“Let me get this straight. The one’s about a precocious computer geek who’s also a bit of an asshole.”
“Yeah.”
“And the other’s about King George VI.”
“Yeah.”
“And King George VI has a disability.”
“Well, he has a stutter. I mean, it’s not crippling or anything — ”
“But it’s an obstacle that needs to be overcome.”
“Yeah.”
“And I assume, at the end, he does. And becomes King.”
• “The Hurt Locker” producers finally respond to last year’s law suit, and how. [Hollywood Reporter]
• SMEAR ALERT: The oil and gas industry has the gall to send a letter to AMPAS urging them to steer clear of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland.” [New York Times]
• Lisa Schwarzbaum shallowly attributes the dramatic success of two scenes in “The King’s Speech” to classical composers, rather than Tom Hooper’s directorial choice to use them in said scenes. [Entertainment Weekly]
(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.
[Updated Oscar predictions here.]
Hey, have you heard of this movie called “The Social Network?” You should probably check it out. It’s about Facebook and stuff and it’s supposed to be really good. So good, in fact, that it’s managed to tame the single most argumentative species in the animal kigdom, The Lesser Spotted Film Critic, into silent agreement. Of the 12 American critics’ groups to dish out awards so far, 11 have given their top honor to the film. (“Winter’s Bone,” you say? Get with the program, San Diego.)
The enthusiasm for the film, of course, extends beyond the sometimes soundproof critics’ chamber, as less distinguished media collectives like the HFPA and the BFCA have voiced their approval – while this morning, give or take a Supporting Actor snub, the film passed its first industry award test with two key Screen Actors’ Guild bids. Expect the Directors’, Producers’, Writers’ and Editors’ Guilds to follow suit in the New Year.
So, we can basically tie a ribbon around Oscar’s neck and hand him over to Scott Rudin and David Fincher now, can’t we? After all, against all its on-paper disadvantages, “The Hurt Locker” was in a similar position this time last year, and it didn’t budge, did it? (Indeed, it didn’t even unite the critics’ groups to this extent – of the 12 awarding bodies I mentioned above, only five selected Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq actioner last year.) Scarcely anyone has a word to say against the film, so let’s sit back and let the sweep wash over us, right?
Guy’s updated Oscar predictions here.
Just one week on from the first formal awards announcements of the season, the Oscar season may still be taking its first steps, but my personal interest in the precursor trail is nonetheless set to peak this very weekend.
That, of course, is when the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association weigh in with their selections of the year’s best, showing up the likes of the nominee-naming Washington group as the pretenders they are, while classing up the season with some unapologetically idiosyncratic film smarts.
Or so we hope – for as much as the major critics’ groups often delight us by throwing caution (and Oscar-soothsaying cred) to the wind with rebellious left-field picks, they are equally capable of falling dully into line behind pre-anointed favourites. I was recently chased by Tom O’Neil’s resurrected Gold Derby site for my NYFCC and LAFCA predictions, and while I’m as game as anyone for a spot of light-hearted, consequence-free punting, the irony of the exercise still nagged away at me: the day I predict either group’s set of winners accurately is the day they’ll cease to matter to me.
“Mila Kunis is so winning Best Supporting Actress this year,” remarked an independent filmmaker to me over drinks today, referring, of course, to the 27 year-old’s sly breakout turn in Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” This was no idle fan statement. The man knew his Oscar onions – his theory was built upon established Academy affection for hot ingénues in sashaying support roles, as well as the current absence of any obvious frontrunners in the category.
Still, even as he explained this, my eyebrows must have shot up somewhere past my hairline. As the writer who caught hell from many readers for daring not to predict Natalie Portman among my Best Actress nominees last month, the prospect of Kunis even getting nominated for subtly smoking work in an outré arthouse thriller hadn’t crossed my mind. I told him as much while emphasizing, as an admirer of the performance, how much I’d like to be wrong.
“That’s what everyone says to me,” he replied. “‘Oh, she’s a revelation, I’d love to see her nominated, but she won’t be.’ Whenever I start hearing that kind of talk about a person or a film, that’s when I go to the bookies and put money on them. If everyone’s seeing the same thing in them, who’s to say the voters aren’t?”
Whether you choose to believe them or not – and speaking for myself, I don’t quite – the media powers that be have currently reduced the 2010 Best Picture race to just two titles: “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech.” That’s entirely (and hopefully, lest things get too dull too soon) subject to change over the next four months, but given what we’ve seen at this point, it’s difficult to devise a could-win theory for many of the films most fancied for the remaining eight slots, be it “Inception” or “Another Year.”
I don’t really blame those in the blogosphere who are narrowing things down to this pair of films: after a lackluster Toronto fest failed to turn up a hidden dragon along the lines of “Slumdog Millionaire,” the slate of contenders looks much as it did before the fall festival season began. With expectations for “Network” and “Speech” pegged high all along, meeting them was enough to seal frontrunner status.
