• Off the Carpet picked out the likeliest runners in a highly malleable Best Supporting Actress race.
• We checked in on the Best Animated Feature race, where it seems we may be looking at a three-nominee field after all.
• Away from the awards beat, the week’s big news was the casting of Tom Hardy in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman venture.
• The Academy formally revealed the list of 65 contenders for Best Foreign Language Film.
Well, it makes sense for The Weinstein Company to tidy up its slate a bit. “Blue Valentine,” “Nowhere Boy” and big dog “The King’s Speech” are enough to play with, and there is also “The Company Men,” which has been screening lately.
So we bid farewell to Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” which was looking like an awards season also-ran anyway, given the response out of Venice and Toronto. From the Lido, Guy wrote that “Schnabel’s stated passion for the material is scarcely evident in his screen treatment thereof” and that the film is “enlightening neither as emotional essay nor as straight-up history lecture…[it] seemingly lands shy of every imaginable target audience: it’s too dry for the middlebrow awards set that might otherwise thrill to its superficially good intentions, too didactic for the highbrow intelligentsia that turned out for the director’s previous outings, and too dull for just about everybody.”
David Poland originally Tweeted the news last night. I’ve been waiting all morning for an informed source to verify. Crazy, I know, but anyway, with said verification, chalk it up. The film will be released in March of next year.
[Photo: The Weinstein Company]
It wasn’t by coincidence that the three photos decorating the season’s introductory installment of this column two weeks ago represented lead actress contenders in the 2010 Oscar race. After all the talk of 2009 being “the year of the woman,” owing much to the number of female directors who found themselves in the mix (and inevitably leading to Kathryn Bigelow’s history-making moment at the Kodak), I’m sensing an even better argument for 2010 as a singular season for the fairer sex.
Let’s start with the performances. By my count, there are already eight nominatable offerings from lead actresses this year (which contrasts drastically with a dearth of supporting hopefuls). This is just going by what I’ve seen, mind you.
For starters, Natalie Portman has dazzled the early festival season with her work in “Black Swan.” Lesley Manville, meanwhile (should she remain a lead focus), sets a high bar in “Another Year.” Despite my feelings on the film, Carey Mulligan really settles into a next-level groove in “Never Let Me Go,” and Jennifer Lawrence, of course (like Mulligan last year), has already become the year’s star-in-the-making story in “Winter’s Bone.”
Dovetailing with the performances themselves, there are also films that seem to reflect the theme in narrative. In “Secretariat,” for instance, Diane Lane capably (if a bit histrionically) portrays headstrong Penny Chenery, a woman of virtue in an era when she was expected to keep her head down and clean house. Similarly, Sally Hawkins absolutely kills as the Norma Rae-ish Rita O’Grady in “Made in Dagenham,” fighting for equal pay in a similar time (and she’s likely to be joined in the hunt by co-star Miranda Richardson for a fiery supporting turn). And we can’t forget the palpable feminism apparent in summer indie “The Kids Are All Right,” where Annette Bening and Julianne Moore both bring their “A” game.
Festival jury president Quentin Tarantino announced that Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” was the unanimous choice for Venice’s top honor.
The full list of festival winners (with commentary to follow later):
Golden Lion (Best Film): “Somewhere” (review)
Silver Lion (Best Director): Alex de la Iglesia, “A Sad Trumpet Ballad” (review)
Special Jury Prize: “Essential Killing” (review)
Coppa Volpi (Best Actor): Vincent Gallo, “Essential Killing” (review)
Coppa Volpi (Best Actress): Ariane Labed, “Attenberg” (review)
Osella (Best Screenplay): “A Sad Trumpet Ballad” (review)
Welcome to Oscar Talk.
In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, a 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 on route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.
Today we’re chatting from the Telluride and Venice festivals respectively. The former is just gearing up while the latter has bowed a number of films already (I’m sure you’ve caught Guy’s coverage). So Anne has more to say about the movies today than I do, but this is what’s on the docket…
• Michael Cieply chats with comeback kid Ben Affleck, whose film “The Town” is set to play Venice this week. [New York Times]
• Remember when “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” won the Palme d’Or? Parisian critics would rather not. [The Guardian]
• Catching up with Julian Schnabel, re: “Miral,” prior to Venice. [Variety]
Venice Film Festival
Coming as it does from a filmmaker whose previous work has bent over backwards to reclothe and perfume the unglamorous body of the prestige biopic, the opening beats of Julian Schnabel’s latest, “Miral,” couldn’t be more prosaic.
For a good few minutes, the credit sequence offers the eye little more than a dawdling pan over a fuzzy map of the Israel-Palestine region, ennobling music thrumming away. (The blocky purple credits themselves are hideous, by the way, but that’s already the least of our problems.) Surprises aren’t exactly forthcoming when we the credits wrap and our geography lesson is complete: “My name is Miral,” intones Freida Pinto in a helpful introductory voiceover. “I was born in 1973, but my story really begins in 1947.”
