In Contention

Tag: Carlos

  • Emmy goes to the movies

    We don’t normally pay much attention to the Emmy Awards, this being a site primarily devoted to the bigger screen. But when the recently unveiled nomination list contains such film heavyweights as Todd Haynes, Olivier Assayas and (twice) Martin Scorsese, it’d be remiss not to mention it — and the fact that the line between cinema and television is becoming an increasingly pliable one.

    Indeed, there’s still disagreement over which category one of yesterday’s nominees falls into. Assayas’ five-hour stunner “Carlos” may have been produced for French television, but it’s a bit difficult to define a vast work from one of world cinema’s leading auteurs, one that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was theatrically released on the arthouse circuit, as merely a TV miniseries.

    Most haven’t — it won a slew of film critics’ awards last year (and indeed made my 2010 Top 10) before more finicky eligibility rules kept it out of the Oscar race (I know, I know, as if) and in the TV races at the Globe and SAG Awards.

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  • Césars for Polanski, ‘Gods,’ ‘Illusionist’… and Fincher

    When the nominations for the César Awards — known in glib terms as the French Oscars — were announced last month, I wrote that I anticipated a tight race between Roman Polanski’s widely acclaimed Euro thriller “The Ghost Writer” and Xavier Beauvois’s lofty Cannes prizewinner “Of Gods and Men,” with the latter just winning out.

    As it turned out, I was right. Beauvois’s film (the French Oscar submission, which surprised many by failing to make the Academy’s shortlist) took the top prize, but it was “The Ghost Writer” that netted the most wins, with four — including two for Polanski himself (Best Director and Adapted Screenplay), plus honors for editing and Alexandre Desplat’s score.

    Given that combination of awards, it’s tempting to call Polanski’s film the “Social Network” of the French awards circuit — except that title goes to, well, “The Social Network.” David Fincher’s one-time Oscar frontrunner beat a rum bunch of mismatched nominees, including “Bright Star,” “Inception” and “Invictus,” to be named Best Foreign Film.

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  • My dream Oscar ballot, part two

    Yesterday, I began my very far-fetched (and in some cases, frankly impossible) wishlist for Tuesday’s Oscar nominations with my favorite achievements in the technical categories. Today, I offer up my picks in the top races, and I don’t mind telling you things got pretty agonizing in some categories.

    “Why can’t I have 15 nominees for Best Supporting Actress?” one half of my brain asked earlier this morning, as I once more marvelled that any pundits could once have deemed that particular race “weak.” Cooler instincts prevailed, but it bears repeating just what a staggering, and pleasingly varied, year it’s been for female performances on both sides of the category divide. I was also surprised to see how many performances stood tall from films that weren’t necessarily on their stars’ level — I like to think there aren’t too many coattail picks here.

    I’ve veered from Academy format in one respect: I’ve dispensed with a Best Foreign Language Film category. Not only do I dislike the award in principle — it’s a different language, not a different medium — but my general picks are heavy enough on foreign fare that a ghetto category seemed superfluous. Check out my picks after the cut, and share your thoughts in the comments.

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  • My dream Oscar ballot, part one

    For the past two years running, I’ve celebrated Oscar Nomination Eve by assembling my own ideal (and, usually, incredibly far-fetched) ballot, so here we go again. As well as a kind of last-ditch prayer to the Oscar gods, I also look on it as a salute to the worthy contenders who haven’t a hope in hell of hearing their names read out on Tuesday morning.

    At the request of some readers, I’ve bent the rules to accommodate several titles unfairly ineligible for Oscar consideration in any category: most of you are aware of the arcane ruling that has denied “A Prophet” the chance to ever compete in a non-ghetto category, while the TV airings of “Red Riding” and “Carlos” keep them out of the game too. I’m less clear on why the likes of “White Material” and “Fish Tank” aren’t on the Academy’s list of eligible titles, but they aren’t, and I must make my peace with that.

