In Contention

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  • The lost contenders of ‘For Colored Girls’

    Thanks to a crippling flu attack during the film’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it UK release, I was late in getting round to Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” — a rumored Oscar spoiler for about seven-and-a-half minutes back in the autumn, before Lionsgate got curiously tentative about publicizing it.

    A paucity of press screenings meant several key online voices missed the film entirely; they haven’t been that generous with awards screeners, either.

    Given Perry’s history, and the steamroller-subtle nature of the film, the studio can’t have been expecting a critical hit — though it found some prominent supporters anyway, chief among them Manohla Dargis. I heard from a number of people I trust that the film, a free adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s beloved 1970s “choreopoem,” was messy and misjudged, while others acknowledged that it retained an inelegant brute power.

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  • On the costumes of ‘True Grit’

    Back during the pre-holiday build of Tech Support Interviews with the below-the-line talent of Joel and Ethan Coen’s “True Grit,” you’ll recall my conversation with Mary Zophres on the costumes of the film.  Today we’ve got a nifty featurette for you built around the threads of the film.  It makes for a nice reminder that, one week from today, the Costume Designers Guild will announce it’s nominees:

  • Predict the Golden Globe winners

    The Critics’ Choice Movie Awards are tonight a 6pm.  I have generally refrained from predicting those awards since becoming a BFCA member four years ago, but I think we can all take an educated guess as to which way the wind will blow this evening.

    Sunday, the Golden Globes keep the party going as 90 glad-handed foreign press members bestow awards for the year’s best.  For some reason Ricky Gervais was asked back to host after last year’s awkward snooze-fest.  He’ll be doing the song and dance for a drunken crowd.  The usual.  (Anyone missing the year they had to just get it over with via Access Hollywood?  Honest question.)

    Anyway, here’s the usual space for predictions.  I’m not taking too many risks and I feel pretty good about most of my calls.  It’s very much a predictable affair, I think.  Unlike last year (when I was criticized for such a stupid call as “The Hangover” for Best Picture — yep).  I frankly think everyone is filing in line, ready for it to be over.  So chalk it up to the frontrunner and let’s get out of this season.

    Oh, wait…six more weeks.

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  • ACE springs for Best Picture frontrunners

    Guy rightly noted yesterday a seemingly “whatever” coagulation of the guild awards circuit into “easy-to-recall season staples.” If you were hoping the American Cinema Editors (ACE) would put an end to that, keep dreaming.

    Of course, ACE historically skews as populist and inside-the-box as the DGA set, which is why the two are often coupled for maximum tea leaf importance when forecasting Oscar. But one at least hoped for a “District 9”-level statement of “we like stuff that has no chance of winning Best Picture,” but it wasn’t to be.

    The “surprise,” for most, will likely be Pamela Martin joining the guild party for “The Fighter,” but given the givens, it’s not such a left-field pick. Season heavy, boxing film (which does well with editors), etc. She’ll probably be an Oscar nominee, too, but I must say, it’s a shame the year’s best job at the Steambeck, “Shutter Island,” was ignored here after an early below-the-line guild showing.

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  • 1/14 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Weinstein on the “Oscar movie,” HFPA sued, more bad ‘Social’ breath

    • Former Golden Globes publicist Michael Russell sues the HFPA two days before its biggest night leveling a boatload of accusations. [The Wrap]

    • Harvey Weinstein himself admits that the stereotype of the classic “Oscar movie” is probably gone. [The Carpetbagger]

    • Still beating David Fincher up over “The Social Network”‘s bad breath. [Slate]

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  • “Just kidding. It’s an inception machine.”