Except it doesn’t; another woman’s does, however, and it’s the first of several admissions of the film’s own uncertainty as to why it’s here in the first place. The first of Schnabel’s biopics to come with a moderate fictional sheen, it’s scripted by Rula Jebreal — an international political journalist who became conscientized during her teenage years at an embattled Jerusalem orphanage — from her openly autobiographical novel, though it loftily purports to be about three generations of Palestinian women working toward independence.
In a few hours’ time, a shiny and sensibly priced orange plane will whisk me off to the city of water, romance and the most expensive fleapit hotels this side of, well, anywhere for my second consecutive dive into the Venice Film Festival. Truth be told, I’m not quite ready for it… a surfeit of pre-travel errands has meant I’m still leafing through the fest’s vast 62-page press screening schedule, still trying to cobble out some semblance of an itinerary.
A neat, contained festival preview, therefore, wasn’t really on the cards: I tried to narrow things down to a “10 most anticipated” list, but I’m far too hungry for the entire buffet to limit myself to that.
In its place, then, I offer an indication of what the festival is serving up on a day-by-day basis; not only will you get an idea of when, in the next fortnight, your own horse in this race will come to attention, but you can also see some of the cineaste’s Sophie’s choices that lie ahead of me.
My scribbly Venice calendar after the cut.
In the last couple of weeks the major fall film festivals have unveiled aggressively competitive line-ups, and the amount of potential awards product landing at Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York is, as usual, vast.
There are plenty of overlapping exhibitions but as for firsties, Venice will get dibs on Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest,” Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” and Richard J. Lewis’s “Barney’s Version” before the films make their way to other fests. Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” will be exclusive to the Lido.
New York, meanwhile, landed a real coup by boasting the world premiere of David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” which will not be at the other fests.
Toronto is again packed to the gills with product (too much, if you ask me, but it’s a media circus after all). Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” will see its first bow there before heading off to New York in October. Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” will also debut, as well as John Madden’s “The Debt,” Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock,” Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” and Nigel Cole’s “Made in Dagenham.” World premieres searching for distributors at the fest include Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole” and Dustin Lance Black’s “What’s Wrong with Virginia,” any of which could end up being awards season possibilities.
I still remember when I was 12 and getting into the Oscars for the first time. My Dad said, “How can you tell if the film has good editing?” To a very large extent, I had to concede his point, as the best editing is often that which we don’t explicitly notice. Rather, it simply “becomes” the film as we become immersed in what is on the screen, not remembering that everything was staged from different angles on different days.
Film Editing brings films to agreeable length, coherent narrative and appropriate pacing so as to engage the audience in accordance with the director’s vision. The Academy Award for the art form has definitely shown a tendency toward “showy” editing in the past, though. War films, musicals, action films and movies that are not told linearly all frequent this race. But perhaps the best predictor of the editing nominees is what is occurring in the Best Picture race. Most of the nominees show up here. Now that we have ten Best Picture nominees, I would think at least four nominees will also be there.
All things considered, Lee Smith’s editing of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” has got to be considered the leader in this race. The film was well received, is a Best Picture favorite, was certainly told in a “unique” manner and Smith was nominated last time he and Nolan worked together. I fully expect him to earn his third nomination this year.
Thanks to commenter Ziyad for alerting us to this pared-down French one-sheet for Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” which will premiere next month at the Venice Film Festival. The film still has me (said in Tim Gunn tones) worried, but I rather like this — the expression on the face of Freida Pinto (essentially confirmed here as the film’s star, despite what her billing may imply) is ambiguous enough to counter an otherwise staid composition. Meanwhile, the naïve hand-painted lettering asserts artist-filmmaker Schnabel’s auteur identity, scarcely detectable in the film’s recent trailer.
UPDATE: The festival website has a list of out-of-competition selections, which include two directorial efforts from the Brothers Affleck: Ben’s “The Town” and Casey’s Joaquin Phoenix doc “I’m Still Here.”
EARLIER: Before you ask: no, “The Tree of Life” is nowhere to be seen. Not that that’s a surprise by this point. There is a “but,” however — Venice festival organisers announced that there will be one surprise competition entry added at the festival’s halfway mark. I wouldn’t bet the house (or even the garden shed, frankly) on it being the Malick film, but hope is being kept alive nonetheless. (Last year, the fest had two surprise films: one from Werner Herzog and one from Brillante Mendoza.)
Shifting the focus to what did make it, the 22-title lineup looks much as we expected — we’d effectively been promised Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” and Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” since they failed to show up at Cannes, while Tuesday’s Toronto announcement tipped us off to the presence of Francois Ozon’s “Potiche,” the Paul Giamatti-Dustin Hoffman starrer “Barney’s Version” and the Haruki Murakami adaptation “Norwegian Wood.”
(More commentary, and the full competition lineup, after the cut.)
Toronto International Film Festival organisers unveiled a typically cluttered lineup of galas and premieres for this year’s edition — including, as usual, a number of films pencilled in as 2010 awards contenders.
