BYOB Tuesday

Globes

What can one say about The Golden Globes than True Grit, 0 nominations, The Tourist, 3 nominations?

How badly do you want to have Johnny Depp show up that you need to to nominate him twice? (Disney lands its first non-animated Best Picture nominee since Mary Poppins, 45 years ago.)

You have to wonder what The Coen Bros did to HFPA at their press conference session.

And the Michael Douglas nomination, with due respect, is about his illness, not his performance. They want the television moment.

I don’t really have much more to say. There are nods I fully embrace, those I would have preferred, and those about which I am indifferent. But who cares? Dick Clark says you do.

The problem isn’t being nominated. It’s not being nominated. And then, only because you are out of that part of the conversation for a while. The only person whose nomination for a Globe really matters in terms of Oscar – which is the only reason HFPA has any power – is Jacki Weaver, whose Oscar stock just rose because she’s that deep in the conversation.

If you add up all the money spent on HFPA members, plus their personal membership benefits, they make more money each year being HFPA members than most journalists earn… and I would bet, in 80% or more of their membership, more than they personally make in any other endeavor.

Of course, the irony about ubiquitous bribery is that it gets to the point where the person being paid off has more power than the person paying them off… and then, it’s all about who ISN’T paying or how big the pay off. There is no issue of actual value, only the fear of having been told, “No.”

Proud moments.

The End Of Yogi Bear, Better Late Than…

Ebert, Generation Next

Another Year, actors Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville

Why Critics Have Become Less & Less Relevant

I feel I have to start out columns like this reminding people that I believe that no one is ever going to be embarrassed that they chose The Social Network as their film of the year or Colin Firth or Fincher or pretty much anyone whose name I have seen being awarded or nominated for year-end awards in the last week. No doubt, HFPA will mess that streak up tomorrow… but the exception proves the rule, right?

But this is my thinking… could NYFCC and LAFCA pay any less heed to the idea of critical thinking than they have this year?

I mean, LAFCA proves its critical thinking by embracing a performance from last year’s Sony Classics foreign language masterpiece, A Prophet, another from Mother, which was on last year’s festival circuit then got a March release by Magnolia, and Carlos, a great made-for-TV mini-series, also released by IFC.

I must have been so distracted by the weirdness of these choices… since obviously the current landscape much be horrible if they are digging into these cobwebbed corners for awards candidates… that it didn’t occur to me to post the DP/30s with all three filmmakers. Terrific films, but WHAT?!?!

But don’t worry, like NYFCC, they laid down and did the heavy lifting for the mainstream.

This is what film critics have become in this country. Either they are chasing the obscure, followed by a small but loyal band of like minded folks who put their money where their effete taste is or they are getting their sense of the world out of Entertainment Weekly. (No offense to EW or the fine folks who make a magazine that rarely pretends to be anything other than what it is.)

People get upset with me at this time of year when I dismiss The Precursors because, they scream, it’s not all about Oscar.

Bullshit.

It’s all about Oscar. It’s all about Oscar for every person who believes they can win that prize, until they don’t. And then, the precursors they won become much more valued.

But more to the point, the notion that the film year is so homogeneous or that there is one performance or film that is so clearly head and shoulders over the others… are you serious?

What does The Social Network winning both coasts do for The Social Network? Aside from some lovely ego play, nothing. The film has been in position to be nominated across much of the board since the first screening in September. Come February, no Academy member is going to vote for anything based on what awards groups said.

What does The Social Network winning both coasts do for film lovers? Nothing. Anyone who is going to see a movie because of the critics groups has seen this film… and 80% of them already have it on DVD in their house (two copies in many).

(Perhaps the greatest irony is that Jesse Eisenberg and the double-dip of Supporting Actor candidates are the ones that needed help from these groups with The Academy and didn’t get any.)

I can already hear the yelling… “We don’t care what the other group does!” “We voted by our rules and this is just the way it happened!” “We’re not influenced by the Oscar race!”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to Miss Daisy.

