In Contention

Tag: Geoffrey Fletcher

  • AMPAS welcomes 135 new members

    Well, we already knew Jeremy Renner had got the nod. And no surprise that many of his fellow acting nominees from this year’s Oscar race — Christoph Waltz, Mo’Nique, Carey Mulligan, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick among them — have now been granted Academy membership. (Lest you think that the invitation automatically follows a nomination, Saoirse Ronan only gets in now, two years after her nod.)

    Other inclusions from Oscar’s class of 2009 include directors Lee Daniels and Juan  Jose Campanella, writers Mark Boal, Geoffrey Fletcher, Neill Blomkamp, Nick Hornby and Tom McCarthy, cinematographers Barry Ackroyd and Christian Berger, musician T-Bone Burnett, editors Bob Murawski and Joe Klotz, sound designer Paul N.J. Ottosson and costumer Catherine Leterrier.

    More thoughts, and the full list of 135 invitees, after the cut.

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  • Fletcher rides Oscar momentum to directorial debut

    In retrospect, Geoffrey Fletcher’s Best Adapted Screenplay win for “Precious” at last month’s Academy Awards shouldn’t have come as quite the shock it did. In the last few years, Oscar voters have been especially kind to newcomers in the writing races, with this year’s pair of freshman winners, Fletcher and Mark Boal, coming on the heels of three others who struck gold for their first feature credit: Michael Arndt, Diablo Cody and Dustin Lance Black.

    How do you follow that kind of debut success? In the case of many of those names, we’re on the verge on finding out. Arndt has lain low since striking gold with “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006, but will be back on the radar this summer with “Toy Story 3” — for which, unusually for a Pixar production, he has sole script credit.

    Cody may have struck out with “Jennifer’s Body” last year, but is having more luck on the small screen with “The United States of Tara.” Boal, meanwhile, is continuing his happy partnership with Kathryn Bigelow, as the two are readying the South American-set thriller “Triple Frontier” for shooting.

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  • Interviews with the winners

    Geoffrey Fletcher at the 82nd annual Academy AwardsBefore we close the book on 2009, here’s one last rundown of our interviews with this year’s Oscar recipients.  It was lovely to meet with them all as this was truly, for the most part, a season of camaraderie.

    “The Cove”
    Louie Psihoyos (Best Documentary Feature)

    “Crazy Heart”
    Jeff Bridges (Best Actor)
    Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett (Best Original Song)

    “The Hurt Locker”
    Mark Boal (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay)
    Chris Innis and Bob Murawski (Best Film Editing)
    Paul Ottosson (Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing)

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  • Breznican backstage

    (from left) Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock backstage at the 82nd annual Academy AwardsAnthony Breznican (who, by the way, won the Publicist Guild’s reporter of the year prize Friday) gave us a wonderful behind-the-scenes take on the Academy’s pre-nomination proceedings at USA Today back in early February, and he’s back this morning with a first-hand perspective from backstage at the Kodak last night.

    Here’s a taste:

    As [Mo’Nique and Geoffrey Fletcher] walked down the corridor to the elevator that would take them to the pressroom, Robin Williams jumped in front of them to lighten the mood, making “swish, swish, swish” noises as he swept an invisible broom in front of her slow walk.

    “It’s curling, curling!” Williams said, finally getting Mo’Nique to laugh out loud.

    Check out the rest at USA Today.

  • ‘The Hurt Locker’ takes 6 Oscars, including Best Picture

    Jeff Bridges at the 82nd annual Academy AwardsOh, let’s start with the positive.  The irony of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner of all time coming in a year when the Academy did everything it could (right down to a hopelessly baiting horror film montage) to shove the Oscar telecast toward populist appeal couldn’t be more delicious.  Much of the season was deceptively tame, but a final week push from all sides (including within) to unseat the perceived frontrunner either came too late or simply didn’t work.

    “The Hurt Locker” claimed six trophies, including Best Picture, Best Director and best Original Screenplay.  The latter became perhaps the tightest race of them all as The Weinstein Company worked aggressively to secure a prize for Quentin Tarantino, but again, it either came too late or didn’t work.

    Kathryn Bigelow’s war saga wasn’t even daunted by its perceived competition as “Avatar” managed only three wins, for Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.  Only one of those races included competition from “The Hurt Locker.”

    The biggest surprise of the night, no doubt, was Geoffrey Fletcher’s Best Adapted Screenplay win for “Precious,” an award that seemed to be pre-ordained for “Up in the Air” scribes Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner.  How often we forget the Academy can be as unpredictable as not.  And Fletcher, by the way, is the first African American winner of a screenplay Oscar.  “Precious,” meanwhile, was one of three films (along with “Crazy Heart” and “Up”) to win two Oscars, and it seemed to receive a lot of respect and admiration in the room.

