In Contention

Tag: The Fighter

  • Guess again: final predictions and preferences

    “Oh Sister, I have such doubts!”

    I’m not given to quoting overwrought (if Oscar-nominated) ecclesiastical dramas at the best of times, but let’s face it, this is not the best of times. There comes a time in every Oscar-watcher’s life when he has to accept the things he cannot change — or simply stop changing the many, many things he can — and commit to some bloody predictions already.

    That time has come particularly late for me this year, just a few hours ahead of the ceremony that will finally answer such burning world issues as whether Colleen Atwood will win her third Oscar tonight, or Jenny Beavan her second. I had my reasons for stalling — only this afternoon did I complete my viewing of all the short film contenders, meaning I have now seen (or at least skimmed) everything up for an award tonight save, unavoidably, “Country Strong.” (Sorry, Gwyneth, but I’m rooting for ya anyway.)

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  • The In Contention Readership Ballot

    Today’s the big day. No more Oscar Guide, no more polls, just a few choice hours left in the season and then, the 83rd annual. (And not a moment too soon.)

    I appreciate everyone participating in the daily polls this month and last, which accompanied each of our Oscar Guide entries. It offers us a nice glance at the majority opinion of how the race SHOULD go down, so I’m happy to offer up, for the second-straight year, the In Contention Readership Ballot.

    There were a handful of frisky choices this year, though not too many. Your big winners were Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (which is owed Best Picture by your estimation).  Both films racked up five of your wins.  Nothing else was close. And, interestingly enough, the film likely to walk away with the most awards tonight? It only deserves one prize in your book: Best Actor.

    Check out the ballot after the jump, and good luck to your favorites tonight.

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  • The Oscar-winning Boston Movie

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Picture

    And so we come to the end of this year’s Oscar Guide, and the category that has been the cause of more conversation than ever this year: Best Picture. And that can’t be overstated. I can’t recall the last time the debate around a Best Picture winner was so heated, and I’m tempted to say it was, in some way, good for us all.

    There was a lot of passion around favorites this season. A LOT. In some cases, it might even be considered oppressive passion, but it’s worth it to have such strong opinions about the films we love. We may choose to convey those opinions in different ways, modest or broad, but that the pulse of film adoration is this strong at a key moment in the medium’s progression is, indeed, heartening.

    The nominees are:

    “Black Swan” (Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin)
    “The Fighter” (David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman and Mark Wahlberg)
    “Inception” (Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan)
    “The Kids Are All Right” (Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Celine Rattray)
    “The King’s Speech” (Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin)
    “127 Hours” (Christian Colson, Danny Boyle and John Smithson)
    “The Social Network” (Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Ceán Chaffin)
    “Toy Story 3” (Darla K. Anderson)
    “True Grit” (Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen)
    “Winter’s Bone” (Anne Rosellini and Alix Madigan-Yorkin)

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  • Just walk away: final predictions

    While Guy is pulling his hair out (I know the feeling), I’m backing off.  At some point you have to put your pencil down and step away, and so I am.

    For me, the most difficult categories to pick — and the ones I found myself flip-flopping on down the stretch — were Best Supporting Actress and Best Documentary (Feature).  Interestingly, both proved nerve-racking for completely different reasons.

    In the case of supporting actress, you have a race that felt fluid (easily a three-way sprint) coming into phase two, and a situation later complicated by an advertising hiccup from the frontrunner and the charm factor going way up for a contender in the expected Best Picture winner.  In the case of documentary feature, you have five stellar films that are — no kidding — evenly favored among the committee voters.

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Directing

    Coming down to the wire, the race for Best Directing remains a very close one. Earlier in the year the prevailing wisdom was that a split could be in the cards, with the Oscar-bait frontrunner more likely to win Best Picture and the zeitgeisty competition likely to see its talented helmer finally noticed.

    Then things changed a bit, with the zeitgeisty choice pulling ahead as a Best Picture possibility, which left supporters feeling even more strongly that its director would find himself in the winner’s circle. At the end of the season, we’re back to that original thought process in some quarters, while in others, the anticipation of Oscar bait going hand-in-hand is taking hold.