I’ll tell you exactly what I got out of these two groups this year… vanilla pudding… sweet… delicious even… but not remotely nutritious… not even interesting. Maybe that’s not the job of film critics… but ya know, in 2010, with everyone losing their jobs left and right, you think maybe a critics group or two might get serious about how to do something more than going along to get along. Maybe?

P.S. I think Colin Firth is the cat’s pajamas. He probably should have won last year for a performance that was complex, to say the least. But he’s going to win this year for a more technical, but very high quality performance. I am at peace with that. That said, if you saw Bardem’s performance in Biutiful and you think that any of the other performances, including Firth’s, is even aiming for the kind of depth Bardem goes to there, you are an idiot. And I don’t think Colin or any of the others who are in the race would disagree. You can dislike the movie or you can not like that kind of film or performance… that is your personal prerogative. But the lack of any nods to Bardem, in a performance that makes the overlooked turn in The Sea Inside looks like a cake walk, from LAFCA, NYFCC, or BFCA is an embarrassment. I loved him and “Friendo” too. But this is how critics have become marginalized. It can’t stop handing awards to great, fun, movie-movie performances and disconnects from the tough stuff.

There are exceptions. Melissa Leo and Amy Adams got in for the first time with great, small, intimate indie performances. And they may both be nominated this year for much more traditional work. If you think Christian Bale is doing something interesting in The Fighter, maybe you should have seen The Machinist or American Psycho, which were much more complex turns, by design of the overall films. But those performances weren’t obscure in the right way.

I toil in this garden. I am not opposed to the nature of it. But the hypocrisy… and I can’t see Kim Hye-ja and Colin Firth at LAFCA as anything less than a freaky combination of an overreach and an underreach… just gets to me sometimes.

P.S.S. The Social Network still isn’t going to win Best Picture from The Academy… unless they are starting a Media branch.

BFCA Kicks In

I have mixed feelings about BFCA’s nominations.

One one hand, I have been saying that the race is between The King’s Speech, True Grit, and Black Swan for some time. And indeed, these are the three top nominees at BFCA.

On the other hand, there are some tragic missteps, starting with Bardem.

It’s weird. I no longer participate in BFCA, yet as I was heading out the door, I made the case that if they wanted to be taken more seriously, the awards should mirror Oscar. And so now they do… though a number of the silly awards – Best Kid, Best TV movie, etc – are still there. And while the nominations for Best Actor and that ilk magically expand to keep everyone a little happier, the group couldn’t come up with 5 nominees for such challenging categories as Best Editor and Best Costume Design… and a big 3 slots for foreign language. Oy.

I do think that BFCA, which expanded its roster while critics all over America were being fired, does fit The Academy’s taste more than most groups. There are 250 or so people with pretty middling taste. The Academy voting base is 20 times bigger, but the BFCA sampling it as good a fit as there is on the precursor circuit.

I also have to say that while I might have preferred some different nominations, there isn’t a single nominee in the top 8 categories that I feel doesn’t deserve to be there. I like every one of the 10 movies. I think a few are overrated. I think a few are overrated. But I like the films… which may be a problem as we keep going through this season… how will passion play into the story?

Rabbit Hole, actor/producer Nicole Kidman

Rabbit Hole, actor Aaron Eckhart

The Tyranny Of Small Groups With Big Logos

There are groups for which I have real contempt. But not every group that puffs itself up outrageously is loaded down with idiots and con artists.

The question is, why do we pay attention?

AFI just announced its annual Top Ten… and I like and admire most of the people on their committee… but it’s 13 people who AFI uses to give their organization the notion of a voice, when, in fact, it is not a part of what AFI does for any reason other than self-promotion.

This is not Carlos de Abreau giving awards to whomever he can best leverage or film festivals that make up awards to fit the talent they can wrangle or NBR, which has members but still has its awards picked privately by committee, or even HFPA, whose 80+ members have one of the greatest scams going in the history of Hollywood, sucking well over $10 million a year out of the system and always looking to suck up some more.

But is it really of any true value? Anymore than a baker’s dozen of your friends hanging around after dinner?