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  • 3/2 Oscarweb Round-up

    Carey Mulligan in An Education• Pete Hammond says the Best Actress race is close, pats himself on the back for the fact that one of the countless early ideas he threw at the wall actually stuck. [Notes on a Season]

    • Rachel Abramowitz notes Carey Mulligan’s rise to stardom via Julian Fellowes, well, via an assistant friend of an assistant to a casting director who knew Fellowes’s wife.  You follow? [24 Frames]

    • The 20 best Oscar night dresses of the last 20 years. [Entertainment Weekly]

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

    Peter Capaldi in In the LoopIn most cases, the adapted screenplay category of a given Oscar race is packed with Best Picture nominees or contenders. This year, however, there was a nice balance of adapted and original screenplays in the Best Picture category, and in fact, of the “top five” films that trickled down throughout the season, three were original and two were adapted, a rarity.

    Regarding the adaptations, things seemed to firm up for a while, but with the various WGA ineligibilities, one couldn’t shake the feeling that a surprise was in the works. At the end of the day, Scott Cooper’s run on “Crazy Heart” came to an unfortunate end, while a fan-fave British comedy found support.

    The nominees are:

    “District 9” (Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell)
    “An Education” (Nick Hornby)
    “In the Loop” (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche)
    “Precious” (Geoffrey Fletcher)
    “Up in the Air” (Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner)

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  • 3/1 Oscarweb Round-up

    Vera Farmiga in Up in the Air• Geoffrey Fletcher writes up what Precious (and “Precious”) means to him. [Huffington Post]

    • Donna Freydkin talks to Vera Farmiga, who, by the way, has a lot of support for her nominated performance in “Up in the Air.”  (Just sayin’…) [USA Today]

    • Maggie Gyllenhaal offers a soundbite concerning the whirlwind campaign behind “Crazy Heart” (the campaign that netted her a nomination, mind you). [Vulture]

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Top shots, Berlin coverage and more

    Paranormal Activity• You asked for it, you eventually got it: our annual list of the Top 10 shots of the year, part one and part two.

    • In our ongoing Oscar Guide series, we dug into the supporting actor, foreign language film, art direction, makeup and sound editing races.

    • Guy’s Berlinale coverage continued, with “The Illusionist,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “Winter’s Bone” among the highlights.

    • We interviewed “The Cove” director Louie Psihoyos, as well as the creative minds behind “Coraline,” Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick.

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  • INTERVIEW: Geoffrey Fletcher

    Geoffrey FletcherIn a dimly lit backstage area of Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre, “Precious” screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher says his Oscar nomination is still setting in. “When I see in print somewhere that I’ve been nominated, it’s still a bit of a shock,” he says.

    And of course it would be. Two years ago Fletcher was standing in line in New York City outside a comic book shop waiting to get Quentin Tarantino’s autograph on his special edition “Reservoir Dogs” DVD. Now he finds himself sharing the circuit with Tarantino, both of them nominees for their work writing two of the most popular films of the Oscar season.

    “Every day throughout the season has been a learning experience, and a wonderful one, because the journey was pretty long,” he says. “But to get here, even though you wonder how it might feel to have a film out, maybe even one that gets some attention, nothing really can prepare you for it. But there’s some good to that, too, because each learning experience helps anyone who’s creative.”

    He still remembers clearly the first time he screened the film in Midtown Manhattan, long before Sundance or buyer interest, and seemingly a whole lifetime before the film awards madness that eventually took hold.

    “I was crazy about this project and I was so close to it that I felt like I was having a child and handing it to others,” he says. “People around me, primarily strangers, were a huge part of the experience. They seemed completely engaged and they reacted very vividly. I could hear them as well, I could see them and hear them reacting. On the way home I felt so alive.”

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  • ‘Precious’ scribe to pen Attica film for Doug Liman

    AtticaThis announcement will hit via press release in the trades tomorrow (EDIT: Strike that, it looks like the release has now gone out, maybe due to this early report.), but since the news has already appeared in the form of a blog post last month from director Doug Liman, and since I confirmed it with Geoffrey Fletcher during a telephone interview this afternoon, I don’t see the harm in jumping the gun.

    The “Precious” screenwriter will follow up his Oscar nomination with a script based on the Attica prison uprising for Liman.  The project was set up in December and is a personal endeavor for the director.  Liman’s father, Arthur L. Liman, was the young lawyer who ran the investigation during the uprising.

    The ultimate report was “a riveting page-turner,” Liman says in this 30ninjas blog entry.  “But the people whose job it was to prosecute the crimes wanted my father to reveal who had admitted to what. When my father refused, they threatened to hold him in contempt of court and throw him in jail.”

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  • Nominated screenwriters convene in Hollywood

    Terri TatchellCreative Screenwriting senior editor, Jeff Goldsmith, always bites off a lot when he lines up a massive panel of the year’s screenplay nominees to discuss the evolution of their work each year, which leads to any number of publicists grumbling in the shadows about the time overage.  Last night’s panel was supposed to run until 8:30 but Goldsmith was still hammering away at 8:45.  But he always asks well-considered, engaging questions and writers being writers, they have plenty to say.

    The panelists included Nick Hornby, Alessandro Camon, Armando Iannucci, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche, Geoffrey Fletcher, Terri Tatchell, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner.  Quentin Tarantino, Mark Boal and Oren Moverman were scheduled to attend but bailed out at the last minute, while the Coen brothers — no shock here — were never going to be there.  So Goldsmith almost nailed down nine of the 10 nominated films.

