In Contention

Tag: The King’s Speech

  • OFF THE CARPET: Once more into the breach

    So nine years ago yesterday I started a crappy, embarrassing little amateur site on Yahoo!’s now defunct Geocities platform and called it Oscar Central. It was a way to blow off steam in film school, maybe fold an offline hobby (Oscar-watching, predicting, obsessing) into an online community that seemed to already have healthy numbers. Plus, hey, it was the early years. I figured some low tech internet training was far from the worst thing I could be doing.

    That’s a long way of saying today kicks off my 10th season of Oscar coverage online, and in that decade, plenty has changed. One thing has remained the same, however, and that is a focused interest, both from myself and a growing readership, in the admittedly arbitrary and somewhat solipsistic process of awarding the “best” in filmed art and entertainment.

    To put it more succinctly: Here we go again.

    The 2010-2011 Oscar season takes its first real steps Wednesday as the 67th annual Venice Film Festival sets sail on the Lido. That opening night will see Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” get its toes wet as Fox Searchlight tests the season’s waters, perhaps with a worthy follow-up to the director’s 2008 awards title “The Wrestler,” perhaps not. Two days later the 37th annual Telluride Film Festival lifts its curtain in the mountains of Colorado, bringing any number of “surprise” bows (we all know what they’ll be but, again, I’ll respect the fest’s wishes in this space), before Toronto’s media circus fills in the cracks and brings us to mid-September and the fiery beginnings of Oscar’s 83rd barbecue.

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Original Score — Volume I

    I am marveled by the accomplishments of all the crafts artists who elevate our films, but this is particularly the case with respect to music composers. Composing equals genius as far as I am concerned.These musicians  join the film at the end, when usually only the director, editor and perhaps the sound mixers are still working.  But capturing the mood and feel of a film that has been created in your absence must be extraordinarily difficult.And  I do not need to count the ways in which a brilliant score can make a good film truly unforgettable.

    The category of Best Original Score is one of the hardest to predict in my opinion, even shortly before the nominations are announced. So what sort of music is rewarded by this branch? Certainly being noticeable in the film helps. Loud music and/or music which plays for lengthy parts of the film with minimal dialogue can do well, too. Being an animated film or a Best Picture contender hardly hurts either.

    For years, we could count on John Williams to take a spot among the nominees. But given that Williams is only composing for Steven Spielberg these days, his name has been absent from the nominees for five straight years now. (I suspect we’ll see him finally move past Alfred Newman on the all-time list next year.)

    Nevertheless, while the branch is not quite as insular as it was in the earlier part of last decade, it remains a fairly exclusive club. Seldom do composers get first trips to the Kodak – usually only one a year. In fact, of the past 11 years, only three have seen two new nominees, and only one has seen three.

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Makeup — Volume I

    Makeup and hairstyling builds characters by transforming actors with realism or imagination that would otherwise be lacking on the screen. With the announcement that the Best Visual Effects is expanding to include five nominees this year, Best Makeup now remains the sole category to have three nominees, chosen from a “bake-off” of seven finalists which are revealed in advance of the January nominations announcement.

    This award tends to cite so many different aspects that it is difficult to pin down exactly what the branch looks for. However, aging and illness are certainly well regarded, as are the creation of blood and injuries, disfigurement and turning actors into monsters and other fantastical beings.

    It should be remembered that this category awards both makeup and hairstyling. However, last year’s nomination for “The Young Victoria” is a rare example of where the hairstyling portion of the category apparently played a significant role. Traditionally, facial and body makeup is far more important.

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  • Telegraph predicts “global hit” for ‘Dagenham’

    Two weeks ago, when I made my first Oscar predictions of the 2010 season, I went out on a bit of a limb for “Made in Dagenham,” the upcoming true-life Britcom that will have its world premiere at Toronto next month.

    I have yet to see the film, but the story material, the talent involved and the promisingly perky trailer (embedded after the jump) combined to suggest one of those undemanding, broadly appealing UK charmers that sneak up on the Academy every couple of years — and that, as “An Education” proved last year, face a gentler climb to a Best Picture nod in a field of ten.

    With the Academy’s sizable British voting bloc having often made their presence felt even in the days of five nominees — hello, “Atonement” — the odds do favor at least one British film making the cut in most years. Many see Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” as the prime candidate for that hypothetical slot this year, and it’s certainly a worthy one, but it remains a tough sell in many respects: a quiet, sometimes despairing essay on middle-aged loneliness unlikely to register beyond a rarefied arthouse audience.

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  • Just say no

    Last week, Tom O’Neil reported on a horrifying unacceptable interesting potential development in this year’s Oscar race, and as much as I’ve tried to push it to the recesses of my mind, the thought won’t leave me alone — not least because it provides a depressingly neat answer to one of the question marks I had over the predictions I made last week.

    As I struggled to cobble together a list of 10 plausible Best Picture nominees, I kept searching for the annual middlebrow specialty wild card that is neither too populist nor too outré for the bluehair voting contingent — the film that will make voters feel artistically discriminating, without making them want to slit their wrists. A film for those voters who, to filch a quote from Nick Davis, “like the arthouse best when there’s no real art in it.”

