Awards Update Archive for October, 2010

18 Weeks To Oscar: In The Shadow Of The Hurt Locker

The clearest lesson of last year’s Oscar winner was that you don’t have to kill yourself in September or October or November to win Best Picture. But does that trend-setting experience set the season on a good track or a bad one?

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The King’s Speech, actor Geoffrey Rush

DP/30 – A favorite to earn his second Oscar for his work in The King’s Speech, Geoffrey Rush talks about his life, career, the film, and a little bit o’ Pirates 4 with David Poland.

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19 Weeks To Oscar: Looking For A Rush

So far, the season hasn’t sizzled. But new films and the thrill of seeing new faces rise and old faces coming back may turn this into a season of happy fireworks.

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A 20 Weeks Special Edition – Let The Premature Awardulation Begin!!!

Ah, as the temperatures finally drop from the 80s in Los Angeles, it’s time to start giving out year end awards months before the year has ended. Now, there are two classes of premature awardulation. There is the sincere and well-intended. That would be your Gotham Awards. Desperately trying to compete for attention and position…

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Gurus o’ Gold – A Post Toronto Look At The Field

The Gurus are back for a post-Toronto October drive-by before we start out weekly duties in November. Not too many suprises in Best Picture, but the Acting categories are looking tight for the men and fairly open for the women.

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10 Reasons Why The Academy Moving To January Makes Perfect Sense

Some people think Oscar will be ruined by moving into January. All I can say is, “What have they been waiting for?”

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“Controversy” Over Brazil’s Oscar Entry?

A story ran out of Los Angeles on suggesting that there might be hanky-panky in the selection of Brazil’s Oscar candidate for 2010. The editor of a top Brazilian movie site says that the accusation is false.

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Awards Update

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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