    The “Jackass” crew have produced a number of send-ups of the year’s awards hopefuls for tomorrow’s Critics’ Choice Movie Awards (which I will be attending once again).  Courtesy of /Film, here’s the “Inception” bit:

  • On the costumes of ‘The Fighter’

    When the Costume Designers’ Guild announce their nominees next week, I have no doubt that Mark Bridges’ work on “The Fighter” will show up in their contemporary category — not really the right classification for a film whose lurid early-1990s threads are as meticulously era-specific as any of 2010’s more lavish period spectacles. (If you didn’t cringe and/or chuckle at the first sight of Christian Bale’s balloon pants, chances are you weren’t alive in 1991.)

    Either way, it remains perhaps my favorite costuming of the year, even if the Academy is unlikely to agree. That said, they’ve been warming to more modern work in recent years — with nods for the high-gloss couture of “The Devil Wears Prada” and the cheap 70s duds of “Milk” — even if corsets and hoop skirts invariably eke out the win.

    This year’s Costume Design field, however, is lean enough that a contemporary nominee or two could squeeze in.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Jawellnofine

    (Updated Oscar predictions here.)

    It’s six years this month since I left Johannesburg for the sodden streets of London, so it could just be that I’m in a commemorative mood, but the endlessly useful South African idiom “jawellnofine” (mostly redundant translation: “yes… well… no… fine”) has been on my mind rather a lot this week. It’s a versatile Frankenstein term that, like a more finely calibrated “whatever,” can express everything from dispassionate approval to passive-aggressive indifference to reluctant acceptance — or any combination of these at once.

    How am I currently feeling about the Oscar season, you ask? Jawellnofine.

    It’d be churlish for me to complain too vigorously about the current state of the race. After all, five of the films currently sitting in the “most likely” pile for a Best Picture nomination — “The Fighter,” “Black Swan,” “The Kids Are All Right,” “The Town” and “Winter’s Bone” — placed in my own Best of 2010 list last week: hardly an unhappy stat, even if my and the Academy’s respective Top Tens will have only a 20% overlap.

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  • Iowa critics add to ‘Network’ haul

    If I’m not mistaken, save for the International Film Music Critics (which is obviously geared toward music rather than filmmaking), the Iowa Film Critics have put a bow on this year’s critics’ awards circuit by dishing out a Best Picture honor to, well…what else?

    Onward through the guilds.  The American Cinema Editors (ACE) announce tomorrow morning.  And the Costume Designers Guild (CDG) and Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) will wrap that nominations circuit up when they announce a week from tomorrow on January 21.  (And by then we’ll already be discussing the implications of the BFCA and Golden Globe winners, while looking ahead to the PGA awards.

    And the season keeps on keepin’ on.  Stay updated, as always, via The Circuit.

  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The wizardry of ‘TRON Legacy’

    It’s somewhat intriguing to note how far the visual effects side of filmmaking has come in the last three decades.  When “TRON” was released in 1982, it’s FX wizardry was disqualified from Academy Award consideration.  The reason: the use of computer technology to achieve its look and environment was deemed, believe it or not, “cheating.”

    Today, hard drives and databases are considered vital tools in the filmmaker’s arsenal, and not simply in the blockbuster realm, either.  Not only that, but digital production is very much the future of the medium.  And the craftsmen and women at Digital Domain are a big part of that ever-changing equation.

    A few weeks back I trekked out to the company’s Venice, CA production facility to talk about the work put into that film’s sequel, “TRON Legacy,” with CEO Cliff Plumer, commercial division head Ed Ulbrich, visual effects supervisor Eric Barba and animation head Steve Preeg.  That new vision was very much at the forefront of discussion.

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  • Fincher calls it down the middle

    Of course, no shock that the clearest vision and interpretation of the film comes from the guy responsible for it:

    I hate the awards part of the moviemaking process…And besides, on Social Network, I didn’t really agree with the critics’ praise. It interested me that Social Network was about friendships that dissolved through this thing that promised friendships, but I didn’t think we were ripping the lid off anything. The movie is true to a time and a kind of person, but I was never trying to turn a mirror on a generation…Let’s hope we strove to get at something interesting, but Social Network is not earth-shattering.

