DreamWorks Animation’s “Megamind” is opening wide today, so maybe more of you will be able to see it and comment. I’ve had my say (including a back and forth with Anne about the film on Oscar Talk this morning). But I’d be interested to hear what you all think. Once (or if) you see it, cut loose with your thoughts in the comments section below.
I think it’s safe to say we’ve offered plenty on Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” as of late. Here are my thoughts from Telluride and Guy’s totally different take from London fest. The film opens in limited release today and I’m eager to hear some reader thoughts, so cut loose with your reaction in the comments section below once you see it. (It opens wide on November 19 so feel free to re-visit this thread then.)
Tom O’Neil has officially taken Gold Derby back. The LA Times will still sell advertising at a percentage, but the site is Tom’s once again and today the site launched with a handsome new design.
There are already a few pieces of content in place right now, like an “Oscar Outrages” segment with Kathy Griffin and an editorial pleading the case for Julianne Moore in supporting for “The Kids Are All Right.” He’s also brought back the expert picks section, which was really the first of its ilk before The Envelope’s Buzzmeter and Movie City News’s Gurus o’ Gold came along. Our own Guy Lodge is one of the prognosticative pundits.
As always, the site will not only focus on film awards but also music, television and theater kudos as well. There’s still a lot of filling in to do but it’s off to a nice start. We wish him the best. Check out GoldDerby.com for more.
Two years ago composer A.R. Rahman managed to sweep the music categories at the Academy Awards. One of only two nominations “Slumdog Millionaire” didn’t translate into an Oscar was original song “O…Saya” — because the film’s other key track, “Jai Ho,” won instead.
This year Rahman is back in the mix with the vibrant score for Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours,” and specifically, the original song “If I Rise.” Dido provides the vocals on the song, which plays sporadically at key moments during the film’s climax and finally plays in full over the closing credits.
At the end of the day, this could be a formidable contender in the race for Best Original Song. It’s well-placed in the film and that will go over well when voters sit down and watch all of the contenders in context. At the very least, that’s enough for the track seriously threaten a nomination.
Reader Graysmith alerted me to this yesterday, but it’s worth passing along. Ben Affleck’s “The Town” will be making its way to DVD and Blu-ray on December 17. The film was released in theaters September 17. That makes it three months to the day between release and home video, and to say the least, an incredibly short window.
I remember Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” having an even shorter window (March 5 theatrical, June 1 home video), but this is more significant because clearly Warner Bros. is angling for prime exposure right in the middle of Oscar season. And that mid-December stretch is key, bringing the Golden Globe nominations on the 14th and the SAG nominations on the 16th.
“Inception,” meanwhile, will be hitting stores December 7, so get ready for the buzz to swing back around on both films.
Welcome 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.
As we move into November, AFI Fest is heating up, campaigns are in full swing (talent being pitched left and right) and pretty soon I’ll be eating turkey and watching “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” Crazy. We had a slightly shorter window this week, but let’s see what’s on the docket today…
• Steve Pond gets Danny Boyle’s thoughts on this rash of faintings at screenings of “127 Hours.” [The Odds]
• Sasha Stone calls 2010 (so far) one of the best years for film in recent history. [Awards Daily]
• “Megamind” gets Josh Wigler thinking about the best animated villains of all time. [MTV Movies Blog]
Back-to-back trailers today. A few weeks back we got a look at Peter Weir’s “The Way Back” via the UK trailer. The poster hit recently. Today, Yahoo! Movies has the domestic trailer for the film, which has the proper energy, I think. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.
Fresh on the heels of a domestic one-sheet for the film, today we get a look at the domestic trailer for Sylvain Chomet’s “The Illusionist.” You get a nice listen to the score (which deserves an Oscar nod it will not likely get). Check it out via Apple by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.
Danny Boyle has been wanting to tell the story of Aron Ralston on celluloid for four years now. He met with the mountain climber in 2006 seeking permission, but at the time, Ralston was looking to convey the story in documentary form.
“He didn’t want to make it as a feature with a major actor,” Boyle says, sitting with screenwriter Simon Beaufoy discussing their latest collaboration. “He wanted to narrate it a la ‘Touching the Void.’ Any climber is very much conscious of Joe Simpson and that kind of world. And also he’s not from our world in the media. He and his peer group particularly think Hollywood is bullshit, and you can imagine what they think Hollywood might do to a true story like this.”
Flash forward a few years and Boyle is coming off a high after his film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” swept the Oscars and provided plenty of cachet (and confidence) for him to tackle anything he wanted. But this story of a 27-year-old undergoing physical trauma and mental enlightenment in a tiny Utah canyon was still sticking with him.
As I said last week (and have said several times before), no category is year-in and-year-out more perplexing than Best Makeup. Each year, this branch finds ways to turn otherwise dubious awards contenders into bona fide Oscar nominees — dubious because often nominees might be abysmal or relatively obscure. The branch seems to have its favorites – like Greg Cannom and Rick Baker – but nevertheless manages to snub them sometimes when they seem sure bets.
The category remains the sole remnant of the bake-off system, where the field is narrowed to seven and the nominees chosen from that collective. Year after year, shocking omissions occur in both rounds.
As I stated last time, despite the general weirdness of this category, we can put some traits as more likely to be embraced than others – aging, prosthetics and illness likely top the list. Also, while the category technically rewards both hairstyling and makeup, it rarely seems to concentrate on the former (“The Young Victoria” last year is a notable exception). So all that having been established, what do I expect to see in contention this year?
I ended up missing last night’s premiere of “127 Hours” but man do I wish I had been there. Because these fainting spells are turning into a traveling roadshow experience for the film. First Telluride (where I was skeptical it was anything more than altitude sickness), then Toronto, now the Academy on Wilshire. Maybe they should just start having medics on stand-by.
The incident is being reported as a “diabetic seizure” and apparently came during a not-all-that-intense moment in the film. Gregory Ellwood wrote it up last night. The Hollywood Reporter and David Poland chimed in today. I was reading about it in real time via Steven Zeitchik’s Tweets. Bizarre.
Apparently the film got a standing ovation, as of course it would. Premieres are cake for a film like this. Bummer I couldn’t make it but, onto the next. Check back later today for an interview with the film’s director and writer Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy.
[Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]
Featuring Annette Bening, Helena Bonham Carter, Natalie POrtman, Nicole Kidman, Hilary Swank and Amy Adams:
• Pete Hammond talks “I Am Love” with dark horse Best Actress contender Tilda Swinton. [Deadline]
• How DreamWorks Animation is using social gaming to boost “Megamind.” [Hollywood Reporter]
• Meet the characters of “Morning Glory.” [MakingOf]
The pieces are gradually — very gradually — falling into place for Terrence Malick’s endlessly delayed “The Tree of Life.” First, new adoptive parent Fox Searchlight revealed a US release date of May 27, 2011. Now, courtesy of Collider, we have our first glimpse, albeit not of the finest quality, of a sales poster for the film. A bit of a half-and-halfer, as far as I’m concerned: the image is stark yet subtle, but the clunky typography carries a fan-made look to it.
In addition to the poster, the studious Collider folks have also dug up a synopsis — one that’s been kicking around for a while, I hear — for those itching to know what the hell the film is actually about. It carries a spoiler warning, so I can’t say I’ve read it myself, but it’s also included after the jump if you feel so inclined. Now the only remaining question is: when, are where, are we finally going to clap eyes on it? Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, or none of the above?
When the director of a gentle indie character study—even one joshingly praised as “mumblecore with a plot” by certain critics—cheerfully tells you that his next project is more of a “werewolf buddy cop comedy,” you could be forgiven for expecting a thick veil of irony to cover the remark.
But Aaron Katz, it turns out, is as guileless and unfussy as the films he makes, describing his foray into genre play with a boyish excitement and sincere sense of movie-love. “There are a lot of big films that come out in the summer now, but not the kind that I really love,” he says, fairly late in our Sunday afternoon conversation. “In the 80s early 90s, we had films like ‘Die Hard’ or ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ – genuinely fun and weirdly classy and restrained compared to blockbusters today. So we’re trying to write the kind of entertainment that we’d want to see, but still, you know, very much us.”
That modestly stated “us” nods to a distinct stylistic trademark the 29 year-old Oregon native and his collaborators have established across three features in just five years: his 2006 debut, “Dance Party, USA,” and Spirit-nominated follow-up, “Quiet City,” both balanced the talky, lo-fi youth idling of much contemporary Amerindie cinema with an unusually crisp visual sensibility.
You know what to do. PLEASE STICK TO ONE QUESTION, and try not to cover any terrain we’ve already hit. I immediately gloss over something that feels done or stale (sorry). Cut loose with your queries in the comments section and we’ll address what we can.
Catch up with the idea behind this series here.
So sorry for the hiatus with this column but I took a break last week to focus on the top 10 horror films list and am a day late this week because I was stuck shooting all day yesterday. I’m sure you’ve all been missing it intensely.
But where were we? Ah, the late-80’s. A time when Hollywood fluff like “Moonstruck” and “Fatal Attraction” were up for Best Picture, but lost to, what else, a historical epic from an acclaimed director. Bernardo Bertolucci’s, “The Last Emperor,” swept the 1987 ceremony, winning nine Oscars from nine nominations, the largest haul since “West Side Story.”
1988 belonged to “Rain Man,” but is perhaps more notable for Kevin Kline’s slapstick work in “A Fish Called Wanda” earning him a rare statue for a comedy. Every argument with an Oscar nerd since regarding comedic performances sees them bring it up as a precedent. Didn’t help Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy or Sacha Baron Cohen though.
The ceremony itself is infamous for an opening number that involved Snow White and Rob Lowe singing some awful duet. Why this particular number, in a vast sea of awful numbers throughout the course of Oscar history, has been singled out is beyond me. And probably beyond Rob Lowe as well.
But now it’s my turn to do some singling out.