• Pete Hammond reports from on the ground at Saturday night’s DGA awards. [Notes on a Season]
• Dave McNary from the angle of each nominee’s speech detailing the need for maintaining believability in their films. [Variety]
• On the heels of Kathryn Bigelow’s big win, Kira Cochrane wonders why there are so few female filmmakers. [The Guardian]
• In the biggest upset of the season so far, “The Hurt Locker” came up trumps at the PGA Awards.
• “Inglourious Basterds” took the top prize at the SAG Awards, which also gave another boost to Sandra Bullock.
• With Oscar nominations out next week, we listed some of the greatest nominee fields in Oscar history.
• Off the Carpet took stock following the weekend’s precursors, and Kris revised his winner predictions.
I received my last correspondence from Miramax publicity yesterday. Today, the company has effectively been shuttered, and it is, without question, the end of an era.
When things were streamlined for the brand back in October, I wrote a brief remembrance. But how ironic that, as the latest and greatest in independent cinema looks for distribution and attention in the snowy hills of Sundance, the studio that made the fest in some ways and, indeed, blazed the trail for independent cinema throughout the 1990s, finds itself closing up shop.
It was 21 years ago that Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies and videotape” put the fest on the map, waltzing into town with no hope for securing a deal and waltzing out under the Miramax umbrella that would eventually change first the business of indie film, and soon enough, the business of awards season. Chris Lee, in previewing the fest’s 25th anniversary last week, writes up the film’s impact at the Los Angeles Times.
This seemed to be in the offing for a while, but it’s always disconcerting to hear of major upheaval at a Hollywood institution like Miramax. The studio is folding its New York office, while Daniel Battsek, who has headed the Weinstein brothers’ former empire since 2005, will leave the company in January.
Battsek announced the news in this rather terse email:
After further reflection and discussion about the change in direction for Miramax, Rich Ross and I have agreed that I will step down as President of Miramax, effective the end of January, 2010.
With this decision, we have also agreed that the best chance of success for Miramax is for the company to be located in Los Angeles, and I will work with the group on a transition plan.
I’m very proud of all the great work we have accomplished here at Miramax and equally proud of my overall career at Disney.
I’ll have to just say it: this is sad. Just from a movie-goer, awards-watcher standpoint. Miramax has indeed been “folded-in” at Disney for about a year, as David Poland notes in his characteristic “nothing surprises me” fashion. And Greg Ellwood has put together a nice analysis of the event over at his Awards Campaign blog at HitFix. But beyond all that, it’s just…a bummer.
After all, it’s something of an end of an era for awards obsessives. Miramax dominated the 1990s under the Weinstein brothers who founded the company, acquired by Disney in 1993. The run is legendary, of course, and changed the way awards campaigns would be structured for years to come. But even with the brothers’ departure in 2005, it seemed there could be a spark of renewal in the brand.
2006 saw the first post-Weinstein Best Picture nomination in Stephen Frears’s “The Queen,” and a year later, “No Country for Old Men” took the Oscar, the first Miramax win since 2002’s “Chicago.” But the slate of upcoming releases was increasingly thin, and now, the company has been downsized considerably. Anne Thompson also has more details. In a nutshell, though, Miramax, as we’ve known it for two decades, is no more.
And like I said, it’s sad. The changing face of the industry right now was both inevitable and necessary, but it’s going to be a bit weird to see this former awards giant virtually (if not completely) absent from the Oscar landscape.
One of the films I’ve been keeping an eye on as we march up to the awards season is Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest,” a re-imagining of the William Shakespeare yarn with a female lead rather than male. Helen Mirren seemed a great bet in the lead actress race and of course design heads Sandy Powell (costumes) and Mark Friedberg (production design) were going to be in the conversation.
Well that conversation will now shift to 2010, as I just got confirmation the film would not be ready until next year due to the amount of visual effects yet to be included. That effectively leaves Miramax with the already released (and mostly forgotten) “Chéri” for its lone awards hopes. It looks like it’ll be a year away from the fray, since I don’t think Mike Judge’s “Extract” is exactly going to light up the circuit.
This also whittles the lead actress race down even further, while giving Powell the go-ahead for a potential nod for “The Young Victoria,” now that the film has a US distributor. Mirren’s “Love Ranch,” directed by husband Taylor Hackford, could still be a thread if it gets picked up by a distributor. It’s getting to be that time…
I’ll update predictions again on Monday, August 31.
It’s a little over a week old, but I only just noticed Mike Goodridge’s rather interesting column at ScreenDaily, in which he offers yet another take on the Academy’s expanded Best Picture field. (Is it even a month since the announcement? It feels like we’ve been talking about this forever.)
