You might have noticed this morning’s round-up reverted back to “Oscarweb.” The big late-summer festival trilogy wrapped up with Toronto’s kudo-dishing over the weekend and on the other side, we face the long haul. The season is officially here. You ready?
As punishing as it feels, I’m still excited for our weekly coverage. Punishing because monthly diagnosis is so liberating, but we’re at that stage where the nuances of the season are worth tracking closely, the layers of the race peeled back slowly but surely. Today’s Off the Carpet column kicks all of that off for us at In Contention.
Tomorrow we’ll have a list dedicated to the best of the Academy’s chosen. Wednesday, Guy will launch “The Long Shot,” a new weekly awards column that will consider things from afar without the dizzying insider silliness you find in this space every Monday, and I’m really excited for that. Gerard comes back Thursday for another series of Tech Support columns, and, of course, Anne and I will continue the conversation Friday in our weekly Oscar Talk podcast. I think we’re covering all bases.
So, as we go into the season, what do we know? And do we think we know more than we actually do? Probably.
“Up in the Air,” for instance, was the story of September if only because any goodwill toward “Precious” was already a known commodity. Jason Reitman’s “Juno” follow-up comes along at just the right time for the country, taps into actor George Clooney’s movie star quality to find other insights and pretty much nails a tone, a vibe, an overall sense of things.
• Patrick Swayze left us this week, passing away of cancer at the age of 57.
• The Venice Film Festival drew to a close, with Israeli war drama “Lebanon” taking top honors.
• It was Colin Firth, however, who emerged with Oscar buzz for the Weinstein-acquired “A Single Man.”
• Across the Atlantic, we kept you up to date with Toronto goings-on, as buzz for “Precious” continues to build.
The third installment of Oscar Talk lands as Toronto winds down and, seemingly, the season’s biggest questions are being answered. Or are they?
I’m joined by Anne Thompson of indieWIRE as always and we discussed the following:
• The Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man,” Anne’s thoughts, my thoughts, the Coens doing Woody, etc.
• The first sell of Toronto, “A Single Man” (not to be confused with “A Serious Man”), and the Oscar prospects of Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.
• Business at the fest and a shifting acquisition paradigm in the industry.
• Anne gives her thoughts on Annette Bening and Samuel L. Jackson in Rodrigo Garcia’s “Mother and Child,” great performances, but will it be picked up?
• Robert Duvall’s Oscar-worthy work in “Get Low,” a film that has yet to be picked up when it’s the sort of film that may have ignited a bidding war in years past.
• Thoughts on other films that bowed at Toronto, including “Capitalism: A Love Story,” “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” and “Jennifer’s Body” (leading to a conversation about Megan Fox’s talents that will put each of us out on a limb).
• Anne loved Edward Norton in Tim Blake Nelson’s “Leaves of Grass” but found the film on the whole to be a missed opportunity.
But nothing seems to be decided even with a bulk of the season’s offerings having been screened in Venice, Telluride and Venice. Onward!
As always you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. (If you have some audio issues with the levels, my apologies — with Anne in Toronto and me in North Carolina, we had some technical difficulties.)
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I realized yesterday I hadn’t updated my own Oscar predictions since July, so a spring-clean was in order. I should really wait for the end of Toronto, but I’m off on vacation on Saturday, so there’s no time like the present.
Needless to say, a lot can change in two months — particularly when those two months include the start of the festival season. Back in July, “Shutter Island” was still a fall release, Colin Firth wasn’t even on my radar and I still expected “Up in the Air” to be a minor-key adaptation of a minor-key novel. It was a more innocent time.
As always, if you want sensible, well-reasoned, informed predictions, you’re better off looking to your right.
I must say, when I saw and loved Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” at Venice last week, I obviously picked up on the awards possibilities for Colin Firth’s career-best work. Hard not to.
What I didn’t quite anticipate is that it would be the talk of Toronto only a few days later. It’s encouraging to see such a niche film garnering so much attention. That’s what Harvey Weinstein will do for ya.
So, is Colin Firth decisively in the Oscar pack? Well, it depends who you choose to listen to. Anne Thompson says a big “hell yeah”:
Firth, who just turned 39 [sic], is a slam dunk for his first Oscar nomination. While the actor has delivered in many strong roles over the years, including BAFTA-nominated performances in Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones Diary, he’s never single-handedly carried a movie like this.
David Poland, meanwhile, offers an equally emphatic “hell no”:
Colin Firth is excellent … It’s the kind of performance in the kind of movie that could draw an Oscar nod in the thin list of actress contenders each year. But Best Actor is a 1000 to 1 shot. In fact, Julianne Moore has a better shot at Supporting, which might be why The Weinsteins bought the film.
I meant to get to this earlier, but sometimes, you know, real life gets in the way. Anyway, the big news of the day is that The Weinstein Company has snapped up the U.S. distribution rights to Tom Ford’s stunning debut “A Single Man,” with plans for a 2009 Oscar-qualifying run, marking the first really newsworthy deal of the Toronto fest.
This is just the kind of fate I hoped might await the film when I saw it last week at the Venice Film Festival. It’s a delicate, esoteric piece that needs the attentive handling of a smaller outfit — but, at the same time, has significant, clearly designated awards prospects that need some savvy campaigning to help realize. I can’t see a better fit for this film than the Weinsteins, frankly.
The long and short of it is that you can firmly pencil Colin Firth in on your list of Best Actor prospects. It’s a prominent, immensely moving performance that, following his recent win in Venice, should gain critical traction in what looks like an unusually lean field so far. Add the fact that Firth is a popular, well-established star still looking for his defining career role — for critics, at least; for the female public, he’ll always be Mr. Darcy — and the Weinsteins’ campaigning muscle, and he’s firmly in the mix.
Okay, so I was mainly off the mark. When it comes to guessing festival awards, I usually am. But at the same time, few of the selections revealed tonight by Ang Lee’s jury at the closing ceremony of the Venice Film Festival really surprise me.
It was clear that Samuel Maoz’s “Lebanon” would walk away with something (I had it pencilled in for Best Director), given its combination of political currency and personal investment on the part of the director. (The film is an autobiographical reflection on his own experience in the First Lebanon War.) Personally, I think giving it the Golden Lion is a tad generous for a debut that, while very accomplished, never quite hits home emotionally, but it’s a reasonable winner.
I have more of a problem with the runner-up Grand Jury Prize going to Fatih Akin’s “Soul Kitchen,” though I saw it coming. The film is a sweet but slipshod effort that hardly represents the director’s strongest work; with several more deserving films in competition going unawarded, its selection feels like a nod to the more mainstream contingent of the competition. (The absence of critics’ favorite “Lourdes” from the winners list, meanwhile, is the biggest shock here.)
Guy will comment further on these winners later, but for now, just the facts:
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION JURY
Golden Lion: “Lebanon” (Samuel Maoz)
Silver Lion (Best Director): “Women Without Men” (Shirin Neshat)
Grand Jury Prize: “Soul Kitchen” (Fatih Akin)
Best Actor: Colin Firth, “A Single Man”
Best Actress: Ksenia Rappoport, “The Double Hour”
Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Young Performer: Jasmine Trinca, “The Big Dream”
Best Screenplay: Todd Solondz, “Life During Wartime”
Technical Contribution for Set Design: Sylvie Olive, “Mr. Nobody”
OTHER JURIES
Luigi De Laurentiss Lion of the Future: “Engkwentro”
Venice Horizons Documentary: “1428” (Du Haibin)
Venice Horizons Special Mention: “The Man’s Woman and Other Stories” (Amt Dutta)
And so it comes to this. Ten days of blazing sunshine, free-flowing Prosecco, occasionally “Brazil”-style administration and – oh, right – a few films too, will come to a head tonight as Ang Lee and his merry band of jurors will name the supposed best of the fest.
I’ve written before about the near-futility of predicting festival awards. Unlike the Oscars, the voting body is different every time, so you’re never quite sure what they’re looking for. We persist because it’s fun, thought it actually becomes more difficult when you’ve seen most of the films in question, as personal reservations (or fondnesses) keep getting in the way.
If I were back in London, for example, I’d be more open to the whispers that Fatih Akin’s cheery but slight crowdpleaser “Soul Kitchen” is a serious contender for the Golden Lion, effectively serving Marco Müller’s more populist programming direction; having actually seen the film, my gut reaction is more in the “you’ve got to be kidding me” vein.
If no clear-cut frontrunner has emerged from this year’s lineup, it’s because no film has united critical opinion and mainstream media interest the way “Brokeback” or last year’s champ “The Wrestler” did. Some are plumping for Michael Moore, though that would seem a bit old-hat five years after Cannes laurelled “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
(More thoughts, and my will win/should win picks, after the cut.)
The more I think about Tom Ford’s debut feature “A Single Man” (not to be confused with “A Serious Man” — keep up!), which unspooled yesterday to a very warm Venice reception, the more I like it. I wrote my review on the fly, so I’m not sure if my full admiration for the film’s extraordinary craft and marvelous Colin Firth performance came through, but this is a special piece of work.
Thanks to diligent reader Tim for digging up the trailer, which captures the film’s woozy, moody beauty perfectly.
Venice Film Festival
In a curious way, revered fashion designer Tom Ford had a defined auteur’s stamp before he ever so much as shot a frame of his debut film: from his louche advertising campaigns to his infamous curation of Vanity Fair’s 2007 Hollywood issue to the forms and textures of his designs themselves, Ford has constructed a highly idiosyncratic brand identity fusing burnished retro cool and chilly modern eroticism.
No surprise then, that the handsome, eggshell-delicate character study “A Single Man” is very much an extension of that identity: trading in polished surfaces and swoonily aestheticized desire, the film looks on occasion like an animated GQ shoot. (And yes, Ford provides the leading man’s wardrobe.)
But just as you’re tempted to dismiss the film as a gorgeous vanity exercise, it reveals a keen beating heart beneath the decor — and the match of Ford’s precise sensibility to Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 literary examination of the effect of grief on an overly compartmentalized life begins to make perfect sense.
We’ve reached the midway point of the London Film Festival, and today’s big event is the European premiere of “W.” As I eavesdropped on assorted critics’ reactions coming out of the press screening this morning, the dominant feeling appeared to be one of pleasant surprise; I have a feeling the film may find a rather warmer reception here than in its home country.
I’m still gathering my thoughts on the film, which I thought riveting in some respects and messy in others, though it’s clear Stone has transcended the limitations of Stanley Weiser’s script. Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Banks offer such persuasive, full-bodied characterisations that the Madame Tussaud’s quality of certain supporting players (Thandie Newton in particular) pales by contrast.
With that, here’s another roundup of notable films from the last few days, beginning with yesterday’s starry but rather under-the-radar Mayor of London gala selection:
GENOVA (**1/2)
There is much to engage the eye and ear in “Genova,” the new film from restless Brit auteur Michael Winterbottom. A return to his usual, more organic directorial style after the disappointingly conventional “A Mighty Heart,” the new film teems with activity: from the loose, jazzy rhythms of the editing to the fragmented, eclectic soundtrack overlaying busy dialogue, and above all, superb location work that turns the labyrinthine alleys of the eponymous Italian coastal city into a playground of threat and desire.
