In Contention

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Film Editing

    I’m afraid you’ll find that I’m having trouble getting all that excited about this year’s race for Best Film Editing. How can I when the absolute best editing job of the year (from a true master, no less) was shunned altogether, while a cruel joke was played in the form of “Inception” editor Lee Smith getting the shaft, too.

    The below is a decent set of contenders with an array of virtues. It’s just a shame that the editor’s branch is so slavishly devoted to Best Picture frontrunners, especially when truly exceptional work that doesn’t necessarily find itself dovetailing with Oscar bait is ignored each and every year. Nevertheless, the statistic remains: in 30 years, no film not nominated here has gone on to win Best Picture.

    The nominees are:

    “Black Swan” (Andrew Weisblum)
    “The Fighter” (Pamela Martin)
    “The King’s Speech” (Tariq Anwar)
    “127 Hours” (Jon Harris)
    “The Social Network” (Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter)

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  • 2/21 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Seidler’s Oscar virgin confessions, Bier on ‘Better World,’ the close races

    • David Seidler: Confessions of a 73-year-old Oscar virgin. [Los Angeles Times]

    • Ageism and the Oscar party Bollywood would throw. [The Huffington Post]

    • Anne Thompson talks to “In a Better World director Susanne Bier. [Thompson on Hollywood]

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  • ‘A Prophet’ tops International Cinephile Society honors

    One last set of kinda-critics’ awards to see out the season — the International Cinephile Society is an online group of journalists, academics and industry professionals that, true to their name, offers a slightly more global outlook in their measuring of the year’s best.

    It’s a small organization, but I mention their awards here for two reasons: 1) I’m one of the voters, and 2) despite that hindrance, they’ve assembled one of the best winners lists I’ve seen all season. Jacques Audiard’s long-lingering prison drama “A Prophet” evidently still weighs heavily on people’s minds, as it took the group’s top two awards, plus an acting win for Niels Arestrup.

    Its tally was equalled, however, by “Another Year” and “The Social Network,” making for a pretty generous spread of choices — few of which we’re likely to see echoed on Sunday night. Vive la différence, and all that. Full list of winners after the cut.

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  • 44 years old today

    If only…

  • Overkill

  • Prediction conundrum of the day

    You may have heard Anne and I get into it over the design categories in Friday’s Oscar Talk.  For costumes, she maintained that the great (and deserving) Colleen Atwood is likely to win for “Alice in Wonderland.” Yet, as best I can tell, the only true fantasies to win the award — ever — are “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (a bona fide sweeper) and “Star Wars” (I’m considering “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” a period entry).  And no Tim Burton film has won here when nominated, unfortunately.  I’m thinking “The King’s Speech.”

    She also contended that Tim Burton’s film and “Inception” are more likely to win Best Art Direction than the period frontrunner.  You know where I stand on what’s deserving, but I don’t think the Academy at large is savvy enough to go there.  History is on the side of “Alice in Wonderland” when you consider the fact that no Tim Burton film nominated for Best Art Direction has ever lost (going all the way back to my beloved “Batman”).  So suddenly I’m leaning in that direction more than I was for costumes.  Additionally, fantasies have historically fared better here than in Best Costume Design.

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  • BOX OFFICE: ‘Swan,’ ‘Speech’ cross $100 million

    The headline says it all. The two films join “Toy Story 3,” “Inception” and “True Grit” as the only Best Picture nominees to reach that mark this year. “The Fighter” has slowed too much to get there and a re-release of “The Social Network” didn’t go as well as planned in that regard.

    (Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)

  • BERLIN: ‘Nader and Simin’ wins big

    Unlike large voting bodies such as the Academy, the decisions of rotating festival juries are rarely easy to anticipate — when only six people are determining the awards, as was the case at this year’s Berlinale, who knows what idiosyncratic personal tastes might come into play?

    So it is that the only truly surprising thing about this year’s Berlin Competition winners, announced at a ceremony last night, is just how unsurprising they are. As I predicted in my Friday review of both films, Isabella Rossellini and her fellow jurors sided with the critics, as it came down to Béla Tarr’s imposing survival study “The Turin Horse” and Asghar Farhadi’s intricate moral drama “Nader and Simin, a Separation” for the Golden Bear.

    As expected, it was Farhadi’s more accessible, though no less deserving, film that came out on top — two years after the filmmaker took the festival’s Best Director award for “About Elly” — while a seemingly surly Tarr had to settle for the runner-up Grand Prix. (The severe Hungarian auteur was there to pick up his award, but refused to give an acceptance speech.)

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  • ‘True Grit’ wins CAS

    The second industry organization of the night has announced, and as a tip of the hat to the SoundWorks Collection (which reported the news via Twitter), I figured I’d offer up their custom profile of the film. I knew there was some complaining about the “Inception” mix in the sound community, but I don’t know that it’ll stretch to the Academy at large, which will still likely go the route of the big blockbuster. But it’s very much between these two films.

    Our Oscar Guide on this year’s Best Sound Mixing category can be found here.

