It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” ā some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it ā I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury ā he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” ā and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging ā I was with her at that moment ā she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy namedā” “Yeah, sure ā you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that Iām on the phone with you now, after all thatās been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didnāt seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. Thereās not a case of that. He wasnāt using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had ā if that were what the accusation involved ā the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. Iām not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, āYou know, itās not this, itās thatā? Because ā let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. TimesĀ piece, thatās what it lacked. Thatās what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
As somebody who LOVES the Oscars but also believes they almost always get it wrong, I applaud this decision. It probably won’t last long, but with some luck, the winner won’t be a foregone conclusion as soon as the nominees are announced.
Too bad, IO. If this had happened last year, your favorite popcorn movie might have made the final cut.
Is this change a direct result of TDK NOT getting nominated?
They should have added one more slot. Not five. This is a bad idea.
It’s a smart move. Smarter than that crappy production reboot from earlier this ear.
Gee, just include more movies the mass audience cares about… (Forehead smack!)
Though… are we going to have to sit through clips from al 10 movies now?…
“Is this change a direct result of TDK NOT getting nominated?”
Sure felt that way to me.
How depressing. This will be spun as giving films like Wall*E and The Dark Knight a greater opportunity as well as foreign films and smaller critical darlings but in reality this will just mean whatever middlebrow dogshit Rudin or Weinstein puts out is guaranteed to be nominated year after year.
Moment of silence for last year’s just missed the boaters:
Changeling
Defiance
Doubt
Revolutionary Road
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Not sure how I feel about this yet, but I suspect that ASD is right: this will do nothing more than books mid-level art house films to the top of the Oscar heap.
If the Academy really wants to walk this walk, they should go all the way and create separate drama and comedy/musical awards like the Globes.
Can’t we hold off on the cynicism for awhile?
Perhaps it really will let UP or HURT LOCKER into the club. Besides we’ve already had CHOCOLATE and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES nommed and fucking GLADIATOR and A BEAUTIFUL MIND actually won.
If it opens up the race, then let’s see it as a good thing. At least until it’s not.
“…as history shows us, more chance that the wrong choices will be made.”
DP, can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Isn’t it equally likely to mean that there’s more chance that the right choices will be made? Especially given how very wrong some of the last several years’ worth of choices have been.
Looking at ASD’s list, instead of Defiance, which had a poor Academy campaign, I think The Wrestler would have gotten the tenth slot. Maybe Dark Knight, but that isn’t as much a lock as people assume.
The more I think about it, the more this looks like a boon to indie-style campaigns and will do nothing for mainstream successes like Star Trek and Up.
So what will this do to the For your consideration ad revenue?
The best thing about this move (and I don’t really like it) is that the Direction category becomes potentially more interesting. Hopefully this will result in stronger names being chosen, assuming the members actually reconsider what the position means in relation to the finished product. At least now it can’t just be a reflexive copy of the BP noms with the occasional substitute.
Of course some could argue that this is going to give heavyweights like Scorsese and Spielberg an unfair advantage, but as an auteurist I can’t complain too much. At least your Jason Reitmans won’t get in.
I can’t wait to hear the BFCA’s reaction.
THE WRESTLER? THE VISITOR? W? RACHEL GETTING MARRIED? 4 MONTHS, 3 MONTHS & 2 DAYS? HAPPY-GO-LUCKY? SYNECDOCHE, NY? FROZEN RIVER? IN BRUGES? SNOW ANGELS? Isn’t this fun?
Imagine the fun this winter.
More patronizing rubbish. With ratings in the tank and genuine artistic accomplishments like The Dark Knight getting overlooked, this has the feel of lowering the bar to let some popular “faves” in so the rubes in hicksville will watch. And they will never win anyway.
Why should we be anything but cynical about this when the nominees for this past year were largely rubbish.
I agree with what seems to be the building consensus, far from giving films like TDK or Up a fair shake it will just mean more middling art-house or Weinstein crap will get in.
The Globes can only top this with a 40-nominee best picture race.
“this has the feel of lowering the bar to let some popular ‘faves’ in so the rubes in hicksville will watch. And they will never win anyway.”
Okay, here’s a Hot Blog first: I absolutely agree with Nicol.
I was hoping you’d respond, Nicol — was it my inclusion of THE VISITOR? Shhhh. Don’t answer — let a girl dream.
I agree about TDK. I think it should have been nominated and won.
What would you have nominated?
“Of course some could argue that this is going to give heavyweights like Scorsese and Spielberg an unfair advantage, but as an auteurist I can’t complain too much. At least your Jason Reitmans won’t get in.”
Cheap shot. Jason Reitman’s direction of Juno was underrated amongst all the Diablo Cody hype. It’s a beautifully made movie (watch it and you can tell a lot about the characters played by Jennifer Garner and Michael Cera before they say a word of dialogue. Or how the Jason Bateman’s characters’ wardrobe gets gradually scruffier as he goes deeper into the Juno world That’s not from the script. That’s the filmmaker’s touch.)
