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The last time Taraji P. Henson was on Oscar’s stage
I was inspired to hunt this clip down after that Three 6 Mafia item I mentioned yesterday. Eesh, remember the awful scene recreations for the original song contenders that year? Ouch. Anyway, maybe Taraji will grace the stage on different auspices this year. For now, this is what we’ve got:
My guess is this will get yanked soon enough. The Academy is pretty stingy with its content.
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2/3 Oscarweb Round-up
• Lionsgate picks up Sundance sensation “Push” with Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry in on the publicity push. [Variety]• Aseem Chhabra wonders why negative portrayals of India from westerners always cause people to “freak out.” [Mumbai Mirror]
• “Little Miss Sunshine” producer David T. Friendly, meanwhile, smartly tells reporters sniffing around the “Slumdog” smear story to “consider the source,” calls the whole scenario “fueled by sour grapes.” [The Wrap]
• David Poland on the evaporating post-Oscar theatrical bump. [The Hot Blog]
• Another Oscar section for all our obsessive enjoyment. [E! Online]
• Michael Cieply reads into the body language of the season’s contenders at yesterday’s nominees luncheon. [The Carpetbagger]
• Peter Bart chimes in from the scene as well. [Peter Bart]
• Tom O’Neil on the steady leak of Oscarcast surprises. [Gold Derby]
• Christopher Campbell’s reasons bot to underestimate “The Reader” at this stage. [Spout Blog]
• Hilary Alexander reports from the BAFTA talent photo shoot. [Daily Telegraph]
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Gilliam to receive BAFTA Fellowship
In one of the few good decisions BAFTA has made this year, Terry Gilliam will receive the Academy Fellowship (yes, that’s a lifetime achievement award to you and me) at Sunday’s ceremony in London. That’s a pleasantly inspired choice, if you ask me. Here’s an extract from the press release:
Awarded annually by the Academy, the Fellowship is the highest accolade bestowed upon an individual in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film. Previously honoured Fellows include Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Christie, John Barry, Stanley Kubrick and Judi Dench. Last year’s recipient was Anthony Hopkins.
Finola Dwyer, Chair of BAFTA’s Film Committee, said: “We’re delighted to make Terry a fellow of the Academy: he is one of the most original, imaginative and innovative directors working in the industry today.”
Terry Gilliam adds: “This is a great honour for someone who needs so many other people to do his job.”
Because they’re genuinely clueless about how to stage an awards telecast, BAFTA tends to place the Fellowship award right at the end of the ceremony — you know, after Best Film has been presented and most viewers have flipped channels. I suspect they’ll make the same error this year, but stay tuned. Gilliam ought to be worth watching.
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Fly on the wall
Come on, who wouldn’t want to listen in on this particular conversation? Rourke’s way with the dainty teacup makes me smile. And his outfit (loving that pocket square) is strangely awesome.
Sasha Stone has a bunch of nice pics from yesterday’s nominees luncheon, including the Class of 2008 shot. Check ’em out here.
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That was fast…Bale tirade techno YouTube video
I just laughed my ass off for two-and-a-half minutes. Click here for the back story, then feast your ears:
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Denby nails it
If you saw his TV chat with Charlie Rose and A.O. Scott, you won’t be surprised to read that critic David Denby doesn’t think much of this year’s Oscar crop. (And if you didn’t, you could probably guess.) Anyway, in this very lucid New Yorker piece, he expands on the points he raised on the show, tearing apart every Best Picture nominee but “Milk,” and lamenting the exclusion of “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Rachel Getting Married.” I don’t agree with everything he says (and I do think he’s unnecessarily cynical about “Slumdog Millionaire”), but he’s bang on-target here:
In the well-acted “Frost / Nixon,” a nice journalistic coup—David Frost’s pushing Richard Nixon into semi-confessional mode, in 1977—has been elevated to a great transformative moment in history, which, alas, it was not. These two films (“Frost/Nixon” and “The Reader”) may have been controlled more by their directors and their writers than by their studios, but they’re still the kind of middlebrow pictures that the Academy used to nominate in the bad old studio-dominated days—the contemporary equivalents of “Judgment at Nuremburg” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” They are “important” pictures that “say” something about public issues. They’re good for the industry’s image.
