In Contention

Tag: The Piano

  • Class of 1993

    There are a lot of reasons I wish I was 10 years old again — the free food and lodging, the still-tempered cynicism, the safe knowledge that there were only three Indiana Jones movies — but chief among them on this Oscar Nomination Eve is that if I was, I’d have the 1993 Academy Award slate coming my way.

    If you’ve forgotten that Oscar year — or if it was before your time — refresh your memory here. Seriously, has the Academy ever cobbled together quite such an impeccable lineup across multiple categories?

    Start at the top, with a Best Picture lineup that balances top-flight Hollywood prestige (“Schindler’s List”), daring international arthouse (“The Piano”) and peerless populism (“The Fugitive”). Move down through those hard-earned semi-surprise acting nods for the likes of Laurence Fishburne and Stockard Channing, down to the Best Supporting Actor race that I’ve already cited as the strongest in the category’s history.

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  • INTERVIEW: Jane Campion

    Jane CampionJane Campion’s laugh comes as a rather lovely surprise: full, throaty and often directed at herself, it betrays a personality more robust, mischievous even, than one might surmise from her fragile, often solemn films. It’s a disconnect she cheerfully acknowledges, and credits in part to her collaborators.

    “As a filmmaker, it helps me to be around young people,” she says, referring to the unusually youthful cast and crew of “Bright Star,” her exquisite meditation on first love, nature and poetry – via the star-crossed affair of John Keats and his teenaged lover Fanny Brawne.

    “People in their twenties can be quite moody and quiet, and not in a bad way – they know how to be alone with their thoughts. People my age tend to blab on a bit without thinking, like I’m doing now.”

    She laughs again. If that’s a frequent occurrence over the course of our phone conversation, it could be because Campion is as relaxed and content as she has ever been in her career. Her first feature since 2003’s harshly-received erotic thriller “In the Cut,” “Bright Star” has placed the New Zealander back in critics’ good graces, even if it looks increasingly unlikely to emulate the Oscar success of her 1993 breakthrough “The Piano.”

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  • How Harvey corrupted Oscar

    Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin in The PianoIt’s a little over a week old, but I only just noticed Mike Goodridge’s rather interesting column at ScreenDaily, in which he offers yet another take on the Academy’s expanded Best Picture field. (Is it even a month since the announcement? It feels like we’ve been talking about this forever.)

    Unlike many, Goodridge is wholeheartedly in favor of the move, which he sees as a potential corrective to the more cynical manipulations of Oscar campaigning. I don’t necessarily agree with that conclusion, but I found myself nodding while reading the setup for his argument, in which he traces the Academy’s motivation back to Harvey Weinstein’s earliest campaigning days.

    Though Weinstein is now regarded as the poster boy for disingenuous campaigning, Goodridge looks back to a time (one many pundits seem to have forgotten) when he was a force for good on the Oscar trail, using his unsurpassed savvy to get deserving indie underdogs into the race.

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