LA Film Critics Go Electronic… Announce Via Publicist As They Vote

Now complete…

LOS ANGELES, DECEMBER 12, 2010 – “The Social Network” was voted Best Picture of the Year, it was announced today by Brent Simon, President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA). The runner up was “Carlos”.

The 36th annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards ceremony will be held Saturday, January 15 at the InterContinental, Los Angeles. As previously announced, Paul Mazursky will receive the 2010 Career Achievement Award.

Award winners are:

PICTURE: “The Social Network”

Runner-up: “Carlos”

DIRECTOR: Olivier Assayas, “Carlos,” and David Fincher, “The Social Network” (tie)

ACTOR: Colin Firth, “The King’s Speech”

Runner-up: Edgar Ramirez, “Carlos”

ACTRESS: Kim Hye-ja, “Mother”

Runner-up: Jennifer Lawrence, “Winter’s Bone”

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Niels Arestrup, “A Prophet”

Runner-up: Geoffrey Rush, “The King’s Speech”

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jacki Weaver, “Animal Kingdom”

Runner-up: Olivia Williams, “The Ghost Writer”

SCREENPLAY: Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network”

Runner-up: David Seidler, “The King’s Speech”

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: “Carlos”

Runner-up: “Mother”

ANIMATION: “Toy Story 3”

Runner-up: “The Illusionist”

DOCUMENTARY / NON-FICTION FILM: “Last Train Home”

Runner-up: “Exit Through the Gift Shop”

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Matthew Libatique, “Black Swan”

Runner-up: Roger Deakins, “True Grit”

MUSIC/SCORE: Alexandre Desplat, “The Ghost Writer,” and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “The Social Network” (tie)

PRODUCTION DESIGN: Guy Hendrix Dyas, “Inception”

Runner-up: Eve Stewart, “The King’s Speech”

NEW GENERATION: Lena Dunham, “Tiny Furniture”

DOUGLAS E. EDWARDS INDEPENDENT/EXPERIMENTAL FILM/VIDEO: “Film Socialism”

LEGACY OF CINEMA AWARDS: Serge Bromberg, “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” and the F.W. Murnau Foundation and Fernando Pena for the restoration of “Metropolis”

CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Paul Mazursky

Weekend Estimates by Chronic Klady

So… The Narnia opening still sucks, the Tourist opening is bad, considering that you have to go back to From Hell to find an opening as weak for Depp (Sweeney Todd opened to less, but on less than half the screens) and even for Jolie, you’re kinda looking at Alexander as a comparable start, taking size into account. Yes, it will do business overseas and they may find a way to not lose a ton… or they may lose a ton. We’ll see in time.

Tangled has now past the past two Disney Animation Thanksgiving releases. Mulan goes down this week, then Pocahontas and Lilo & Stitch. Tarzan‘s $171m is far away, but not impossible. It really depends on how much of the under-12 market Yogi Bear eats through the holiday.

Strong numbers for Black Swan, The Fighter, and The King’s Speech, pretty much in that order. Someone wrote me to ask whether I thought something new was happening with these big per-screens and whether it had anything to do with digital projection. No and no. Interlocking projectors to show a movie on addition screens at a theater to meet need is a decades old occurrence. But The Fighter, for instance, is currently playing on four screens at the Arclight Hollywood, including the Cinerama Dome, 2 screens at Lincoln Square in NY, 3 screens at Boston Common, and I can’t find a fourth theater or city. Maybe they are counting The Dome as a fourth house. (ADD, 1:53p Reader Rob writes, “The fourth location for The Fighter is Showcase Cinemas in Lowell, Mass.”) Black Swan is, for instance, in 3 theaters at various venues in NYC.

This launch for The Fighter is almost identical to The King’s Speech‘s launch a couple of weeks ago. But there are very different strategies to follow, with The King’s Speech waiting on awards, still in 19 venues on this, its third weekend and Fighter going to at least 2200 screens next weekend. Fighter will be looking for a weekend of at least $17 million before duking it out in the rich holiday period. You kinda get the feeling that this weekend’s 4-screen release was only a hat tip to the many critics groups voting this week, comforting them in their possible votes while asking them to embrace True Grit, for instance, is still asking them to embrace a commercial unknown.

