Awards Watch Archive for November, 2014

20 Weeks To Oscar: The Trouble With Biopics

We’re close to an all-biopic Oscar season. Maybe that’s why it’s such a blur right now. The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Selma, Unbroken, Foxcatcher, Mr. Turner, Big Eyes, and American Sniper are all specifically biopics. Boyhood and Birdman are fiction, but have major biographical elements driving them. Lots of bios.

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20 Weeks To Oscar: First Major Event

Guild nominations are rarely outside of the well-established box. It takes a series of those events in coordination to change the game. Critics awards… lovely. But enjoy them for what they are, because they may not match nominations, much less winners.

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Seven Lessons In Creativity From The Director Of The Imitation Game

Seven Lessons In Creativity From The Director Of The Imitation Game And – How Designers Recreated Alan Turing’s Machine

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Mike Ryan On Selma And Ferguson, 11 Miles From His Hometown

Mike Ryan On Selma And Ferguson, 11 Miles From His Hometown

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“The undeclared subject of Citizenfour is integrity—the insistence by an individual that his life and the principle he lives by should be all of a piece. Something resembling an aesthetic correlative of that integrity can be found in the documentary style of Laura Poitras.”

“The undeclared subject of Citizenfour is integrity—the insistence by an individual that his life and the principle he lives by should be all of a piece. Something resembling an aesthetic correlative of that integrity can be found in the documentary style of Laura Poitras.”

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Gurus o’ Gold: Thanksgiving Week

This week, The Gurus offer up opinions on Best Picture and the two Supporting Acting categories. Also, what movies should voters try to see this holiday weekend before nominations commence? It’s a pretty big list, which is a sign of a strong year of movies, if not easy awards choices.

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Reese Witherspoon On Keeping The “Perky” Out Of Wild

Reese Witherspoon On Keeping The “Perky” Out Of Wild

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Will These Be 2014’s Oscar Visual Effects Contenders?

Will These Be 2014’s Oscar Visual Effects Contenders?

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Brent Lang Sez Citizenfour Deserves A Best Picture Nom

Brent Lang Sez Citizenfour Deserves A Best Picture Nom

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Gurus o’ Gold: A Week From Thanksgiving, aka Screener Time

There’s been a march on the Top Ten and the man leading the charge has moved up the Actors list as well. The field narrows as the holiday gets closer.

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Talking With The Authors Of Gone Girl And Wild

Talking With The Authors Of Gone Girl And Wild

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“What makes Inherent Vice, the book and the movie together, an artifact of such beautifully revisionist history is that it shows us another way the ’70s could have gone—the pigs washed away on an unstoppable tide of grooviness, the bungalows left standing and the suburbs taken under. But it’s just a proposition.”

“What makes Inherent Vice, the book and the movie together, an artifact of such beautifully revisionist history is that it shows us another way the ’70s could have gone—the pigs washed away on an unstoppable tide of grooviness, the bungalows left standing and the suburbs taken under. But it’s just a proposition.”

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Angelina Jolie Says Unbroken Was An Emotional Journey

Angelina Jolie Says Unbroken Was An Emotional Journey

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Eddie Cockrell Drops Hints From Sydney Preem Of Unbroken

Eddie Cockrell Drops Hints From Sydney Preem Of Unbroken

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20 Weeks To Oscar – The Ides Of November

It’s still early. And it’s so late! There are a few titles floating out there, waiting for their moment in the spotlight. But it’s getting awfully late to make a first impression.

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How To Train Your Dragon 2 Sets Homevideo Sales Record For Fox-DreamWorks Animation

How To Train Your Dragon 2 Sets Homevideo Sales Record For Fox-DreamWorks Animation

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Caroline Siede Sez, “Unfortunately, The Winter Soldier was the best female-driven superhero film of 2014”

Caroline Siede Sez, “Unfortunately, The Winter Soldier was the best female-driven superhero film of 2014″

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Scott Feinberg’s Rationale For Supporting The H’wd Film Awards

“My position has always been that, like them or not, the HFA are worthy of coverage by awards columnists/bloggers like myself because most of the top Oscar contenders show up for them, and when they do anything en masse, especially in front of a massive audience (as was the case this year when the Hollywood Film Awards,…

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37% Of Oscar-Submitted Docs Directed By Women

37% Of Oscar-Submitted Docs Directed By Women

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Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski Sez Big Eyes Has A Bigger Picture

Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski On Big Eyes‘ Bigger Picture

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Awards Watch

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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