In Contention

Tag: The Hurt Locker

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Actor

    Morgan Freeman in InvictusThe Best Actor category solidified pretty early on this year. I imagine the eventual line-up had slid into place as early as November, and after the Screen Actors Guild made things more official, the predictable race unfolded from there. What we have now is a typical mixture of seasoned veterans, solid industry players and newcomers to the awards season.

    But things weren’t always so clear. Before a last-minute decision to release what, from afar, always appeared to be a potential awards vehicle for a respected star, things could have gone a number of ways. Sometimes jumping in late can be a boost, and sometimes it just seems like the obvious play.

    The nominees are:

    Jeff Bridges, “Crazy Heart”
    George Clooney, “Up in the Air”
    Colin Firth, “A Single Man”
    Morgan Freeman, “Invictus”
    Jeremy Renner, “The Hurt Locker”

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  • On the preferential system

    BallotWe’ve said it before, but the preferential balloting aspect of this year’s Best Picture race has been somewhat neglected by the media and the insistent positioning of the race as “Avatar” vs. “The Hurt Locker.” I see in one corner of the web that Anne Thompson is still calling that the battle “all the way,” with no mention of how the new schematic totally changes that perception.

    Elsewhere, it’s catching on.  In his latest Notes on a Season column, Pete Hammond posits, as I did in this space last week, that Pixar’s “Up” could be a potential beneficiary of the system as it could be in the number two or three position on a great many ballots.  Intriguingly, he also finds a Fox exec willing to say the same thing about “Avatar,” a film clearly more polarizing than a number of it’s co-nominees.

    Hendrick Hertzberg is also coming around to things at The New Yorker, noting that few people who have seen “The Hurt Locker” actively dislike it, which is of course why it’s our likely victor.  Even though Hertzberg is coming from the “Avatar” versus “The Hurt Locker” side of things, at least he’s posing the argument.

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  • New ‘Hurt Locker’ TV spot loaded with accolades

  • OSCAR GUIDE: Best Sound Mixing

    Transformeres: Revenge of the FallenThe year’s sound mixing category had relatively few surprises, just glancing at the tea leaves of the season.  There was a typical 4/5 crossover between the Cinema Audio Society and the Academy, with “District 9” missing both here and in the sound editing field.

    One might be quick to chalk this, in fact all of the tech races up to the tech-heavy elephant in the room.  But let’s not forget “Slumdog Millionaire” managed a win here last year, over a decently respected piece of blockbuster entertainment.  And at the end of the day, the Academy at large generally just votes for its favorite film of the bunch, rather than think too much about what’s deserving in the field.

    The nominees are:

    “Avatar” (Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson)
    “The Hurt Locker” (Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett)
    “Inglourious Basterds” (Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti and Mark Ulano)
    “Star Trek” (Anna Behlmer, Andy Nelson and Peter J. Devlin)
    “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers and Geoffrey Patterson)

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  • SANTA BARBARA: Bigelow honored as Outstanding Director of the Year

    (from left) Andrew Davis, Kathryn Bigelow and Roger Durling at the 25th annual Santa Barbara International Film FestivalAs if another accolade was necessary at this point, Kathryn Bigelow was in town this evening to accept SBIFF’s Outstanding Director of the Year award.  The one-two punch of Bigelow here and James Cameron for the fest’s Modern Master honor made for, again, quite the prescient choices from festival director Roger Durling in the fall.

    The retrospective was emceed by Durling, which was endearing.  Two incredibly shy personalities on the stage at one time.  Lots of “ums” and “uhs,” but they caught their rhythm some time around the “Near Dark” discussion, which is when Durling said Bigelow first caught his attention.  He said he was fascinated by how Bigelow would take genres and deconstruct them, paint with different, darker shades.  Like melding a biker film with film noir in “The Loveless,” or attempting a western through the tools of the horror genre in “Near Dark.”

    Of course, Bigelow’s big achievement this year is no exception to this feature of her work.  It has long been a point of discussion that “The Hurt Locker” isn’t a typical war film, but a combination of suspense, action and, indeed, deep dramatic hues.  And like all of her work, an intense focus on character is at the fore.

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  • Gleiberman’s mea culpa

    Ralph Fiennes in The Hurt LockerA few weeks ago we directed you to an Owen Gleiberman piece focusing on the perceived Best Picture battle of “Avatar” vs. “Up in the Air,” that it was a battle of film culture significance.  Obviously, as Gleiberman notes in his recent “my bad” post, that doesn’t appear to be the race anymore, and I’m as guilty for boiling it down at that time as anyone.

    If one is still inclined to boil things down to a “race,” then it appears more likely that it is “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar,” and as I noted following the former’s PGA victory, that makes for an incredibly compelling clash of filmmaking values.

    “It’s low budget, efficient, muscular independent filmmaking versus blockbuster, groundbreaking, high octane studio entertainment,” I wrote at the time.  “It’s level-headed political realism versus archetypal political grandstanding.  It’s character versus idea.  It’s measured theatrical meditation versus visceral theatrical experience.”  And Gleiberman is now saying virtually the same thing.

