• Patrick Goldstein defends his paper’s perceived hit campaign against “The Hurt Locker,” calls quoted second-hand information that wasn’t properly vetted “the most in-depth piece written about the film’s complex mixture of questionable dramatic license and vivid authenticity.” Ahem, indeed. [The Big Picture]
• Cathy Yan on Scott Cooper, Neill Blomkamp, Cary Fukunaga, etc. — the Oscar season’s rookies of the year. [Wall Street Journal]
• How to make an Oscar-winning sci-fi film. [io9]
In most cases, the adapted screenplay category of a given Oscar race is packed with Best Picture nominees or contenders. This year, however, there was a nice balance of adapted and original screenplays in the Best Picture category, and in fact, of the “top five” films that trickled down throughout the season, three were original and two were adapted, a rarity.
Regarding the adaptations, things seemed to firm up for a while, but with the various WGA ineligibilities, one couldn’t shake the feeling that a surprise was in the works. At the end of the day, Scott Cooper’s run on “Crazy Heart” came to an unfortunate end, while a fan-fave British comedy found support.
The nominees are:
“District 9” (Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell)
“An Education” (Nick Hornby)
“In the Loop” (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche)
“Precious” (Geoffrey Fletcher)
“Up in the Air” (Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner)
Throughout the morning and early afternoon we took statements from or hopped on the phone with 44 of today’s Oscar nominees. Their reactions…
Maggie Gyllenhaal, supporting actress, “Crazy Heart”:
The thing is, you know, I’m so proud of the movie and I always have been, more proud of it than any of the work I’ve done so far. But because I wasn’t getting nominated for anything, I wasn’t expecting it. My phone was ringing so early and I thought, “Wait, maybe!” I was staying at my brother’s in LA. He said to me, “Your phone is going to be ringing all day.” He made me a cup of coffee and then we watched the sun rise. It was pretty mellow. But this wouldn’t be happening for Jeff [Bridges] or me if it wasn’t for Scott [Cooper].
In so many words, this is it. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveils it’s slate of nominees bright and early tomorrow morning, and this being the first year with a 10-film Best Picture field, all eyes will be on the top category to gauge which way the wind blew on this AMPAS experiment.
Will populist entertainment reap the benefits of an extra five slots or will independent cinema finally get its foot in the door? That’s been the question all year long. The answers are around the corner, and less than 24 hours out, they still feel as elusive as ever.
I learned long ago that to forecast “surprises” is folly. They’re called surprises for a reason. All you can do is try to find the pulse on the season and make your judgment calls, and in most cases, that means understanding what the Academy is high on, and when.
For instance, is “The Messenger” poised to surprise in the supporting actress and original screenplay races, as well as Best Picture? Or did the discussion stir up a bit late (which it did), too late, perhaps, to register? The screener showed up earlier than most. Did members find time in that lull to pop it into the player?
Meanwhile, how will the BAFTA contingent affect the race? We see it every year. Contenders left dangling on the vine get their due from a membership that has considerable AMPAS cross-over. Just ask Alan Alda. With that in mind, could Alec Baldwin or Alfred Molina find themselves sliding into an incredibly fluid supporting actor category?
Two weeks before revealing its nominations, BAFTA reveals longlists of 15 contenders in each category from which the eventual five nominees will be chosen. (Switch those numbers to five and three in the Animated Feature race.)
Vague as the lists are, a couple of telling trends stand out. It’s been clear for some time that “An Education” is the film to beat at this years BAFTAs. Like the group’s last three Best Film winners — “The Queen,” “Atonement” and “Slumdog Millionaire” — Lone Scherfig’s film is a mainstream British effort that has U.S. awards traction, allowing them to remain patriotic while fulfilling their recent Oscar-aping remit.
So it’s no surprise that “An Education” leads the longlists with 17 mentions — seven of them in the acting races. Close behind is “Inglourious Basterds,” with 15 bids, while “The Hurt Locker” manages 12.
…who just popped up in my DGA predictions, in case you’ve missed it, do yourself a favor and give Geoff Boucher’s three-part interview with the “District 9” director a look. Boucher did a similarly all-encompassing series with Christopher Nolan last year, and this one is every bit as insightful.
What we get is a profile of a fresh-faced filmmaker (just 30 years old) who, at least so far, hasn’t taken the Hollywood, sell-your-soul bait. He was only interested in returning the investment of “District 9” to investors in exchange for the room to be creative, rather than eyeball a big profit margin (though boy did the film turn a HELL of a profit). And he’s clearly savvy enough to understand the caveat of tent pole filmmaking and how to hang on to creative control of his projects with modest budgets.
I’ve gone through and pulled some talking points from the interview, which you can breeze through after the jump. But definitely give the full series a read. Here is part one, part two and part three.
