• Oscar season ramped up this week, with the popular selection of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin as this year’s Oscar emcees.
• This week’s Off the Carpet column surveyed the runners and riders for Best Actor …
• … only to be immediately outdated as Jeff Bridges and “Crazy Heart” arrived to turn that race on its head.
• Big news in the Best Animated Feature race, as last-minute entry “A Town Called Panic” ensured we’ll have five nominees.
Welcome to the latest installment of Oscar Talk, a weekly kudocast between yours truly and Anne Thompson of indieWIRE’s Thompson on Hollywood.
On the docket this afternoon:
• Anne and I discuss the week’s biggest Oscar news, the tapping of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin as this year’s Oscar telecast hosts.
• Another substantial news item this week was the revelation that Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart” would get a last minute 2009 release from Fox Searchlight. Anne and I talk up the film and actor Jeff Bridges’s wonderful, certainly Oscar-worthy performance.
• “A Christmas Carol” releases today, so we use that as an opportunity to revisit the animated feature contenders.
• As mentioned earlier this morning, the latest Gurus o’ Gold chart has gone up. Anne and I talk about a number of the contenders, placements, etc.
Have a listen to this week’s podcast below, leading in with one of the original tracks from “Crazy Heart.” And as always, you can subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.
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It’s been so long since I actually ranked the Best Picture contenders (given that we did away with the charts some weeks back), that when I sat down to do so for this week’s Gurus o’ Gold update at Movie City News, I really didn’t know which way was up. It’s liberating to stop thinking about things in reductive terms, but I gave it a go, as did 14 other pundits, and this is what we came up with. Sasha Stone also has charts from past years up for comparison.
It seems like USA Today’s Anthony Brenican is the only guy who got his votes in after the big “Crazy Heart”/Jeff Bridges news, but suffice it to say the film would likely be a bit higher on the Best Picture chart and certainly Bridges and Gyllenhaal would be formidable in the lead actor and supporting actress fields.
“Up in the Air” is leading the pack, though “Precious” isn’t that far behind. My top 10 matches the Gurus’ exactly, except rather than Quentin Tarrantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” I’ve placed a bet on James Cameron’s “Avatar” (which sits at #11 on the chart). Intriguingly, Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” is close to the bubble, at #12. I’d say that’s too high, frankly, but critics adore the movie.
Head on over to Movie City News for the full spread.
It’s not just Jeff Bridges who leaps onto the Oscar landscape with Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart.” It’s possible in a few months that we’ll be talking pretty seriously about Maggie Gyllenhaal in the supporting actress race and, most certainly, T Bone Burnett’s contributions as the film’s music supervisor.
Fox Searchlight screened the film this morning to a handful of press and will do so again this evening, looking to gauge reactions to what could be a big boost both on the awards front and commercially. With “Amelia” losing money at the box office and a dwindling slate of product for the Oscar push, it seemed almost inevitable that this little mid-summer pick-up would find its way onto the 2009 schedule. More and more, that’s looking to be the case.
But back to the film. I would rather not offer up a proper review for a movie that hasn’t been color-timed, still has some sound mixing work to be done and, on the whole, just isn’t finished yet, but I feel comfortable calling it a slow burn that settles warmly in the tradition of “Tender Mercies” or “Nobody’s Fool.” While it might be unfair to reduce it to a “country-music ‘Wrestler’” (as The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik did yesterday without having seen the film), that is nevertheless a pretty streamlined way of describing the narrative.
More importantly, however, that “performance of a lifetime” from Jeff Bridges that Fox Searchlight was on about when the studio bought the film nearly four months ago? I think it could be this year’s Oscar-winning lead actor turn walking away.
Just when you thought last year’s Best Picture victor was down for the count, Fox Searchlight goes and shakes things up in November. First, some background…
When we kicked off our coverage of the 2009-2010 Oscar season a year in advance, one of the more anticipated titles was Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart,” based on the novel by Thomas Cobb about an alcoholic country music singer on the road to redemption. The film stars Jeff Bridges in the leading role, along with Colin Farrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall.
In July, Searchlight picked the film up, touting Bridges’s “performance of a lifetime,” but the studio slated the release for the spring of 2010. It seemed a shame at the time given the fact that the film was shaping up to be a potential awards vehicle for Bridges at the very least, perhaps more. But with “Amelia” on the way, a (so we thought) potentially major player in the race with its typical AMPAS tropes. But that ship has sailed, leaving the studio with only the animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and Marc Webb’s summer entry “(500) Days of Summer” to hawk for awards consideration.
Until now. Maybe.