    Anyway, screw ’em: this ballot represents what I found most awards-worthy from all the theatrical features released in the US last year, and you can’t get fairer than that. I’ll begin, as usual, with the ten technical categories — in which I was pleased to end up with a healthy spread of 33 films across 48 slots. Jump in after the cut, and share your own thoughts in the comments. (Also, check out Kris’s very different ideal ballot here.)

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  • ‘Of Gods and Men,’ ‘Ghost Writer’ lead César nominations

    The film may be smarting from its widely (if not, ahem, entirely) unexpected omission from the Oscar foreign-language shortlist earlier this week, but Xavier Beauvois’s sombre religious drama “Of Gods and Men” found more love in its home country, where it scooped a leading 11 nominations for the César Awards.

    The so-called “French Oscars” also unsurprisingly took a shine to Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” which has dominated the European awards circuit and is angling for a surprise Oscar nod or two on Tuesday. Expect these two films to battle it out for the gold; I’d bet on the weighty prestige veneer of Beauvois’s film winning out, but sentimental loyalty to Polanski shouldn’t be underestimated — he is, after all, a previous winner for both “Tess” and  “The Pianist.”

    Beyond those two frontrunners, I’m pleased to see a strong showing for Mathieu Amalric’s scrappy burlesque comedy “On Tour,” though their other choices suggest the Césars can be as frustratingly MOR as their US counterpart.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Don’t let ’em catch you caring

    (Updated Oscar predictions here. They’ll likely be tweaked once more before Tuesday.)

    Following the Academy Award season is a little like watching a particularly low-rent TV soap: just as the mindlessness and predictability of the enterprise escalates to a point where quitting seems the only credible option, some or other narrative curveball will lure you back in.

    So it was with me this week: after my column last week expressed a weary indifference to the race two weeks ahead of nomination day, along came the Academy to throw me a bone and re-pique my interest.

    The bone was, admittedly, a small one — a wishbone, if you will — but it did the job. By shortlisting Greece’s disturbing, tar-black adult fable “Dogtooth” for Best Foreign Language Film, the Academy sent out a reminder to bleary-eyed awards watchers not only that it is still capable of surprising us, but that good films can sometimes endure on their own merits — even if some of them do need an executive committee vote to help them along. (Hey, anyone else starting to think an executive committee for the Best Picture category would be a fine idea?)

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  • Watching and waiting: Guy’s best and worst of 2010

    What kind of year was 2010 at the movies? You tell me. It’s virtually impossible to find one yardstick to measure 365 days of cinema for a collective audience whose interests seem ever more segregated.

    If your film interests are covered largely by the multiplex, chances are 2010 was an unusually unrewarding year for you, challenging even Hollywood’s standard quota of déjà vu — unless, of course, you’re an animation fiend, in which case there was a broad enough range of carefully crafted work to keep you happy.

    If you tend to bypass the mall on your way to the arthouse, however, there was any amount of adventurous indie and world cinema, both newly unveiled and backlogged from previous years, to chew on — if, of course, you’re privileged enough to live in a regrettably narrow radius. And if you’re an Academy voter sifting through the crop of generously campaigned prestige fare, 2010 looks rather like the usual, only a little more so.

    For me, 2010 was both immeasurably improved and somewhat complicated by the festival circuit — access to which is a luxury I shall never take for granted, but also one that inevitably skews my sense of how the film yearbook reads in the real world. When you’ve had access to most of the big-ticket winter warmers by early autumn, and when the likes of Cannes afford you a head start of many months or even years on certain international art films, things rather lose their shape.

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  • NYT offers some pointers to the Academy

    The New York Times has an annual tradition of getting its three top critics — Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott and Stephen Holden — to craft ideal Oscar ballots, and the results this year point to more scattered affections than the critics’ award trail would have you believe. Interestingly, only one title features on all three critics’ Best Picture lists, and it ain’t “The Social Network” — ironically, it’s Olivier Assayas’s “Carlos,” which, of course, isn’t eligible for Academy consideration.