The Black Swan numbers are stronger than Brokeback Mountain‘s, though that seems to be the best box office comparison so far. In an interview with the WSJ, Searchlight said that they would be going to 1000 screens on the 22nd. Interesting. I would probably try to push that to next weekend, avoiding True Grit… but then again, The Fighter may be stronger commercially, at least at first. I just think they can probably beat The Fighter on half the screens… and can probably do the same against True Grit. So why not maximize the season?

It’s a good problem for Steve Gilula to have… how to maximize a hit that they weren’t 100% sure was such a hit outside of the arthouse world.

No such problem for Disney and The Tempest.

DP/30s of Awards Season 2010: 55 & Counting…

127 HOURS
actor James Franco
director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, producer Christian Colson
director Danny Boyle & production designer/costumer
sound designer Glenn Freemantle & composer A.R. Rahman
cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle & cinematographer Enrique Chediak

ALL GOOD THINGS
coming – director Andrew Jarecki
actor Kirsten Dunst

ANOTHER YEAR
director Mike Leigh
coming – actors Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville

BIUTIFUL
director Alejandro González Iñárritu, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editor Stephen Mirrione, composer Gustavo Santaolalla, executive producer Guillermo del Toro
actor Javier Bardem

BLACK SWAN
director Darren Aronofsky
actor Natalie Portman
actor Barbara Hershey
actor Vincent Cassel
actor Mila Kunis
screenwriter Mark Heyman and choreographer/actor Benjamin Millepied

BLUE VALENTINE
writer/director Derek Cianfrance
actor Michelle Williams

CASINO JACK
actor Kevin Spacey, pt 1
Kevin Spacey, pt 2

EASY A
actor Emma Stone, director Will Gluck

THE FIGHTER
Amy Adams
Melissa Leo

FRANKIE & ALICE
actor/producer Halle Berry

GET LOW
actor Robert Duvall
actor Sissy Spacek
director Aaron Schneider, producer Dean Zanuck
screenwriters Chris Provenzano & C. Gaby Mitchell

THE GHOST WRITER
actor Olivia Williams
coming – Pierce Brosnan

GREENBERG
actor Greta Gerwig

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT
director/co-writer Lisa Cholodenko
actor Mark Ruffalo
actor Julianne Moore

THE KING’S SPEECH
actor Colin Firth
actor Geoffrey Rush
director Tom Hooper

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS
director/co-writer Ed Zwick, co-writer/producer Marshall Herskovitz

MADE IN DAGENHAM
actor Miranda Richardson, director Nigel Cole, actor Sally Hawkins

NEVER LET ME GO
director Mark Romanek
actors Carey Mulligan & Andrew Garfield
screenwriter Alex Garland & novelist Kazuo Ishiguro

PLEASE GIVE
writer/director Nicole Holofcener

RABBIT HOLE
director John Cameron Mitchell
coming – actor Nicole Kidman
actor Aaron Eckhart
writer David Lindsay-Abaire

THE SOCIAL NETWORK
actors Jesse Eisenberg & Andrew Garfield
Justin Timberlake
actor Armie Hammer

SOMEWHERE
writer/director Sofia Coppola
Stephen Dorff

TANGLED
composer/songwriter Alan Menken

THE TOWN
co-writer/director/actor Ben Affleck
actor Jeremy Renner

TOY STORY 3
coming – director Lee Unkrich

THE WAY BACK
director/co-writer Peter Weir

WINTER’S BONE
writer/director Debra Granik
actress Jennifer Lawrence
actor John Hawkes

SHORT LIST DOCUMENTARIES
The Tillman Story, director Amir Bar-Lev
Client 9: The Rise & Fall Of Eliot Spitzer, director Alex Gibney
Inside Job, director Charles Ferguson
Exit Through The Gift Shop, producer Jaimie D’ Cruz, editor Chris King
coming – The Lottery
Wasteland

Friday Estimates by Klady

So now The Fighter is out in exclusive release to take on Black Swan. A strong start… but not really Swannie.