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  • 2/8 Oscarweb Round-up

    Maggie Gyllenhaal at the Los Angeles premiere of Crazy Heart• Sandra Bullock says she’s “so not winning an Oscar.”  Alright, Sandie, enough of the modesty.  The writing is on the wall. [People]

    • Rosanna Greenstreet sits down with Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal. [The Guardian]

    • Soldiers reaction to “The Hurt Locker” and it’s awards success. [New York Times]

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  • SANTA BARBARA: ‘Kells’ screens and the writers talk

    The Secret of KellsIt’s been a slow ramping up for me in Santa Barbara, coverage wise.  I’ve had some Wi-Fi difficulties that are being sorted and I’ve posted when I can from where I can, but a couple of notes on the last two days.

    Yesterday I took in a late afternoon screening of Tomm Moore’s “The Secret of Kells,” the film that probably served up the biggest surprise last Tuesday when it slid into the animated feature field over the populist, branch-respected “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and the less-respected “Ponyo,” which nevertheless comes from a titan of the medium.

    The film is beautiful in so many ways, offering a rich, artistic palette of shapes and color to paint a portrait of a well-circulated Irish story revolving around the non-fictional Book of Kells.  The artwork ultimately mirrors, in some way, the Insular art featured in the book, and the narrative itself, abstract as it feels at times, seems to be about the persistence of art and history.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Oscar nomination week

    Anne Hathaway and Tom Sherak announcing the 2009 Academy Award nominations• Did you hear? The 2009 Academy Award nominations were announced. “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” led the pack.

    • Days before, Kathryn Bigelow nabbed the Directors’ Guild Award — the first woman ever to do so.

    • Back to the Oscars, we collected reaction statements from 44 of this year’s nominees.

    • I rounded up some of the most pleasant surprises in the nominations, as well as the most unwelcome snubs.

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  • Four producer nominees for ‘The Hurt Locker’

    Mark Boal and Kathryn BigelowGlad to see this has been sorted out. You might recall that when the Best Picture nominations were read out on Tuesday morning, “The Hurt Locker” and “The Blind Side” were both slapped with the vague “nominees to be determined” tag — a stopgap the Academy issues wen there are admin issues to be ironed out.

    “The Hurt Locker” initially fell foul of the Academy’s arbitrary (and, for my money, rather misguided) recent rule that permits a maximum of three nominated producers per film. Exceptions, however, can be made: as was the case last year, when “The Reader” was allowed four nominees, including the late Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack.

    So I’m happy that the powers that be at the Academy have been equally reasonable about “The Hurt Locker,” ruling that its quartet of producers all have a legitimate claim to a nomination.

    Should it win on the big night, then, Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro will go up on stage to claim the statuette. (This, of course, makes both Bigelow and screenwriter Boal double nominees this year.)

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Now what?

    Jeremy Renner in The Hurt LockerA whole 31 days ahead of the 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, the race already feels like it’s winding down.

    Of the precursors, only BAFTA and the lesser guilds (sorry, WGA, but you brought irrelevance upon yourself) lie in wait to distract us from a month of wafty speculation and idle editorializing. Trust me, you’re going to get very sick of the phrase “battle of the exes” before the month is out … if you aren’t already.

    For me, a trip to the Berlinale next week couldn’t be better timed – a few days of seeing and discussing some new films, including several of this year’s hot Sundance titles, will be a welcome vacation from the ever-dwindling pool of names and titles we’ve been talking about since the fall.

    But if you’re not one of the lucky few who can make it to a festival – or if you’re as uninspired as everyone else by the new releases of the last few weeks – fresh perspective needn’t come only from fresh films. I recently had the pleasure of rewatching “The Hurt Locker” and getting happily reacquainted with it as a movie, rather than as the industry story it has grown into over the months.

    Awards season can sometimes smother the movies it celebrates, turning them into representations of competing social and artistic ideals that they were never intended to be. As the competition narrows, these definitions get progressively more binary – and the side-taking more vicious. (You only have to look at Roger Ebert’s online opposition of “Avatar” to see what the season can make us do to movies we even like.)

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  • Yes…and more than one movie, actually…

    Cover of Entertainment WeeklyAlright.  It must be said.  I’m as guilty as anyone, perhaps more than most, at positioning this year’s Oscar race as a two-horse sprint to the finish between “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker.” But slowly it’s occurred to me that this Oscar race has been boiled down so quickly because it makes for such a sexy headline.  There’s David and Goliath, there’s the exes thing, there’s plenty of meat in the idea that these two films are out in front of the pack.

    And now I see it once again with Entertainment Weekly’s cover query: “Can anything beat ‘Avatar?’”

    Has the press (again, guilty) been lazy in allowing things to be positioned as such?  Well, yes and no.  The usual indicators tell us that these are the two films in question for obvious reasons. Guild support has been rampant for both, after all.  And the list of Oscar nominations had each out in front, tied with nine nominations apiece.  But there is a crucial point that many a journalist (again, guilty) is failing to consider when calling this thing.