And for the record, I think the additional five this year would have been Doubt, The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, Revolutionary Road, and WALL-E.
Wally, I didn’t mean to suggest that Reitman’s direction was subpar (I was a big fan of Thank You For Smoking). For the material, it was a good fit. But that he should have been included in a category alongside the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson? No. And while I’m not an Atonement cheerleader, Joe Wright deserved that spot more.
Also, you look deeper into the field that year (2007 was regarded as a GREAT year for film), and there were many more worthy candidates in that category. Perhaps this all sounds prejudiced against comedies, but most of the time the screenplay and the acting take a front seat to the direction, with a less-interesting visual approach. Besides, Reitman sure as hell ain’t Ernst Lubitsch.
The real question is: will the fact that now 5 additional films will be able to pimp Best Pic noms be enough to explode Chuck in Jersey’s head? š
Hey Boonwell,
The Visitor is exactly the type of film that will benefit this move. A soft, tranparent leftist fantasy that has no stones.
Jenkins is good in it and it moves and is even entertaining in parts, but it has about as much to do with reality as the Transformers, which is why I mentioned it a few posts down.
It is even, dare I say, truly racist, because it succumbs to the notion of the “noble savage” or the “Madonna/whore” complex.
The Muslim immigrants in The Visitor are not three dimensional human beings who are allowed to feel…no, they are perfect faunts of vapid cheezy human goodness whose only purpose is to provide “enlightenment” to out hapless protagonist. And other than having them say they are Muslim, the film shows no evidence of even understanding what that means. They are merely props for the protagonist to feel enlightened by.
Take the scene where Jenkins reveals to the mother that he has wasted his life, his wife has died and at 60ish he is alone and does not know where to go.
What does she say…”Sounds exciting?”. I that point I yelled bullshit at the screen. That is not how an illegal immigrant mother whose son is faced with deportation would react. It is how a white, New Age baby boomer would react.
The film also wants us to symapthize with the plight of the young man being deported and his mother but does not give him any dialogue saying why they love America and deportation is bad. The filmmakers do not want you to understand why they love America…only that they are being mistreated by it.
And howabout the one dimensional ways in which govenment officials are painted?
This film is well acted…but it is a facile simplistic fantasy. I have seen worse films…but when he finds the secret to his life is playing djembe…of if only it were that simple. I think in the sequel Jenkins will speak in bot like ebonics. That I would pay to see.
This is exactly the type of film that will benefit from this Oscar process. In other words, more of the same old same old.
Nicol, I agree with you that The Visitor is a lame film, but I think it was always too low-profile to get Oscar traction and that will remain the same. The beneficiaries will be the middle-brow Doubts and Revolutionary Roads that come into the gate with bigger presences and advertising budgets. That’s the same-old.
SInce tepid films have won so often in the past, maybe this will give a chance to a decent sleeper. Not that I know *that* many important ones in film, but some of the European film folk seem quite happy about this. Outsiders may have a chance esp arthouse as already said.
AMPAS is running scared. Not enough opportunities to collect bribes from the studios with every use of “Academy Award Winner” and “Academy Award Nominee”.
Spy magazine (R.I.P.) exposed Oscar as a racket nearly 15 years ago. Any reputable publication, print and/or online, could update that story with little trouble.
As to Harvey and his cronies? The Weinstein Co. may not even be in business when the ballots go out. That’s what happens when your business model is centered on buying awards.
You tell ’em, o dogged fruitcake!
LOL at Chucky’s conspiracy theories. LOL at Nicol’s completely wrongheaded approach to The Visitor.
Sci-fi in the short list? Not gonna happen. We like it though.
Okay, this is where I sort of come to Nicol’s defense and say that The Visitor had a lot of problems and (to me) wasn’t a good film. That said, I think his critical approach to it was hyperbolic and unnecessarily vicious, and after all, it was a film with its heart in the right place.
But I still treasure the not-as-rare-as-Nicol-thinks moments when he and I agree on things.
On thing this surely means: there will never be a director nominated whose film isn’t also nominated for Best Picture…
This actually means also, I’d surmise, that there will be really two kinds of BP nominees: the five “uber-nominees” with a director nod match up, and five that will be considered nothing but also-rans.
Good point, offthemark. The five films that’ll have a nomination for best director definitely have a huge advantage over the five that will not.
This is the stupidest idea to come along since somebody in an Academy office pinned an index card to the wall reading “Rob Lowe+Snow White=GENIUS”.
Getting nominated for Best Picture under these circumstances will be like getting laid by the sluttiest girl in the bar who got drunk enough to screw TWICE AS MANY GUYS as she would otherwise do. Yeah sure, that nice guy underdog who never quite seals the deal is finally going to get some from her; but then so is that 300 pound dude with the yellowing sweat stains running down the armpits of his shirt.