Note the quotation marks. The rest here.
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Sid Ganis: Big surprises in store for 81st Oscarcast
From Dave Germain, reporting from this afternoon’s nominees luncheon:
Ganis, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, told the 112 contenders gathered at the annual nominees luncheon to expect a lot of new things at the Feb. 22 ceremony.
“Your categories are being presented in a completely different way. Heads up,” Ganis told actors. “Cinematographers, editors, composers. All of you guys. You’re in for a big surprise.”
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Christian Bale flips out on the set of ‘Terminator Salvation’
It must have bubbled up inside Christian Bale real good and hot for him to lose his shit like this. TMZ broke the story (hate to link to them, but this is spicy stuff).Apparently “Terminator Salvation” D.P. Shane Hurlbut wasn’t being sensitive enough to Bale’s acting process, walking around and being somewhat distracting off camera during a scene between Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard, and Bale went off like a friggin’ fireworks display.
The best part is when he sounds like he’s literally going to get up and go beat the living hell out of Hurlbut toward the end of the tape. I can’t really hear what’s going on in the background, but judging from Bale’s reaction, Hurlbut must have been stating his case a little too much for the actor’s taste, or perhaps he was egging him on in some way, I can’t tell. But jeez, talk about a testy moment. My guess is the “Shut the f— up, Bruce” comment is aimed at 1st A.D. Bruce Franklin (the toughest job on any film set). This incident happened just before his London arrest, apparently, but the audio just made it out today.
After Bale’s recent legal troubles, something like this is bound to add to the gathering snowball that paints him as a hot head, a loose cannon, whatever. I’ve met him a couple of times, and he’s certainly a serious fellow. But he’s also got a sense of humor buried in there that is quite hysterical. Then again, you can always sense he could quite easily be on the verge of snapping like a twig and going atomic on someone’s ass.
I hope Hurlbut made it out alive.
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Nominees luncheon under way
Today is the big Academy luncheon for this year’s Oscar nominees. The AP’s Sandy Cohen and The Carpetbagger’s Michael Cieply are filing from the event.This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the season for me because of the varying personalities you find mingling together. Right now, M.I.A. is chowing down with Kate Winslet (assuming they both showed up). An interesting picture.
It reminds me of three years ago when I couldn’t help but ask the guys from Three 6 Mafia what they thought of the luncheon, rubbing elbows with everyone from Steven Spielberg to Reese Witherspoon. The quote I wrangled didn’t disappoint:
I was thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’ You know, you’re used to sitting in the studio with a bunch of guys drinking beer and smelling like something they shouldn’t be smelling like, and then you pull a switcheroo and you’re in Hollywood in a room with Steven Spielberg and Reese Witherspoon. And she’s sexy, man.
I laugh every time I read that.
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Standard crowns ‘Hunger’ best film
I have to hand it to the Evening Standard Awards: they are a breath of fresh air in a suffocating awards season. While their choices can have a bit of an over-democratic, drawn-from-a-hat feel to them (Stephen Daldry for Best Director? On what planet?), they are never afraid to veer from the herd.And so they have done this year, justly and imaginatively handing their Best Film prize to Steve McQueen’s magnificent “Hunger” at last night’s London awards dinner. It’s a small but prestigious citation for the film, voted as it is by a panel of leading British critics, including Standard stalwart Derek Malcolm and the Telegraph’s excellent Tim Robey.
If you ask me (which no one did, but I’ll say it anyway), they royally fluffed Best Actor, curiously settling on a tie between Michael Sheen and the admittedly very good Pat Shortt, which rather embarrassingly left Michael Fassbender — easily the most deserving nominee — the lone loser.
They redeemed themselves, however, with an inspired choice in Best Actress. Bypassing the obvious Kate Winslet option, they instead honoured Tilda Swinton for her extraordinary, bruising work in “Julia,” which I’m beginning to think may well be the thesp’s finest performance to date. (No mean feat, that.) The fact that BAFTA essentially handed Swinton a nod for just showing up in “Burn After Reading,” but failed to even longlist her for “Julia,” is yet another reason why we shouldn’t even be paying attention to that particular shindig this year. (But hey, tune in for my BAFTA live-blog on Sunday!)
