In Contention

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  • The 80s yielded one great Best Pic winner: ‘Platoon’

    Ten awards for Best Picture were handed out throughout the 1980s, one of the worst decades for film in history, and I’d wager that only “Platoon,” the Oscar winning giant of 1986, can lay claim to being a great film.

    Oh, that is not to say there were not great films made in the 80s; there were indeed, but nobody went to see them, despite rave reviews. Many of the decade’s very best films were released and abandoned, to be re-discovered on video, at that time a very new addition to the film industry.

    “Raging Bull” ended up being the finest film of the decade, hell one of the five greatest films of all time, yet Oscar did not see it that way. Somehow, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece lost the Oscar for Best Picture and the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Film to Robert Redford and “Ordinary People” — a well crafted film, but hardly the raw and angry work of the former.

    That same year would see the releases of “The Empire Strikes Back” — a superior film to the first “Star Wars” installment, yet snubbed for a nomination for Best Picture — and Richard Rush’s “The Stunt Man,” which might have been a strong choice for a nomination as well.

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  • Indy screenings

    Well the press invite to next weekend’s all media screenings of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” landed yesterday afternoon. Four showings on Sunday starting at 10 in the morning. It seems like it’s been a while since there was one of these all day free-for-alls. When was the last time, “King Kong,” maybe? I don’t know — but the tragedy (well, a personal tragedy, in any case) is that I’ll be across the pond as of Tuesday. So I’ll be checking it out on opening day with everyone else.

  • ‘Synecdoche, New York’ — another makeup contender?

    Rope of Silicon recently posted a series of stills from upcoming releases, including Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” films and Fernando Meirelles’s “Blindness.” But this image from Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” has me wondering if we don’t have another major contender for Best Makeup, a category shaping up to be more competitive than in years past.

    Here’s the pic:

    In addition to this new hopeful, I’d say there are solid bets to be placed on “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Dark Knight,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” and “Tropic Thunder.” Not a shabby start.

  • Who joins the great Best Picture snubs this year?

    It happens every year, a great film, in some cases destined to be remembered more than the eventual Oscar winner is snubbed for a Best Picture nod, or gets nominated and loses to an inferior film that happened to capture the public’s attention at that particular point in history.

    Some of the greatest films of all time lost the top award, “Citizen Kane” among them, arguably the greatest of all time (though I disagree). “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, easily John Huston’s best work, joins the list, as does “The Searchers,” which is in my opinion the finest western ever made and contains the greatest John Wayne performance of all time.

    Remember “Rocky” winning over “All the President’s Men,” “Network” and “Taxi Driver?” Or “Kramer vs. Kramer” over “Apocalypse Now?” In the last twenty years, Oscar has pulled some howlers, some choices that left me nearly putting my foot through the television upon the announcement. The first time I remember being really, truly angry at a lame decision was in 1981 when “Chariots of Fire” bested Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” which I believe to be among the best films of the 80s.

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  • Time Warner weeds out indie filmmaking

    The news that Time Warner is phasing out Picturehouse Entertainment and Warner Independent Pictures was a bit upsetting this morning, I have to say.

    WIP may not have hit any major strides (though a Best Picture nominee one year after it became a brand wasn’t too shabby), but I believe Bob Berney had built something special at Picturehouse, a company that was beginning to look like a real home for filmmakers and visions you can’t put into little boxes.

    Of course, the “dependent” circuit, as it were, has claimed this sort of artists’ haven thing for some time. But long ago many of them began to succumb to the same inflated budgets and profit-obsessed mentalities as their parent companies. I never got that vibe from Picturehouse.

    Just look at some of the product: “Fur,” “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Tristam Shandy,” “Mongol” and “La Vie en Rose,” featuring a lead performance whose ultimate Oscar victory caught more than a few people off guard.

    Forgive me, but the notion that the now in-house New Line Cinema is somehow going to reach the niches that Berney and WIP did is a stretch. The potential seems all too clear for the brand to go back to the genre-soaked days of old, Dimension Films to Warners’ Miramax. But I’m happy to be proven wrong.

    But for me, it’s a sad moment. I liked what Berney had cooking and on the occassions that I spoke to him about this project or that, I thought he had a pretty hip (and, thankfully, realistic) vision of what he could do at the company.

    But what do I know?

  • First (official) look at Sean Penn in ‘Milk’

    Source: Entertainment Weekly

  • Lead actress contenders also join interesting group

    As the piece on actors managed to spark some interest and debate, of course I have to explore the women. Though I am studying just the last 20 years, the Best Actress Oscar has often left some of the greatest performances as mere nominees, or in some cases not even that.