Unlike many, Goodridge is wholeheartedly in favor of the move, which he sees as a potential corrective to the more cynical manipulations of Oscar campaigning. I don’t necessarily agree with that conclusion, but I found myself nodding while reading the setup for his argument, in which he traces the Academy’s motivation back to Harvey Weinstein’s earliest campaigning days.
Though Weinstein is now regarded as the poster boy for disingenuous campaigning, Goodridge looks back to a time (one many pundits seem to have forgotten) when he was a force for good on the Oscar trail, using his unsurpassed savvy to get deserving indie underdogs into the race.
As you know, despite a mixed critical reception over here in the UK, I was quite taken with Stephen Frears’ “Chéri,” a tarter-than-expected Belle Epoque romance that showcases the director’s best work in nine years, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s best work in … well, longer than that.
I’m not sure how the film, a rather subtle specialty item, will play on its American release in a month’s time, but Miramax clearly has hopes for it, and have launched this rather attractive official website to make their case. (They appear to have dispensed with the accent aigu, perhaps to prevent anyone mistaking it for a foreign-language effort.)
The site features the standard promotional bumf, but does a good job of showing off the film’s lavish technical credits, particularly Consolata Boyle’s costumes and Alexandre Desplat’s lovely score, which is actually more delicate than the selected excerpt here suggests. Both are, I think, very much in the Oscar mix, while Pfeiffer’s radiant performance may need to find more critical champions Stateside to sustain momentum.
Unlike the appropriately sober (if aesthetically half-assed) UK poster, this U.S. one-sheet for “Chéri” does much the same thing as the trailer in selling the film as an effervescent romantic comedy.
The film plays along for its first half, though as I said in my review, the chick-lit crowd may find themselves surprised by the melancholy turn the proceedings take. Still, whatever means necessary, and all that. Meanwhile, you’d never guess that Rupert Friend plays the title character. (Thanks to commenter Red Wine for the tip.)
[Source: IMP Awards]
I wrote about this trailer after being surprised by it at the cinema almost two weeks ago. Now it’s finally appeared online, you can see for yourselves. I’m still a little uncertain of the brittle, faintly campy comic tone present here — Colette’s novella (which I’ll get into when our Page to Screen series begins) is a rather more delicate, melancholy animal. But it looks like a classy outing all round. We’ll see.
I can’t remember the last time I first laid eyes on a trailer for a prestige film in the cinema rather than on a computer screen. I kind of miss it — as a kid, the unexpectedness of such sightings, combined with the darkness of the theatre, made trailers something of an event for me.
So it was this afternoon when, sitting in my local London multiplex, I was taken off-guard by the trailer for Stephen Frears’ “Chéri” — which, to my knowledge, hasn’t surfaced online yet. Hoping to share it with you all once I got home, a thorough scouring of the internet proved fruitless. What gives?
As for the trailer itself, it surprised me in more ways than one. The film appears more openly comic than I was expecting, with a shrill tone that recalled “Mrs Henderson Presents” more than “Dangerous Liaisons” on the Frears scale. Of course, as we saw with “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Miramax isn’t averse to painting subtler material with a broad marketer’s brush, so we’ll see.
Anyway, even with the film’s UK release set back to early May, the trailer is bound to appear online soon. Watch this space.
(Kind of quiet out there…)
• David Carr addresses the “some stars won’t walk the red carpet” talk, slams fashionistas as being “pilot fish on a big whale.” Ooooooohhhhh. [The Carpetbagger]
• Rebecca Ascher-Walsh talks to double nominee Kate Winslet. [The Envelope]
• Dave Karger says it’s Harvey vs. Miramax in the ladies’ acting fields. [Entertainment Weekly]
• Sasha Stone goes deep with “WALL-E” helmer Andrew Stanton. [Awards Daily]
• David S. Cohen writes up “The Wrestler”‘s unsung hero: trainer Afa “the Wild Samoan.” [Variety]
• Patrick Goldstein responds to the week’s “Reader” slams. [The Big Picture]
• Patrick Goldstein, in a well-reasoned piece that even I — a dedicated Boss fan — can’t disagree with, says Bruce Springsteen “had to stoop to conquer” Sunday night. [The Big Picture]
• Jeffrey Wells bizarrely reviews Best Live Action Short nominee “New Boy.” Beware careless spoilers. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• Michael Cieply, reports on the on-going discussion of how to handle the Best Original Song performances, from a cost stand-point, of course. [The Carpetbagger]
• David Carr, meanwhile, in addressing the Christian Bale situation, takes another swipe at “The Dark Knight.” But he should really watch the film again and understand that the ending isn’t “unsatisfying,” but merely poorly integrated into the whole. [The Carpetbagger]
• Speaking of Bale, Tom O’Neil wonders if the actor threw away his Oscar hopes for “Public Enemies” by shooting off at the mouth. [Gold Derby]
• Dave Karger previews Saturday’s WGA awards. “Milk” and “Slumdog” have it in the bag, right? Anyone expecting an upset? [Entertainment Weekly]
• Three weeks in the life of an Oscar ballot. [Little Gold Men]
• David Fincher: “‘Benjamin Button’ was a semi-confection that became resonant.” [The Guardian]
• Treading waters we were swimming through back when the film was set for a 2008 bow, Brad Brevet wonders if Stephen Frears’ “Chéri” is an Oscar contender. Considering it’s Miramax’s best bet, then yeah, it probably is a contender. [Rope of Silicon]
What else is there to say? Tomorrow we’ll have a new president and the last eight years will, hopefully, start to fade away. In four days we’ll have a fresh slate of Oscar nominees and the last four months of awards speculation will suddenly be a distant memory. The big wheel keeps on turning.