Elsewhere, Martin McDonagh racked up another screenplay win, filmmaker Joanna Hogg deservedly took the Newcomer award (beating Dev Patel in the process), and the wonderful Sally Hawkins pipped co-star Eddie Marsan (now wouldn’t that have been a good tie opportunity?) to the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy. (I still wouldn’t quite call “Happy-Go-Lucky” a comedy, but let’s not split hairs.) Yep, the best performance of 2008 still won’t go away, no matter what the Academies on either side of the Atlantic think.
Mike Leigh, meanwhile, bagged a career achievement award. Full list of nominees and winners (in italics) after the cut.
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Sidebar clean-up, predix, etc.
Since I’ve been hoofing it in Santa Barbara since the day of the Oscar nominations, I haven’t had a moment to clean up the predictions sidebar with new pics and the usual asterisks to signify my predictions. Well, it’s done now. All the pics represent my predictions in the various categories, all subject to change, of course.
I don’t anticipate writing any lengthy “Off the Carpet” columns unless something really shakes the race up, but it all seems to be falling into place, no? Then again, when you get comfortable with the season, that’s when it surprises you.
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‘Sugar’ trailer
I’ve already expressed my admiration for “Sugar,” the wonderful new baseball-oriented social drama from “Half Nelson” creators Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. So has Kris. This trailer possibly makes the film look a little broader and more conventional than it really is, but I can assure you it’s going to be one of the year’s finest. (Thanks to Nick for the tip.)
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What does it all mean?
“Pictures at a Revolution,” Mark Harris’s smart, keen-eyed study of the cultural implications of the 1967 Best Picture race, is without a doubt one of the best books ever written on the subject of the Academy Awards. So it’s hardly surprising that Harris, in a piece for yesterday’s Observer, has provided the most intelligent take on this year’s awards race to date.What’s particularly interesting is that, while he just wrote an entire volume on the countercultural meaning of a Best Picture race in a pivotal year in Hollywood history, he’s quick to avoid such a unified reading of this years nominees — effectively and wittily debunking several trends that many Oscar-watchers have attempted to glean from the crop:
1) The Academy has a new, more global outlook, represented by the 10 nominations given to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Alternatively, the Academy suddenly has a new, more insularly American outlook, as evidenced by the fact that 17 of the 20 acting nominees are from the US, the most since the early 1990s.
2) The “gay mafia” in the Academy, outraged by the passage of the anti-gay marriage amendment Proposition 8 in California, powered the gay-rights drama Milk into the race with eight nominations. However, it will never win, because the Academy is hopelessly homophobic, as we all are presumed to have learned when Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash.
3) In a time of great economic uncertainty for the major studios, Hollywood reasserted its authority by bestowing 13 nominations on the high-grossing, high-budget product of two conglomerates, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But the Academy simultaneously renounced any interest in supporting studios or representing popular taste by snubbing Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Dark Knight, excluding it from consideration for best picture, director or screenplay.
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‘Skin’ takes the Santa Barbara Audience Award…but where are the buyers?
One of the films I caught during the recent Santa Barbara International Film Festival but neglected to mention was Anthony Fabian’s “Skin,” the true-life story of Sandra Laing, a black girl born to white parents in Apartheid era South Africa.The film has been bouncing around the festival circuit — Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, AFI — but despite landing buyers in a few foreign markets, American distributors have shied away.
“Skin” boasts solid performances from Sophie Okonedo and Sam Neill. It’s quite accessible and is the kind of thing you’d expect a dependent to pick up without blinking. I wasn’t blown away by the film or anything, but it’s certainly marketable. So what gives?
Well Fabian’s film somewhat surprisingly took the Audience Award in Santa Barbara over the weekend, it’s first gong so far. I expected something like “C’est pas moi, je le jurre!” to win the award, or one of the Asian dazzlers, like “Suspect X,” each of them audience favorites during the fest. But “Skin” made its stand.
Maybe those domestic buyers will come calling now.