    Elsewhere, their overlaps are on more expected (and Oscar-favored) candidates: all three agree on Jesse Eisenberg, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale and the Coens’ screenplay for “True Grit.” More interesting are their more idiosyncratic picks: I co-sign Holden’s Best Supporting Actress mention for Charlotte Rampling in “Life During Wartime,” and would never have predicted Scott’s screenplay citation for “Green Zone.”

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  • Ruiz’s ‘Lisbon’ takes Louis Delluc prize

    Well, here’s an awards announcement a million miles away from “The Social Network” — the Louis Delluc Prize, the single most prestigious award in French cinema. (Yes, loftier than the César Awards.) And I do mean “single”: awarded to one film from a shortlist of eight by a jury of French journalists and industry types, it’s one of the simpler ceremonies on the block.

    While last year’s award went to the ubiquitous crossover hit “A Prophet,” this year’s jury (headed by Cannes festival president Gilles Jacob) threw a slight curveball: the award was handed this morning to Raul Ruiz’s epic Portuguese-French production “Mysteries of Lisbon,” a dreamy 272-minute period puzzle piece that I was thoroughly bewitched by at the London Film Festival. (Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Belle Epine” received debut filmmaker honors.)

    The film beat out one hell of a heavyweight shortlist, listed after the cut.

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  • Likability: the best films of 2010

    I don’t quite know how to peg 2010.

    On one hand it has felt like a weak year. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed quite a few films. Maybe the story lies in that sentence: “enjoyed.” There were precious few films that really rocked me, but plenty that were a nice enough experience.

    If you listened to Friday’s Oscar Talk, then you know my top 10. But before publishing it in this space, allow me to walk through the many films that fell short, starting at the top with Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine.” Here is an honest depiction of a relationship in crisis with performances that hit the mark. It wears its soul on its sleeve.

    The Coen brothers’ dip into the western genre, “True Grit,” was a straight-forward piece of flavorful filmmaking much appreciated for its restraint, while similarly, Ben Affleck’s “The Town” didn’t attempt reinvention of the wheel while forging a resonant character study in a genre film’s clothing.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 44 — The top 10 films of 2010 (x2)

    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.

    It’s the middle of the season, critics’ awards are set to unleash next week, the guild announcements are right around the corner, the holidays are breathing down our necks and it couldn’t be a busier time of year. There’s plenty to discuss, but Anne and I are nevertheless straying from the usual format this week…

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  • Finally, the 10 best of the 2010 LFF

    For those of you who were loyally following my London Film Festival coverage this year, I must apologize for leaving it somewhat in limbo. Though I did eventually find time for a lengthy discussion of fest closer “127 Hours,” a snowballing workload put paid to my hopes of squeezing in a few more review roundups. And frankly, since the festival wrapped on Thursday after four weeks of press screenings, I so relished having ownership of my days again that I let things lie longer than I intended.

    But by way of a belated send-off, here’s a gathering of the films that made the LFF for me this year. I saw precisely 60 films at the festival, in addition to 27 I’d already seen at previous fests, so I was naïve to hope I might get round to discussing most of them.

    Some of the  clunkers (glum German childbirth drama “Blessed Events,” Ferzan Ozpetek’s lead-footed gay comedy “Loose Cannons”) barely merit appraisal; other, more interesting, disappointments (Xavier Dolan’s meticulous but terminally precious love triangle “Heartbeats,” Benedik Flieugauf’s visually startling but sketchily conceived sci-fi “Womb”) at least deserved a few paragraphs. Ah, well.

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  • 10/26 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Ferrell talks ‘Megamind,’ SAG to simulcast kudocast, Coppola shoots with Kilmer

    • Drew McWeeney talks to “Megamind” star Will Ferrell. [Motion/Captured]

    • This year’s SAG Awards will be simulcast to all time zones at 5pm PST. [Variety]

    • Francis Ford Coppola has “quietly” begun shooting his next film, a thriller with Val Kilmer. [Deadline]

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  • LONDON: ‘Cold Weather,’ ‘Carlos,’ ‘Little White Lies’

    Okay, so my weekend plans to catch up on my LFF review backlog didn’t entirely pan out — though the schedulers have, at least, kindly slowed the snowball effect by screening a number of films today that I had already seen. Strange as it sounds, given that it’s been on the festival track for five months now, Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” (reviewed in Cannes) finally premiered in its home country this evening, while Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” continued to dismay critics at this morning’s press screening — as I treated myself to a smug lie-in.

    The weekend, however, was one of multiple festival treats for me, including my first dip into this year’s particularly enticing Treasures From the Archives sidebar, featuring a broad array of immaculately restored classics and curios.

    Joshua Logan’s “Picnic,” a widely forgotten Best Picture nominee from 1955, was an unexpected candidate for this treatment, but the gleaming new print of this creaky but affecting slice of small-town Americana repaid the archivists’ gamble — the film’s ambitious narrative-hopscotch structure remains fresh, the scattergun ensemble acting less so, but the real purpose of the outing was seeing master DP James Wong Howe’s luscious color lensing primped, polished and projected on London’s classiest cinema screen.

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  • OSCAR TALK: Ep. 36 — London fest, ‘Carlos,’ foreign film race, NC-17 for ‘Blue Valentine,’ ‘All Good Things’ and more with special guests Guy Lodge and Peter Knegt

    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.

    This week we’re happy to be joined by In Contention’s own Guy Lodge and indieWIRE‘s Peter Knegt, both calling from London where the London Film Festival has just kicked off. Plenty to chew on with four voices on the mic so let’s see what’s on the docket…

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  • 10/13 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Stone worried for Douglas, Aronofsky close on ‘Wolverine,’ assessing a shorter ‘Carlos’

    • Tim Gray weighs in on Oscar’s potential slide to January. [Variety]

    • Darren Aronofsky is closer to jumping on board the “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” sequel than we thought/feared. [Deadline]

    • Oliver Stone is pretty worried about Michael Douglas’s health concerns. [Associated Press]

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  • ‘Carlos’ trailer

    Olivier Assayas’s five-and-a-half-hour Carlos the Jackal biopic was the film I most regretted missing it Cannes, where its gargantuan running time prevented any repeat screenings. Happily, I have a chance to catch up with it at next month’s London Film Festival, and am enormously looking forward to doing so. (It will have its US premiere next week at the New York fest.) IFC will be releasing the film on October 15 both in its full miniseries-format glory and in a 150-minute theatrical cut; word from those I trust at Cannes is that the film rewards the long haul. Click on the image below to check out the trailer via Apple, or watch the embed after the jump.

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  • TELLURIDE: Settling in with the freshly unveiled line-up

    I’m just settling in here in the Colorado mountainside as the Telluride Film Festival prepares to draw the curtain on its 37th dance tomorrow afternoon.

    As I look over the schedule (I Tweeted the films earlier this morning), I’m seeing plenty to chew on. For starters, the world premiere of Peter Weir’s “The Way Back” is slated for tomorrow night. I was crushed, though, to see it slotted at the exact same time as the world premiere of Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go.” But both will screen plenty throughout the fest, as a tribute to Weir is in store to go along with the former, while Romanek and actress Carey Mulligan are in town to promote the latter.  Author Kazuo Ishiguro will also be here to sign copies of his novel.

    Telluride is preempting Toronto on Romanek’s film, as well as the new Errol Morris documentary, “Tabloid.” Meanwhile, Sylvain Chomet’s animated “The Illusionist” has been playing the festival circuit all year and is definitely near the top of my must-see list.

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