    “The Kids Are All Right” kind of fits the bill, though it’s actually good, and its fun factor is a little too high. “Winter’s Bone” is suitably low on fun, but it’s also as chilly as its title. “The King’s Speech?” Well, it has corsets and cut-glass British accents a go-go, as well as Harvey Weinstein — a man who, as “The Reader” reminded us only 18 months ago, knows this voting contingent inside out. But it’s also a small-scale story of one man overcoming a stutter: mightn’t that prove a little slight for voters who like their awards bait capital-I Important?

    According to O’Neil, it seems this thought might have crossed Weinstein’s mind, and he’s already forming a back-up plan. Ladies and gentlemen, enter “The Concert.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Costume Design — Volume I

    Costume design in many ways represents much about the Oscars: glitz, glamor, beauty. But obviously threads do much more than make movie stars look attractive.  They build character, set mood, define period and serve as a defining design aspect of a film.

    Like art direction, the nominees for here overwhelmingly fall into one of two categories: period or fantasy. Indeed, when two contemporary films (“The Queen” and “The Devil Wears Prada”) were nominated in 2006, it was a rare occasion.

    It’s not an exact science, but while a fantasy film is almost always nominated every year, there is usually only one as four films tend to be period. It also should be noted that recent winners in the category have all highlighted British or French royalty and high society.

    Being a Best Picture contender does not hurt with this branch (same with any), but the branch also does a great deal of thinking for itself. Last year, for instance, both “Bright Star” and “Coco Before Chanel” managed nominations here, the only ones for their respective films. In the last four years, four other films (“Curse of the Golden Flower,” “Marie Antoinette,” “Across the Universe” and “Australia”) have also managed the feat, rare for crafts categories.

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  • ‘Never Let Me Go,’ ‘Rabbit Hole’ among Toronto premieres

    Toronto International Film Festival organisers unveiled a typically cluttered lineup of galas and premieres for this year’s edition — including, as usual, a number of films pencilled in as 2010 awards contenders.

    Of the 50 titles announced thus far, half will be world premieres: those include such highly anticipated works as Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go,” John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole,” Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” and Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock.” The remaining half have either appeared at previous festivals — with a hefty contingent from Cannes, including Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” — or look set to make their debut at Venice the week before.

    With Venice due to reveal its own lineup tomorrow, the fact that such still-unseen titles as Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” Francois Ozon’s “Potiche,” Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” John Madden’s “The Debt” and Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” are all marked only as North American premieres would appear to confirm that they are all Lido-bound. (I’m surprised, however, that Guillaume Canet’s “Little White Lies” will be making its first appearance at Toronto rather than at a European festival.)

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  • Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ to open Venice

    [FURTHER UPDATE: Focus has confirmed that “The American” will not, in fact, be appearing at Venice.]

    [UPDATE: “Black Swan” has indeed been confirmed as the Venice opener, and will play in Competition. More soon.]

    I’ve been saying for some time that this year’s Venice Film Festival looks to be a very good vintage, capitalizing on the number of highly anticipated auteur works that weren’t quite ready in time for Cannes. Even with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” still a major question mark — some are even suggesting it won’t surface this year — there’s plenty to get quivery about besides, as is clear from this tasty Variety piece.

    Nick Vivarelli’s article reiterates the titles — including Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” and Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” — that have long been all-but-guaranteed to show up at Venice, but adds some tantalizing new ones. Chief among them is Darren Aronofsky’s ballet psycho-thriller “Black Swan,” which will premiere as the festival’s opening film on September 1.

    The press release breaking the news, and more Venice possibilities, after the cut.

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  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Art Direction — Volume I

    As we like to point out in this space each year, the Academy Award for Best Art Direction is presented to two individuals who have different but key roles in designing a film’s sets and props.

    The first of these, the production designer, is the director of the film’s art department, responsible for the supervision of those in it and the overall architecture of the film’s design. The set decorator, on the other hand, is responsible for filling up those sets with proper scenery to fully bring them to life.  When these individuals, and those who work alongside them in the art department, do their jobs well, we can be fully immersed into the story.

    Historically, the nominees in this field fit into one of two categories: historical or fantastical. At least two – usually three or four – of the nominees every year are set in the past. This is not surprising. Being set outside of day-to-day life, such films require a different sort of research and, moreover, draw attention to themselves by not appearing to be what we encounter every day.

    At the same time, fantasy titles show up at least once, often more, every year as well. Last year’s winner, “Avatar,” is a good example of this.  Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg created a completely different world strictly from imagination.

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  • Hurry, only 319 days until…

    We have less than a month left until Cannes likely triggers the first mass Oscar chatter of the year. (More so if Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” is included in tomorrow’s Official Selection announcement.) These are precious days, then … enjoy them while they last.

    Of course, if my “precious” is your “miserable,” and you’ve spent the last five weeks suffering Oscar-talk withdrawal, the indefatigable Nathaniel Rogers over at The Film Experience has your fix. You’ll remember that Kris decided against doing year-in-advance nomination predictions this year, which makes this very thorough Oscar forecast the first of its kind I’ve seen this year.

    Needless to say, a hefty pinch of salt is required at this foetal stage in the competition — Nathaniel himself headlines his predictions with the caveat “for fun and discussion.” Still, his lists raise some interesting possibilities: most notably, a Best Picture slate with a very different populist-specialist balance to last year’s ten.

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