Awards Update Archive for October, 2011

19 Weeks To Oscar (20W2O) Charts: October 23, 2011

By David Poland - Sunday, October 30th, 2011

With 19 weeks to go, the Oscar race has barely moved. The only real event of the last week was the successful release of Tintin in 19 countries overseas.

That’s all about to change. In the next 3 weeks, most of the award season will take root. All but a couple of the contenders will be exposed to the light. Talent will be filling the corridors of LA’s hotels and screening rooms at a nearly insane level. Some will rise. Some will fall.

But for now… animation.

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Brett Ratner Is Amused

By Ray Pride - Friday, October 28th, 2011

Brett Ratner Is Amused

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19 Weeks To Oscar: The Mean Season?

By David Poland - Thursday, October 27th, 2011

It’s a tough year for Oscar voters. Lots of great movies… but not too many that will leave them walking out of the theater with a smile on their face for the whole human race. Insanity, rape, murder, sex addiction, 9/11, and even one of the “feel goods” is about sacrificing something you love for your country. Fun Fun Fun!

(Charts to come.)

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20 Weeks To Oscar (20W2O) Charts: October 23, 2011

By David Poland - Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

We are now on the 20 week road to Oscar and here, to go with
the first column of this year’s series, are the first set of post-Toronto charts for Best Picture and the four acting categories. Six unseen movies are still major question marks in all of the races, especially Best Picture, which could have anywhere from 5 to 10 nominees this year.

(BP Chart corrected, Monday 11:30a)

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20 Weeks To Oscar: Line Dance

By David Poland - Friday, October 21st, 2011

20 years of Oscar consultants, in-house and out, figuring out how to game the system, and a decade of deteriorating media standards has led to an out-of-date response mechanism at The Academy, which just wants to do what it’s been doing all these years and to protect, as best they can, their membership from being prayed upon by the vultures.

But where is the line?

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1 Week To 20 Weeks To Oscar: Counting Best Picture Ballots

By David Poland - Thursday, October 6th, 2011

So I’m a week from writing the weekly column… but the one issue that seems to keep cropping up is how the change in the Best Picture vote accounting rules really works. Steve Pond did a nice job trying to lay it all out when it happened. But people still seem to be unsure what is really up. So I had a chat with AMPAS’ Ric Robertson and Leslie Unger in the name of clarity. This is where I landed…

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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