• Carolyn Giardina floats the possibility of “How to Train Your Dragon” beating “Toy Story 3” for Best Animated Feature with nothing but those (not unexpected) Visual Effects Society wins to justify it. [The Race]
• James Cameron thinks Christopher Nolan should have been nominated for Best Director this year. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Steve Pond explains the voting procedure of the five categories not on the ballots that went out yesterday. [The Odds]
Four for “Inception,” three for “How to Train Your Dragon” (which beat out “Toy Story 3” every step of the way). “Hereafter,” meanwhile, took the supporting effects award.
Key quote from Christopher Nolan, who received the inaugural Visionary Award:
I know visual effects people pride themselves on doing the impossible. I’d just like to encourage you to say “no” to the unreasonable.
(Courtesy: David Cohen)
Check out the full list of winners at The Circuit.
[Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures]
The race for Best Original Screenplay is full of worthy competitors this year. Four Best Picture nominees and the year’s best screenplay period make up the field, and even if there are a few that should have been in the mix, I find it difficult to argue with what squeaked through in the end.
The writing categories can sometimes be interesting to watch on Oscar night. The Academy can mix things up, but only within the Best Picture landscape, as these awards have gone to a non-Best Picture competitor just six times in the last 20 years. Nevertheless, all signs seem to be pointing to one film to dominate the show, and this category is no exception.
The nominees are:
“Another Year” (Written by Mike Leigh)
“The Fighter” (Screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson; Story by Keith Dorrington & Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson)
“Inception” (Written by Christopher Nolan)
“The Kids Are All Right” (Written by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg)
“The King’s Speech” (Screenplay by David Seidler)
“He no longer challenges our ideas about film,” actor Leonardo DiCaprio said of Christopher Nolan tonight, before presenting him with the Modern Master Award. “He has helped define them.”
It was a great bow on a fine evening meant to celebrate the director’s work over the last decade. The Modern Master designation is Santa Barbara’s highest honor and, despite an unexpected Oscar snub for Best Director from the Academy last Tuesday afternoon, this is certainly the year to single him out in such a light.
Pete Hammond served as moderator for the evening as he queried Nolan on his brief if dense career to date. It was shrewd to note that “Following” in 1998, a $6,000 movie that grossed $40,000 and “Inception” in 2010, a $160 million movie that grossed $800 million worldwide, only have 11 years separating them. The director’s latest “has been successful on its own terms, not on Hollywood’s,” Hammond said by way of introduction. It’s a good way to put it.
It looks like “The King’s Speech,” which went much wider this weekend, could quietly become a $100-million grossing movie. Meanwhile, that re-expansion for “The Social Network” didn’t make much of a dent and it seems increasingly unlikely it’ll cross that mark, leaving “Black Swan,” “Inception,” “Toy Story 3,” “True Grit” and potentially “The Fighter” as the only Best Picture nominees to ultimately get there.
In more depressing news, “The Way Back” will barely make $3 million when all is said and done.
(Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)
I nearly forgot tomorrow brings the DGA awards. I thought they were next weekend. Anyway, I guess this can be your place to offer up predictions. I’ll say this, though. I don’t think David Fincher has this in the bag. At all. Ballots were due in today, by the way, which means the Oscar nominations could have an impact. Maybe last minute voters want to spring for Christopher Nolan after he was unceremoniously snubbed by the Academy?
Fincher’s dominance in the critics awards circuit is unmistakable. But now you’re talking about 10,000 people rather than a 30-person media organization (and, in most cases, much smaller than that). “Inception” is a populist film, but so, too, is “The King’s Speech.” And I think I’m just brazen enough to predict Tom Hooper to win.
Yep, I am. I think Darren Aronofsky deserves it above all comers, but that’s unlikely. And Fincher would be my second pick. He could well win, and “The Fighter” could take the SAG ensemble prize, blowing the race wide open (for some). But no, I’m going to put my chips on a sweep for “The King’s Speech” that started with PGA, will continue tomorrow night and keep going through Sunday with an ensemble win. What about you?
[Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures]
So the 83rd Annual Academy Award nominations were finally announced this week, and I did fairly well in handicapping the nominees. Outside of Best Sound Mixing, I never missed more than one nominee in a category. Unfortunately, there were no categories where I scored 100% (apart from Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay). Oh well.
The massive overall tally for “The King’s Speech” resulted from a plethora of nominations in the crafts fields. “True Grit” and “Inception” got all but one plausible tech nomination (with one very notable exception for each, discussed below). “TRON Legacy”’s tally, on the other hand, has got to be considered a disappointment as must, to a lesser extent, those of “Black Swan” and “127 Hours.” The complete shut-out for “Shutter Island” was also somewhat of a surprise, but other branches saw fit to make Oscar nominees of some unlikely titles.
