MCN Columnists
David Poland

20 Weeks to Oscar By David Polandpoland@moviecitynews.com

20 Weeks To Oscar: Why Amy Adams Deserves To a Win Best Actress This Year (Spoilers)

American Hustle is about the human condition. And almost everyone in the film is on some kind of con. At the center of the emotional parallelogram of the film is Sydney Prosser, played by Amy Adams. She is not a good girl. She is perfectly willing to play the game… whatever game will get her where she needs to get right now.

Read the full article »

20 Weeks To Oscar: The Great Settling 2013

Yes, it’s that time again. Time for all good voters to spend a week with their screeners (and hopefully, screenings), deciding for themselves who really does deserve their votes. But this may be the least predictable season I have ever witnessed. There is… and will be… only one legitimate blockbuster in play. Gravity. $652 million worldwide.

Read the full article »

20W2O: Episode 12 Wks to Go – The Desolation Of Smog

Next time you read, “X has happened and it’s changed the race dramatically,” take a deep breath and think. If the race has been between the same 15 movies and the same 35 actors, etc, for months already, does any one event really change… or even suggest anything changing amongst 5800 people who are, mostly, not voting for any of the prior awards?

Read the full article »

20W2O: Oscar III (Legit Awards So Far, 1)

Now is the spring of our discontent
Made hideous summer by this board of Review;
And all the artistic ambitions that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the award season buried.
Now are our favorite films bound with victorious wreaths;
Filmmakers’ bruised souls hung up for monuments;
Their stern pretensions changed to merry overlong meetings…

Read the full article »

20 Weeks To Oscar: Spikin’ It

There is a difference between what the why and the why is here. There is why there hasn’t been a greater embrace… and that’s because Spike won’t give his voice in support of his films, except in the most Spike-ian ways. I don’t think this is a “f— you” to Oscar, award season, or the industry. But it might be. I can’t answer the question because of the other “why.” That is Spike’s true why… and he’s not really sharing.

Read the full article »

20 Weeks to Oscar

Quote Unquotesee all »

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” — 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 — 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 — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — 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 named—” “Yeah, sure — 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 I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s 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 didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — 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. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s 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