Speaking of “Amelia,” the film may or may not be a factor in this year’s awards race. The jury is still out there, but over at MakingOf, director Mira Nair talks about the job of a director and her process in making a film. Take a look:
Tag: Mira Nair
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Finding trends in Oscar’s ten
Over at MCN, David Poland has offered his first formal Oscar column of the season (can we say “the season” in July?) and he has some strong points to make. Prediction junkies who just jump straight to his top 10 forecast for Best Picture will find some (delete according to taste) interesting/exciting/eccentric choices in the mix — he’s certainly the first pundit I’ve heard suggest that Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” is a frontrunner, while “Julie & Julia” hasn’t previously entered the discussion much either.But the column itself is of more interest, largely because he brings up a key (and I think under-discussed) point about the potential impact of a 10-nominee race: namely, that with such a broad field, it becomes much more difficult to pinpoint voter and industry trends from year to year:
How will 10 nominees change the dynamic of desperate efforts to spin trend stories? How can it be The Year Of… anything with such inevitable diversity?
It could, I guess, be The Year of Matt Damon, who has Invictus, The Informer!, the animated Miyazaki film, Ponyo, and maybe even Green Zone coming out. It could be The Year Of Not Bio-Pics, in spite of the Nelson Mandela film from Eastwood, Invictus, and Meryl Streep invoking Julia Child.
Some will try to make it The Year of The Woman, with Nine leading the way for such hopefuls as Julie & Julia, Bright Star, Precious, An Education, Broken Embraces, the 2 SPC Coco Chanel movies, Amelia, Cheri, and even the female director of The Hurt Locker. And maybe they will have a point… there could be 5 nominations in that group.
Or not.
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‘Amelia’ trailer
Judging from this recently posted trailer for Mira Nair’s “Amelia,” the Amelia Earhart biopic that will certainly be the centerpiece of this year’s Fox Searchlight Oscar campaign, I’d say Richard Gere, rather than Ewan McGregor, has a shot at the supporting race for a role that looks to sport some considerable screen time. He even gets above-the-title placement.
As for the trailer itself, it’s a pretty standard glimpse. Everything is as you’d expect from a period, some might say “Oscar bait” production such as this. As usual, Swank haters will gag at the “2 time Academy Award Winner” intro, of course.
Here is the embed, but Yahoo! Movies had the exclusive, FYI:
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Could female directors hit Oscar paydirt this year?
Only the greenest of awards-watchers needs reminding of the following statistic: a mere three women have been nominated for Best Director in the 81-year history of the Academy Awards. It’s long been an embarrassing state of affairs — never more so than in the late 80s and early 90s, when in three out of six consecutive years, the Best Picture nominee denied a directing nod happened to be made by a woman.Still, the sad truth is that the workings of the industry are such that female filmmakers are rarely entrusted with the kind of prestige studio product that grabs awards attention. (It’s no coincidence that the three past nominees — Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola — all come from the foreign and/or independent sector.)
2009, however, offers a considerably rosier outlook. As I was compiling my own early Oscar predictions (which I’ll share with you next week) in the wake of Cannes, it occurred to me that the Academy has an opportunity to double that paltry aforementioned statistic in the space of a single year. More than double, actually: looking down the list of awards possibilities, it is feasible — if still not very likely — that as many as four of this year’s five Best Director slots could be filled by the fairer sex.
Apparently, I’m not the only one thinking alone these lines: IndieWire’s Peter Knegt considers the possibilities of three ladies in his post-Cannes awards speculation column, going so far as to predict nods for all three (based only on films he’s seen so far). So who are these women (including the one Knegt isn’t considering) with a chance of making Oscar history come January?