  • ‘Social,’ ‘Alice’ win ACE awards

    Alright, so I should have gone with what I said was the safe bet for the ACE drama Eddie.  Rather than making history by awarding a film not nominated for the editing Oscar and giving it to the truly deserving contender, “Inception,” the editors decided to rethink it and go with “The Social Network” instead.  Fair enough.

    I was, however, correct in assuming “Alice in Wonderland” had a better play on the win than the other comedy hopefuls.  “Toy Story 3” triumphed in the animated field as expected, while I was also on the money with “Exit Through the Gift Shop” winning in the doc category.  I’ll take three out of four.

    “Inception” could, however, take the Cinema Audio Society award for sound mixing, which is what most are expecting.  More on that when those awards wrap up shortly.

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  • Weekend polls

    FYI, I’ve reloaded the short film live action poll for today, since they were just released last weekend and many may have been able to see and vote.  Tomorrow I’ll reload the docs (last weekend we reloaded the animated shorts).

  • CINEJABBER: Where is my mind?

    The ACE Eddies and CAS awards are tonight, the MPSE awards tomorrow, the Costume Designers Guild Tuesday, the Indie Spirit Awards a week from today, the Oscars next Sunday. I think I see a checkered flag in the distance.

    I don’t have much for you here this week, but you know the drill. Open thread. Happy Saturday.

  • WEEKLY WRAP: BAFTA ‘Speech’ sweep, ASC upset, Berlinale coverage

    • To the surprise of precisely no one, hometown favorite “The King’s Speech” reigned supreme at the BAFTAs.

    • Before you go basing your Oscar predictions on the BAFTA outcome, Kris pointed out a crucial caveat.

    • “Inception” added another guild award to its mantel, as Wally Pfister beat Roger Deakins to the American Society of Cinematographers’ top prize.

    • Guy hobbled off to the Berlinale, where his festival coverage included an early 2011 Oscar prediction for Vanessa Redgrave in Ralph Fiennes’s “Coriolanus.”

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  • James Franco joins the Twitterfolk

    After viewing his art exhibition yesterday, I suggested James Franco might want to remove one string from his bow, but the man apparently thinks he hasn’t been busy enough lately: he can now add “celebrity Twitterer” to his increasingly long list of occupations. There’s not much yet on the @jamesfranco account to prompt discussion — just two introductory tweets to a rapidly accrued 45,000 followers (and counting, of course) — but I have no doubt he’ll mold his entertaining odd persona to the medium soon enough. His online hello is below. (Meanwhile, while we’re gathering Franco videos, he and Judd Apatow kid about Oscar hosting after the cut.)

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  • BERLIN: Béla Tarr and Golden Bear favorites

    The Berlinale competition drew to a close this morning, with Joshua Marston’s “The Forgiveness of Blood” — more on that in a final roundup this weekend — wrapping up a selection that’s been a typically mixed bag for the festival. Healthy critical argument has flared up over a number of titles — including lone Asian entry “Come Rain, Come Shine,” a bare-bones day in the life of a separating couple that struck some as delicately affecting and others merely as attractively vacant. (I’m one of the others, sad to say.)

    Meanwhile, films the critical majority has sided against include “Lipstikka,” a reportedly bananas Israeli melodrama that Telegraph critic Tim Robey warned me off with this choice dialogue sample: “You play games with me, like you used to do with your men, with your sex and boobs.” Part of me regrets missing this one.

    Amid the splinters of the Competition, however, a pair of critical favorites have moved comfortably ahead of the pack in terms of general approval and all-round buzz — they screened three days ago, eons in festival time, yet I’ve barely heard anyone talk about any other films since. I’m afraid to say that my own top film of the fest, Cameroon-set German drama “Sleeping Sickness” (reviewed here), isn’t one of them.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 53 — BAFTA fallout, foreign language and animated short races, Banksy in L.A.

    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.

    We’ve got another 10 days left in the 2010-2011 awards season, not that anyone’s counting. That means three more episodes of Oscar Talk and Anne and I will exit stage right, but for now, there is still, as always, plenty to chew on. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Documentary (Feature)

    It has been noted what a solid year of documentary filmmaking 2010 was. It was well-reflected in the Academy’s initial narrowing of the feature field to 15 contenders and is certainly evident in the ultimate quintet of nominees, each of them informative and bold in their own ways.

    Still, it came as quite a shock to many that the perceived frontrunner of the year, Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman,” was left off the list. Theories run rampant, but at the end of the day, it seemed the branch just didn’t go for the film’s stretching of truths and hastily boiled-down rhetoric. Nevertheless, an opportunity may have been missed to shine a light on the issue of education reform, which is still a considerable one.

    The nominees are:

    “Exit through the Gift Shop” (Banksy and Jaimie D’Cruz)
    “Gasland” (Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic)
    “Inside Job” (Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs)
    “Restrepo” (Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger)
    “Waste Land” (Lucy Walker and Angus Aynsley)

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  • “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s gone. Had. You lose.”