For all my bitching about Roberto Benigni winning Best Actor in 1998 for his incessant mugging in “Life is Beautiful,” I was also thrilled the Academy watched enough films and paid enough attention to realize that Edward Norton was deserving for his magnetic turn as a neo-Nazi who sees the light in “American History X.” Norton was electrifying as Derek, the charismatic leader of a group of skinheads, handpicked by the older gentleman, played with menace and sleaze by Stacey Keach, who believes in what Hitler taught and seeks to spread the word to the youth of California.
Norton gave the best performance by an actor I saw in 1998, but the Academy got caught up in the groundswell of support of Benigni’s movie, a fable set in a death camp. I’m not a fan, either of his overwrought, over the top performance, or the film itself. No rant, you all know what I think there.
That said, there was a bounty of great male performances in 1998, many of which went unnoticed by the Academy. They did their best to get it right, though. Joining Norton and Benigni for nominations were Nick Nolte in “Affliction,” Ian McKellen, superb in “Gods and Monsters,” and Tom Hanks as the weary soldier in Steven Spielberg’s magnificent “Saving Private Ryan.”
Not even nominated, however, were Warren Beatty for his brilliant turn as the truth-talking senator in “Bulworth,” Joseph Fiennes in Best Picture winner “Shakespeare in Love,” Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show,” George Clooney in “Out of Sight,” Brendan Gleason in “The General” and John Travolta in “Primary Colors” or “A Civil Action,” take your pick. And perhaps the most deserving of all: Jeff Bridges as The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” the actor’s finest work, in my opinion.
Each of the aforemenetioned men gave stronger performances than the eventual Oscar winner, yet failed to nab a nomination. Jeez!
Venice Film Festival
A trim, lively comedy powered by a winning quartet of personality performances and an endearingly naff drive-time rock soundtrack, Grant Heslov’s helming debut “The Men Who Stare at Goats” doesn’t make too many demands of its audience. In return, we shouldn’t make too many demands of the film.
Anyone looking for a skewering satire of U.S. military practice might come away disappointed, even as the film opens with the cute semi-disclaimer, “More of this is true than you might imagine.”
Based on British journalist-humorist Jon Ronson’s book of the same title, which investigated the development of outlandish psychological warfare techniques in the U.S. army and their application in the Iraq war, Heslov’s film (from a script by Peter Straughan) jettisons most of Ronson’s dark gallows humor in favor of a sunnier, sillier sort of absurdity.
Not much has been retained but the idea of crazy psychic soldiers with telekinetic powers (the title is to be taken literally), but given the indifference of film audiences to anything remotely Iraq-related, you can hardly blame the “Goats” team for playing down the political currency of their source material.
• Comic-Con was the week’s big story, with 25 minutes of footage from “Avatar” its major talking-point so far.
• Meanwhile, the rather less glitzy sci-fi of “District 9” wowed the crowds.
• And Gary Oldman slipped some unexpected news about the next Batman installment.
• Good week for trailers, as both “Alice in Wonderland” and “Bright Star” offered a crazyglimpse of their goods.
The first opening day studio panel has just concluded as Walt Disney Pictures brought Robert Zemeckis (“A Christmas Carol”), Tim Burton (“Alice in Wonderland”) and the “Tron: Legacy” principals to Hall H for a hefty three-dimensional dose.
The “Christmas Carol” footage, which was an extended version of the Marley’s ghost sequence Disney has been showing for a few months, seemed to leave the audience dizzy with glee.
Patton Oswalt sat down with Zemeckis before the unveiling for a brief Q&A, leading by questioning the director’s reason for tackling the Charles Dickens classic after so many incarnations have already been filmed.
“If you read the actual novel, it’s very, very trippy,” Zemeckis said. “It’s very surreal and it’s really cool, and it’s very cinematic. I think we now have the filmmaking tools to film what Dickens wrote.”
Oswalt addressed the issue of “dead eyes” in the performance capture technique and a term applied to the uneasy visceral feeling it summons: “the uncanny valley.”
Yesterday Guy kick-started the Best Actor conversation on “Crazy Heart” star Jeff Bridges. The film, recently acquired by Fox Searchlight, is currently scheduled for a Spring 2010 release but seems to be all but begging for an autumn awards run given the buzz circling Bridges’s performance. I imagine similar discussions are happening at Searchlight, and without any real muscle in the lead actor race so far (I’m not sure Joseph Gordon-Levitt can survive the year), it would make some sense to jerk it into a qualifying release pattern.
Bridges, of course, is well overdue for some Oscar glory. He’s cranked out worthy performance after worthy performance, going all the way back to his first nomination for “The LAst Picture Show” and his first leading bid in “Starman.” His work in Rod Lurie’s “The Contender” (another nomination) still stands as my favorite presidential depiction on film yet. Nathaniel Roges over at The Film Experience is thinking along the same lines today, but offers sound reasoning for the actor’s consistently bleak Oscar track record.