Fighter did $25k per screen on 4 yesterday, heading to what will most likely be about $75k per screen for the weekend on 4. As a matter of fact, this is almost exactly the I Heart Huckabees number. I expect Fighter to do a multiple of what Huckabees did ($12.8m domestic), but it is a striking stat. More directly, the Fighter launch is about 15% better than 127 Hours, which also started on 4 screens a month and 5 days ago. 127 has been in a bit of a holding pattern, perhaps waiting for some critics awards love. But they may have overstayed their box office welcome, expanding but still dropping slightly last weekend.

On the other webbed hand, Black Swan did $80k per screen on 18 screens last weekend. So what does Searchlight do with such a buzzy movie? Well, they jumped to 90 screens this weekend, 5x last weekend, and the results are still quite strong. Per-screen yesterday was about $11k per, projecting to $33k or so on 90 screens. Historically, there isn’t a lot to compare it to because it’s a lingering number of screens, which is not usually where films with these kinds of numbers hang out. Juno was not as strong, doing a similar per-screen on half the screens on “this weekend” in 2007. Precious was stronger, registering a similar per-screen on twice as many screens on its second weekend. And Slumdog Millionaire did about half-the per-screen on a 78-theater count in the first week of December two years ago.

So which will Swannie be? Precious, which never really played well after it got past 600 screens? Or a $140m-plus hit like Juno or Slumdog, which expanded to 100 and 600 screens, respectively, by the New Year and had $50m and $30m in the bank before Oscar ballots started getting sent in right after the holiday? Or will it be somewhere in between the two?

I am also put in mind of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a movie that wasn’t supposed to be able to play in Middle America and triumphantly did, but didn’t really ever trend down at all until it hit $80 million… and then, with Oscar’s help, took another $50 million into the domestic box office. Of course that year, a decade ago now, was one of the great Oscar seasons of modern times, with Soderbergh dueling against himself with two great films, a foreign language nominee, an epic, and a Harvey Weinstein bon bon. There were so many stories inside of that group of films that The Academy defaulted to “The Big One.” Not a shock, really. I’d say that it happened again – though I love this film and only like Gladiator – with The Departed a few years ago. Too many interesting choices often lead to The Big One.

But there is no Big One this year. The odds of either Toy Story 3 or Inception, both likely nominees, winning Best Picture are infinitesimal. Out of the rest of the pack, The Social Network is the commercial muscle right now with $91 million. Will one of these other films, from King’s Speech to Fighter to Swannie, challenge that number? If so, that is when the phenomenology that won Best Picture for Slumdog kicks in. If not, we’re still looking for the turn that the season will take.

After the first day of Potter 7’s fourth weekend, the film is now behind 2 previous Potter films day-by-day and it delivered the lowest-grossing fourth Friday of the series. Front loading’s a bitch. (No offense, ma’am.) There is nothing bad to report here. It’s going to do a “Harry Potter number” and will be the 6th in the series to gross over $800m worldwide, the 27th film in history to do so. Think of that… 27 total and Potter represents 6 of them. Amazing.

Walden and Fox can’t be happy with Narnia 3’s launch… less than half of what either of the first two films opened at. Even if it gets stronger over the weekend and cracks $30m, it’s way off of either of the first two films… and people saw #2 as a major disappointment.

And Sony, oddly, can’t be too unhappy about The Tourist, given that they’ve treated the film like an ugly stepchild the whole way… because it’s massively disappointing, given the stars. Knight & Day opened to almost the same Friday number, but Fox, which believed in that film, had already siphoned off $7 million with a Wednesday opening. The two films should have a very similar 3-day start, though with the head start and a better film, K&D should outgross The Tourist domestically by $15 million or more (perhaps $20 million more). But as with K&D, with these stars, even with a flop here, the money is overseas. Cruise and Diaz did $185m overseas. And while I expect Tourist to also scale down from that overseas, they could end up with $100m+ international to bolster the bottom line of a weak domestic run.

BYOB Weekend… Dec 10 2×10-10