• Larry Rohter talks “Outside the Law” with director Rachid Bouchareb, who calls the film “a historical continuation” of 2007’s “Days of Glory” and mentions a third part is in the cards. [The Carpetbagger]
• The biggest lies of this year’s Oscar contenders. [The Race]
• As “The King’s Speech” dusts off its mantle, this taxing conversation keeps getting play. [Entertainment Weekly]
Anne and I will be briefly previewing the American Cinema Editors and Cinema Audio Society awards in tomorrow’s Oscar Talk, and maybe a little Motion Picture Sound Editors thrown in to boot. All three will be announcing winners this weekend, while members of the Costume Designers Guild will put a bow on the guild season Tuesday night when they present their awards.
So, let’s start with the editors. It’s one of the oldest industry organizations, going all the way back to 1961, and this year marks its 50th anniversary. In that 50 year existence, the Society has awarded the eventual Oscar winner for Best Film Editing 35 times.
Additionally, 20 times their choice was also reflected in the Academy’s selection of Best Picture of the year (including four instances where the Society awarded a film that did not win Best Film Editing at the Oscars but still won Best Picture).
One of the earliest installments of this season’s Oscar Guide covered the Best Original Song category. It could be a tight race, though most are betting on Randy Newman (who we spoke to earlier today) taking his second Oscar, for “We Belong Together.”
Another strong possibility, especially given its Best Picture nomination, is “127 Hours” landing the win for Dido and A.R. Rahman’s “If I Rise.” It would be Rahman’s third win to date and he’s also nominated for Best Original Score. It seems unlikely for the film to score anywhere else, so it’s not a bad call if you feel like going out onto a limb.
Fox Searchlight has provided us with the official music video for the film. It’s not the most creative video ever cobbled together, but it gets the word out a little more. Check it out after the jump.
Over at his indieWIRE blog The Lost Boy, Peter Knegt expresses some displeasure with what he calls a “boring” list of Academy Award presenters announced so far. So he’s compiled a list of suggestions that could spice things up on Oscar night.
For instance, what a howler it would be to see Bono and Julie Taymor, the creative minds behind the disastrous Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” (which is currently being rewritten at the last minute) present Best Original Song? Or how about notorious David O. Russell rivals George Clooney and Lily Tomlin (who is actually close friends with Russell now, it should be said) presenting the clip for “The Fighter?”
I think he’s on to something by suggesting Armie Hammer present the Best Visual Effects award with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, but I’d tweak that a bit and say Hammer should present, via video, AS Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Anyway, head on over to The Lost Boy to read up on Peter’s suggestions. Any ideas from the peanut gallery here?
[Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures]
This video has been making the rounds this week. I keep forgetting to pass it along:
A number of people asked about the BAFTA outcome in our solicitation for Oscar Talk queries this week. We’ll be discussing last weekend’s awards on the show, but I thought I’d address those questions separately here.
A sample:
With the BAFTA below-the-line awards not all going to The King’s Speech (even things like Art Direction and Costume), as expected, is the extremely well-covered supposed sweep of the film still holding strong?
My answer: Yes, it is. Something the BAFTA does (which, frankly, the Academy should do, but more on that in a moment) is relegate all categories except Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film and the acting fields to branch-specific voting. That means production designers decided that “Inception” deserved to win Best Production Design at BAFTA, costume designers decided that “Alice in Wonderland” deserved to win Best Costume Design and, indeed, directors decided David Fincher deserved to win Best Director.
As a nice break from the cynicism of Oscar season, I’ve been following “God of Love” director Luke Matheny on Twitter and delighting in his head-in-the-clouds, it’s-all-happening ride. At his blog he’s been posting some nice candids from the Nominees Luncheon. Godspeed to him, however the short film race turns out.
When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, composer Alan Menken almost tied Randy Newman for third-most nominations among living artists. But Newman inched away, nabbing his own nomination for the song “We Belong Together” (listen) from “Toy Story 3” and thereby maintaining a firm grip on the designation.
It was Newman’s 20th nomination to date, a healthy run by anyone’s measure. But it was extra special given his recent history with Pixar Animation Studios, and the voice he has given to the “Toy Story” franchise since its 1995 beginnings.
He was able to put a bow on the series in his own special way, and should he win the Oscar next weekend, it’ll be his second trophy. His first also came for a Pixar entry, “Monsters, Inc.,” which netted him the gold in this very same category.
James Franco obviously had to sleep for a couple of hours between rehearsing for the Oscars, campaigning for the Oscars, filming one of his four films set for release this year, preparing to direct two prestige literary adaptations, planning his Broadway revival of “Sweet Bird of Youth” opposite Nicole Kidman, writing the Great American Novel and solving world hunger — since amid those distractions, he didn’t have a film to premiere at this year’s Berlinale. The man’s slacking.
Still, he isn’t entirely absent from the city over the festival period: his first solo European art exhibition, “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” opened last week in a private gallery in Berlin’s hipster-saturated Oranienburger Strasse district. As a welcome distraction from a second consecutive day of mostly unfulfilling filmgoing (the festival schedule is very much in the winding-down stages, though I still have some crackers to review), I went along to check it out — and as much as I like Franco, I must admit that if, amid his legion of other activities, “visual artist” got dropped from his résumé, it wouldn’t be the most crushing of losses.
(Note: depending on your sensitivities, pictures after the cut may not be suitable for the office.)
This year the visual effects branch of the Academy followed the lead of the sound editing category and widened its net to five nominees. It did not, however, follow suit by eliminating the superfluous bake-off process, which whittles the contenders down to seven before deciding on the ultimate slate of nominees.