When I first began compiling my Oscar nomination predictions back in May, I took a wild-card Best Actor punt on Jeff Bridges in a little, then distributor-less indie called “Crazy Heart.”
In truth, I had little basis for the guess other than the strong reputation of the 1987 source novel, and the fact that Bridges is surely one of the most sorely Oscar-overdue actors in the business. Like Ed Harris, he’s one of those dependable American stalwarts, well-liked by all, who you think must win at some point, but rarely land roles showy enough for the winner’s circle.
“Crazy Heart,” however, gives Bridges the opportunity to play a washed-up, alcoholic country singer seeking to get his life and career back on track — now just count the Oscar hooks in that sentence. How can he lose?
So I was interested to see my idea given at least some credence by Fox Searchlight, who recently acquired global rights to the film for a seven-figure sum.
I’ll dig into individual film reviews in due time. It’s been a slow start up here in Santa Barbara but the first two nights have been charming enough.
Rod Lurie’s “Nothing But the Truth” gets better and better each time I see it, particularly where Lurie’s work as a writer is concerned. Some beats are on the nose, perhaps too much for some people’s tastes, but I think he’s really developing as a filmmaker. And the flick went over like gangbusters with the crowd at the packed Arlington Theatre opening night gala yesterday. All the clever jokes found a home. The performances caught their stride with the viewers, it seemed, and everyone seemed to be in tune with the film’s tight rhythm. Most of all, the message seemed to settle (not surprising in a town this left of center), and that’s encouraging.
Jeff Bridges and James Cromwell were among the A-listers who came out to celebrate the film, which has been all but smothered by an untimely Yari Film Group bankruptcy. And the after-party at Paseo Nuevo up the street was slammed — too slammed. But, as always, upstairs in a V.I.P. setting is the place to be, and that’s where Lurie and his sharp college-bound son yukked it up with Bridges and “Truth” star Noah Wyle, among others.
Here’s my brief one-off on the film from back in September when it was playing Toronto.
Tonight, Kate Winslet was in town to accept the Montecito award, becoming the first person in the history of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to be awarded twice. With that in mind, festival director Roger Durling took playful umbrage on stage with her remarks at the Golden Globe ceremony a week ago when she claimed she never wins anything.
Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin sat down with Winslet for a two-hour conversation through her career that I frankly expected to be a bore, but it was a lively and candid chat. Clips from her wide ranging portfolio were peppered in here and there, but the cutest moment came when the actress couldn’t stop chuckling at the “Titanic” clip. “It’s so funny because I don’t see me and Leo playing Jack and Rose,” she said. “It’s just me and Leo. What are we doing there? It’s so funny to me that we were in ‘Titanic,’ I don’t know how to explain it.”
…but I’ll try. A sprint of sorts through deacades of deserving contenders (in my opinion, of course).
I ask you this: How did those lovable characters from “The Wizard of Oz,” portrayed so brilliantly by Ray Bolger (Scarecrow), Jack Haley (Tin Man), Bert Lahr (Lion) and Margaret Hamilton (Wicked Witch), fail to be nominated in any of the supporting categories? Any one of them should have won the damned thing let alone be nominated, but in 1939, each and every one of them was snubbed.
It was only a few years ago that the inimitable Robert Downey Jr. was in our living rooms as a result of repeated drug arrests. I recall several instances where I felt as if he’d never recover. Fortunately, he did, and on May 2 Mr. Downey will appear as a comic book hero in “Iron Man.” Advance buzz for the film has been strong, and David Carr of The New York Times filed this profile in today’s paper of the actor once labeled “the best of his generation.”
“Iron Man,” I suspect, will be an enjoyable film. Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard also star. Based on what I’ve seen thus far, it has some technical appeal that may catch voters come awards season. It’s this film – and the remaining work on Mr. Downey’s schedule in 2008 – that should finally complete his remarkable comeback.
Later this summer, he stars as Kirk Lazarus in the film “Tropic Thunder” from Ben Stiller. Downey’s character, a method actor who undergoes a pigment alteration, has many people curious. And this fall he appears in Joe Wright’s latest film “The Soloist” opposite Jamie Foxx.
Mr. Downey has only been nominated once for an Academy Award, in 1993, for his role as Charlie Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s film “Chaplin.” He did not win. Since then, he’s appeared in more than thirty five films — some quite memorable (“Wonder Boys,” “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “Zodiac,” especially). But none of these roles caught the attention of the awards community.
Seven years ago this month, Mr. Downey was fired from his recurring guest role on “Ally McBeal.” This year, he’ll release three films, one of which, “The Soloist,” may earn him a second Oscar nomination. And his past seems to be well behind him. As he remarked to Mr. Carr, “I’m not in that sphere of activity anymore, and I don’t understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out O.K. from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don’t even really understand that planet anymore.”
I’m certainly grateful for that.