And the good news for some of you… the opening on Dec 3 is now expanding to 8 cities instead of just NY and LA… Boston (Boston Commons, Kendall Square), Chicago (River East, Century Centre, Evanston), San Francisco (Metreon, Kabuki), Washington DC (Bethesda, E Street, Georgetown), Dallas/Ft Worth (Magnolia, Angelika, Plano), and Toronto (Varsity)
Next week, the full-length Aronofsky and Portman Black Swan DP/30s. But with the official announcement of the deal for Darren’s next movie, here’s this clip from the chat…
David and I were talking about the latest Gurus chart, and I made the (half-joking) observation that we should do kind of an anti-Gurus chart of my kids’ random Oscar picks. In the past when I’ve had them choose Oscar winners with random methods including Magic-8 Ball, Twister, Guitar Hero, and “Pin the Oscar on the Donkey’s Butt” they’ve averaged just about as well as folks paid to pontificate on the politics of Oscar Night. Plus, they’ve had a lot of fun doing it.
It just goes to show you, no one really knows anything, maybe not even the people being paid to know about things.
There have been some occasionally heated discussions here and on The Hot Blog about film critics and what “qualifies” someone to write about film. Generally, for what it’s worth, I think having a broad knowledge of film, a passion for movies, and the ability to write about why you like or don’t like a given film in a coherent way that connects with your readership qualifies someone to write about movies, though this is not necessarily the same thing as more purely academic film criticism.
As to what qualifies someone to be or not to be an Oscar pundit, well, that depends, I think, on what you’re looking for. Random guesses abound on the internet, and once you get it down to a Top Ten or so, pretty much anyone who works in any aspect of this business is entitled to offer a qualified opinion on which films or actors they think should win. Understanding the politics involved behind the scenes may be a little more tricksy, but if you’ve kept up at all with the recent history of Oscar winners it’s not terribly difficult for the average person to make educated guesses that are as accurate as (maybe better than) those of the experts.
In the spirit of “the average folks” versus “the experts,” I asked my kids (plus one friend) to give me their early weigh-in on their Best Picture pick based on the Top Ten on the Gurus chart, based on the titles alone if they didn’t know anything else. (For the record, Neve has seen The Social Network and Inception, and all of them have seen Toy Story 3). I also asked them to weigh in on which film had the worst title.
Their not-so-expert opinions are below. I’ll check in with them closer to Oscars for their picks in the major categories. If you have ideas on how they should make their picks this year, let me know.
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LUKA (AGE 7)
BEST PICTURE PICK: I think Toy Story 3 will win because I really like it. It was kind of sad, but some parts were funny, and it had a really good story. And I think they’re gonna make a Toy Story 4.
WORST TITLE: I think 127 Hours is a really bad name for a movie because no one wants to watch a movie that’s that long. That sounds like a really, really, really long movie. And boring.
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VEDA (AGE 9)
BEST PICTURE PICK:Toy Story 3, because it was really good and sad and it had great animation and stuff. And great characters like Woody and Buzz.
WORST TITLE: The King’s Speech. Boring. I think it’s about a guy standing there who’s giving a boring speech to try to put everyone to sleep so he can steal the town’s rarest thing.
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JAXON (AGE 11)
BEST PICTURE PICK:Toy Story 3, because it had really good animation and also it had a really good story behind it.
WORST TITLE:The King’s Speech sounds like a guy standing on a big platform just speaking for two hours. Boring.
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NEVE (AGE 13)
BEST PICTURE PICK: Either True Grit or Inception. Inception because I thought it was very interesting and I liked all the plot twists and how you had to pay attention to every thing or you’d be lost. And True Grit because I loved the trailer and I read the summary and it looks really interesting. No Country for Old Men terrified me, but I appreciated its artistry, so I think this one will be good.
WORST TITLE:The King’s Speech. The title sounds boring, because who wants to see a movie that’s about some guy’s speech? A good title is everything, right? If it’s bad, and people think it sounds boring, no one will come see it. See, this is why I get Veda to help me with my titles for my writing.