Moreover, the temptation to pit David Fincher’s modish Facebook story and Tom Hooper’s tony royalty porn against each other is hard to resist, given how conveniently the films are opposed: both acclaimed biopics after a fashion, but one concerned with present-day American youth, the other with British aristocracy of yore. “It’s the time-capsule piece versus the time-warp piece,” snarked one friend of mine recently, anticipating a narrative that will likely run all season, even if other frontrunners enter the fray.
“You’re the Oscar guys, aren’t you?” asked the spike-heeled PR officer upon eyeing the press badge dangling from my neck, her voice exuding the steely sweetness they teach you on the first day of public relations boot camp. It was midway through the Venice Film Festival and I was too beat — or my mouth just too full of complimentary cheese — to rephrase her blunt description. I nodded in reply: yes, I am indeed “the Oscar guys.” One of them, at any rate.
“Thought so,” she said, eyes darting across the room, perhaps in search of my chart-brandishing entourage. “Not much for you here, is there?”
On the one hand, I could hardly argue, not least since we’d both just emerged from a film — Chilean auteur Pablo Larrain’s brilliant nightmare of a black comedy “Post Mortem” — that stands as much chance of securing an invitation to the Kodak Theater as Kim Kardashian does to the Kennedy Center Honors.
Five days into the festival, and the only film screened that belonged in the Oscar conversation (following the critical belly-flop of Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” at least) was high-gloss opener “Black Swan,” and even that was generating “too cool for the Academy” conclusions. Oscar-watching at European festivals, even blogger-inundated Cannes, is a pretty spotty sport compared to the FYC frenzy of Telluride and Toronto.
One of the most common lines (usually used in praise) on our newly-crowned Best Picture winner is that it’s deliberately apolitical, taking no sides in the Iraq conflict as it aims simply to present the soldier’s experience on the ground. Kathryn Bigelow herself dismissed that as something of a misconception in a recent interview with Steve Pond:
I guess my feeling is that graphic portrayals of innocent children killed by bombs, and soldiers incapable of surviving catastrophic explosions … I think that’s pretty clear. And then also, to add to that, the movie opens with a quote, “The rush to battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” So it’s definitely taking a very specific position.
Blogging last night on the Oscar race, Michael Moore says much the same thing — less tacitly, of course, than Bigelow:
The truth is “The Hurt Locker” is very political. It says the war is stupid and senseless and insane. It makes us consider why we have an army where people actually volunteer to do this. That’s why the right wing has attacked the movie. They’re not stupid — they know what Kathryn Bigelow is up to. No one leaves this movie thinking, “Whoopee! Let’s keep these wars going another 7 years!”
Like a Tiffany engagement ring presented in a Happy Meal box, sometimes the most beautiful gifts come in really cruddy wrapping. And such was the case with last night’s Academy Awards ceremony.
On the one hand, the show managed to delight (if not surprise) me with one of the unlikeliest sweeps in Oscar history, making history in more ways than one — and for a film that just happened to be my favorite U.S. release of the year. I can’t say that about every (or any) Oscar show I’ve watched in my lifetime. On the other hand, this remarkable turn of events was merely the silver lining to a confounding debacle of a ceremony, one of the most lazily conceived, sloppily staged and lumpenly paced efforts I’ve witnessed in two decades of Oscar-watching.
I’d dearly love to bring a sunnier perspective on the matter than that of Kris, but just as we were in near-complete agreement on our predictions (save for, ahem, Best Animated Short), I can only echo every gripe he expressed in last night’s wrap-up. Unlike many others, I wasn’t the greatest fan of Bill Condon and Laurence Mark’s streamlined, revue-style reboot of the Oscars last year, but it had a tonal consistency and moved at a clip that last night’s show could only dream of.
Before we close the book on 2009, here’s one last rundown of our interviews with this year’s Oscar recipients. It was lovely to meet with them all as this was truly, for the most part, a season of camaraderie.
“The Cove”
Louie Psihoyos (Best Documentary Feature)
“Crazy Heart”
Jeff Bridges (Best Actor)
Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett (Best Original Song)
“The Hurt Locker”
Mark Boal (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay)
Chris Innis and Bob Murawski (Best Film Editing)
Paul Ottosson (Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing)
I stumbled across this at YouTube this morning and thought I’d share. “The Hurt Locker” producer, as you know, was locked out of the Kodak by the Academy, punishment for EmailGate. He attended a private viewing party for the film last night with friends and someone was shrewd enough to take a video, so if you’re interested, here are his sentiments and his list of thank yous:
• Melissa Silverstein with a personal reflection on those four words: “the time has come.” [Women & Hollywood]
• Anne Thompson gets a nice soundbite from “Logorama” director Nicolas Schmerkin backstage: “It took longer than ‘Avatar.’ It took more directors than ‘Avatar.’” [Thompson on Hollywood]
• Paola Singer sits down with Best Foreign Language Film winner Juan Jose Campanella. [Speakeasy]
Oh, let’s start with the positive. The irony of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner of all time coming in a year when the Academy did everything it could (right down to a hopelessly baiting horror film montage) to shove the Oscar telecast toward populist appeal couldn’t be more delicious. Much of the season was deceptively tame, but a final week push from all sides (including within) to unseat the perceived frontrunner either came too late or simply didn’t work.
“The Hurt Locker” claimed six trophies, including Best Picture, Best Director and best Original Screenplay. The latter became perhaps the tightest race of them all as The Weinstein Company worked aggressively to secure a prize for Quentin Tarantino, but again, it either came too late or didn’t work.
Kathryn Bigelow’s war saga wasn’t even daunted by its perceived competition as “Avatar” managed only three wins, for Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography. Only one of those races included competition from “The Hurt Locker.”
The biggest surprise of the night, no doubt, was Geoffrey Fletcher’s Best Adapted Screenplay win for “Precious,” an award that seemed to be pre-ordained for “Up in the Air” scribes Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner. How often we forget the Academy can be as unpredictable as not. And Fletcher, by the way, is the first African American winner of a screenplay Oscar. “Precious,” meanwhile, was one of three films (along with “Crazy Heart” and “Up”) to win two Oscars, and it seemed to receive a lot of respect and admiration in the room.
Tonight’s the big night, and as we close in on the final hours of the 2009-2010 film awards season, I thought I’d offer up this list (another one!), which reflects how you, the readership, would like the night’s festivities to go. These are the results of the daily polls that accompanied our Oscar Guide series during the second phase of the season. Thanks for participating.
Best Picture: “The Hurt Locker”
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”
Best Actor: Colin Firth, “A Single Man”
Best Actress: Meryl Streep, “Julie & Julia”
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, “Precious”
Best Adapted Screenplay: “Up in the Air”
Best Original Screenplay: “Inglourious Basterds”
Ah, Oscar lists — the gift that keeps giving. I’m not going to ape Kris’s impressive ranking of all the nominated features: we’d have the same #1, for starters, and we’re agreeing on far too many things these days. So here’s something else to play with.
I’ve had a number of emails asking me how I would rank the 10 Best Picture nominees, were I filling out the preferential ballot. I was happy to oblige, but then went a little crazy and applied the same process to all the other races. Hey, Oscar day comes but once a year: get your geek on. With that, my personal Oscar ballot, in full preferential order:
Best Picture
1. “The Hurt Locker”
2. “A Serious Man”
3. “An Education”
4. “District 9”
5. “Inglourious Basterds”
6. “Up in the Air”
7. “The Blind Side”
8. “Up”
9. “Avatar”
10. “Precious”
Plenty of interesting Oscar-related floating around the web on the last day for any such discussion, but two pieces related to tonight’s principal “Hurt Locker” hopefuls stand out.
Kathryn Bigelow’s likely win tonight will probably prompt some over-optimistic speculation in some quarters about the future of female directors in Hollywood. With that in mind, the L.A. Times’s Rachel Abramowitz seeks to keep those hopes in check with some sobering stats of present-day industry inequality that one Oscar can’t fix on its own:
Although successful female directors appear to have gained higher profiles of late, the actual percentage of top films directed by women has remained static for 25 years at 7% to 9%, according to an annual study of women writers, directors, and producers of the 250 top-grossing films of the year by the Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television at San Diego State University.
For instance, neither Warner Bros., the world’s largest studio, nor Paramount Pictures hired a single female director last year, while Walt Disney Studios and Universal Studios hired just one apiece. No woman has ever been hired to direct an event picture with a budget of more than $100 million, the kind of film most valued by the Hollywood machine.
And so it comes to this: more months than I care to count of watching, thinking, sweating, fretting, writing, deleting and occasionally not caring boil down to single predictions in 24 categories. There’s a lot to get through here, and I’m not going to delay things with an introduction.
Well, except for this one caveat — apology, even — of sorts. As you wade through my list, you may notice that my predictions look quite similar to those of one Mr. Kris Tapley. Remarkably similar, in fact. Unhealthily similar, even.
What can I say? Short categories aside (which were subject to further research), the following predictions haven’t wavered in my mind since nomination day, over a month ago — and I see no compelling reason to go out on a limb this year. Sometimes great minds think alike. Frequently wrong, but alike nonetheless.
With that, my predictions, preferences and rationales continue, category by category, after the cut.