Tomorrow the Directors Guild of America will chime in with its list of nominees for the 2009-2010 film awards season. Long considered to be the best “predictor” of the Oscar game (as in, the DGA winner typically wins the Oscar for Best Director, and Best Director often matches up with Best Picture), this guild’s shenanigans makes for a heavily anticipated harbinger of the season.
Then again, maybe not. In the last few years, names like Christopher Nolan, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel and Bill Condon have popped up on the list, almost as if the guild was concerned with predicting the Best Picture race as it had done, five-for-five, for four straight years prior. Those picks reflected the buzz of the early-year hour in each case, but ultimately, the Academy went a different direction with its Best Picture slate.
That said, “the 10” makes for an entirely different dynamic. I actually expect (or maybe “hope” is the word) tomorrow’s announcement to inject some intrigue into the proceedings. I think there will be someone shortlisted who catches a great many off guard. But who will it be?
• Tom O’Neil serves some crow up to a few colleagues while failing to understand that his prize pony needed a few films to underwhelm in order to be in the position it’s in. [Gold Derby]
• David Poland crunches the “Avatar” numbers yet again. The film is still…almost…breaking records. [The Hot Blog]
• Neill Blomkamp don’t need no stinkin’ big-budget blockbusters. [Hero Complex]
In January 2005, exactly one week after I left my birth town of Johannesburg to study film in the brighter lights of London, Darrell James Roodt’s earnest AIDS drama “Yesterday” became South Africa’s first Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
Only a month later, the rather better “uCarmen eKhayelitsha” took the Golden Bear at the Berlin fest; again, the country’s first production to take top honors at one of the major festivals. And only a year later, Gavid Hood’s “Tsotsi” went one better than “Yesterday” by taking the Oscar.
By this time, I was beginning to wonder if the movie gods were sending me a sign that I’d picked the wrong country: South Africa’s film industry seemed poised for a crossover explosion. That didn’t quite happen. Hampered by the usual financial constraints of a third-world industry, the country went back to its steady output of provincial lowbrow comedies and not-quite-there dramas, few of them seen beyond its own borders.
Almost five years later, however, something interesting is starting to bubble there again — but this time, it’s not South Africa’s own industry making waves as much as an international cinematic preoccupation with the country and its stories.
As “District 9” remains the number-one topic of conversation among American moviegoers, not least for its invocation of the apartheid era, I’m surprised to see a number of prominent critics have either missed or ignored the most obvious of its symbolic historical references: the tragedy of District Six.
A vibrant, multi-racial residential pocket of Cape Town that was declared “whites-only” in 1966, prompting the forced removal of over 60,000 people and the eventual demolition of the entire area, it stands as one of the key symbols of South Africa’s darkest days — and is plainly the primary touchstone for Neill Blomkamp’s allegory.
Some have discussed the connection, of course — starting with that title, it’s hardly subtle — but if you weren’t aware, and were grabbed by the film, you might like to do some further research.
“District 9” opens tomorrow. We’ve done our part to get the word out around these parts, and even spotlighted the film’s talented young star. But in due time, you’ll all make your mind up as to whether it’s a new staple of the science-fiction genre or a victim of its own hype.
In the meantime, however, there is a nice playlist featured over at YouTube collecting the short works of director Neill Blomkamp. Have a look and come back tomorrow to let us know your thoughts on the film (we’ll definitely have a thread available):
When actor Sharlto Copley first pops up on screen in Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9,” it isn’t a grand movie moment in the style of John Wayne’s arrival (albeit out of focus) in John Ford’s “Stagecoach” by any means. In fact, viewers might instinctively expect Copley’s character, Wikus Van De Merwe, to be a supporting player, what with his unassuming demeanor and character actor appearance.
By the end of the film, however, audiences will have witnessed one of the most controlled, authentic portrayals of the year. And this humble viewer’s prediction is that, down the line, the upcoming weekend’s wide release will ultimately be seen as the coming out party for an exciting new acting talent.
At the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills recently, Copley winds down at the end of a lengthy press day for the film. Fielding wall-to-wall questions from broadcast and print media can leave a person numb to the talking points, but as he hungrily chomps down on an apple, he still maintains focus on what it is about the project that interested him from the outset.
“I guess I was always interested in films that either had a comedic edge or a depth to them, an intelligent aspect,” he says, staring off toward the downtown Los Angeles skyline as he searches for the words. “As much as it could be exciting or whatever, that was always important to me. And I think what Neill’s done with this film is combine those things really well. You’ve got satire, you’ve got drama, so it’s a pretty unique situation.”
Indeed, “District 9” is seen in some quarters as indicative of a human interest science-fiction story in a genre that has increasingly lost its grounded footing. It makes for a nice sister film to Duncan Jones’s “Moon” in that way, sci-fi that interests itself with tangible emotional beats more so than the high concept science of it all.
I’ll be posting my interview with “District 9” star Sharlto Copley later today or tomorrow, but in the meantime, I thought I’d pass along this Andrew O’Hehir interview with the film’s newbie director, Neill Blomkamp, over at Salon.