Of the 50 titles announced thus far, half will be world premieres: those include such highly anticipated works as Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go,” John Cameron Mitchell’s “Rabbit Hole,” Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction” and Rowan Joffe’s “Brighton Rock.” The remaining half have either appeared at previous festivals — with a hefty contingent from Cannes, including Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” and Woody Allen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” — or look set to make their debut at Venice the week before.
With Venice due to reveal its own lineup tomorrow, the fact that such still-unseen titles as Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” Francois Ozon’s “Potiche,” Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” John Madden’s “The Debt” and Tom Hooper’s “The King’s Speech” are all marked only as North American premieres would appear to confirm that they are all Lido-bound. (I’m surprised, however, that Guillaume Canet’s “Little White Lies” will be making its first appearance at Toronto rather than at a European festival.)
Of the so-called “tech” categories, Best Cinematography is one of the most popular, certainly for me. The invention of the camera took us beyond radio and literature and set modern art on a path aimed toward the moving picture, and this field recognizes those behind the lens.
Cinematography obviously has a massive impact on a film, everything unfolding within a frame and any nuance specific to the tone, atmosphere and theme of the piece. It is unimaginable to think of a good movie not having a good Director of Photography (DP).
“Pretty” films with beautiful landscapes and memorable, postcard-like shots shots are a regularity (and tend to win). But war films also show up regularly. And being a Best Picture contender never hurts. Innovative lighting that creates unique mood is frequently rewarded, at least with nominations, as well.
While this branch does at times play favorites (Robert Richardson and Roger Deakins being the most notable), it always tends to find room for one, two or three first-time nominees every year. From this vantage point, I’m curious who they will be because, the way I see it, most of the obvious contenders have been nominated before.
[FURTHER UPDATE: Focus has confirmed that “The American” will not, in fact, be appearing at Venice.]
[UPDATE: “Black Swan” has indeed been confirmed as the Venice opener, and will play in Competition. More soon.]
I’ve been saying for some time that this year’s Venice Film Festival looks to be a very good vintage, capitalizing on the number of highly anticipated auteur works that weren’t quite ready in time for Cannes. Even with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” still a major question mark — some are even suggesting it won’t surface this year — there’s plenty to get quivery about besides, as is clear from this tasty Variety piece.
Nick Vivarelli’s article reiterates the titles — including Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” and Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” — that have long been all-but-guaranteed to show up at Venice, but adds some tantalizing new ones. Chief among them is Darren Aronofsky’s ballet psycho-thriller “Black Swan,” which will premiere as the festival’s opening film on September 1.
The press release breaking the news, and more Venice possibilities, after the cut.
“Miral,” Julian Schnabel’s follow-up to his 2007 award-winning “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” has a number of readers excited, so thanks to Matt for trackking down the French trailer to the film. For some time the perception has been that Hiam Abbas would be someone to watch in the film, but it turns out Freida Pinto in the title role was our best bet all along. She looks great here, but I’m unsure if this will play out as an Academy thing. The Weinstein Company secured domestic distribution last month. Click the image below to have a look or watch the embed after the jump.
Apologies for the two week dry spell. I thought I’d be able to update along the way as I trekked out to Ohio to play meet the parents (which, thankfully, couldn’t have gone better), but alas, quick stops in hotels and 10 hour driving days made that much more difficult than I thought it would.
Anyway, I’m back in pocket now with a (relatively) cleared out schedule for the rest of the summer. Nothing much is happening on the western front besides the Seattle film fest. Chad is out of town for the moment and couldn’t put up the box office columns, but it appears “Shrek Forever After” took the top spot for a third-straight week. I don’t imagine anyone has much to say about that, in any case.
Two nuggets dropped today, however. The first involves Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” which is a heavily anticipated, potential Oscar title for many readers and could be a play for “The Visitor” breakout Hiam Abbas. The Weinstein Company has acquired domestic distribution rights, adding to a stable that already includes Sundance titles “Blue Valentine” and “The Company Men,” as well as “The King’s Speech” and UK hit “Nowhere Boy,” among others. It’ll be interesting to see how that very Sony Classics-esque slate is handled during the season.
Berlin went with Werner Herzog. Cannes with Tim Burton. Now Venice clearly felt they had to follow suit by tapping an eccentric auteur as jury president for the 67th Venice Film Festival in September. Quentin Tarantino will take the job.
It will, of course, be Tarantino’s second stab at chairing the jury of a major European festival: in 2004, he held the position at Cannes, somewhat contentiously throwing his weight behind the decision to award the Palme d’Or to Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Tarantino made no bones about wielding his influence on the awards that year (the runner-up, Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” was also a film after his own heart), so it’ll be interesting to see if he’s similarly persuasive in Venice.
Interestingly, unlike Cannes and Berlin, Tarantino has never actually taken a film to Venice — in contrast to last year’s president, two-time Golden Lion champ Ang Lee.
Meanwhile, Variety reports that, in addition to Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” the Venice lineup will also include Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” Monte Hellman’s “Road to Nowhere” and Francois Ozon’s “Potiche.” If all goes according to plan, I’ll be on the Lido once more to let you know how it all goes down. For now, I’ve got Cannes on the brain.