In Contention

Tag: Facebook

  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 53 — BAFTA fallout, foreign language and animated short races, Banksy in L.A.

    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.

    We’ve got another 10 days left in the 2010-2011 awards season, not that anyone’s counting. That means three more episodes of Oscar Talk and Anne and I will exit stage right, but for now, there is still, as always, plenty to chew on. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • ‘Say Anything?’

  • 1/13 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: No dice for Winklevi, Alice Ward fights for her life, Weaver keeps making the rounds

    • Away from Oscar and in real life, Micky Ward’s mother is in a hospital fighting for her life… [Boston Globe]

    • …while the Winklevi lose their Facebook settlement appeal. [Paid Content]

    • Is “The King’s Speech” royalist propaganda? [The Guardian]

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  • Seven years to the day

    Sony’s campaign for “The Social Network” sure is moving along swimmingly.  As if the critics’ groups didn’t give the film enough of a headwind going into the voting frame of phase one, the film is hitting DVD and Blu-ray January 11, a scant three months after theatrical release and right in the middle of the buzz maelstrom.

    Of course, it’s all by design, and a DVD release party being held at Spago in Beverly Hills Thursday night, press naturally invited en masse, will keep the good word spreading.  An Oscar run is all about timing, and so far, this one has it in spades.

    There’s something else that’s key to that date, though.  Film writer William Goss alerted me over the weekend to the fact that, on January 11, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began this epic, defining journey when he bought the domain (“thefacebook.com”) that would become, after a slight tweak, the most-visited website on the internet.  Coincidence?

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  • Videos du jour

    A number of videos have been making the rounds this week, so I figured I’d consolidate.  Starting with Facebooking Aaron Sorkin’s sharp dialogue:

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  • What Eduardo Saverin learned from ‘The Social Network’

    You know Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder played by Andrew Garfield in “The Social Network” who won an undisclosed sum of money when he sued Mark Zuckerberg and still kept his name on the masthead of the site, yet we haven’t really heard from him on the matter?  Well, he finally broke his silence in — where else — a blog.

    Serving as a guest blogger for CNBC, Saverin took the opportunity to shine a light on what the film says about forward momentum in an entrepreneur-driven society rather than nitpick factual accuracies and inaccuracies.  In so doing, he may have made the most convincing case for considering David Fincher’s work “the film of a generation,” to toss out Peter Travers’s quote one more time.

    What is a generational film, anyway?  It was a question posed by Bill Cody at Rope of Silicon earlier this week.  I wonder.  Sometimes such classifications feel like little more than hyperbole, but it seems a lot of people really want to believe it when it comes to “The Social Network.”

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  • Zuckerberg gets Simpsonized

    One more clip from last night’s episode after the jump.

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  • Defriending ‘The Social Network’

    With David Fincher’s “The Social Network” already accruing positive buzz ahead of its New York Film Festival premiere next month, its handlers would do well to pre-empt the inevitable pushback over matters of factual accuracy — complaints that have already dogged the film’s sloppy source book, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires” (discussed at length in Page to Screen here).

    No one will (or should) be seeing “The Social Network” for an exhaustive journalistic essay on the origins of Facebook. Rather, what we’re hoping for from writer Aaron Sorkin is a tangy interpretation of the facts that reaches for broader truths about the social-networking generation; dramatic flexibility, then, is the order of the day. Needless to say, the powers behind Facebook, including founder (and “Social Network” protagonist) Mark Zuckerberg, don’t quite see things that way. This recent New York Times piece goes into the friction between them and the film’s producers.

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