… “Navi” is Hebrew for “A Prophet.” Presumably, you all did, and I’m just behind the curve. What can it all mean?
Tag: Avatar
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Stop the presses: ‘Avatar’ sweeps VES
ZOMG! Well, actually, it wasn’t a clean sweep, as “District 9” managed to win in the compositing category (one of many that saw “Avatar” as a multiple nominee). But it was unsurprisingly dominated by Cameron and company throughout, with six awards going to the blockbuster. Go to The Circuit to see the damage.
(Also, while I’m at it, any word out there on the International Film Music Critics Association’s list of winners, which was supposed to have been announced Friday? That’s literally the last precursor left standing at the moment.)
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SUNDAY CENTS: Win for ‘Shutter,’ new films stutter
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.Kevin Smith has never had a number one film at the box office and Martin Scorsese has ensured that he won’t buck the trend in 2010. “Shutter Island” is the top box office performer for the second weekend in a row, dropping 46% to $22.2 million. That puts it firmly in the could-have-been worse, could-have-been-better category and with $75.1 million in the bank so far, Paramount can consider their decision to move out of October justified, particularly since I don’t think the Oscars would have touched it with a 10-foot pole, but that’s just me.
Smith’s “Cop Out” did manage an $18.6 million debut, handily becoming a career-high for its director. For Bruce Willis, on the other hand, it falls somewhere between “The Whole Nine Yards” and “The Kid,” amongst a bevy of forgettable titles. Reviews were scathing and drops should be harsh so it will be a close race with the $46 million of “Dogma” to the title of Smith’s biggest hit. If Warner Bros. was using this as an audition for a bigger franchise, I think Silent Bob has fluffed his chance. It should also be noted that the figure is inflated slightly by the extra seats Smith has to buy for himself when he went.
Not too far off in third is “The Crazies,” which managed a $16.5 million debut from nearly 700 fewer screens than “Cop Out,” giving it the second-best per theater average in the top 10. Overture did a good job of raising awareness and interest amongst the target audience, which must not include me, because I never saw a single thing about it once, anywhere.
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OSCAR GUIDE: Best Music (Original Score)
For years the composers of the music branch tended to be a bit insular. Impressive newcomer talent was often ignored while the usual suspects showed up year after year. Not long ago, there seemed to be a shift, yielding slates much like the one we have for 2009.There is one first-timer, but other nominees are only enjoying their second and third nominations, while the true veterans of the category haven’t been to the dance in six and nine years respectively. Usually the Academy at large springs for a Best Picture nominee with overwhelming consistency, most often films with cultural flavor or dramatic, sometimes whimsical heft.
The nominees are:
“Avatar” (James Horner)
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” (Alexandre Desplat)
“The Hurt Locker” (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders)
“Sherlock Holmes” (Hans Zimmer)
“Up” (Michael Giacchino) -
FRIDAY FORECAST: ‘Cop’ and a laugh
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.It’s the last full weekend before the Oscars. Have you seen all the nominees yet? I sure haven’t. In fact, there isn’t a single category where I’ve seen every film and can have an educated opinion. That’s not likely to change before the big day since I’ve been happy to put the 2009 movie-going year to bed for a while.
There’s plenty of new joy to be found! Like “Cop Out,” the first big budget studio outing from Kevin Smith. Primarily known as the guy behind a bunch of movies your college roommate likes, he is notably absent from all press materials for the Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan buddy flick.
Willis typically can’t open straight-forward action films to very much, unless they have the words “Die” and “Hard” in them. Recent run-of-the-mill efforts include “Surrogates” ($15.2 million), “16 Blocks” ($13.8 million) and “Hostage” ($12.1 million).
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2/26 Oscarweb Round-up
• Maria Puente on the wide array of villains represented by the year’s Oscar nominations. [USA Today]• Bill Mechanic tells Sharon Waxman that the Oscarcast will be “emotional.” [The Wrap]
• Not movie related, but FYI, Batman’s is still bigger. [Hero Complex]
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: Composer symposium, part one
When you’re a film music composer as prolific as Hans Zimmer, unique soundtrack flavors can be a bit elusive. But with Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes,” Zimmer found them, pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable with action film scores in the process.But the work isn’t without its inspirations. There seem to be bits of Danny Elfman married with Ennio Morricone, but Zimmer was actually reaching back much further.
“Let me just be German about it,” Zimmer says with a laugh. “It was actually the Kurt Weill vibe I was after. But it’s sort of all in the family, I suppose. It’s fun for me if I can actually go and embrace some of that European stuff again.”