    It was a great discussion with plenty of insights.  Goldsmith asked about defying genre, which he judged to be the connective quality of all the work represented by the panel, what the re-writing process was like for all involved, how they made it through the agony of staring at a blank page, etc.

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  • SANTA BARBARA: ‘Kells’ screens and the writers talk

    The Secret of KellsIt’s been a slow ramping up for me in Santa Barbara, coverage wise.  I’ve had some Wi-Fi difficulties that are being sorted and I’ve posted when I can from where I can, but a couple of notes on the last two days.

    Yesterday I took in a late afternoon screening of Tomm Moore’s “The Secret of Kells,” the film that probably served up the biggest surprise last Tuesday when it slid into the animated feature field over the populist, branch-respected “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and the less-respected “Ponyo,” which nevertheless comes from a titan of the medium.

    The film is beautiful in so many ways, offering a rich, artistic palette of shapes and color to paint a portrait of a well-circulated Irish story revolving around the non-fictional Book of Kells.  The artwork ultimately mirrors, in some way, the Insular art featured in the book, and the narrative itself, abstract as it feels at times, seems to be about the persistence of art and history.

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  • The nominees react

    Maggie Gyllenhaal in Crazy HeartThroughout the morning and early afternoon we took statements from or hopped on the phone with 44 of today’s Oscar nominees.  Their reactions…

    Maggie Gyllenhaal, supporting actress, “Crazy Heart”:

    The thing is, you know, I’m so proud of the movie and I always have been, more proud of it than any of the work I’ve done so far.  But because I wasn’t getting nominated for anything, I wasn’t expecting it.  My phone was ringing so early and I thought, “Wait, maybe!”   I was staying at my brother’s in LA.  He said to me, “Your phone is going to be ringing all day.”  He made me a cup of coffee and then we watched the sun rise.  It was pretty mellow.  But this wouldn’t be happening for Jeff [Bridges] or me if it wasn’t for Scott [Cooper].

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  • Paramount and Lionsgate do it up pre-Globes

    Tobey Maguire in BrothersThere will be a number of post-Golden Globes parties tonight — Summit, Warner Bros., Fox, Weinstein, etc. — but a pair of studios did it up Saturday night in honor of their nominees.

    First at the Chateau Marmont, Paramount toasted its stable with a star-studded, paparazzi-snapping affair.  Actually, it wasn’t the least bit comfortable.  Talk about over-invited.  In the inner sanctum, surrounded by Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Benicio Del Toro, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Mike Tyson (who wasn’t on the list, but would you turn him away?), George Clooney, Chris Pine, Tobey Maguire, etc., breathing, let alone moving more than two inches, was a chore.  Jason Reitman was on hand early on but had to take off for the LAFCA gala before long.  Luckily, he missed that fire hazard.

    I got a few seconds with Farmiga, who was excited to say hello to Scorsese again.  Anne Kendrick and her beau Edgar Wright smartly made their way to a secondary room at one point where we had a nice chat.  Wright was, of course, being hit up by “Scott Pilgrim” queries left and right.  From the youngsters, that is.  The crowd was largely, shall we say, octogenarian.  Plenty of HFPA and Academy members scattered throughout.  And Kendrick, bless her heart, didn’t even want to talk about the “O-word.”

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  • 12/4 Oscarweb Round-up

    Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones• Peter Knegt talks to “Up in the Air” supporting actress hopeful (and newly minted NBR award recipient) Anna Kendrick. [indieWIRE]

    • Stanley Tucci and how to (reluctantly) play a pervert. [The Carpetbagger]

    • Peter Jackson, meanwhile, doesn’t much care about an Oscar campaign but does hope that people look closely at Tucci and Saoirse Ronan’s performances. [Vulture]

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Field of adaptations

    Amy Adams in Julie & JuliaAs always, the year’s adapted screenplay race is much more competitive than the original screenplay race. But what’s intriguing to note is that of the anticipated “big four” still to be widely screened, three of them are right in the thick of this discussion.

    In the case of “Nine,” there is a chance for Anthony Minghella to receive his second posthumous Oscar nomination in as many years, something I don’t think we’ve seen since James Dean. But sometimes the razzle-dazzle of a movie musical can overshadow what craft there might be on the page, so it’s no slam dunk. Michael Tolkin is co-writer on the script, and even though I’ve seen the film, I’m prohibited from offering my thoughts on the work.

    “The Lovely Bones,” meanwhile, is adapted from a beloved novel, looks to feature a more reserved and refined Peter Jackson than we’ve seen in recent years and could see the lovable trio (Jackson, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh) back in Oscar’s good graces. We’ll know when we see it.

    The Royals and invited British press get their look on the 24th. Harry Knowles has received his typical peek (as Paramount continues to nurture the relationship as if it’s 2002 and AICN still moves the needle). The rest of the US press corps has to wait until the other side of the holiday on the 27th to judge. Hopefully we’ll still care by then. I heard some scathing criticisms out of an exhibitor screening last week.

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