    Katherine Hepburn, though nominated for “The African Queen,” “Summertime,” and “Long Day’s Journey into the Night,” sat at home while others won; sometimes they were deserving, sometimes they weren’t. Gloria Swanson gave possibly the greatest performance by an actress never to win the award with her seething work in “Sunset Boulevard,” easily among the most iconic portrayals in film history. Shall I even mention poor Judy Garland? Robbed of her Oscar for “A Star is Born?” Into the 60s we have Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” and Jane Fonda’s brilliant turn in “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?” — each of them Oscar losers.

    Since 1988, there has been an equal amount of questionable winners in the lead actress category, beginning with Jodie Foster’s win for “The Accused” in a year that saw Mery Streep astound audiences in “A Cry in the Dark,” which won the New York Film Critics Circle award. One year later Jessica Tandy won the Oscar for “Driving Miss Daisy,” besting critics fave Michelle Pfeiffer, who won honors from the LA and NYC critics, as well as the National Society of Film Critics. Insiders had stated that Tandy was destined to win the Oscar the moment she was cast, and indeed she responded with the finest work of her career.

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  • Sean Penn might be the greatest living actor

    After writing my piece on the recent Best Actor winners and non-winners I was rather shocked at the number of comments on Sean Penn’s astounding performance in “Mystic River,” a performance I believe to rank with the best of Brando, Duvall, Nicholson and De Niro.

    I love debate, I love to talk film, and best of all I love debating the merit of performance as I studied method acting in the hopes of becoming an actor before I fell in love with film criticism.

    For the record, I was terrible, but remained fascinated by those who could do it, and Mr. Penn might just be the very best at what he does. Far too often his off-screen antics have over-shadowed his brilliant work as an actor, and while he has mellowed in his later years, he is still every bit as surly and rebellious as he ever was, though as a father and husband perhaps he understands the need for boundaries these days. I had the pleasure of interviewing Penn at the Toronto International Film Festival a few years back, and always believe that there should be no trace of the characters he portrays in his films for him to be judged a great actor. There were none. The person sitting across from me, relaxing when he seemed to know I was here to discuss acting as an art and craft, was not anyone I had seen on film, nor the hot-tempered photography beater of his youth.

    We all became aware of Penn in “Taps” back in the early 80s, but it was his hysterical turn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” that made him a star. I find it difficult sometimes to connect the actor who portrayed the doomed killer in “Dead Man Walking” and the deeply distrubed man in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” to the actor who portrayed the goofy, sunny, surf-loving Jeff Spicoli. Pauline Kael said Penn had the sort of talent that bites you on the nose and she was not off the mark at all.

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  • Someone put Wolf out of my misery…

    He’s embarrassing himself, asking the same question over and over again when it’s clear the callers from Indiana just don’t have any insight into the matter.

  • Batman vs. Iron Man

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlLeCu63HCA

  • That leaked Two Face photo…

    Jeff Wells is running it over at his site. So is AICN. Since I saw at least two take-down orders out there on the net, I refrained from running the pic. But Jeff says he ran it by publicists at Warner Bros. and no one got back to him, so taht was reason enough for him.

    Anyway — while it’s there — what do you think? Personally, if it’s indeed real, I think it’s perfect. Especially knowing what it might look like on film with Wally Pfister playing with the shadows. And it’s downright terrifying.

  • Kidman takes on Dusty: could Oscar beckon?

    Unwritten rule of Oscar strategy #476: playing a troubled popular music icon will probably net you at least a nomination. Just ask Marion Cotillard, Reese Witherspoon, Joaquin Phoenix, Jamie Foxx, Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, Gary Busey, Diana Ross, Susan Hayward… the list goes on.

    It’s not hard to figure out why. Academy voters have long had a bias towards biopics, somehow believing that interpreting a real-life figure, whose physicality, voice and mannerisms are already established, is more of a challenge than creating a fictitious character from scratch. Playing a real-life entertainer only ups the ante, allowing the actor to build multiple performance personae within the character, as well to show off any singing/dancing/playing skills we didn’t know they possessed. (Singing being optional, of course, as Cotillard and Foxx can attest.) Throw in the mental breakdowns and substance abuse problems that generally go with the territory, and you have Academy Award bait of the highest order.

    So the news that Nicole Kidman, arguably the foremost leading lady of her generation, is set to produce and play in a biopic of the late Dusty Springfield, inarguably the greatest white soul singer of all time, can’t fail to prompt early Oscar speculation.

    Even laying aside Springfield’s astonishing musical legacy for a moment, the woman is a fascinating character: born and raised in London, she overcame crippling self-confidence issues to top the U.S. charts in the 1960s, confusing the barriers between what was perceived as “white” and “black” music. As her hold on the charts loosened, however, she descended into a reclusive lifestyle of alcoholism, drug abuse and self-harm, all the while conflicted between her emerging bisexuality and her Catholic faith. Finally clean, she made something of a comeback in the late 80s, before being diagnosed with breast cancer, finally losing the battle in 1999. All this, and with a British accent to boot. Like I said, baity stuff.

