• Anne Thompson ponders how the year’s mainstream studio pics might fare with Oscar. [Thompson on Hollywood]
• Patrick Goldstein catches up with Tom Hooper and the director’s Hollywood education. [The Big Picture]
• Steve Pond dutifully reports from a “Biutiful” post-screening Q&A with members of the crew. [The Odds]
The delicate folks at the MPAA have come in for a right old bollocking in the past few weeks, and deservedly so. First came the furore over the baffling ‘NC-17’ rating they awarded “Blue Valentine” — a lemon of a situation that Harvey Weinstein, to judge from the steamy poster unveiled yesterday, has decided to make into lemonade.
Another of Weinstein’s babies, “The King’s Speech,” also got the brunt of the ratings board’s conservatism when it was slapped with an ‘R’ for a brief torrent of narratively contextualized four-letter words — despite having a fair claim to being the most mild-mannered prestige drama of the year.
We all know that bad things, like Kardashian sisters, come in threes, so we didn’t have long to wait before the next eruption over MPAA idiocy, and once more, the film at the center of it is a calculatedly inoffensive true-life Britpic. Despite having the kind of cheery inspirational message that young girls and their grandmothers alike can appreciate, feminist dramedy “Made in Dagenham” has received an ‘R’ rating for “language and brief sexuality,” referring respectively to a scattering of f-words and some gentle, clothed innuendo.