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This is terribly sad news. Tim Hetherington, the gifted British photojournalist who justly shared a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination with Sebastian Junger earlier this year for their joint debut “Restrepo,” has died on the front line in Misrata, Libya, where he was documenting the conflict. Also killed was his colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Chris [...]
Tim Hetherington (1970-2011)
Posted by Guy Lodge · 10:48 am · April 20th, 2011
Filed in: Daily
The five categories giving me hell
Posted by Guy Lodge · 3:48 pm · February 25th, 2011
With a little over 48 hours until the big night, I find myself in an uncommon state of disarray — my crammed Oscar weekend “To Do” list includes viewing all 15 short nominees in order to make an informed dart-throw of a prediction (stickler that I am, I held out for a theatrical screening), preparing [...]
Filed in: Daily
OSCAR GUIDE: Best Documentary (Feature)
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 7:24 am · February 18th, 2011
It has been noted what a solid year of documentary filmmaking 2010 was. It was well-reflected in the Academy’s initial narrowing of the feature field to 15 contenders and is certainly evident in the ultimate quintet of nominees, each of them informative and bold in their own ways. Still, it came as quite a shock [...]
Filed in: Oscar Guide
My dream Oscar ballot, part two
Posted by Guy Lodge · 12:35 pm · January 23rd, 2011
Yesterday, I began my very far-fetched (and in some cases, frankly impossible) wishlist for Tuesday’s Oscar nominations with my favorite achievements in the technical categories. Today, I offer up my picks in the top races, and I don’t mind telling you things got pretty agonizing in some categories. “Why can’t I have 15 nominees for [...]
Filed in: Daily
OSCAR TALK: Ep. 49 — Final pre-nod discussion
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 9:00 am · January 21st, 2011
Welcome to Oscar Talk. In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty [...]
Filed in: Oscar Talk
FIRST-HALF FYC: Best Picture
Posted by Guy Lodge · 7:07 pm · January 19th, 2011
For the past eight weeks, I’ve been spotlighting nomination-worthy names, in all major Ocar categories, from the first half of the US release calendar. Today, we close out the series with an alternative January-to-June Best Picture 10, though it comes a week after ballots closed — timing was never my strong suit. A look at [...]
Filed in: Daily
A look at Oscar’s 15 documentary feature hopefuls
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 9:08 am · January 19th, 2011
While Guy has been surveying the foreign field, I’ve been diving in elsewhere. It has been considered a banner year for documentary filmmaking. So naturally, the Best Documentary Feature race has been an interesting one to watch since the season’s early days. Two months ago the Academy announced 15 finalists (whittling it down from 101 [...]
Filed in: Daily
DGA announces documentary nominees
Posted by Guy Lodge · 11:11 am · January 12th, 2011
Two days after revealing their feature film nominees, the Directors’ Guild of America has named their five selections in the documentary category. It’s a list that mostly lends credence to the presumed Oscar frontrunners, with one notable exception: Chinese director Lixin Fan, whose lavishly acclaimed debut “Last Train Home” was left off the Academy’s 15-title [...]
Filed in: Daily
Guardian shortlists 10 titles for Best First Film
Posted by Guy Lodge · 11:17 am · December 24th, 2010
When I was filling out my ballot for indieWIRE’s 2010 critics’ poll, Best First Film was perhaps the category I spent the longest time deliberating over — as unremarkable as the year has been in other respects, the amount of scrappy new directorial promise surging up through the cracks has been both unusually high and [...]
Filed in: Daily
Likability: the best films of 2010
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 11:51 am · December 13th, 2010
I don’t quite know how to peg 2010. On one hand it has felt like a weak year. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed quite a few films. Maybe the story lies in that sentence: “enjoyed.” There were precious few films that really rocked me, but plenty that were a nice enough experience. If you [...]
Filed in: Daily
OFF THE CARPET: Kicking the tires on the circuit
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 8:42 am · November 29th, 2010
On the precipice of December, the season feels at once stale and fresh. We’re in the post-Thanksgiving food coma paradox that hits every year. But things are going to start heating up real soon. The last two films out of the gate, “TRON Legacy” and “True Grit” (both ironically starring Jeff Bridges), have already started [...]
Filed in: Off the Carpet
15 films shortlisted for documentary feature Oscar
Posted by Guy Lodge · 1:04 pm · November 18th, 2010
Cue the annual outcry over what titles didn’t make it — judging from the Twitter reaction, this year’s most-mourned snubee is the Chinese critical darling “Last Train Home.” (I’d join the pitchfork-wielders, but I haven’t had an opportunity to see the film yet.) More surprising, however, is the omission of such widely fancied contenders as [...]
Filed in: Daily
Deadline for Oscar docs looming
Posted by Guy Lodge · 5:21 pm · August 26th, 2010
As we enter the fall festival season with an Oscar prediction sheet still covered in question marks, there is at least one category where almost all the viable contenders have already been seen. I speak, of course, of Best Documentary Feature, a race already crowded with possibilities from earlier fests and the summer release calendar, [...]
Filed in: Daily
INTERVIEW: ‘Restrepo’ co-director Sebastian Junger
Posted by Guy Lodge · 11:04 am · July 9th, 2010
It may have a hard time distracting audiences from shinier baubles on the summer-movie tree, but there are few films currently in theaters more invigorating and essential than “Restrepo.” An unprecedentedly first-hand war documentary, shot on the fly by a pair of filmmakers embedded in a U.S. Army unit stationed in Afghanistan’s perilous Korengal Valley, [...]
Filed in: Interviews
More halfway-mark blues
Posted by Guy Lodge · 8:20 am · July 5th, 2010
A few weeks ago, I commented upon the scarcity of viable awards contenders released in the last six months, coming to the unsurprising conclusion that there hasn’t been much to, well, comment upon. In the past few days, however, Variety’s Tim Gray and EW’s Dave Karger have revisited the subject … and haven’t come up [...]
Filed in: Daily
‘Get Low,’ ‘Monsters,’ ‘Skeletons’ among Edinburgh winners
Posted by Guy Lodge · 4:57 pm · June 27th, 2010
I have an irritating habit of missing key prizewinners at film festivals, so it was with some astonishment that I perused the list of films honored at the close of the Edinburgh Film Festival — only to find that I’d seen most of them. Considering the brevity of my visit, and my mostly random selection [...]
Filed in: Daily
EDINBURGH: ‘Get Low,’ ‘Restrepo,’ ‘Vacation!’
Posted by Guy Lodge · 5:02 pm · June 24th, 2010
My third day in the ‘Burgh (shut up, I have legitimately heard people call it that) wasn’t as film-heavy as the previous one: social commitments and a certain football match between Slovenia and some other country got in the way. Under these circumstances, three screenings — taken together, as disparate a cross-section of the U.S. [...]
‘Winter’s Bone’ takes Sundance gold
Posted by Guy Lodge · 6:03 am · January 31st, 2010
Talk about a good day for female filmmakers. Hours before Kathryn Bigelow’s history-making triumph at the DGA Awards, Debra Granik took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (in the U.S. Dramatic strand) for her critically lauded sophomore feature “Winter’s Bone.” Granik and co-writer Anne Rosselini also took screenwriting honors for the film. The film is [...]
Filed in: Daily