Regardless, it was nice to see many deserving crafts artists get their due. With the throat-clearing out of the way, I’ll now give short reactions to – and previews of – each below-the-line field.
Even when they aren’t being read out with gale-force enthusiasm by Mo’Nique, the Oscar nominations tend to attack you with breathless speed that you need at least half an hour to decide how you feel about them at all. As usual, this morning’s announcement found me bouncing from one split-second reaction to another: Yay! No! What? That? Why? Who’s missing? What did she say? That? No! Did I call that? Yay!
As Kate Winslet would say in such situations: “Gather.” And now that I’ve stepped back, gathered and taken into account that no Oscar nomination slate in history has been without its disappointments, I can honestly say that I’m more happy than not with the list in front of me.
Some of the day’s biggest surprises didn’t elicit much of an emotional reaction from me. My eyebrows rose as high as anyone’s over Christopher Nolan’s latest failure to secure a Best Director nomination — is he the first man in Oscar history to fall three times at this hurdle after being DGA-nominated? — though I always said he couldn’t be regarded as a sure thing.
Did you hear? The Oscar nominations were announced this morning. And there was a lot to chew on. (And boy can we be grateful for that.)
With a full slate of contenders in front of us, it seemed only right to go ahead and offer up the latest set of winner predictions. They are indicated by asterisk in the sidebar and are listed out in full after the jump.
After roughly a week of falling into the logic (and blaring rhetoric) suggesting “The Social Network” would turn its critics run into Oscar gold, I’m back to my instincts (and, judging by its nomination haul, the will of the Academy) with a bet on “The King’s Speech.” Not only that, but I think we could see a mini-sweep for the film, as a couple of potentially formidable competitors were ousted from the nominations in a few craft fields.
Of course, things could change. But I’m sensing a momentum shift, and it’s frankly one we could have expected was around the corner.
On the face of it, the nominees for the 83rd annual Academy Awards seemed fairly unremarkable. Aside from the deafening nature of not hearing Christopher Nolan’s name in the line-up for Best Director (the only true shock of the major categories), everything seemed to be within the expected parameters (even Javier Bardem sliding in, which seemed, increasingly, like a very real possibility these last few weeks).
But then I got to looking through the craft category nominations and the real interesting beats started to surface. First and foremost, “The King’s Speech” led the field with a whopping 12 nominations, even scoring in the Best Sound Mixing category. That’s major, to say the least. And enough, along with the PGA win, to consider it the frontrunner to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
“True Grit” wasn’t far behind with 10 nominations, including a bid for the Coen brothers in Best Director after all. Hailee Steinfeld stayed in Best Supporting Actress and Bridges was chalked up, but again, let me go back to the more intriguing crafts fields.
Two weeks ago, one of our readers, KevinK, asked the following question for Oscar Talk:
What do you think of the atmosphere that comes out of this late stage of the awards season? I think the atmosphere is really toxic and really flies in the face of what we all care about in the first place: a love of film.
We didn’t get to it on the air. So I saved it. Then Thursday, Guy touched on some profound textures in his final pre-nod column. It was one of his best, a sound consideration of the posterity of an awards season above its pageantry.
The Yin and Yang of things is what struck me. To Kevin’s point, the environment around these films is more and more enhanced or diminished by steadily increasing media attention — this outlet being no exception. He went on to note a well-regarded critic’s perceived change of heart on one of last year’s front-running contenders due to its consistent registration during the season, as if a virginal opinion had been sullied by the air of competition and acclaim.
For the past two years running, I’ve celebrated Oscar Nomination Eve by assembling my own ideal (and, usually, incredibly far-fetched) ballot, so here we go again. As well as a kind of last-ditch prayer to the Oscar gods, I also look on it as a salute to the worthy contenders who haven’t a hope in hell of hearing their names read out on Tuesday morning.
At the request of some readers, I’ve bent the rules to accommodate several titles unfairly ineligible for Oscar consideration in any category: most of you are aware of the arcane ruling that has denied “A Prophet” the chance to ever compete in a non-ghetto category, while the TV airings of “Red Riding” and “Carlos” keep them out of the game too. I’m less clear on why the likes of “White Material” and “Fish Tank” aren’t on the Academy’s list of eligible titles, but they aren’t, and I must make my peace with that.