This year the two films that missed the cut after making the bake-off were the inventive “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” and, famously, the effects beast of the year “TRON Legacy.” The latter was shunned as a result of shoddy de-aging work despite having quality in spades throughout the rest of the film, but regardless, a drama with a single effects scene of note and a sequel with nothing new to offer managed to slide in instead.
The nominees are:
“Alice in Wonderland” (Ken Ralston, David Schaub, Carey Villegas and Sean Phillips)
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” (Tim Burke, John Richardson, Christian Manz and Nicolas Aithadi)
“Hereafter” (Michael Owens, Bryan Grill, Stephan Trojanski and Joe Farrell)
“Inception” (Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb)
“Iron Man 2” (Janek Sirrs, Ben Snow, Ged Wright and Daniel Sudick)
• Nikki Finke chats with Relativity Media honcho Ryan Kavanaugh. [Deadline]
• Gregory Ellwood thinks Melissa Leo flushed her chances at an Oscar down the drain. [Awards Campaign]
• Melena Ryzik catches up with “Waste Land” director Lucy Walker. (Oscar Guide on documentary features coming tomorrow.) [The Carpetbagger]
Alright, you know the drill. What do you want us to address? PLEASE KEEP IT TO ONE QUESTION, and as always, keep it fresh.
Regular readers probably know by now how much I love Kelly Reichardt’s spare, serene Oregon Trail western “Meek’s Cutoff,” which premiered at Venice back in the early days of autumn (how long ago does that feel?), clocked in at #2 on my Best of 2010 list and finally hits US theaters in April. (An unglamorous but sensible choice of slot for a challenging arthouse picture.) Now the first poster for the film has hit, and while the atypically badass image of a fierce-looking Michelle Williams brandishing a rifle was seemingly chosen to lure the “True Grit” audience, it does convey the film’s pastel, handmade visual quality. Full poster after the cut; check out my Venice review of the film here.
Sorry there was no Berlinale dispatch yesterday. It was my birthday, and after “celebrating” it with a triple-bill of variously despairing Competition entries — finishing with “The Turin Horse,” Béla Tarr’s impressive 146-minute ode to blizzards, boiled potatoes and dying — more traditional festivities were in order, beginning with several stiff drinks. There’s nothing like a film festival to infuse a birthday with bleaker-than-usual ruminations on mortality.
After a dawdling start, however, the Competition really kicked into gear yesterday with a pair of substantial auteur works that will likely remain the prime topic of critical conversation for the duration of the festival: the aforementioned Tarr opus and Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s “Nader and Simin, A Separation,” now the runaway favorite for the Golden Bear for reasons both artistic and political.
I’ll discuss both these films in due course, but neither one has quite displaced an earlier (and more critically divisive) Competition title from the top of my personal best-of-the-fest list — and indeed, if anything does in the next three days, I’ll be a very happy (and surprised) man. That title would be German director Ulrich Köhler’s third feature “Sleeping Sickness” (****), an arrestingly structured and humidly atmospheric study of immigrant living and integration in west Africa that would make a valuable companion piece to Claire Denis’s more pristine “White Material,” but also warrants discussion on its own merits.
More of Banksy’s hijacking of Los Angeles in the run-up to Oscar at his official site.
Amy Adams. You know the girl. Sweet, bright-eyed, purveyor of naive, fresh-faced screen creations. You certainly wouldn’t peg her as an expected fit for Charlene Fleming, boxer Micky Ward’s tough-as-nails bartender girlfriend in David O. Russell’s “The Fighter,” but as it turns out, she delivers perhaps her most accomplished performance to date in that role, in that film.
“Sometimes people’s confidence in you is the most input that you need,” Adams says over lunch in December, in the middle of awards season but just before the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, tapped her as a nominee for Best Supporting Actress in the film.
“A lot of times when I’ve approached projects — I haven’t ended up playing these characters — but with characters that are different than how people see me, I feel a real sense of them challenging me. ‘Can you do this?’ There’s no real way to answer that question except to do it.”
One of the things I’ll likely take away from this crazy season, more than the back-biting and the intensity of the race, more, even, than the films I loved, is Roger Ebert’s continued resurgence as one of the most vital voices of our community. His energy hit a new level last year with elevated output via his blog and a big splash on Twitter, and this year, he reclaimed “At the Movies” with two polished hosts at the helm.
Now comes this. Ebert announced via Twitter yesterday, “Thanks to the Library of Congress and some fans, the earliest years of Siskel & Ebert are online.” And now, for posterity, we have SiskelandEbert.org, packed with classic episodes of the duo’s film review segments going all the way back to that first back-and-forth over “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” 35 years ago.
I’ve included that episode after the jump, but head on over there if you want to dive into the history books. A true delight for all film fans.
Recently the International Film Music Critics Association were the last critics group to offer their (specialized) thoughts on the 2010 film year. The announcement made for an interesting counter to the year in score awardage. And the eventual nominees for Best Original Score reflected, if nothing else, a continued break with tradition.
The music branch has been slowly initiating new blood as of late, though it hasn’t completely relinquished its trademark consistency. A big step was made in the recognition of one of the year’s more atypical scores, though a big opportunity was lost with Daft Punk’s failure to register what could have been a truly exciting tip of the Academy’s hat.
The nominees are:
“How to Train Your Dragon” (John Powell)
“Inception” (Hans Zimmer)
“The King’s Speech” (Alexandre Desplat)
“127 Hours” (A.R. Rahman)
“The Social Network” (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross)