Tag: The Town
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2/14 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Remembering 1939, Finke talks to Pascal, Marion Cotillard in ‘The Dark Knight Rises?’
• Patrick Goldstein remembers 1939: “When 10 great Oscar nominees really meant 10 great nominees.” [The Big Picture]• Nikki Finke talks to Sony honcho Amy Pascal in the wake of “The Social Network”‘s post-season stall. [Deadline]
• Marnie Hanel chats with “127 Hours” production designer Suttirat Larlarb, with sketches to boot. [Little Gold Men]
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OSCAR GUIDE: Best Supporting Actor
Very few of the 20 actors nominated for Oscars this year (if any) feel like egregious calls. As usual, the lead actor race is the most impressive, but the Best Supporting Actor slate isn’t too shabby, either. Each performance is masterful in its own way, and each serves its respective narrative to the fullest.Two of the nominees this year are depictions of real life individuals and three are complete manifestations. But all five of the below actors owned their roles and then some, finding the right flow of eye-catching showmanship without dominating the narrative arc. And though some might argue, I’d say each is perfectly representative of “supporting” in the truest sense of the word.
The nominees are:
Christian Bale, “The Fighter”
John Hawkes, “Winter’s Bone”
Jeremy Renner, “The Town”
Mark Ruffalo, “The Kids Are All Right”
Geoffrey Rush, “The King’s Speech” -
THE LONG SHOT: Jawellnofine
(Updated Oscar predictions here.)It’s six years this month since I left Johannesburg for the sodden streets of London, so it could just be that I’m in a commemorative mood, but the endlessly useful South African idiom “jawellnofine” (mostly redundant translation: “yes… well… no… fine”) has been on my mind rather a lot this week. It’s a versatile Frankenstein term that, like a more finely calibrated “whatever,” can express everything from dispassionate approval to passive-aggressive indifference to reluctant acceptance — or any combination of these at once.
How am I currently feeling about the Oscar season, you ask? Jawellnofine.
It’d be churlish for me to complain too vigorously about the current state of the race. After all, five of the films currently sitting in the “most likely” pile for a Best Picture nomination — “The Fighter,” “Black Swan,” “The Kids Are All Right,” “The Town” and “Winter’s Bone” — placed in my own Best of 2010 list last week: hardly an unhappy stat, even if my and the Academy’s respective Top Tens will have only a 20% overlap.
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Predict the ASC nominees
Now that the DGA has spoken, something to pass the time. Tomorrow the crafts guilds continue to roll out the season as the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) offers its picks for the best work behind the camera in 2010. This is perhaps my favorite of the below-the-line categories, so I thought I’d offer up a lengthy preview.The Society is usually good for 80% when it comes to Academy crossover with its nominees. Sometimes you get a 5/5, sometimes a 3/5, but generally it’s 4/5. The trick is figuring out what the oddball selection will be. But let’s see what’s looking good for a nod, first.
Leading the way this time around, like most years, would have to be Roger Deakins. His work on “True Grit” will likely win him an Oscar and the road there could very well begin with a win from the Society. He seems to be papa bear these days. Chalk it up.
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Predict the DGA nominees
Monday the guild circuit continues — at the start of what will be a very busy week — as the Directors Guild of America (DGA) unveils its list of nominees.The age-old rule of thumb has been that this is perhaps the most consistently foreshadowing precursor, as the five DGA nominees tend to have a good shot at Best Director recognition, and the Best Director nominees tend to line-up with the Best Picture nominees, give or take (though with the 10, I think it might be safe to say that the idea of a “lone director” has been lost to the realities of probability).
Last year the five DGA nominees represented the perceived top five films of the Oscar race: Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Lee Daniels, Jason Reitman and Quentin Tarantino. The year before that, we all thought it did the same, but alas, Christopher Nolan and his film ultimately missed the mark with Oscar.
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1/6 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Roberts stumps for Bardem, ‘Valentine’ as class commentary, Affleck’s ‘Town’ inspirations
• Julia Roberts’s Oscar plea for”Biutiful” star Javier Bardem. [Inside Movies]• Patrick Goldstein on “Blue Valentine” as a meditation on the class divide. [The Big Picture]
• Ben Affleck on “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” “Amores Perros,” “Breaking Away” and “Heat” as inspirations for “The Town.” [The Envelope]
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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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PGA nominates the expected
Look to your right, at Kris’s current Best Picture predictions. Now look at the list of 10 films just nominated for the Producers Guild of America’s top award. Ready for a quick game of Spot the Difference? It’ll be very quick — there are none. (Kris’s hopes yesterday for one wild-card nod were in vain.)The PGA could hardly have stuck any more closely to the script with this morning’s announcement, which points to a rapidly solidifying race three weeks ahead of the Oscar nominations. Still, questions remain, and I’d still bet against the Academy following this list precisely to the letter.
Among the titles left off the PGA’s list is “Winter’s Bone,” but the microbudget no-name indie was never likely to score with these guys. Will passion votes still propel it into the Oscar Ten — and if so, among the presumed stragglers, will “127 Hours” or “The Town” make way?
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Predict the WGA and Scripter nominees
Also speaking up tomorrow will be the WGA (Writers Guild of America). The recently revealed list of ineligibilities makes picking this group’s choices much more fun, though it still kinda stinks because you know some of the best scripts of the year will be spectators.Last year the beneficiaries of the purge (which ultimately missed with Oscar) were “Crazy Heart,” “Julie & Julia” and “Star Trek” in adapted, “(500) Days of Summer,” “Avatar” and “The Hangover” in original. From my vantage, there doesn’t appear to be as many options to choose from on the periphery of these races, but I’ll give it a stab.
Click on through the jump to see my picks in the adapted and original categories, as well as discussion of the USC Scripter Awards. (I’ll opt out of picking the documentary field from the WGA, which is likely to be a crap shoot, anyway.)
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Predict the PGA nominees
Tomorrow the guild circuit launches with the WGA (separate post coming) and PGA nominations. The critics’ circuit was well and good but this is where crossover memberships begin to give us a tangible view of how the race will fill out.Last year the PGA (Producers Guild of America) piggy-backed the Academy’s plan to expand the field of nominees from five to 10. It also copied the new voting scheme, which uses the preferential balloting system to determine nominees.
The two films that missed with the guild but made it into the Best Picture 10 were “The Blind Side” (odd that it missed, given its box office take) and the Coens’ “A Serious Man.” In their place: Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” (why?) and the blockbuster “Star Trek.” What can we expect this year? Continue after the jump to see what I’m thinking.
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Pete Postlethwaite (1946-2011)
Pete Postlethwaite had one of those faces — weathered, folded, kneaded, endlessly interesting — that demanded to be on camera, even as it denied him any possibility of leading man status.And yet, in the latter half of his career, Postlethwaite, who sadly passed away yesterday after a lengthy battle with cancer, made a convincing case for the character actor as star. Neither his visage nor his gratifyingly alliterative name threatened more than a career as “that guy,” but somehow we got to know him better than that.
The turning point, of course, was a hard-earned and wholly unexpected 1993 Academy Award nomination for “In the Name of the Father” (speaking as we were, recently, of nods that came without any precursor warning), his granite-hard and quietly mournful performance as Maguire Seven convict Giuseppe Conlon joining a gallery of performances I cited last year as one of the finest Oscar fields in history.
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OFF THE CARPET: Macro/micro
I decided to update the Contenders section this week by addressing things (mostly) as they seem to stand in the wake of the critics’ awards circuit of the last two weeks. Save for this or that personal hunch (like buying into Guy’s shrewd proposition that the BAFTA contingent could help Lesley Manville over the hump, or keeping in mind, over all, that critics don’t vote for Oscars), I think it’s fairly representative.I don’t have a lot to offer in the way of a column this week. The race as it stands is how you see it. There are pockets of advocacy growing louder and louder out there, but I’m waiting for guilds to chime in and for studios to decide if they are in it to win it (and it becomes clearer and clearer who is and who isn’t, by the way).
Ballots will go out a week from today. Voters will have, presumably, spent the Thanksgiving and upcoming Christmas holidays digging into screeners and catching up on this or that. The precursors have illuminated a few paths they may not have taken (precious few, though), but mainly they’ve demanded viewings of 11 films in play for 10 Best Picture slots. What will the small screen do for these contenders?
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Make your SAG predictions
Now that most of the major critics’ groups have had their say, tomorrow begins the second phase of the precursor season, as the Screen Actors’ Guild makes the first of this year’s industry award pronouncements.I always feel a twinge of dread about the SAG nomination list — frequently more middle-of-the-road than the critics’ picks, though with odd flashes of peer affection for unlikely veterans and character actors, they have a way of reducing the pool of Oscar hopefuls rather aggressively. More often than not, boredom ensues: last year, 19 of the 20 SAG individual performance nominees went on to repeat at the Oscars.
Suffice to say, a snub from these guys stings more than one from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but Marcia Gay Harden will forever remain a beacon of hope to the SAG-ignored: 10 years ago, a diss from the Guild (and indeed from virtually every other precursor, save the New York critics) didn’t stop her taking the golden boy home for “Pollock.”
Predictions after the jump.
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12/14 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: critics’ awards scoop and outrage, the year in posters, Steinfeld’s ‘Grit’
• Tim Appelo gets the inside scoop of yesterday’s NYFCC vote. [The Race]• David Poland, meanwhile, is outraged that critics so far, in their dwindling numbers, have failed to resonate by missing the fertile ground between obscure and obvious. [The Hot Blog]
• Jenelle Riley sits down with “True Grit” young’un Hailee Steinfeld. [Backstage]
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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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12/13 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: HFPA’s “unsavory business practices,” Elswit talks ‘Town,’ the Zen of ‘TRON’
• Golden Globes PR chief slams HFPA for “unsavory business practices.” [The Wrap]• David Heuring chats with “The Town” cinematographer Robert Elswit. [Variety]
• Oscar marketing smackdown: “127 Hours” and “Buried.” [The Hollywood Reporter]
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OFF THE CARPET: Time to flex
All of the cards (save for the elusive James L. Brooks title “How Do You Know,” which few seem to be expecting much from at this stage — a commodity in Oscar season, actually) are on the table.The critics are beginning to speak up with their faves (likely to be “The Social Network” after “The Social Network” after “The Social Network”) and the working (and voting) industry is just now getting its first look at many of the films that have been stirring conversation throughout the festival season via DVDs and Academy screenings. They’ll make their voices heard with guild nominations throughout January. But now is not the time to show weakness.
The thoroughbreds of the season remain “The King’s Speech” and the aforementioned “The Social Network.” I’m confidant “True Grit” will soon join their ranks, while “The Kids Are All Right” could be fairly considered in that group as well. And “Toy Story 3” is riding sentiment like a champ (with even more campaign strategy to come).
“The Town” is the only other film that I know has registered in a big way with Academy types (and it’s laid back campaign approach feels like the right call). “The Fighter” screened for AMPAS this weekend and is receiving media attention at just the right time. I think it will soon prove itself to be a formidable contender in the race, if it hasn’t already.