Awards Update Archive for November, 2012

Branagh On Knightley

By Ray Pride - Monday, November 26th, 2012

Branagh On Knightley

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Gurus o’ Gold: Thanks, About To Be Given The Last 4 Films

By The Gurus of Gold - Thursday, November 22nd, 2012

Coming up this weekend, Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty come out to be seen by the media and guilds. Next week, Django Unchained and The Hobbit. And at that point, all the mysteries will be unfolded and voting for many groups will begin. So to give you a proper “before” and “after,” one last spin with the Gurus’ Top Ten lists for Best Picture…

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20W2O: 15 Weeks To Go – Who Really Wants It?

By David Poland - Thursday, November 15th, 2012

This weekend, Anna Karenina and Silver Linings Playbook arrive in theaters and Lincoln expands. Next week, Life of Pi, Hitchcock and Rust & Bone. And then, in the last two weeks of the year, spread around the holiday, are Amour, This is 40, The Impossible, Not Fade Away, Zero Dark Forty, On The Road, Django Unchained, and Les Miserables.

But who wants it?

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20W2O: 16 Weeks To Go – This Year’s Strategy

By David Poland - Monday, November 12th, 2012

Every Oscar season has a lesson… or two. For the last two years (The Artist and The King’s Speech), it’s been “Let the movie do the work… don’t be a stranger, but don’t get in the way of success.” At least, that is the image being projected. The talent was subjected to months of work, meant to feel casual to voters. And charm was required for all of those months. Both movies were sensations at Toronto. Both films were screened generously. Both films had its stars working the room for months. Silver Linings Playbook and Argo were the two closest thing to Toronto sensations this year….

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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