The piece is wide-ranging, moving from Blomkamp’s background in digital effects and advertising to Copely’s performance to racial issues raised in varrying ways by the picture. Indeed, one of the more obvious aspects of the film that taps into a grounded sense of human condition, and therefore helps the film to succeed as high science-fiction art among genre entries that largely miss such necessary nuance, is the parallel drawn between the ghettoized alien race of “prawns” and South Africa’s Apartheid system (the film is set in South Africa).
O’Hehir’s query turned into a nice springboard for Blomkamp to again discuss how important it was to set the film in Johannesburg, a perspective I haven’t properly conveyed in this space, despite the Comic-Con coverage.
Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” is primed to explode on the cinema landscape next week. At least I hope it is. I’m never good at reading the populist pulse, especially as it pertains to predicting box office and things like that, but on a $30 million budget, and being an exceptional piece of work that should become a word-of-mouth success on home video if not theatrically, I can’t imagine the film won’t pull a profit.
Entertainment Weekly’s cover story this month features actor Sharlto Copley, praised on high in this space during last month’s San Diego Comic-Con International, with the fetching headline: “Why ‘District 9’ will blow you away.” That’s a good start. I know plenty of people who ask me daily, “What’s the deal with ‘District 9?’” Breeding intense curiosity is always a win.
Scott Bowles sat down with the film’s producer, Peter Jackson (who made his first ever trip to Comic-Con to promote the film), in San Diego and got some great stuff, particularly Jackson’s revelation that working on the film reminded him of his guerrilla filmmaking roots.
Peter Jackson made his long-awaited first trip to Comic-Con yesterday in support of Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9,” which screened to a select audience Thursday. He received the expected standing ovation by the many Ringers and Bad-Tasters in attendance.
“This is a moment to remember for the rest of my life,” he said after snapping a few photos of the audience like a geek in heaven.
Jackson was joined by Blomkamp and actor Sharlto Copley on stage for a discussion of the thoughtful sci-fi film. An extended trailer (that, to my mind, gave away too much of the plot’s particulars) cranked the crowd’s anticipation for the film up to 11, but I personally wish the moderator had drawn out some more insightful commentary from Copley, whom I praised to the ends of the earth after seeing his riveting performance Thursday.
Jackson talked about the project’s genesis, being born from the ashes of his failed “Halo” project. The seeds of “District 9” can be found in Blomkamp’s short film “Alive in Joburg,” which crossed Jackson’s path when he was seeking out a helmer for “Halo.”
“The idea was that we would produce ‘Halo,’ but from the very beginning we wanted to find a new director, someone who was fresh, original, who would bring a new spin to the film,” Jackson said. “Neill had done a couple of short movies and we were really impressed. And then ‘Halo’ died due to studio politics. We got kind of disillusioned with what happened and we thought, ‘Why don’t we try to take control of the situation,’ so we suggested the idea of working on an original idea. Keep the budget low and put this energy into a different project. So it worked out for the best.”
Last night Peter Jackson showed up at the Horton Plaza United Artists theater a few blocks north of the convention center with protege Neill Blomkamp and actor Sharlto Copley in tow. The occasion: the first ever screening of Blomkamp’s “District 9,” a sci-fi installment that finds itself in the midst of a heavy “what the heck is it?” campaign right now that hopes to drum up anticipation for the August 14 release (and will no doubt see a spike in that once the web press finds time to sit at their laptops and hammer out reactions).
I didn’t really know what to expect. I haven’t follwed the viral on this to the letter like so many and I really just thought it would be a nifty diversion during the Con if nothing else. But it was so much more. The film, which I won’t even discuss plot-wise, isn’t a watershed moment for sci-fi cinema by any means, so don’t let me over state.
What it is, however, is a dedicated, small piece of character-driven genre, much like Duncan Jones’s “Moon” in that way, that was smartly nurtured by Jackson. It also has plenty of seat-leaping action moments to go around, but at it’s heart, it is a near one-man show from actor Sharlto Copley, a fresh young talent who, quite frankly, stunned the hell out of me with his control of a character that is quite complicated in some ways.
Expanding on the teaser that generated much excitement among genre aficionados a few months back, comes this more revealing trailer for South African Neill Blomkamp’s freshman feature “District 9,” produced in association with Peter Jackson.
Can’t say I’m as sold on the venture as others are — and the new trailer makes it look rather broader and less enigmatic than what we were originally led to expect — but I’m always up for seeing my hometown of Johannesburg show its sun-bleached colors on screen. Represent, Joeys. (Newish one-sheet after the cut.)
I haven’t kept up with Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9,” a Peter Jackson production that has the geek world chomping at the bit. But the recently released trailer has certainly sparked my interest. A plot synopsis from the film’s IMDb page: “An extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth suddenly find a kindred spirit in a government agent that is exposed to their biotechnology.”
Alrighty then. Click the jaw-dropping image below to check out the trailer over at Apple.
