Sad Brad Smith performing “Help Yourself,” taken by First Showing‘s Alex Billington mid-flight during a Paramount/American Airlines stunt from New York to Los Angeles this afternoon. Us Weekly, In Touch, Perez Hilton types aboard.
Tag: Help Yourself
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OSCAR TALK: Ep. 8 — ‘This Is It,’ music branch, ‘Invictus’ and ‘Avatar’ trailers, the Best Actor race and more
We have a belated edition of Oscar Talk for you today. We apologize for the lateness, but what better way to kick back on a Sunday afternoon than with yours truly and Anne Thompson of indieWIRE’s Thompson on Hollywood?In this eighth installment, we actually covered a lot of ground. This week’s topics:
• With “Michael Jackson’s This Is It” hitting theaters this weekend, we lead off talking brief about the film (which Anne hasn’t seen).
• With music on the mind, this leads to another quick discussion about the Academy’s music branch, which caused poor Sad brad Smith to preemptively refrain from submitting his moving track “Help Yourself” from “Up in the Air” for consideration this year.
• Rumors of Neil Patrick Harris hosting the Oscarcast after doing bang-up jobs at the Tonys and Emmys are circulating, and in the wake of Ricky Gervais being tapped to emcee the Golden Globes this year, we spin our wheels on that topic one more time.
• “Precious” is opening next week, so with that (and Anne’s recent piece concerning Mo’Nique’s behind-the-scenes drama issues) in mind, we talk about whether the film, or the actress herself, has to win a popularity contest this season to gain the Academy’s attention and respect.
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‘Help Yourself’ from ‘Up in the Air’ becomes the latest music branch rule book casualty
The music branch of the Academy sure hasn’t done the hard-working awards team at Paramount any favors lately. You might recall the 2007 fiasco surrounding Johnny Greenwood’s score for “There Will Be Blood,” which left his immaculate (some would say year’s-best) work ineligible due to arbitrary, overly subjective fine print concerning the dilution of the original music by pre-existing material.Well, lightning strikes twice, as musician Sad Brad Smith has opted out of submitting his soulful, thematically potent track “Help Yourself” from Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air.” We featured the song here earlier in the week.
The reason, I’m told, is that, though unpublished, a portion of the song existed previously in Smith’s repertoire. As such, the track would not qualify due to the fact that it wasn’t rendered, in full, specifically and originally for the film, as the music branch’s rules stipulate.
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Listen to Sad Brad Smith’s ‘Help Yourself’ from ‘Up in the Air’
It looks like others are finally coming around to what we reported here over a month ago: Sad Brad Smith’s “Help Yourself” from the film “Up in the Air” is a formidable contender in this year’s Best Original Song race. EW’s Adam Markovitz does note something we haven’t conveyed yet, however — that director Jason Reitman caught Smith’s act at a Chicago coffee shop on a recommendation and asked him to write something up for the film. “Help Yourself” is the result, and it’s a fantastic track.No, really, I don’t usually dig on this sort of melody. It seems so dangerously close to being too precious for it’s own good, but pulls back just enough to be a pretty profound piece unto itself. The tune plays in a marriage sequence that is, really, the emotional heart of the film. I would love to see Smith nominated and performing on that stage, but you just never can tell with the music branch.
Anyway, we provided Mary J. Blige’s “I Can See in Color” from “Precious” earlier in the week, so it seemed only right to pass Sad Brad Smith’s track along also. As always, we’ll continue to keep an eye on this race as it unfolds.
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New ‘Up in the Air’ trailer features original song contender ‘Help Yourself’
A new trailer has dropped for Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air,” considerably more broad than the one the director conceived as an internet exclusive teaser, but still very much on the nose for the film’s tone and rhythms. Furthermore, the final moments feature the Sad Brad Smith song “Help Yourself,” which will more than likely be in the hunt for an original song nomination as it plays over a portion of the film, as opposed to the closing credits title track.
Here’s the new trailer (see it in HD here):
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Two ‘Up in the Air’ tracks join the race for Best Original Song
We’ve been getting you up to speed on the Best Original Song situation over the last couple of weeks. After putting together a rough early look at some contenders, we revealed yesterday that Mary J. Blige would have a song in Lee Daniels’s “Precious.” Today we’ve got the skinny on the music from one of the season’s most anticipated films.“Up in the Air,” which played like gangbusters in Telluride, will have two original tracks. The first is a title song which runs over the closing credits and, like Blige’s “I See in Color,” it has an interesting backstory.
After “Juno” was released in 2007, with its use of pre-existing songs and a hit soundtrack, director Jason Reitman told the first ever audience of “Up in the Air” at this weekend’s fest that he began receiving tons of music from people. One night he was approached by a man who had recently lost his job and had written a song he thought might go well with the director’s latest film.