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  • How ‘Salt’ could surprise and win Best Sound Mixing

    I stopped researching somewhere in the 1970s, but as far as I can tell going back that far, the Best Sound Mixing (formerly Best Sound) category has never included more than three Best Picture nominees. In a number of cases there were two, a great many years saw one and often enough, there were none.

    So there’s a theory worth addressing. But before I get to that, first and foremost, the safe money in the category is on “Inception.” However, there should be a bit of pause because the film did not resonate with the Academy enough to land two key nominations (Best Director and Best Film Editing) and it flew over many heads. But it’s the loud blockbuster of the bunch and ought to be considered the frontrunner.

    That having been said, when you think of the reality of the Oscars, the winner ballots are largely filled out in blocks of support, sometimes even mandated from on high (no joke). So there are six Best Picture nominees that aren’t represented in the Best Sound Mixing category, and the last thing in-house supporters of those films will want to do is check off a box for a competitor and add to another film’s momentum. The only vote that wouldn’t put wind in anybody else’s sails? “Salt.”

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Directing

    Coming down to the wire, the race for Best Directing remains a very close one. Earlier in the year the prevailing wisdom was that a split could be in the cards, with the Oscar-bait frontrunner more likely to win Best Picture and the zeitgeisty competition likely to see its talented helmer finally noticed.

    Then things changed a bit, with the zeitgeisty choice pulling ahead as a Best Picture possibility, which left supporters feeling even more strongly that its director would find himself in the winner’s circle. At the end of the season, we’re back to that original thought process in some quarters, while in others, the anticipation of Oscar bait going hand-in-hand is taking hold.

    The nominees are:

    “Black Swan” (Darren Aronofsky)
    “The Fighter” (David O. Russell)
    “The King’s Speech” (Tom Hooper)
    “The Social Network” (David Fincher)
    “True Grit” (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 54 — Final predictions and thoughts!

    Oscar TalkWelcome to Oscar Talk.

    In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    And this, as they say, is it. The penultimate podcast of the season, with nothing but the Oscars between us and the end of this year’s crazy ride. So, it’s time dive into the discourse one more time and read the tea leaves> Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Final analysis, part two

    Yesterday we began our final look at the 10 crafts categories.  Check out part one here.  Today, the conclusion.  Meanwhile, you can find my final predictions in all categories here.

    Best Music (Original Score)

    Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, despite their atypical approach to film music composition, are very much contenders in this race. Having won the BFCA award and Golden Globe for their work on “The Social Network,” they must be taken seriously. The fact remains, however, that this is not a typical Oscar-winning score.

    Alexandre Desplat has had an amazing run since he broke onto the American scene in 2003 with “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” Four Oscar nominations later, it seems he is poised to win his first statuette for another Colin Firth film, “The King’s Speech.” Being behind the Best Picture frontrunner is a huge advantage. Moreover, its subtle elegance managed to win the BAFTA. Even so, a win is hardly assured as subtlety is actually not frequently awarded here.

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  • Rundown of awards presentations

    From Deadline (thanks to PaulH):

    1. Art Direction (Tom Hanks)
    2. Cinematography (ditto)
    3. Supporting Actress (?)
    4. Animated Feature (Justin Timberlake, Mila Kunis)
    5. Animated Short Film (ditto)

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  • 2/25 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Carter keeps the season interesting, Gervais’s suggestion, Portman overrated?

    • 10 great things Helena Bonham Carter has done or said to spice up this year’s Oscar race. [Vulture]

    • Ricky Gervais humbly suggests an opening monologue for Oscar hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway. [RickyGervais.com]

    • TCM’s Robert Osborne (my sole company on predicting “Letters from Iwo Jima” four years ago) on Oscar campaigns. [Wall Street Journal]

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  • THE LONG SHOT: A toast to the douchebags

    (Not-quite-final predictions here.)

    176 days from the unofficial opening of my Oscar season — a breakfast-hour press screening of “Black Swan” on the first day of the Venice Film Festival — it’s fair to say I’m ready for the endgame.

    Aren’t we all? Whether you’re delighted or disappointed by where the awards trail has led us thus far, it’s fair to say it offers little further room for discovery. Back in the golden days of September, pundits whittled the race down to “The King’s Speech” versus “The Social Network,” past versus present, comfort versus cred, That Was Then versus This Is My Now. And as much as I clung to the idea that it couldn’t be that simple, they were right.

    The axis may have swung in this narrative across the season, and the side-taking may have become more heated in the post-nomination phase, but the fact remains that the increasingly small world of Oscar blogging has largely revolved around two films for the better part of six months. If you want to know what this looped conversation has done to our collective brains, look no further than the fact that I just quoted Jordin Sparks lyrics in the paragraph above.

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  • INTERVIEW: Talking westerns and only westerns with ‘True Grit’ actor Jeff Bridges

    Last year was the best opportunity to do the career retrospective thing with Jeff Bridges, right at the starting gun of an Oscar-winning steamroll through the film awards season. This time around, the actor is nominated for his sixth Academy Award, for his work in the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” and it seemed a conversation about westerns might be novel.

    So a little over a year after that hefty interview and roughly 10 months after he paid homage to his parents on the stage of the Kodak Theatre, we got together at the same restaurant to talk up the genre that sparks some of his earliest memories of the film business.

    “I was always thrilled when my dad would be doing a western,” he says, “because I knew he’d be coming through that door after work, all dressed up like a cowboy. And I’d get to put all his stuff on and I’d be smelling the horses on his clothes, all of that stuff.”

    Indeed, the actor remembers going to set and cracking up at the sight of actors sitting atop ladders and acting as if they were on horses for the camera, the veil of filmmaking totally lifted. But he also recalls an instance when his older brother and fellow actor, Beau, disrupted a take during the filming of “High Noon,” which starred their father, Lloyd Bridges.

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  • ‘Dragon,’ ‘King’s Speech,’ ‘TRON’ win with film music critics

    Check out the full list of winners at The Circuit.

  • Taking questions for Oscar Talk

    Alright, here’s the big push.  You know the drill.  PLEASE KEEP IT TO ONE QUESTION, and, as always, keep it fresh and please, don’t bore me.

  • TECH SUPPORT: Final analysis, part one

    So this is it. Over the last seven-plus months here at Tech Support, we have tried to illuminate and analyze the craft races as they unfolded. On Sunday, the winners will be revealed, ushering some new faces into Oscar’s club.  And indeed, I expect the vast majority of the winners to make their first trip to the podium.

    I’ll be breaking down each field in a two-parter.  Check back tomorrow for the final five categories, but for now…

    Best Art Direction

    As is the case in many categories, “The King’s Speech” is, to me, the safe bet for the win here. A royal period piece and likely Best Picture winner would be difficult to beat in any year. But in all fairness, this is in many ways not a typical “royal” winner in a category where style triumphs over substance.

    Production Designer Eve Stewart (11 years after her first nomination for “Topsy-Turvy”), along with set decorator Judy Farr, immaculately filled many of the film’s sets (despite late-breaking news of one location) with intimate details that feel very much in tune with the characters. A guild win also shows industry support.

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Actress

    Early in the season the lead actress category appeared to be more competitive than ever. An easy list of 10 contenders could be drawn up, many of them admittedly sight unseen, and it was anyone’s guess as to which lady could insinuate herself as the odds-on favorite to win.

    Then the critics began narrowing things down, while certain films began to underwhelm and fall to the wayside. With them went a few of those potential contenders. The critics also began to mold a frontrunner, one who would eventually prove to have the vote of the industry before having that status challenged in the final lap. Indeed, it’s been a wild ride for Best Actress.

    The nominees are:

    Annette Bening, “The Kids Are All Right”
    Nicole Kidman, “Rabbit Hole”
    Jennifer Lawrence, “Winter’s Bone”
    Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”
    Michelle Williams, “Blue Valentine”

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  • Like rama lama lama

  • 2/24 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Hanks to present two off the bat, Elton John on Best Actress, Twitter Best Pic reviews

    • Pete Hammond reports that Tom Hanks will present Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography to start the show, so we’ll know very quickly if a sweep for “The King’s Speech” is afoot. [Deadline]

    • Glenn Kenny talks up the underrated “Shutter Island” a year after its release. [The Film Talk]

    • It’s been a week of celebrity Oscar picks, more than ever.  Here’s Elton John’s call for Best Actress. [Inside Movies]

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  • The model for this year’s acting presentations?

    I mentioned yesterday that the multi-presenter format used for the acting awards in the last two Oscar ceremonies is being scrapped this year. However, while we’re doing away with the five-way individual tributes, producer Bruce Cohen claimed they were adopting an idea from the “1970 Oscars” that would ensure every nominee gets duly celebrated.

    Looking at footage from that year’s awards, it wasn’t clear what he meant — though it seems he might have been misquoted, and actually said “1970s Oscars.”

    With that in mind, helpful reader Michael Amir Bina got in touch to inform me that this presentation format (embedding disabled, I’m afraid), from the 1979 awards, is what we should be expecting. Nothing groundbreaking, just brief rundown of each nominee’s career and achievements to date. Fine, I suppose, though it slightly steps on the notion of the Oscar being for a single performance. Meanwhile, how much telecast time will the show’s writers be able to wring from poor Hailee Steinfeld’s résumé?

    [Photo: Libero.it]

  • “I’m not dancin’ with no damn wolves.”

  • The top 10 shots of 2010: part two

    In case you missed part one of this year’s top shots column, be sure to catch up before digging into the final five selections today.

    As I mentioned yesterday, it wasn’t exactly a banner year for singular images from films in 2010. And that’s certainly not a crime. But more to the point, what I learned as I set about writing this piece was how deeply my personal experience of the year was reflected in my ultimate selections. It may have been tough to find what felt right for the list, but in some ways, the intensity of that digging ultimately illuminated the year’s work for me all the more.

    How can I not be grateful for that? In the final analysis, perhaps a year that isn’t so obvious, without such a bevy of possibilities for this collective, yields a more measured and perhaps passionate consideration of the year in visual storytelling. Not to be highfalutin.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy the conclusion. Let’s dive in…

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  • Oscar the Grouch’s Oscar picks

    (Courtesy: AOL)