    This year the Best Picture category (and only the Best Picture category) will use the preferential voting system rather than the standard one-vote system to determine the winner.  In so many words, the answer becomes: Which film is the most acceptable to the group, regardless of passion pockets?

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  • February winner predictions

    Jeff Bridges in Crazy HeartThese appeared at Movie City News’s Gurus o’ Gold page this morning, so you probably already saw them.  Here they are in any case, since, you know, I guess it’s about that time:

    Best Picture: “The Hurt Locker”
    Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”
    Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, “Crazy Heart”
    Best Actress: Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side”
    Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”
    Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, “Precious”
    Best Adapted Screenplay: “Up in the Air”
    Best Original Screenplay: “The Hurt Locker”

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  • How we did today (not bad) and a year out (not so much)

    Brian Geraghty in The Hurt LockerI forgot to sit down and take a look at my year-in-advance predictions for this year and see how I did.  Not too great.

    In the Best Picture field (before the announcement of an expanded category, mind you), the only film I listed that made it through was “The Hurt Locker.” Kathryn Bigelow was also the only director I correctly projected, so that’s 1/10 and 1/5 in the top two categories.

    Morgan Freeman, Carey Mulligan, Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz were the only actors I got correct, while in the screenplay categories it was just “An Education,” “A Serious Man” and “Up.”

    All in all, including the crafts categories, I got 24 nominees of the 88 I predicted in 18 categories.  I’ve lost track of how well I’ve done with this silly experiment over the years, but I don’t think that’s one of the better tallies.  Maybe it is.

    Which brings me to this announcement.  After a lot of consideration I’ve decided to forgo my nearly decade-old process of predicting the nominees a year in advance.  There will be no post-Oscar assessment of the year ahead.  The reasons are plenty.

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  • The bright side

    Abbie Cornish in Bright StarWell, I’ll start the good news selfishly, by noting that I didn’t entirely embarrass myself with my predictions: not counting the short categories (which I was too cowardly and uninformed to predict) I nailed 78/106, just two points behind Kris’s round tally of 80.

    But while I was pleased to see at least one of my out-on-a-limb guesses come good — seriously, why didn’t more people call that Art Direction nod for “The Young Victoria?” — I was better at predicting what wouldn’t get nominated.

    So, my season-long hunches that Julianne Moore would be frozen out in the supporting race, that “(500) Days of Summer” would be blanked, that “Up in the Air” would miss that crucial Film Editing nod, and so on, were all on the money. And my increasing sense that nobody really liked “Invictus” enough to put it atop their ballot proved right too.

    Now, if I only I’d known what would land in their place. You can’t have it all, I suppose.

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  • Guy’s final predictions

    Anthony Mackie in The Hurt LockerRight, there comes a point every year in predicting the Oscar nominations when you realize you’re just shuffling names to dodge commitment. I’ve reached that point, so it’s time to put myself out my misery.

    Kris has already had his say — and stolen some of my best guesses from last week in the process. Okay, I kid because I love. It’s comforting, in fact, to have his very sensible company on calls like Diane Kruger for Best Supporting Actress, or “The Road” for Best Cinematography.

    That said, however, there are still numerous areas of the ballot still driving me crazy. I discussed my uncertainties in last week’s Long Shot column, but the last few days haven’t given me any more confidence when it comes to those pesky final two Best Picture slots.

    Though logic goes against me, I can’t shake the feeling that “Invictus” will miss — how many people are putting it at the top of their ballots? However, between the likes of “The Blind Side,” “The Hangover,” “Crazy Heart,” “Star Trek” and “The Messenger,” no one title emerges as a clear spoiler.

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  • My dream ballot: part two

    Charlotte Gainsbourg in AntichristYesterday, I began my far-fetched wishlist of nominees for tomorrow’s announcement with a look at the technical categories. Today we move into the big races. And as much as I thought I had my favorites clearly mapped out in my head, a rundown of the eligible titles made for some very crowded races indeed.

    Once again, I’ve mostly played by the Academy’s own criteria, considering only U.S. releases from 2009 — hence the slight discrepancy with my Top 10 from December. But where certain titles seemingly never made it through the administrative red tape guarding Oscar eligibility, I’ve intervened on their behalf. (Films as good as “Summer Hours” can’t go unmentioned, after all.)

    Check out my picks after the cut, and share your own last-minute thoughts and hopes in the comments. My final predictions are coming shortly.

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  • Reitman: “Bigelow is going to win and she deserves to win.”

    Over at Roger Ebert’s little corner of the web, the Chicago Sun-Times critics has posted a great conversation with “Up in the Air” director Jason Reitman.  There’s a bit of everything, really, but most noteworthy is his praise of “The Hurt Locker” and “District 9.” He proves he’s a lot more humble than his detractors would like to think he is, I’d say.  Take a look:

    After the jump, he talks about where he sees his career going and again praises his fellow contenders.  But do head over to Ebert’s site for more (including his thoughts on why “The Catcher in the Rye” is probably not a filmable volume).

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