I don’t know what else can be added to the conversation at this point that hasn’t been mulled over a million times already. I do know, as my final set of Oscar predictions will reflect, that this years seems to be given to the safe bet more than any other in recent memory. But I also know the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a difficult group of people to corner. There are always surprises.
As I look over the landscape of the 2008-2009 season, I find myself seeking out those blind-side possibilities. No one saw “City of God” coming four times over in 2003. Hardly anyone expected Tommy Lee Jones to snatch a nomination last year after failing to pop up throughout the precursor season. And certainly, no one banked on a “Dreamgirls” snub in 2006.
But these things happen. I’ll lay out a set of my own left-field possibilities on Wednesday, since this year’s inauguration proceedings have kept the weekly Oscar column somewhat removed from the actual announcement (generally I write this the day before), but today I thought I’d end phase one with a few question marks I feel it necessary to punctuate.
• Patrick Goldstein busts Miramax’s balls for fudging a “Doubt” praise quote. [The Big Picture]
• David Poland analyzes the top 10 collective for Oscar tea leaves. [The Hot Blog]
• Sam Thielman reports from the NYC Lincoln Center Q&A with David Fincher… [Variety]
• …and Lane Brown gives the director some more grief for his “charm offensive.” [Vulture]
• Alex Billington has Jamie Callum’s “Gran Torino” music video (and the balls to state “those of you that have seen this by now know that it’s actually a great movie.”) [First Showing]
• Paula Schwartz reports from the New York Film Critics Circle awards with a few embarrassing quotes from the always entertaining Rex Reed. [The Carpetbagger]
• Todd Martens touches on Bruce Springsteen’s favor to Mickey Rourke and Darren Aronofsky. [Pop & Hiss]
• Anita Singh sits down with “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel. [Daily Telegraph]
• Susan King previews the Palm Springs International Film Festival. [The Envelope]
• Chrissy Iley chats it up with Frank Langella. [The Sunday Times]
Every Oscar season is about managing expectations. Studios, of course, want to keep the murmurs to a minimum whether they have the goods or not because the peril of peaking too early is just as bad as the sting of negative word-of-mouth. Similarly, being “the one to beat” sets a film up to rise to an unfair occasion rather than coming to the table fresh.
Holding back is a tradition and is even one of two philosophies on the awards season sell. There are those who’ll tell you that, if you have a great movie, you should show it and show it proudly. The other side of the equation believes in the manipulation of when and where opinion will trickle out. It seems every year a train wreck of sorts occurs, and this year, that train wreck was obviously “Frost/Nixon.”
After landing in London to some mediocre reviews (no one at this site, by the way, ever said the film was bombing with critics across the board), should Universal Pictures have been particularly surprised? Ron Howard, America’s white-bread filmmaking standard exhibiting to the chilly British disposition? It wasn’t going to be a rapturous reception, and with the film having been completed for months on end, holding back until the London festival to give anyone a sanctioned peek raised eyebrows long ago.
First Paramount Vantage, then Universal, and now Miramax Films. Studios are leaping into the online FYC phase of campaigns this season. MiramaxHilights.com is showcasing three modest enterprises for contention: John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” (with a new poster I haven’t seen yet) and “Fernando Mereilles’s “Blindness.”
There isn’t anything available for each film yet. No screenplays or score downloads. I assume that will come in time, as will category placements. The biggest question mark for these films in that arena is whether Philip Seymour Hoffman is pushed as a lead or supporting actor in “Doubt.” My guess is still the latter.
Thanks to reader Jacob for the tip.