The score is a delightful, jaunty construction that relishes in its own peculiarity. The good thing about director Ritchie, Zimmer says, is that he’s a bold director who welcomed these slightly “quirky” and “crazy” intrusions.
“There was an enormous amount of thinking about how to do this differently,” Zimmer recalls. “It became apparent quickly that Guy and I had similar tastes in music and, in a funny way, what hadn’t been done in a movie of this scale. It’s all soloists. It’s not really orchestral. Every note you hear has a real performance attached to it. You can’t really hide it. Everything is very opinionated and bold. It’s not the sort of homogeneous sound you get from an orchestra.”
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‘The Hurt Locker’ sweeps BAFTA Awards
The writing, in case you hadn’t already read it, is on the wall.In the biggest BAFTA haul for a non-British production since “American Beauty” a decade ago, Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq drama took six awards at the Royal Opera House, including Best Film, Director and Original Screenplay. Next up: Oscars. And plenty of ’em, I’m guessing.
I did respectably enough in my predictions, nailing 15 out of 21 categories, though I missed the big one, thinking homegrown favorite “An Education” would come out on top. The Brits did, however, vote local in the lead acting categories, with Colin Firth and Carey Mulligan taking well-deserved honors — probably their last of the season.
“An Education” lost both the top awards it was up for, as the ever-selective Best British Film committee once more looked to the fringes to reward Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” instead. I’m thrilled to see a major award for my #2 film of last year, after it was blanked entirely in the general categories. Continuing a good night for my pet films, meanwhile, “A Prophet” took foreign-language honors.
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SUNDAY CENTS: Leonardo leads (Donatello does machines)
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio’s fourth collaboration together has provided the former with his biggest debut ever and the latter’s second only to “Titanic.” $40.2 million is the estimate, which puts it a fraction behind “Madea Goes to Jail” from this same weekend last year and means that unless word of mouth is particularly poisonous, it should squeak past the $100 million mark. To do so, it’ll have to perform more like an esteemed thriller than a typical horror film as “Friday the 13th” could only translate a $41.4 million February opening into a $68.9 million total last year.
Second place goes to “Valentine’s Day,” which suffered a morale-damaging 69% dip from last weekend. The drop was never going to be kind due to the holiday last Monday but only “New Moon” and Ang Lee’s “Hulk” have dropped harder while playing on more than 3,500 screens. I guess audiences decided not to go back and watch it again for all the hidden nuances in the way Jamie Foxx says “Damn!” to something off-screen.
“The Wolfman” also fell 69% to $9.8 million and fifth place, although that was a bit more expected. It will now be lucky to gross $71 million, which is what it would need to surpass “Teen Wolf.” Maybe if Anthony Hopkins’s character was a bit more like Rupert “Stiles” Stilinksi, Universal could be a little closer to recouping that $150 million budget. Maybe throw in Del Toro doing a handstand on a horse and carriage ride? Just thinking out loud.
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‘Avatar,’ ‘Basterds’ win with MPSE
See the full list of winners here. We covered the sound editing category last week in the Oscar Guide. I think “Avatar” is still safe to win there, but there could still be a splitting seeing “The Hurt Locker” take sound mixing.
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BAFTA predictions
Enjoying a curious position this year as the only televised awards ceremony between the Academy Award nominations announcement and Oscar night itself, the BAFTAs will no doubt be relishing their precursor status even more than usual.Since they made the move to precede the Oscars nine years ago, BAFTA hasn’t slavishly anticipated the bigger awards (they’ve matched the Academy’s Best Picture pick only three times), but they have sometimes been at the crest of new waves in voting: late surges of momentum for the likes of Marion Cotillard, Tilda Swinton and Alan Arkin all made their first appearance on BAFTA night.
This year, however, I’m suspecting that the Brits will voluntarily isolate themselves from the Oscar-influencing game. Never ones to shy away from patriotic voting, BAFTA has handed its top prize to a homegrown production for three years running – it’s highly likely that Oscar longshot “An Education,” which leads the nomination count with two U.S. productions, will make it four.
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FRIDAY FORECAST: ‘Shutter’ to sink?
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.It’s been a long time coming but “Shutter Island” finally hits screens this weekend, with no competition in sight. That’s right, Scorsese gets the weekend all to himself and his genre exercise, which is opening on just under 3,000 screens. The man is viewed as something of a deity, particularly on sites like this, and his fanbase clearly spans over more than one generation. At age 60, his career took a turn towards the populist and there seems to be no looking back. “Shutter Island” should be able to straddle the line between snobs and laymen, men and women and teens and adults. Sounds like a winning combination.
“The Departed” opened to $31 million in 2006 and is Scorsese’s highest grossing film, along with the reason he has an Oscar on his mantle. Picking up a lifetime achievement gong at the Golden Globes last month is just another reason why his profile has never been higher across the country. His last attempt at this type of film was 1991’s “Cape Fear,” which opened with $18.5 million en route to a $143.6 million finish, and that’s certainly not out of reach here, although I’d say it’s unlikely. I’ll say $33 million for the weekend and then it’ll need strong word of mouth to hit $100 million.
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1/18 Oscarweb Round-up
(Your non-Harvey-influenced round-up for the morning…)• Is Armando Iannucci planning to take the world of “In the Loop” to HBO? [CHUD]
• Bill Mechanic responds to criticism over move to eliminate original song performances. [The Odds]
• Actors on an actorless “Avatar.” [Los Angeles Times]
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2/17 Oscarweb Round-up
• David Poland sits down with Mark Boal and, separately, Paul Ottosson and Ray Beckett to talk “The Hurt Locker.” [The Hot Blog]• Saoirse Ronan talks “The Lovely Bones” across the pond. [Daily Telegraph]
• Chris Jones profiles Roger Ebert, the man and his thumbs. [Esquire]
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‘Avatar’ sound panel
Speaking of sound, I stumbled across this panel of sound engineers from “Avatar” over at SoundWorks Collection, well worth a look:
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OSCAR GUIDE: Best Sound Editing
This year marked the first year in recent memory that the Motion Picture Sound Editors offered up its list of nominees prior to the Oscar nominations announcement rather than after. Generally that batch of tea leaves is therefore elusive for those of us looking for indicators along the way.Nevertheless, there wasn’t a huge shift in ideology form the mixing field to the editing field. Four films crossed over while the one that pushed through here certainly isn’t as deserving as the one that was nixed, but c’est la vie. I get the feeling there was some chummy autopilot voting going on there, but it’s a relatively solid batch of competitors anyway.
The nominees are:
“Avatar” (Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle)
“The Hurt Locker” (Paul N.J. Ottosson)
“Inglourious Basterds” (Wylie Stateman)
“Star Trek” (Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin)
“Up” (Michael Silvers and Tom Myers) -
OSCAR GUIDE: Best Art Direction
Over the weekend the Art Directors Guild handed out their awards in three categories: period, fantasy and contemporary. And it’s a good thing they have the contemporary field since the Academy recognizing that kind of work is like Haley’s Comet.The Best Art Direction category recognizes both the production designer and the set decorator of a given film, while the art director – an actual role on a film, mind you – isn’t recognized at all. It’s very strange. At some point they really need to change the name of the category to “Best Production Design,” but when you think of the changes the Academy needs to make — well, get in line.
The nominees are:
“Avatar” (Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Kim Sinclair)
“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” (Dave Warren and Anastasia Masaro; Caroline Smith)
“Nine” (John Myhre; Gordon Sim)
“Sherlock Holmes” (Sarah Greenwood; Katie Spencer)
“The Young Victoria” (Patrice Vermette; Maggie Gray) -
SUNDAY CENTS: Love glory
*All historical figures cited are adjusted to today’s dollars.The overwhelming demand to see an eclectic array of celebrities fall in love with as little character development as possible has led to “Valentine’s Day” both winning the weekend and posting the biggest President’s Day debut of all time, narrowly eclipsing “Ghost Rider.” $52.4 million is the gross, which should balloon to around $60 million including tomorrow, and you have your first $100 million earner of 2010 on the way. The timing couldn’t have worked out better, with Warner Bros. estimating today’s gross to be bigger than Friday or Saturday.
It was a fierce battle for second place between “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” and “The Wolfman.” The former took the edge with $31.1 million, while the hairier option earned $30.6 million. That’s a win for Chris Columbus, who was in desperate need of one after “I Love You Beth Cooper” and “Rent,” and the fantasy flick should have enough juice to flirt with the $100 million barrier.
“The Wolfman,” however, will likely have to settle for around $75 million and some solid overseas grosses. For a project as troubled as this was, Universal can’t complain. Believe it or not, that will make it the third biggest film Del Toro has ever been a part of after “Traffic” and “Sin City.”