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KENDRA (AGE 14)
BEST PICTURE PICK: The name Inception really grabs me. It sounds very dramatic. I also like the sound of Black Swan. That sounds interesting, too.
WORST TITLE: I concur on The King’s Speech. It just sounds really boring. Maybe it’s not, it might be a really good movie, but that’s how it sounds.
The first thing I asked myself about the black #10 envelope with the too-neat white-ink writing and a Beverly Hills P.O. box return address. It was obviously light as a feather… or, correctly, as light as two feathers. Hmmm. Oh!
Tyler Perry was on Oprah this week. After all, it’s a little more than two weeks until his award aspirant, For Colored Girls, goes into theaters. But he didn’t say more than a couple of sentences about the film. Hmmm… But he’s going to be on again on his film’s opening day, November 5. And that episode was described by Oprah as being like no Oprah episode before. Interesting. So the movie… oh… no… the show will have 200 grown men who were molested as children, including Perry himself.
And that is how this Oscar season feels so far.
Not like molestation. It’s a great thing that Tyler Perry and Oprah are doing, trying to bring light to a shame that men are loathe to ever admit and therefore find it harder to heal.
What it is like is waiting for something exciting, something expected, something that shocks and surprises and makes it all fun. And not getting quite what we expected. What we get isn’t bad. It may even be incredibly valuable and worthwhile. But it’s just not exciting.
Toy Story 3 and Inception are both likely nominees, both are big commercial hits, and neither is likely to get much further than their nominations. TS3 can’t even hope to win Best Comedy at the Golden Globes, since the HFPAers like to segregate the animation. Even being nominated for Best Picture with 10 nominees feels like it’s The Pixar Slot after just one year getting nominated.
The Social Network is a hit and a likely nominee. But is it really the experience to stir (older) men’s souls? The King’s Speech, which isn’t open yet but is being given frontrunner status by some, is wonderful… but can anyone really say they have never been on that journey before?
The are a number of tiny indies that are terrific, from Never Let Me Go to Winter’s Bone to The Kids Are All Right to Get Low to Biutiful to Another Year to Rabbit Hole. I don’t know that we have seen any of these films before, really. They all play on ideas we have of older films, but each is really fresh in its own way, loaded with some great performances.
But is any one of them capable of becoming The One, even if they fight their way to nominations?
It now seems that the excitement of the season comes down the to small handful of films that are not yet in play. They may or may not be better than the films already out there, but there is something pulsing beneath the surface.
The glorious madness of Black Swan feels like it could blow audiences away, especially the actors, who will identify with the pain and paranoia of being a performer. Aronofsky has made an incredibly sophisticated horror film, which is going to make it a shooting star or somewhat earthbound by resistance of an older Academy.
The deceptive simplicity of 127 Hours and the audience’s pleasure in spending all that time with James Franco is a singular event this year. Of course, some people are already whining about one event in the last 15 minutes making the movie hard to take. But I would argue that the skill with which Boyle and his compatriots get through that one event, in a film of enormous tension that commands the compassion of the audience is a far greater achievement than any discomfort that is created.
Paramount, which is marketing and distributing The Fighter, has started to convince the talkers around town that they have a game changer. A new 2 minute ad – not a trailer – is turning heads and looking like Raging Rocky On The Waterfront. And it doesn’t help that Mark Wahlberg has become a working class hero in Hollywood, matched only by Matt Damon in his generation.
And then there is the film that is the last to start revving its engine – it started this week – The Coen Bros version of True Grit. John Wayne won the Oscar in the role played by last year’s winner, Jeff Bridges. Can he pull a Hanks? The original was not nominated for Best Picture. Nor were Kim Darby, Glen Campbell, or Jeff Corey, who played the roles now handled by Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. Yet…
It was 27 years between How The West Was Won being Best Picture nominated and two westerns in three years winning, Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven. That was 17 years ago, with no Westerns being nominated in the interim.