    From the director’s interview with W Magazine.

    [Photo: Columbia Pictures]

  • 1/13 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: No dice for Winklevi, Alice Ward fights for her life, Weaver keeps making the rounds

    • Away from Oscar and in real life, Micky Ward’s mother is in a hospital fighting for her life… [Boston Globe]

    • …while the Winklevi lose their Facebook settlement appeal. [Paid Content]

    • Is “The King’s Speech” royalist propaganda? [The Guardian]

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  • One of these things is not like the other

    Though I guess it goes to show how well it’s registering on home video:

  • Taking questions for Oscar Talk

    You know the drill.  Rifle off your queries and we’ll try to address a few during the podcast.  PLEASE KEEP IT TO ONE QUESTION, and as always, try to keep it fresh.

  • ‘Enter the Void: Bigger, Longer and Uncut’

    Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void,” which was finally released in autumn after lying in distribution limbo since Cannes 2009, is not exactly a film that inspires widespread agreement.

    My own 2009 review of the French enfant terrible‘s deranged follow-up to “Irréversible” dismissed it as “fatuous… deploys an arsenal of tricked-out technique and a colossal running time of 163 minutes to make the startling revelations that death is, like, sad, and that drug-dealing is generally not a good idea.”

    Kris, by contrast, couldn’t have landed any further from me on this one, going so far as to name the film in his Top 10 of the year. It’s that kind of conversation-piece picture, and we’re grateful for them — and even more grateful now that IFC has announced plans to re-release the film theatrically in the form its maker intended.

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  • Foreign Oscar watch: Israel, Italy, Germany and Sweden

    A couple of months ago, I compiled some critical thoughts on five films in contention for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, ranging from the hotly fancied (France’s “Of Gods and Men”) to the longest of long shots (Estonia’s “The Temptation of St. Tony”). It was intended to be the first in a series of posts spotlighting as many of the 65 submissions as I could get my hands on — but alas, in the chaos of the season, my plans got away from me.

    Now, with exactly a week to go until the Academy announces the nine-film shortlist on 19 January, it’s time to belatedly return to the category. At this late stage, I’ve still seen only a third of the competing field, with a handful of unseen screeners patiently piled atop my DVD player. Sadly, two of the films most heavily tipped for a nomination — Canada’s “Incendies” and Denmark’s Golden Globe-nominated “In a Better World” — are not among them.

    I have, however, caught up with the submissions of four countries frequently favored by the Academy. My viewing, however, only confirmed the relative scarcity of obvious heavyweights in what is always an unpredictable race.

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  • DGA announces documentary nominees

    Two days after revealing their feature film nominees, the Directors’ Guild of America has named their five selections in the documentary category. It’s a list that mostly lends credence to the presumed Oscar frontrunners, with one notable exception: Chinese director Lixin Fan, whose lavishly acclaimed debut “Last Train Home” was left off the Academy’s 15-title documentary shortlist, to the dismay of many a critic.

    Fan isn’t the only first-timer to crack the DGA’s list: war journalist Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington made the cut for their gutsy foray into filmmaking, “Restrepo.” Notably, if not surprisingly, absent is “Exit Through the Gift Shop” director Banksy — the Guild was never likely to tap a celebrity outsider who won’t even identify himself, and I suspect the Academy will have similar reservations.

    Meanwhile, note the three overlaps between the PGA and DGA lists, “Client 9,” “Waiting for Superman” and “Inside Job,” with only the last-named film also scoring with the Writers’ Guild. Just in case you hadn’t spotted the one to beat. Check out the nominees at The Circuit.

    [Photo: National Geographic Entertainment]

  • Updates to The Circuit

    A few things.  First, I don’t think I ever pointed out the Vancouver critics’ picks.  The DGA announced nominees for documentary filmmaking and Tyler Perry owned the NAACP Image Award nominations.