    The nominees are:

    “Black Swan” (Darren Aronofsky)
    “The Fighter” (David O. Russell)
    “The King’s Speech” (Tom Hooper)
    “The Social Network” (David Fincher)
    “True Grit” (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)

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  • THE LONG SHOT: A toast to the douchebags

    (Not-quite-final predictions here.)

    176 days from the unofficial opening of my Oscar season — a breakfast-hour press screening of “Black Swan” on the first day of the Venice Film Festival — it’s fair to say I’m ready for the endgame.

    Aren’t we all? Whether you’re delighted or disappointed by where the awards trail has led us thus far, it’s fair to say it offers little further room for discovery. Back in the golden days of September, pundits whittled the race down to “The King’s Speech” versus “The Social Network,” past versus present, comfort versus cred, That Was Then versus This Is My Now. And as much as I clung to the idea that it couldn’t be that simple, they were right.

    The axis may have swung in this narrative across the season, and the side-taking may have become more heated in the post-nomination phase, but the fact remains that the increasingly small world of Oscar blogging has largely revolved around two films for the better part of six months. If you want to know what this looped conversation has done to our collective brains, look no further than the fact that I just quoted Jordin Sparks lyrics in the paragraph above.

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Final analysis, part one

    So this is it. Over the last seven-plus months here at Tech Support, we have tried to illuminate and analyze the craft races as they unfolded. On Sunday, the winners will be revealed, ushering some new faces into Oscar’s club.  And indeed, I expect the vast majority of the winners to make their first trip to the podium.

    I’ll be breaking down each field in a two-parter.  Check back tomorrow for the final five categories, but for now…

    Best Art Direction

    As is the case in many categories, “The King’s Speech” is, to me, the safe bet for the win here. A royal period piece and likely Best Picture winner would be difficult to beat in any year. But in all fairness, this is in many ways not a typical “royal” winner in a category where style triumphs over substance.

    Production Designer Eve Stewart (11 years after her first nomination for “Topsy-Turvy”), along with set decorator Judy Farr, immaculately filled many of the film’s sets (despite late-breaking news of one location) with intimate details that feel very much in tune with the characters. A guild win also shows industry support.

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  • 2/23 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Leo speaks again on Adgate, hosts speak out on show, Burwell on ‘Grit’ score

    • Melissa Leo tells a different story on Adgate: She was doing what Parmount told her to do. [Daily Beast]

    • Telecast hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway in their first interview on the upcoming festivities. [Hollywood Reporter]

    • Meanwhile, Tom Sherak tells Susan Wloszczyna we’ll like the style of the show. [USA Today]

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Film Editing

    I’m afraid you’ll find that I’m having trouble getting all that excited about this year’s race for Best Film Editing. How can I when the absolute best editing job of the year (from a true master, no less) was shunned altogether, while a cruel joke was played in the form of “Inception” editor Lee Smith getting the shaft, too.

    The below is a decent set of contenders with an array of virtues. It’s just a shame that the editor’s branch is so slavishly devoted to Best Picture frontrunners, especially when truly exceptional work that doesn’t necessarily find itself dovetailing with Oscar bait is ignored each and every year. Nevertheless, the statistic remains: in 30 years, no film not nominated here has gone on to win Best Picture.

    The nominees are:

    “Black Swan” (Andrew Weisblum)
    “The Fighter” (Pamela Martin)
    “The King’s Speech” (Tariq Anwar)
    “127 Hours” (Jon Harris)
    “The Social Network” (Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter)

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  • BOX OFFICE: ‘Swan,’ ‘Speech’ cross $100 million

    The headline says it all. The two films join “Toy Story 3,” “Inception” and “True Grit” as the only Best Picture nominees to reach that mark this year. “The Fighter” has slowed too much to get there and a re-release of “The Social Network” didn’t go as well as planned in that regard.

    (Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)

  • Presenter ideas to spice up the show

    Over at his indieWIRE blog The Lost Boy, Peter Knegt expresses some displeasure with what he calls a “boring” list of Academy Award presenters announced so far.  So he’s compiled a list of suggestions that could spice things up on Oscar night.