So even though there was plenty of Southwestern dust in No Country For Old Men, True Grit may offer the excitement of a true throwback. Or not.
And what of The Way Back, which has replaced Tree of Life, now officially relegated to 2011 (along with Miral), as the Popular, But Unsure, New Distributor Wildcard Choice?
Where else can we look for excitement? Well, James Franco is a newcomer to the awards circuit, as is Jesse Eisenberg. And will voters find the idea of nominating the dual role played by Armie Hammer fun? Personally I think it is a bit ugly that Tobey Maguire hasn’t been Oscar nominated yet… but will voters be amused by the idea of sending the new Spider-Man to his spandex suit with an Oscar nomination in tow?
And how about “second time’s the charm?” Colin Firth. Natalie Portman. Josh Brolin. Mark Wahlberg. Ryan Gosling. Anne Hathaway. Carey Mulligan.
There are veterans we love and don’t see enough of in front of that camera these days, from Robert Duvall to Sissy Spacek to Barbara Hershey to Miranda Richardson to Annette Bening, and even Jack Nicholson, who has gone three years without a movie since The Bucket List.
Then there’s this year’s rocket girl, Jennifer Lawrence.
Okay… now I am getting interested… a bit excited even. I want to hear Academy members debate the subtexts of Black Swan and discuss whether they remember the real events of The King’s Speech and try to remember the first True Grit and to consider the actors and filmmakers who are going to take us into the future, from Fincher to Nolan to Aronofsky to Hooper to Granik to Romanek to Russell and embracing the veterans they’ve honored over the years like Jim Brooks and Scorsese and Boyle and Eastwood and The Coens.
Things are just a little slow out of the blocks this year. But we’re almost there. And it could be fun. It may not be as fresh or unexpected as some years… but away we go, dudes, party on.
We have the new Gurus O’ Gold chart up, and in taking a look at the consensus votes du jour, I had a couple thoughts. I missed The King’s Speech at Toronto, so I’ll have to wait until screeners come in/Seattle screenings get set to weigh in on it. Could be the Oscar-bee’s knees like I heard from a lot of folks at Toronto, could be Colin Firth‘s year to win a statue. Or not. Time will tell.
Of the Best Pic-contending movies I have seen, I wouldn’t rank The Social Network as highly as it’s sitting right now. It’s very early for that film to be peaking, I think, and I still just don’t see its subject matter and cynicism as broadly appealing to the Academy voters. But we’ll see. Hereafter? Not so much. I wouldn’t even have that one on my Oscar radar at all except that it’s directed by Eastwood — but I personally found it to be maybe on par with Invictus, which wasn’t great, and maybe a tad below Million Dollar Baby (NOT my favorite movie) in terms of emotional manipulation.
Right now, I think my personal top Best Picture pics would be True Grit (haven’t seen that one yet either, but it’s the Coens and the trailer looks great), Black Swan, 127 Hours, Another Year, The King’s Speech (based on the buzz alone at this point) and Winter’s Bone OR The Kids Are All Right as strong outsiders.
I’m more interested at this point in the Adapted Screenplay race, where we have 127 Hours, True Grit and The Social Network as probably leaders of the pack. To this I would add Never Let Me Go, which I think, after reading the book, is a really solid adaptation — more on that one later. Unfortunately, I missed seeing Rabbit Hole (darn that weighty Toronto slate and its surprises), and I’ve heard so many things on that one (mostly positive) that I’m hoping to get to check it out soon.
Right now I’m also interested in the Best Actor and Actress races as well. For Best Actor, everyone (ah yes, the ever-mysterious, yet oddly influential “they”) came out of Toronto saying James Franco is a “lock” for a nomination, and Firth virtually a “lock” for a nom and probable win. I’ve seen Duvall in Get Low and it’s a good performance, no doubt, and one that may appeal to the Academy. Not my personal top o’ the actor heap, but I have no idea what the Academy’s temperature reading is on that film, and no one’s counting my votes anyhow.