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  • Best actor contenders join an eclectic list of recent winners

    Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Frank Langella seem to be the names bandied about for Oscar consideration this year, which would place them in some impressive company of nominees and winners these last 20 years. Of course, that said, there have also been some bizarre choices for the Best Actor award, which has often left me shaking my head in disgust and wondering what these voters were actually seeing.

    Since 1988, there have been 10 winners that perhaps should not have been, the award arguably deserved by another of the nominees, or worse, an actor not nominated! Consider Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” a widely acclaimed performance that asked that he not connect with anyone in the film, never make eye contact, rock back and forth and speak in a nasally voice.

    Stop what you are doing right now and try what he did in the film, and trust me it is very easy to do. Now do you deserve an Oscar for doing what Hoffman did in that film? The real perfortmance in “Rain Man” was that of Tom Cruise, who we watched evolve over the course of the film, and of course the best performance of that year was Gene Hackman as the tough investigator in “Mississippi Burning.” Hackman was nominated, but he stood no chance in the wake of the juggernaut of support for Hoffman, who in fact should have won years before for his miraculous work in “Tootsie!”

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  • What next?

    As you can see in the polls archive, it looks like readers aren’t too receptive to the notion that Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” will be a major awards contender as it sits atop the hep with four or five other “frontrunners” early in the season. Joe Wright’s “The Soloist” wasn’t far behind. We’ll see if you guys were on the money in a matter of months, but for now, we’ve got a new query for you all.

    Now that the summer movie season has exploded onto the scene in the form of last week’s “Iron Man,” what are you most excited about on the horizon? Well, speak up!

    (I went with the nine most likely choices and an “other” option as well. If you’re more psyched for something else, come back here and let us know!)

  • About The Joker, or Heath Ledger, remembered

    In a post earlier today, Kris linked to the new trailer for “The Dark Knight” starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine . . .I could continue. It’s an exceptional cast complete with some of the finest actors from different demographics, Maggie Gyllenhaal, especially, as a needed upgrade from Katie Holmes.

    This trailer gives us an added (and for me, a needed) glimpse into The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger. This performance, characterized by Michael Caine as “the most murderous psychopath you’ve ever seen on screen,” is, arguably, the most anticipated of the year.

    You expected me to write summer, didn’t you, what with all those new and different performances being released: Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones; Will Smith as an invincible man; Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell; Seth Rogen as a stoner; Adam Sandler as a cross between Little Nicky and Bobby Boucher . . .

    I don’t mean to diminish these performances (or those I didn’t mention: Ed Norton as The Incredible Hulk and Emile Hirsch in “Speed Racer”), but they simply don’t inspire me the way Ledger’s performance does. Is that because he’s dead? In part, I’m sure. But friends of mine will attest that I suggested to anyone that would listen that Ledger’s performance would be memorable. Oscar-worthy was used several times, I recall.

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  • ‘Dark Knight,’ YouTubed

    You know…just to round out a few days of Bat-talk:

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKSUCoN7Ioo

  • Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

    Lots of revamping and updating going down on the Oscarweb lately.

    I noticed Sasha Stone is pointing out that old Oscar fan site standby, The Oscar Igloo, has recently changed faces to Awards Circuit (did the Academy give them shit over the Oscar moniker, too?). Now it seems David Poland’s long-in-the-making transformation of The Hot Button into a blog has come to pass.

    I like this change, personally. Poland is a go-to writer for opinion — if anything — during the awards season months, and his work has always been far too scattered between The Hot Blog, The Hot Button and Movie City News. It seems he’s finally consolidating (like the airlines!), and that’s a good thing, if you ask me.

  • Clint Eastwood — anything he does grabs Oscar’s attention

    Let me begin with something very personal, something I prefer not to do in this column. Movies have not mattered much this past week, as my wife of 18 years, the love of my life was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. This Thursday we journey to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto to allow the finest surgeons in the country to go in and take the tumor out, with the hope she does not have to have chemotherapy or radiation. There is a chance I could lose her, and that I couldn’t bear. The past few days have been a blur, and yet it is her who urged me back to the computer, with a gentle, “You can’t let the movie writing stop because of this…please…write…” God I love that girl. She is at this moment snoozing behind me as I write this.

    Later this year we will see the release of “Changeling,” the latest from Clint Eastwood who over the last 16 years has become one of the finest directors working in movies. Now seriously, had anyone ever told me in the 70s that one day I would be celebrating the works of Eastwood the director by writing a book about him and his work, I would have laughed in their face at the thought.

    Dirty Harry, the man who acted with apes, becoming a world class director? Yet here we are in 2008 and Eastwood has won two Academy Awards for Best Director, twice been honored by the Directors Guild of America, and won countless critics prizes for his work. Revered by actors, beloved by the studios for whom he works, and respected by his colleagues, he has quietly risen to the very peak of the directing world, sitting alongside Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. His films have the lean feel and look of the best work of John Huston and Howard Hawks to whom story was paramount.

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