20 Weeks – The Great Settling
The only titles that are not readily available on screeners are The Good German, The Good Shepherd, Monster House, and The Weinstein Company’s double dip of Factory Girl and Miss Potter. And if you are a screener recipient and are at all adventurous, there are opportunities like Sweet Land and Sherrybaby and A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints and Who Killed The Electric Car and others that might surprise and delight.
But that’s the screener rub. Getting voters to watch your movies when you don’t have Variety to beat them over the head with each day means you have to already have enticed them before they got on the plane to AspenMauiParisLondonMarrakeshBaliMilwaukee.
Ironically, any voter with young kids or grandkids are more likely to get an education on Cars vs Happy Feet vs Over The Hedge vs Flushed Away vs Charlotte’s Web than any single adult title. And if you don’t think that there won’t be notice taken of which one the kids watch for the fifth time, you would be wrong.
The rest & the charts…
(EDIT, 2:16p, Thur – It is the extremely rare occasion when I make a post-publication change on my charts, but thanks to Spammy, I spoke to Fox and indeed, they have changed their plan and decided to send Borat out to Academy members, shipping today. On the downside, they have a Peter Bart moderated Q&A with SBC on Jan 3, and if anyone can wrench the humor completely out of this film, it is Bart. Still, they have made one good decision and I hope that they can get things rolling for SBC in time for it to mean something.)
I think you’re underestimating Babel in the charts. It has had a solid showing in all the critics awards. Rinko and Adriana will both wind up in supporting, IMO, along with Inarritu, Arriaga and best picture nods.
Babel is one third eh one third shit and one third okay— ain’t winning nada
Miss Potter Screeners arrived last week- get a grip.
Just got my Borat screener- life is good.
I am Jeff Well’s Fucked up Ego.
Mel, I had a nice dinner with someone whose name can’t be mentioned on this blog last night and we worked out a couple scenarios including one where Babel doesn’t get nommed for BP. See, the thing is that while there are many people who like that movie, not everyone LOVES the movie. It’s not likely to be the 1st choice on many ballots, maybe not even the 2nd, and that’s the clincher when it comes to the Academy nominations. You’ll have 6,000 voters whose 1st choices will probably be Dreamgirls, The Departed, The Queen or maybe even Letters from Iwo Jima. If enough of them liked Little Miss Sunshine (as people do), that bumps Babel, and that has to settle for acting/direction noms.
Yep, Miss Potter screeners have already gone out…
I hope the Academy goes for Gosling’s edgy brillance over O’Toole’s overrated performance or DiCaprio, who was great, but wasn’t even the best actor in his own film (I think he has a shot for The Departed, but don’t see him getting the votes for Blood Diamond, which is basically an action movie). Gosling’s a dark horse, but he is deserving…
And Rinko too…I hope people don’t forget how gripping she was…
The scenerio, ED, is that many people – especially of Academy age – don’t love the film. And there are many people – especially of that age – who HATE the harshness of these films. It’s not a mystery.
I am, generally, a fan of Arriaga and Gonzalez Inarritu, but so far, they have a grand total of zero combined Oscar nominations in three films together and 3 Burials last year for Guillermo.
Babel has won a total of one critics award, for Supporting Actress.
I’m not saying the film is 100% dead, but what’s going to get them over a hump they have never traversed before?
Well, Amores Perros was nominated for Best Foreign Film. I wouldn’t have expected a debut Mexican film with no American actors, worthy as it is, to garner much more than that.
Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro were nominated for 21 Grams. Penn would have been had he not made Mystic River the same year. And that film was not as critically acclaimed as Babel.
Babel is also their most moving and uplifting film (yes, it’s harsh, but it’s ultimately hopeful). It has that Academy sheen to it, not to mention Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.
I agree that Babel will likely suffer with the acemendy. I think it going to miss out for Picture, Director, and Supporting Actor (Voters believe Pitt will get his producers nom for The Departed so the need to reward him will not be there.), and only one supporting Actress nom (I think the Vera is going to show up for The Departed like Alda did for The Avitor.)
Good 20 Weeks, DP. I especially appreciated your willingness to look at the noms though the eyes of voters rather than critics. You even touched on how us regular folks who just love movies might view things.
Happy Holidays To All! And Merry Christmas to those offended by the Holidays greetings. Makes no difference to me.
