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  • Scorsese/DiCaprio retrospective set to kick-start ‘Shutter Island’ campaign

    People have scoffed at the idea of a Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” campaign for months now.  The film didn’t hit with the critics, therefore it must be an also ran, right?  The thing is, it made decent bank and is packed with elements I know for a fact are well-respected from the industry, whether it’s Thelma Schoonmaker’s typically expert film editing, Robert Richardson’s throwback lensing, Dante Ferretti’s creepy production design or, indeed, Leonardo DiCaprio’s fantastic lead performance.

    All of that goodwill can build momentum in a year of 10 Best Picture nominees, and let’s face it, every DiCaprio/Scorsese collaboration has been nominated in the top category, in years of five, no less.  With Halloween right around the corner, now is the perfect time for Paramount Pictures to remind everyone of the film.  The studio is therefore kicking off the season’s festivities with a two-day American Cinemateque retrospective on their eight-year partnership.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 37 — The early year forgotten, Michael Douglas’s dueling Oscar campaigns, the animated feature race and more

    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.

    After a week with four on the mic, it’s back to just Anne and myself as we mull over something of a slow news week. But there’s always some grist for the mill here and there, catch-up screenings, parties, etc., so let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • ‘Made in Dagenham’ trailer

    I was high on Nigel Cole’s “Made in Dagenham” just before the film bowed at Toronto last month.  I still see Miranda Richardson and Sally Hawkins as formidable in their categories but I’ll be anxious to see if the film is as big a crowd-pleaser as I suspect it is. A new trailer hit yesterday via Apple. Check it out by clicking the image below or watch an embed after the jump.

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  • 10/22 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Arndt, Unkrich on Fresh Air, no ‘Hangover’ for Gibson, ‘Paranormal’ sequel scares L.A.

    • Lesley Manville talks “Another Year” across the pond. [The Guardian]

    • Terry Gross talks with “Toy Story 3” director Lee Unrich and writer Michael Arndt on Fresh Air. [NPR]

    • Watch in night vision as a Los Angeles audience reacts to a screening of “Paranormal Activity 2.” [HitFix]

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  • A little love for ‘I Am Love’

    I know the film has a lot of devotees on this site — I’m not wholly with them, though for the second year running, I do think Tilda Swinton merits a lot more Best Actress consideration than she’s getting — so you may be pleased to know that florid Italian melodrama “I Am Love” has at least (however indirectly) taken one bit of minor silverware.

    I wasn’t aware that the inaugural Screen International UK Marketing & Distribution Awards took place two weeks ago, but so they did, with “I Am Love” (and marketing team AllCity) deservedly scooping Poster of the Year honors for the arresting hot-pink design featured to the right (and in full after the cut). As it happens, we singled out the film’s poster portfolio for praise earlier this year; nice to know we weren’t alone in our admiration. Hey, it’s something.

    Among the posters it beat is another of my favorite 2010 one-sheets recently featured on these pages: the witty crow-and-bomb design for “Four Lions.” Chris Morris’s controversial (and, yes, funny) UK terrorism satire did, however, take the award for Trailer of the Year. You can check that out, too, after the cut.

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  • Guardian does the ‘all-time greatest’ meme

    Ah, lists. The gift that keeps giving — particularly in the world of film blogging, where they provide snappy short-form content, invite numerous comments and generate multiple hits when spread across a zillion pages.

    Last year’s flood of end-of-decade countdowns surely satisfied even the most ardent list fanatic for a good few months, but with no such milestone to mark this year, The Guardian has returned to an old chestnut: the greatest films of all time.

    The gimmick they’ve used for the project (the results of which have been unfolding on their website over the past week) is to subdivide the larger collective according to genre: the 25 best comedies, romances, action films, and so on. As if any all-time best isn’t prone to enough criticism, this doubles the opportunities for debate: now we can kvetch not only about the films that made the cut (or didn’t), but whether they’ve even been categorized correctly.

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  • ‘South Park’ does ‘Inception’

  • ‘I Love You Phillip Morris’ red band trailer

    I recently sang the praises of Glenn Ficcara and John Requa’s “I Love You Phillip Morris,” which is building up the publicity push as of late. We got a poster last week, and today, a red band trailer that, suffice it to say, is NSFW. Check it out after the jump.

