Awards Watch Archive for October, 2014

20 Weeks To Oscar: Sell Short

In the real world, where studios are just selling movies with massive marketing campaigns, the marketing windows have shrunk in recent years. Big TV buys can wait for 3 weeks out if the awareness has been pumped up via publicity for the months and months before. Have Oscar campaigners taken this lesson to heart? Are the early September festivals just an awareness play, followed by a 6-to-8 week window of lingering, and then the real campaign in the course of just a few weeks?

Read the full article » 2 Comments »

The Academy Lists The 134 Docs Submitted For Oscar 2014; Shortlist Of 15 Comes In December

134 DOCUMENTARY FEATURES SUBMITTED FOR 2014 OSCAR® RACE LOS ANGELES, CA – One hundred thirty-four features have been submitted for consideration in the Documentary Feature category for the 87th Academy Awards®. The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are: “Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq” “Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case” “Algorithms” “Alive Inside” “All…

Read the full article »

Mark Harris On “The Curse of Crash: The Narratives That Doom Oscar Movies”

Mark Harris On “The Curse of Crash: The Narratives That Doom Oscar Movies”

Read the full article »

“Much of my time with Boseman went like that. ‘You’ve got to watch what you say,” he admitted, which is why I can’t tell you much about the hilarious pick-up lines he suggested he’d woo Rihanna with. (They were all immediately retracted, and amazing.)”

“Much of my time with Boseman went like that. ‘You’ve got to watch what you say,” he admitted, which is why I can’t tell you much about the hilarious pick-up lines he suggested he’d woo Rihanna with. (They were all immediately retracted, and amazing.)”

Read the full article »

James Marsh On Directing The Theory Of Everything

James Marsh On Directing The Theory Of Everything 2’20” vid

Read the full article »

Mike Leigh Regards Mike Leigh

“On the whole I kind of quite like my films without watching them every night like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. But I do actually think they are alright. A lot of filmmakers say ‘I can’t watch myself’ and, very often it is because the film that got made isn’t the film they wanted to…

Read the full article »

Emanuel Lubezki Goes Behind The Birdman Scenes With Prize Pics

Emanuel Lubezki Goes Behind The Birdman Scenes With Prize Pics

Read the full article »

Theory Of Everything’s Stephen Hawking Joins Facebook

Theory Of Everything‘s Stephen Hawking Joins Facebook

Read the full article »

Oscar Producers Zadan And Meron Set 3-Year Development-Production Pact With B’wy’s Shubert Organization

Oscar Producers Zadan And Meron Set 3-Year Development-Production Pact With B’wy’s Shubert Organization

Read the full article »

Behind The Scenes With Fox’s Worldwide Marketing Co-Chieftains, With Stories About Gone Girl And Pictures Of Eccentric Memorabilia

Behind The Scenes With Fox’s Worldwide Marketing Co-Chieftains, With Stories About Gone Girl And Pictures Of Eccentric Memorabilia

Read the full article »

Does Birdman Know Oscar’s Long Love For Cinema About Greasepaint?

Does Birdman Know Oscar’s Long Love For Cinema About Greasepaint?

Read the full article »

20 Weeks To Oscar: Surveying The Board

Interstellar lands this week.

That leaves Unbroken, The Gambler, Selma, American Sniper, A Most Violent Year, Into The Woods, Big Eyes, and Exodus: Gods & Men

That’s a lot of movies, given an already pretty narrow field.

Read the full article » 12 Comments »

“Honestly, I’m going through exactly what Riggan is going through in this movie. I go, ‘Oh, you think you’re the greatest.’ Then someone says, ‘You’re the greatest. You’re wonderful.’ Then 20 minutes later, I’m going, ‘No, you’re not any of those things. You’re just plain Michael Keaton.'”

“Honestly, I’m going through exactly what Riggan is going through in this movie. I go, ‘Oh, you think you’re the greatest.’ Then someone says, ‘You’re the greatest. You’re wonderful.’ Then 20 minutes later, I’m going, ‘No, you’re not any of those things. You’re just plain Michael Keaton.’”

Read the full article »

Kevin Lincoln On “Edward Norton’s Abandoned Movie Stardom”

Kevin Lincoln On “Edward Norton’s Abandoned Movie Stardom”

Read the full article »

Fine Young Filmmaker Barry Jenkins Goes Bird—- For Birdman

“The infinitude of time as conveyed in Birdman’s unbroken stream of visuals is its most prescient conceit; were this a drama about radio or cinema, it would not work. On the stage where there is no barrier between performer and audience, where the performance—like life—unfolds without edits in a fluid stream of happenings (and non-happenings), there is…

Read the full article »

Gurus o’ Gold: After New York…

This week, the Gurus take on Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, and Director. And if The Gurus are right at this point, all five of these individual honors would got to first-time winners and 3 of the 5 would have never been nominated before.

Read the full article » 17 Comments »

Jeff Jensen On-Sets Interstellar

Jeff Jensen On-Sets Interstellar

Read the full article »

Emma Stone On Not —-ing Up Birdman

Emma Stone On Not Messing Up Birdman

Read the full article »

Michael Cieply Sez World War II May Be Battle That Wins Oscar

Michael Cieply Sez World War II May Be Battle That Wins Oscar

Read the full article »

Variety Cover-Stories “Saint” Bill Murray

Variety Cover-Stories “Saint” Bill Murray

Read the full article »

Awards Watch

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