How do you get excited about TEN nominees? Has anyone at the Academy even stopped to picture how this is going to play out on television? By the time the presenter gets to number seven, he or she will be hitting grocery list territory in a seriously major way.
What they should have done is cut the Best Picture category down to three nominees and gotten rid of those also ran slots, honing the category to nothing but the major league pictures. Yeah, no shit, I know, expecting the best of the best to be in the top three is a pipe dream bigger than the chunnel. But if people can daydream here that a movie like “The Hurt Locker” is destined for some actual glory by being nominee number EIGHT, I can too.
Right on to the above, but I am not going with the five directors being associated to only five of the ten films. It seems more than likely this will OPEN SHIT UP! Which the OSCARS NEEDED TO DO FOR YEARS!
Unfortunately for the Oscars, THIS CHANGES NOTHING! They had their shot with TDK, and they decided to go with the dancing Indian kid. This is their lot in life, and this move is desperate. The kind of desperation move a dying entity would make.
Off the Mark, do you really think titles like Talk to Her, Mulholland Drive and City of God would get nominated for best picture? Since Naomi Watts couldn’t even get nommed for Drive I find it hard to believe that anyone outside of the directors branch would be popping it down on their list. And
Everyone is going to be able to tell who the proper five are and who the fillers are. Although this year it certainly helps titles like Avatar (sci-fi), Precious (black), Bright Star (woman-y), Shutter Island (horror) and Up (animated) nudge in amongst the more typical Oscar fare like Invictus, Public Enemies, The Lovely Bones, Nine and An Education.
KC, very good points, and let me add that this idea seems really goofy for one reason… THE SHOW! This show just turned into a three hour tribute to 10 movies. Does anyone want to see this? Really?
I am glad the Oscars reacted to their stupidity this year with a move, but this move is goofy. It’s just down right goofy.
Since they no longer do the “here is a clip from best picture nominee #4” with a five minute intro by [someone with vague connection to film] I can’t imagine it would extend the running time by much at all.
Also, I apologise for the strange paragraph break in my last reply. Very odd.
No, the running time isn’t hurt. But the exposure of the nominated films during the telecast is going to be decimated because nobody’s going to stop to do “here is a clip from our eighth nominee” now.
In all actuality, having ten best picture nominees is going to hurt the other categories that are going to lose attention so the Academy can give each nominated film its due.
When you cut through all the “its for the good of the movies” bullshit, what’s the real reason this is being done? It doesn’t make any real world sense from a movie-loving point of view. Getting more small films a piece of the Oscar spotlight is almost laughable from the Academy’s perspective.
Well, KC, I almost wrote that it IS possible for another Lynch nomination to slip through without a BP nod, but it was late… I dunno. It depends on how big the directors branch is compared to the rest. I do think it would be GREAT to see an ad that says: “Best Picture nominee: Mulholland Drive.”
…and considering “Grand Illusion” was nominated for Best Picture–back when there were ten nominees in the 30s–it’s not such a stretch.
(IO’s STILL upset about the “Dark Knight” “snub”?????)
Other: the Academy just pulled a response to their stupidity from earlier this year. So I am not the only one still peeved, that those malooks gave their Oscar to a dancing Indian kid. Hell, I am still upset that they jobbed ET to Ghandi. So, again, this move is a response to people like me, and the anger we have at their stupid nominations. Unfortunately it’s too little too late, and this ceremony lost it’s last chance to fix itself.
Cool. So DRAG ME TO HELL has a shot now.
Hey Fievel, the Academy really doesn’t care about people like you. Get over yourself.
Hey Fuckball, if you think this move from the Academy is not about placating people like me. Well. really, you are the most ignorant arrogant motherfucker on this blog, and do not know shit anyway. So fuck you and your entire family… if they are somewhere out there. They probably are, and stay away from you as much as possible.
Fievel, sing your song to someone who cares. And next time, remember, it’s “who’s” not “whose” you illiterate rodent.
IO, there are pills you could take for your Hyper-Irritability Syndrome. Life’s too short to suffer.
BUT seriously…. Having followed all things Oscar for decades and having a good track record for predicting nominations/wins in the past, here’s what I think will happen in terms of the “Other Five”: You’ll get a couple of blockbusters every year–your Dark Knight and your Wall-E; one or two typical middle-brow Oscar-bait films that, with five, would have come up a couple votes short–your “Doubts”; finally, you’ll get one or two foreign or really out-there US art films–“Mulholland Drive”, “Talk to Her”. One thing we might see soon is a return to that odd phenomenon–the film that gets nominated for Best Picture and one other thing–“Nominated for TWO Academy Awards including Best Picture!–or BP but NOTHING else. It did happen before when there were ten slots.
Okay, we’re almost to July. So what’s come out so far that has a real shot at Oscar’s top ten? Anything besides Up? I’m doubting Star Trek.
Nothing. The Oscar campaigns aren’t gearing up until fall releases, as usual.