• Pete Hammond reports that Tom Hanks will present Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography to start the show, so we’ll know very quickly if a sweep for “The King’s Speech” is afoot. [Deadline]
• Glenn Kenny talks up the underrated “Shutter Island” a year after its release. [The Film Talk]
• It’s been a week of celebrity Oscar picks, more than ever. Here’s Elton John’s call for Best Actress. [Inside Movies]
After viewing his art exhibition yesterday, I suggested James Franco might want to remove one string from his bow, but the man apparently thinks he hasn’t been busy enough lately: he can now add “celebrity Twitterer” to his increasingly long list of occupations. There’s not much yet on the @jamesfranco account to prompt discussion — just two introductory tweets to a rapidly accrued 45,000 followers (and counting, of course) — but I have no doubt he’ll mold his entertaining odd persona to the medium soon enough. His online hello is below. (Meanwhile, while we’re gathering Franco videos, he and Judd Apatow kid about Oscar hosting after the cut.)
A nice segue from today’s Cinejabber headline. Howard Stern recently joined the ranks of Twitter after re-signing to Sirius Satellite Radio for a new five year contract. Today, he’s live-Tweeting “Private Parts,” which, to my knowledge, is the first instance of a celebrity giving a real-time commentary of his or her film via the online social networking platform. If you’re bored, head on over.
• Darren Aronofsky and David O. Russell reveal a dislike for filming sex scenes. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Krista Smith, meanwhile, sits down with Russell to talk “The Fighter.” [Little Gold Men]
• Rebecca Keegan and Nicole Sperling write up Scott Rudin vs. Harvey Weinstein. [The Envelope]
• Your favorite Pixar characters soon to grace postage stamps. [USPS]
• “Inception” tops 2010’s list of most-tweeted movies. [The Independent]
• Neville Page on his part in designing “TRON Legacy.” [The Wrap]
• Jeffrey Wells does his part to re-inject Tilda Swinton’s performance in “I Am Love” back into the Oscar conversation. [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• The Academy is ready for its close-up — on Twitter! [Twitter]
• Celebrating 15 years of Fox Searchlight Pictures. [/Film]
• Peter Lattman sits down with “Inside Job” director Charles Ferguson. [Dealbook]
• A.O. Scott on the drive and determination of Gordon Gekko and Mark Zuckerberg. [New York Times]
• Scott Feinberg puts together a massive, comprehensive list of Oscar contenders and pundits on Twitter. Follow away! [ScottFeinberg.com]
They should add an “L” between the “F” and the “I.” American Film List Institute. Anyway, this just arrived via press release. The criteria is apparently “accomplishments of considerable merit; influences with either a positive or negative impression; trends, either new or re-emerging; anniversaries or memorials of special note; and/or movements in new technologies, education, preservation, government or other areas that impact the art film, television and digital media.”
It leads off with the obvious choice. More after the jump:
AVATAR – JAMES CAMERON’S MILEPOST IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE ART FORM
James Cameron’s pioneering effort to unleash the human imagination was fully realized in 2009 with the release of AVATAR, a film that firmly established itself as a landmark in the way stories are told.
• Steven Zeitchik plays things from the other side of the coin, says a high Best Picture profile for “Up” could cause the film in the animated feature category. [Hollywood Reporter]
• Jeffrey Wells takes aim and fires heavily on “Precious.” [Hollywood Elsewhere]
• The People’s Choice Award nominations are here. I KNOW you care. So go ahead and vote. [PeoplesChoice.com]
The few of you who do follow my Twitter account will have gathered by now that, compared to some, I’m not the most active correspondent in that medium — limiting my thoughts to 140 characters is a trial more often that not. However, should I ever find myself in the hunt for an Oscar (hey, I have dreams too!), I’ll be sure to step up my tweet count.
You’ve all heard by now about “Moon” director Duncan Jones’s admirably enthusiastic Twitter campaign for Sam Rockwell’s Best Actor chances, which so far has worked a treat.
No, not because Rockwell isn’t still the darkest of horses for Oscar consideration, but because the quirky nature of the campaign has proved something of a talking point in an otherwise quiet week — generating a fresh wave of viewer interest in a small, long-gone summer release. As nice as this press is for Rockwell, “Moon” is the real winner here.
I was watching the Redskins game this afternoon, doing some work on my computer, and the announcers mentioned something called Redskins Twackle. I was already on the net so I figured I’d give it a look, and this is what I got:
In a nutshell, it’s a Twitter interface for Redskins fans. Obviously something like this would heat up around key moments (games, draft, etc.), but it got me thinking about the on-going concern studios have with finding audiences for their movies and sustaining that interest in any way possible, maximizing the income on their product.
I’m glad someone picked this up:
As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran–thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities–an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: “CNNFail.”
Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.
For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes–nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran–reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.
The rest here.
Guy is handling all of the Cannes updating splendidly, so I’ll just impede on his turf this once. I don’t know if readers have kept up with or even been privy to the consistent Twitter updates coming from “Up” co-director Pete Docter in Cannes, but it’s a nice way to feel like you’re right there with the crew. Things are kind of slow right now — lots of talk about interviews and the like. But the photos from the big opening night after party were ace.
Here’s a shot of the full spread — credited to Getty Images — with two more (one of the tents made up like the home of the film’s main character and a cool/bizarre candid of Pixar honcho John Lasseter) after the jump. As always, you can keep up with In Contention and my general day-to-day silliness here.
• Alex Billington takes a few snaps of upcoming release poster artwork in Cannes (including “Shutter Island” and “A Christmas Carol”), then, the web being what it is, he slaps his watermark all over them. [First Showing]
• Kevin Costner keeps the western’s light flickering with an upcoming A&E mini-series. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• The top 10 movie misquotes of all time. [The Guardian]
• Vaneta Rogers consolidates the numerous “Green Lantern” rumors flying around town. Please, God, don’t fuck it up. [Newsarama]
• Speaking of rumors, Drew McWeeny recounts the crash and burn of one such, this one concerning the potential casting of Christian Bale in Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter of Mars.” [Motion/Captured]
• Roger Ebert expresses concern over the use of 3D technology in “Up,” specifically citing the potential for diminishing “brightness and delicate shadings of the color palate.” [Chicago Sun-Times]
• Anthony Breznican previews the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. [USA Today]
• Candace Jackson talks “The Girlfriend Experience” with director Steven Soderbergh and star Sasha Grey. [Wall Street Journal]
• William Goss remembers 1998: the movie summer that was. [Cinematical]
• Twitter’s potential effect on the unstable world of film criticism gets some more ink. [The Wrap]
You might remember that Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN post from a few days ago. Well, it looks like Kutcher closed the Twitter gap fast and finally topped the news organization’s Breaking News feed to 1 million followers. Now he will “ding dong ditch” Ted Turner’s home, as promised. And this, my friends, is what is out there to cover this morning. CNN even Twittered a congrats:
Recently I wrote about the dawn of the journo Twitter apocalypse, the idea that the micro-blogging platform will somehow have a considerable impact on the journalistic form. I have my doubts. And even if the possibility is there for Twitter to be a tool of the journalistic trade, I find myself wondering whether it should.
Case in point: it seems Ashton Kutcher is in a public sprint to 1 million followers with CNN’s Breaking News feed. The former is sitting at 888,000 followers, according to this AP news story. The latter: 937,000. Britney Spears, by the way, is somewhere in between. But as much as I can’t help a natural irritation to Kutcher’s response to all of this, I also can’t deny what he offers in closing.
From the AP:
The 31-year-old actor recently threw down the gauntlet, challenging CNN and its founder, Ted Turner. In a Web video posted earlier this week, Kutcher said he would ding-dong-ditch Turner’s house if he beat CNN to 1 million. (For those unfamiliar with the classic adolescent prank, ding-dong-ditch is when you ring someone’s doorbell and run away.)
“I find it astonishing that one person can actually have as big of a voice online as what an entire media company can on Twitter,” Kutcher said in a video he posted on qik.com. “I just thought that was kind of an amazing comment on the state of our media.”
Preach on. Speaking of all of this, has CNN’s news coverage on the whole become a lot more akin to a big top show over the last year-and-a-half to anyone else? Not that it wasn’t close to the absurd already but lately I feel like my senses are ambushed every time I turn it on.
(Ironically, I’m off to share this post on Twitter.)
I was having lunch with a publicist recently who seemed to be totally confused at how Twitter was going to affect her job. You know, someone sees a film, Twitters something about it off the cuff and suddenly there’s a conversation to be contained.
My point of view is that there is nothing I can Tweet that I can’t go into my WordPress iPhone application and embellish a bit further and just as fast. So the sudden boom of the Twitter culture seems like a big ole’ non-starter to me. After all, speaking just for myself, I forget I have an account half the time. And when it comes to work, like I said, I’d rather log in and post something here rather than offer up some quick line of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on another platform entirely.
A friend recently wrote a piece for The Huffington Post on all this mess. She stands by Twitter as a journalistic tool, but I can’t take that dive yet. I think what we’re seeing is an industry struggling to stay hip, fresh and, above all, mobile. So Twitter is just the flavor of the month (even though it’s been around forever).
Then I saw Peter Sciretta over at /Film had put up a post called “Early Twitter Buzz: Observe and Report,” collecting the SXSW reactions to the film from folks like Film School Rejects’ Neil Miller, indieWIRE’s Matt Dentler and Cinematical’s James Rocchi, with some varied public reactions (I think) tossed in here and there. Suddenly it seems my publicist friend’s nightmare might be a reality.
Anyway, speaking of SXSW and “Observe and Report,” here’s part one of Anne Thompson’s interview with director Jody Hill (woo-hoo “Eastbound & Down!”) and actor Seth Rogen. Head on over to Thompson on Hollywood for part two: