best Cinematography since 1999’s “American Beauty.”

    • It is also the first Best Picture winner since 1984’s “Amadeus” to win 8 Oscars.

    • Additionally, it is the seventh film to win 8 Oscars after “Gone With the Wind,” “From Here to Eternity,” “On the Waterfront,” “Cabaret” and the aforementioned “Amadeus.”

    • This was the first year since 1994 that all acting winners had been previously nominated.

    • Sean Penn is the only actor to win twice this decade.  (Tom O’Neil also notes he is the ninth male actor to win two lead Oscars after Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis.  Twelve actresses have taken two.)

    • With Penelope Cruz’s victory, Woody Allen is now third behind William Wyler and Fred Zinneman for most performances directed to an Oscar with seven, Chad tells us.

    Anything else?

  • Olbermann on the freedom of Oscar speeches

    Thanks to Ryan Adams at Awards Daily for pointing us to this clip. “Of the 40 hours of TV Oscar analysis I’ve seen in the past 48, the depth of this 6-minute segment make the rest look like the cover of US magazine,” Ryan says.

    Have a look: