• 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.
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 one I had highlighted last month as a title to watch, so I’m glad to see it living up to expectations. I’m an admirer of Granik’s 2004 debut “Down to the Bone,” which put Vera Farmiga on the map — hopefully, “Winter’s Bone” can similarly boost the fortunes of young Jennifer Lawrence, who so excelled in “The Burning Plain” earlier this year.
Granik’s film stars Lawrence as a resilient teenager searching for her missing father in the Ozark Mountains. Comparisons have already been made to Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River,” which took the same award at Sundance two years ago.
The corresponding Grand Jury Prize winner in the documentary category was Sebastien Junger and Tim Hetherington’s debut effort “Restrepo,” a chronicle of one year in the lives of the Second Platoon in Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley.
When (at this stage, I think it’s safe to say “when”) “Precious” and “An Education” land Best Picture nods on Tuesday morning, there will be an interesting trivia note to attach to the occasion: they’ll be the first Sundance competition entries since 2001 to make it all the way to Oscar’s top race.
Indeed, “Precious” will be the first Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner ever to score a Best Picture Oscar nod in the festival’s 25-year history.
These are two interesting stats that aren’t mentioned in AP writer David Germain’s story on the relationship between Sundance and Oscar, which casts a more positive gaze on the number of overlaps between the two. And he’s right to an extent: the past decade alone has given Oscar-watchers plenty of reason to keep a close eye on Sundance.
In the eight years since “In the Bedroom” became the last Sundance contender to crack the Best Picture lineup, Sundance has presented a number of future Oscar contenders in acting and writing categories, including “Maria Full of Grace,” “Hustle and Flow,” “Junebug,” “The Squid and the Whale,” “Half Nelson” and, most recently, “Frozen River.”
I always get a curious thrill from looking down the list of films selected to compete at the Sundance Film Festival — the 2010 batch of which has just been announced by festival directors John Cooper and Trevor Grath.
You know there are at least one or two titles there that we’ll all be talking about in precisely one year’s time, just as “Precious,” “An Education” and “The Cove” have blossomed from festival darlings to surefire awards contenders in the space of 11 months. What’s far harder to tell is which of the 58 titles listed here might be “the one.”
Still, last year I played something of a guessing game with the lineup, singling out one film from each of the competition’s four strands that seemed of particular interest to me: my faith in “An Education” was, obviously, handsomely repaid, while “Big Fan” (a winner at this week’s Gotham Awards), “Afghan Star” (the UK’s foreign Oscar entry) and Doors documentary “When You’re Strange” have done respectably for themselves.
OK, I missed “Precious” — so as far as that particular game goes, I’m going to quit while I’m behind. Still, what follows is a selection of ten titles that I’m keeping an eye on.