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  • Rockwell talks ‘Conviction,’ other choices for Kenny Waters, destroyed footage

    Backstage’s Jenelle Riley recently moderated a post-screening Q&A with “Conviction” star Sam Rockwell and a few interesting nuggets surfaced during the chat.

    First and foremost, I was always under the impression that Rockwell was the first choice for the role of Kenny Waters in the film.  But as he reveals here, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly dropped out of the part along the way.  It leaves you wondering what the film might have been like.  I think either actor would have been intriguing but Rockwell brings a real charm to the character that might have been lacking otherwise.

    But most crushing, I’d say, is the fact that 16 hours of crucial footage was apparently destroyed by an airport x-ray.  Can you imagine?  And it sounds like it was intense material as Rockwell says it was probably the hardest thing he’s ever done to go back and res-hoot all of that stuff.

    It’s worth a look and listen.  Head on over to Backstage to watch or check out the embed after the jump.

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  • Taking questions for Oscar Talk

    Sorry for not posting this yesterday.  It totally slipped my mind.  But you know the drill.  Rifle off any queries you’d like us to address on Friday’s podcast in the comments section below.

  • 10/21 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Praise for ‘Love & Other Drugs,’ sussing out Best Actress, quotable ‘Social Network’

    • Jeffrey Wells calls “Love & Other Drugs” Edward Zwick’s best film yet. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Peter Knegt assesses the Gotham Award nominations. [indieWIRE]

    • Nathaniel Rogers hearts Sam Rockwell in “Conviction.” [Tribeca Film]

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Categorical denial

    Wild-eyed, table-banging outbursts — sometimes of enthusiasm, more often of outrage — are an essential part of the floor show at any Oscar viewing party, but I’ve rarely seen one more unhinged than a friend’s reaction to Angelina Jolie’s (widely expected) Best Supporting Actress victory at the 1999 ceremony.

    “Who the hell was she supporting?” she yelled, red wine slopping out of her glass as she pointed an accusatory finger at the TV screen. “The woman only went and swallowed the entire film without so much as chewing once, all but elbowed Winona out of every shot, and she’s rewarded for supporting her?” She was practically spitting now, so blind with fury she hadn’t even noticed the raven-haired Miss Jolie snogging her brother. “If that’s her idea of support, what happens when she’s against you?”

    I should perhaps explain that my friend’s love for all things Winona Ryder ran deep, and not a little frightening, in those days; the Academy’s heartless decision not to nominate Ryder for Best Actress that year already meant she was watching the ceremony under duress. So it probably wasn’t the best time to explain that, well, Jolie did have the secondary role in “Girl, Interrupted” and that, unfair world that this is, there was still no law preventing rising young actors from being much better than their first-billed co-stars. So we let her rant, at least until Phil Collins started singing and she had something new to complain about.

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  • ‘TRON Legacy’ poster

    I’m not all that psyched for Disney’s “TRON Legacy,” but even I’ll admit that the final one-sheet for the film is pretty damn nifty.  If it strikes you as familiar, that’s because it craftily mirrors the poster art of the original film.  Check out the full image after the jump.

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  • LONDON: ‘Tabloid,’ ‘Waste Land,’ ‘The Peddler’

    Amid a fairly robust non-fiction slate in this year’s London Film Festival programme, there appears to be an informal sidebar of documentaries about the process of, well, documenting — whether via media avenues of art, film or journalism.

    That’s not to say the films in question are particularly meta. The ones grouped here are all pretty straightforward studies of complicated (or even downright hinky) creative processes, none more so than “Smash His Camera” (***), Leon Gast’s slight but enjoyable snapshot of famed US paparazzo Ron Galella, which pokes gentle fun at its gnomish subject while pointedly mourning the gradual draining of artistry from the sport of celebrity shutterbugging.

    “Smash His Camera” has already been released in the States, so I won’t dwell too long on it here, other than to say it made me even more aware than intended of my status as a viewer – largely I couldn’t block out the running commentary from the seat behind me, a ceaseless Noo Joisey-accented stream of observations like, “Now she was the real deal,” and “Whatever happened to that guy?” Only my half-British reserve prevented me turning round and politely telling him to cram it, so I was glad of my restraint when the house lights came up to reveal that the offender was… Ron Galella himself. Now that was meta.

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  • 10/20 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘Complete Metropolis’ coming to TCM, buzz for Leo, Cameron on the usual talking points

    • Jeffrey Wells reminds of the forthcoming TCM airing of the restored “Metropolis” and one hour documentary “Metropolis Refound.”  I’ll…be…there. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Steve Pond conveys positive word on Christian Bale and (as reported for months here) Melissa Leo’s performances in “The Fighter” from ShoEast. [The Odds]

    • Naomi Watts on “Fair Game,” Valerie Plame and politics in Hollywood. [HitFix]

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  • ‘King’s Speech’ told to mind its language

    Admittedly, this isn’t much of a story, but following last week’s furore over the NC-17 certificate handed to the starkly adult marital drama “Blue Valentine,” it’s amusing to see a rather more milquetoast Oscar hopeful having its own trouble with the ratings board.

    London’s Evening Standard paper reports that “The King’s Speech,” already rated R by the MPAA, has been given a 15 rating (permitting no viewers under that age) by the British censors — not a severe rating, but more restrictive than one might expect for a polite period biopic revolving around speech therapy.

    The reason for the adult rating is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: a short comic scene where Colin Firth’s stuttering King George VI is required to say “fuck” 42 times in quick succession as part of a therapeutic exercise. To be frank, 14 year-olds were unlikely to be queueing around the block to see “The King’s Speech” in the first place, but that’s not really the point: R or 15 ratings could wrongfoot mild-mannered mature viewers who otherwise sit squarely in the film’s sights.

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  • Helen Mirren: everywhere and nowhere

    Amid the club of stars surfacing in two or more 2010 releases — Leonardo DiCaprio, Annette Bening, Chloe Moretz, and so on — has anyone been more ineffectually ubiquitous than Helen Mirren? The 65 year-old Brit has been working steadily since her Oscar win nearly four years ago, but apparently cracked the secret of human cloning this year, turning up in no fewer than six titles. (Seven if you count “The Last Station,” which most civilians only laid eyes on in 2010.)

    As much as this looks like a banner year for the actress on paper, however, her strike rate has been bewilderingly low. Brothel-madam biopic “Love Ranch,” directed by her husband Taylor Hackford, flunked with critics and audiences back in June, while “The Tempest,” her would-be highbrow awards bid, met with widespread scorn at the Venice and New York festivals.

    Two other adult-oriented dramas were left in limbo at Toronto, with John Madden’s “The Debt” booted to 2011, while “Brighton Rock” — for which Mirren ceded the critical spotlight to newcomer Andrea Riseborough — still languishes without a US distributor.

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  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1985 and 1986

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    1985 saw “Out of Africa” win the top prize in another instance where I’ve only seen one of the Best Picture nominees. I don’t know what it is about this period, but hardly any of the films jump out as necessary viewing when looking back on what to catch up on. I’ve been meaning to see “The Color Purple” for a while, but also, don’t really care.

    Spielberg’s drama came into the ceremony with 11 nominations and went home with a goose egg, tying an Oscar record. Spielberg himself didn’t get a directing nod, Akira Kurosawa jumping in instead for “Ran.” Fans of ladies daytime TV would be happy to see two of their favorites, Oprah and Whoopi Goldberg, were both nominated this year.

    Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” earned top honors in 1986, competing against a number of films made outside of the Hollywood studio system. One of them, “Children of a Lesser God,” was the first Best Picture nominee ever directed by a woman. It’s also the first and only time an Oscar winner couldn’t attend because they were busy filming “Jaws: The Revenge” (cough, Michael Caine).

    Finally, the winner of Best Documentary Short was a montage called “Precious Images” that may as well have been made by the Academy. It’s the first piece of film they show every new student at my film school and used to joke that if you could name every film in it, you could get free tuition. Check it out here, movie nerds!

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