Melquiades, you are off about Babel being getting better reviews than 21 Grams. Metacritic has the two at almost similar grade (21 Grams – 70 and Babel – 69) and Rotten Tomatoes has 81% to 21 Grams against a 70% for Babel.
Hey Dave,
The links for the charts in today’s article are for last week’s charts. MovieCityNews has a link to this week’s director page though…
(for those who want it: http://www.moviecitynews.com/columnists/poland/2007_oscar/061221_Director.html)
So, United 93 may well indeed miss Best Picture/Director, but why does it no longer even rank in the lists anymore? The wealth of BP critics’ awards it’s getting warrants at least a mention in the 6-10 range, unlike some of those Globe nominees. I certainly think it has a better shot at the #5 spot than Little Children does, which will get Winslet or nothing.
Filipe… wow, thanks for pulling those numbers.
That really shocks me. It seems like all the reviews I read of Babel say it’s a return to form after a misstep with 21 Grams.
Of course, I’ve often noticed that reviewers will trash an artist’s previous work when praising a new one, even if the same critic gave a favorable review to the previous work when IT was new. This happens a lot with music reviews as well.
And I see on the new charts, David does have both Rinko and Adriana in the Supp. Actress top five, so he’s not as far off as I thought.
I would think that only one of the non-English-speakers from Babel would be able to get a nomination, and it would probably be Rinko. The movie would need to do some serious sweeping to get a nomination for Barazza.
Oh, when DP says “the whitest critic in town” who is he talking about? I would think he means Armond, except that the only thing white about him is his name. Is there some other major pan out there?
Follow the actors.
You mean like Dame Judi and Cate, BiP?
” who HATE the harshness of these films”
I don’t think Babel is NEARLY as harsh as Letters from Iwo Jima or The Departed for that matter.
I think that the other two films contextualize their harshness quite differently. Departed is nearly a comedy – and for its violence, has almost no chance of winning Best Picture. And Iwo Jima is a kind of intimate harshness that is about war, which gets a different kind of pass.
The threat on the lives of suburbanites is another issue for many people. And the need to put them in harms way for more than an hour than ramp it up in the last 40 minutes is a part of it too.
Babel isn’t just harsh, it sets out to be an emotional gut-punch; that’s it’s raison d’etre.
Can I get thanked for mentioning the Apocalypto and Balboa and yes PERFUME screeners from yesterday too?
I am after all Jeff’s Ego.
DP, don’t you think that The Departed’s violence is accompanied with enough humor a la Silence of the Lambs to make it a more likely contender than you think? And Scorsese’s film, for the most part, is just a lot of people getting shot. SOTL, by comparison, was pretty gruesome in its detail of what Buffalo Bill was doing to his victim’s. I also recall Anthony Hopkins wearing another man’s FACE during his escape?
If the voters can handle that and still award it BP, I imagine 15 years later they aren’t more squeamish. Plus, The Departed, while considered “minor” Marty by some, has a hell of a lot more depth than Demme’s film.
“(I think the Vera is going to show up for The Departed like Alda did for The Avitor.)”
Alan Alda was a respected never nominated male actor, Vera is a relative newcomer in a male-dominated film. And, as good as Farmiga was, she was nowhere near the realm of the most comparable performances – Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas (mob film dominated by men) and Sharon Stone in Casino (er, mob film dominated by men). She doesn’t really have anything to do other than stand around and look pretty, which is she is lovely at.
Babel… that movie frustrates me. I wish they had deleted at least one of the storylines and then given the characters in the other three stories a third act. Four stories, yet only one of them has even a smidge of a conclusion (the Barazza storyline, and that conclusion is only seen in a brief moment at the end).
The Tokyo storyline was my favourite, yet I have no idea how it fits into the rest of the story (I get how it’s connected with the gun, but that’s a weak link and it doesn’t have much in common to the other three stories). I was very impressed by Kikuchi (moreso as the days pass) because I really connected with her character, but I wish there was some closure to her story. As I said, every character seems to have two acts, but the third is missing. Pitt doesn’t have anything to do other than scream for an ambulence and neither does Barraza.
But then, there are some great moments there and at least they weren’t as all over the place with the editing this time. The drug trip scene in the Tokyo sequence was stunning for lack of a better word.