Anyway, screw ’em: this ballot represents what I found most awards-worthy from all the theatrical features released in the US last year, and you can’t get fairer than that. I’ll begin, as usual, with the ten technical categories — in which I was pleased to end up with a healthy spread of 33 films across 48 slots. Jump in after the cut, and share your own thoughts in the comments. (Also, check out Kris’s very different ideal ballot here.)
Yesterday I began a final look at the crafts categories. Today, a look at the four remaining fields: Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design and Best Film Editing.
BEST ART DIRECTION
The precursors of the BFCA, BAFTA and Art Directors Guild have been fairly consistent in citing four titles in this category. Last year’s winner, Robert Stromberg, seems poised to dip again for creation of a 3D world on Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Eve Stewart, on the other hand, will likely be returning to the fold after an 11 year absence for “The King’s Speech.”
Guy Hendrix Dyas and Jess Gonchor also have got all necessary precursors, and have fashioned surefire Best Picture nominees, in “Inception” and “True Grit” respectively. It is true that they have had difficulty being nominated in the past but Gonchor has also never had such an Oscar-friendly opportunity, whereas the impressive, integral-to-the-story nature of Dyas’s work has been especially embraced by the precursors.
Gerard will address this category in tomorrow’s Tech Support column, but I did want to say something about Best Costume Design — partly because the Guild dropped some rather interesting nominations today, and partly because it’s the technical category that’s still prompting the most head-scratching as I work towards my final predictions.
We all know the Academy favors lavish period productions with corsets and hoop skirts a go-go in this category, but 2010 served up remarkably few possibilities in this vein. Even “The King’s Speech,” the year’s default well-dressed prestige title, is hardly a sartorial showcase in the vein of “Marie-Antoinette” or “The Duchess” — Jenny Beavan’s crisp 1930s wardrobe is functionally stylish rather than spectacular.
As if to illustrate the lack of conventional historical options, the Costume Designers’ Guild found only three films to nominate in their period category, instead of the usual five — and one of them, I’m thrilled to say, is the 1990s-set “The Fighter,” whose threads I was plugging just the other day.
Save for the Academy, of course. And you can find sound editors’ picks at The Circuit. Just about every possible competitor was chalked up (and it’s the sound effects and foley category that tends to shed the most light). Check out the breakdown of hopefuls, as always, at the film’s dedicated Contenders page here.
“Black Swan” and “Inception” are officially the most-recognized films of the year when it comes to the guild/society circuit. Each film was chalked up by every group.
Today “Black Swan” and “Inception” maintained their uniquely perfect guild status (having been cited by every single guild and society) by nailing down nominations in the contemporary category from the Costume Designers Guild. Every frontrunning possibility was chalked up, so the task is still pretty daunting to predict how that will go with Oscar. That leaves just one industry precursor, the Motion Picture Sound editors, which should announce nominees tomorrow.
(Someone do the math for me. Has a film ever been nominated for EVERY industry precursor? PGA, DGA, WGA, SAG, ACE, ADG, ASC, CAS, CDG, MPSE and VES?)
Meanwhile, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) spoke up with its list of nominee. I’ve noted only the three film categories.
It seems hard to believe that it’s been more than six months since I wrote this year’s introductory Tech Support column ( a dissection of the art direction race). Much has changed since then, naturally, as we are less than a week away from the big day when we find out the nominees for the Oscars this year. Today, I take a final look at the music categories, sound categories and the two categories that have been narrowed down to seven finalists – Best Visual Effects and Best Makeup.
BEST MAKEUP
In this utterly bizarre category, virtually any combination of the seven finalists would fail to surprise me as the final three. That said, I’ve had the same top two predicted all year and see no reason to change now: “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wolfman.” The former had massive box office and very noticeable makeup, whereas the latter is exactly the sort of movie that tends to score here and nowhere else.
Logic may put “True Grit” or “The Fighter” next in line due to their Best Picture contender status. But as much as these films are loved, they don’t have as showy makeup as the other finalists, and this is a category that often doesn’t care how films are received overall.
This year’s Best Original Score race really has me at a loss. I freely admit that I have no idea what will happen there. Some days I think we’ll get a small surprise like Alexandre Desplat sliding in for his best work this year in “The Ghost Writer,” others I think we could just get a massive, happy surprise like Daft Punk slipping in for their brilliant work on “TRON Legacy.”
Other times, I kind of just bank on it being a boring assemblage of what we’ve been expecting. Probably option “C” is the wisest expectation.
One thing has begun to materialize lately for me, though. And that is the fact that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who I once upon a time thought might not even get a nomination for their wonderfully woven ambient work in “The Social Network,” could be the frontrunners to win in a category that might be filled with less-singular achievements.