    For instance, what a howler it would be to see Bono and Julie Taymor, the creative minds behind the disastrous Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” (which is currently being rewritten at the last minute) present Best Original Song?  Or how about notorious David O. Russell rivals George Clooney and Lily Tomlin (who is actually close friends with Russell now, it should be said) presenting the clip for “The Fighter?”

    I think he’s on to something by suggesting Armie Hammer present the Best Visual Effects award with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, but I’d tweak that a bit and say Hammer should present, via video, AS Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

    Anyway, head on over to The Lost Boy to read up on Peter’s suggestions.  Any ideas from the peanut gallery here?

    [Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures]

  • 2/17 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Leo’s faux pas, Bagger chats up ‘Waste Land’ helmer, what to learn from Grammys

    • Nikki Finke chats with Relativity Media honcho Ryan Kavanaugh. [Deadline]

    • Gregory Ellwood thinks Melissa Leo flushed her chances at an Oscar down the drain. [Awards Campaign]

    • Melena Ryzik catches up with “Waste Land” director Lucy Walker. (Oscar Guide on documentary features coming tomorrow.) [The Carpetbagger]

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Fighter’ actress Amy Adams

    Amy Adams.  You know the girl.  Sweet, bright-eyed, purveyor of naive, fresh-faced screen creations.  You certainly wouldn’t peg her as an expected fit for Charlene Fleming, boxer Micky Ward’s tough-as-nails bartender girlfriend in David O. Russell’s “The Fighter,” but as it turns out, she delivers perhaps her most accomplished performance to date in that role, in that film.

    “Sometimes people’s confidence in you is the most input that you need,” Adams says over lunch in December, in the middle of awards season but just before the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, tapped her as a nominee for Best Supporting Actress in the film.

    “A lot of times when I’ve approached projects — I haven’t ended up playing these characters — but with characters that are different than how people see me, I feel a real sense of them challenging me.  ‘Can you do this?’  There’s no real way to answer that question except to do it.”

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 52 — Nominees Luncheon, Bening vs. Portman to a photo finish, WGA and Scripter awards, Melissa Leo’s personal campaign, BAFTA preview with Guy Lodge

    Oscar TalkWelcome 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 of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

    Anne is calling from New York today, later on in the show we drop in on Guy in London and I’m in Los Angeles as always, so we’ve got quite the international episode for you today. And with plenty happening between last weekend and today, we’ve got tons to cover, so let’s see what’s on the docket today…

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  • 2/10 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘Gasland’ director fires back, Wahlberg/Russell on Aronofsky, hoping Banksy stays away

    • Mark Wahlberg and David O. Russell on Darren Aronofsky’s departure from “The Fighter.” [Inside Movies]

    • Eric Kohn writes up the Oscar shorts. [indieWIRE]

    • Josh Fox fires back at gas industry accusations about the accuracy of his documentary, “Gasland.” [Facebook]

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  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Supporting Actor

    Very few of the 20 actors nominated for Oscars this year (if any) feel like egregious calls. As usual, the lead actor race is the most impressive, but the Best Supporting Actor slate isn’t too shabby, either. Each performance is masterful in its own way, and each serves its respective narrative to the fullest.

    Two of the nominees this year are depictions of real life individuals and three are complete manifestations. But all five of the below actors owned their roles and then some, finding the right flow of eye-catching showmanship without dominating the narrative arc. And though some might argue, I’d say each is perfectly representative of “supporting” in the truest sense of the word.

    The nominees are:

    Christian Bale, “The Fighter”
    John Hawkes, “Winter’s Bone”
    Jeremy Renner, “The Town”
    Mark Ruffalo, “The Kids Are All Right”
    Geoffrey Rush, “The King’s Speech”

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  • BOX OFFICE: Is there a game on?

    And with that, “True Grit” crosses $150 million domestic and keeps chugging.  “The King’s Speech” moved up a notch in rank and still has $100 million in its sights (and has also leaped-frogged a few 2011 debuts in the process).  “Black Swan” brings up the rear and one more week will get it across that mark, while “The Fighter” is just on the outside of the top 10, aimed at $90 million for now.  And “Tangled,” I notice, is crawling toward a $200 million mark it’ll likely never reach.

    Now, enough of all that.  Super Bowl.

    (Courtesy: Exhibitor Relations)