Bridges in True Grit may (will probably be) Oscar worthy, but he’s coming off a win last year for Crazy Heart. Personally (and again, not having seen True Grit or King’s Speech yet) my sentimental favorite is Javier Bardem for Biutiful, which I think is the best performance in a career of great performances. But the artfulness of Biutiful may not be enough to lift it up above the rather bleak subject matter to put it up there in the hearts of voters.
As for Best Actress, maybe it’s just me but this feels like a slightly less competitive field this year. After barely missing out on a Best Actress nom for Happy-Go-Lucky a couple years ago, this may be Sally Hawkins year with Made in Dagenham, the kind of uplifting Brit-flick that may be appealing to the Academy. I would probably put Lesley Manville‘s really solid turn in Another Year right up there with Hawkins. and if it were me, Jennifer Lawrence would be right in the mix for Winter’s Bone. I heard really amazing things about Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole out of Toronto, too, and I am a fan of Black Swan and Portman’s performance in it. I wouldn’t count her out completely yet.
The Oscar race will start to take shape more as screeners get sent out and buzz starts to bubble up for this film and peter out for that one. This is a fall with a lot of exciting movies to look forward to and it should be an interesting awards season to watch as well. Much as we all get sick of reading and writing about Oscars, our collective obsession with it drives this business to one extent or another.
I don’t plan to write as much about Oscars as the “Oscar pundits,” more to focus narrowly on specific bits and pieces — screenplay adaptations, docs, maybe foreigns depending on what’s nominated there. After years of having my kids do their Oscar picks randomly using everything from Magic 8-Ball to Twister to Pin the Tail on the Donkey (usually with surprising accuracy) I’ve come to believe that it’s really a crap shoot anyhow.
Fun to talk about and argue about and make charts about, but at the end of the day, I don’t know that any one person’s guesses are actually more accurate or better than the randomness of the Magic 8-Ball. So it goes, let the speculating begin.
I was going to write about how tight the Oscar race already is as we enter the month of October. But looking back at last season’s post-Toronto column… 8 of 10 of the eventual nominees were already well in focus. And had I not been so stubborn about believing that District 9 could make it, I would have had every film except The Blind Side in my Top 13 possibles at the time.
The point is not to ring my own bell, but to pay tribute, really, to how early and how strong the Oscar push efforts are these days. They are still stealth. No one is supposed to notice that a campaign has been going on for months. In fact, no one wants to be up in front, towards the head of the pack, this early. You can be sure that a lot of competitors are giddy that The Social Network has such heat around it RIGHT NOW.
The biggest news coming out of Toronto, aside from films that were non-starters, was that we now have only seven films, by my count, that are in any way contenders that have not been widely available to be seen by The Press and some public. And the only one that seems to be an inevitable nominee – scary words, those – is True Grit.
That is not to say that the other unseen films are not serious contenders. Four are comedies – Due Date, How Do You Know, Love & Other Drugs, and Morning Glory – three from very serious directors and one from the director of one of last year’s commercial phenoms, The Hangover. The Fighter is from revered David O. Russell… who has never made it into the Oscar race. And another, For Colored Girls…, is from critically reviled Tyler Perry, who is a commercial sensation and is working from a play that was one of the most widely seen in the 70s and 80s.
And then there are the films that have already garnered a lot of love. Movies like The Kids Are All Right, Winter’s Bone, and Get Low have many fans and supporters. The Town has had a few weeks as the hot title to discuss, to be followed this weekend by The Social Network. Shutter Island is Scorsese’s biggest worldwide grosser ever, slightly ahead of Best Picture winner The Departed. And what of Oscar faves Clint Eastwood, Mike Leigh, and Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu?
I am pretty comfortable that at least 6 of my 7 Most Liklies will be there in the end. The only real question, to me, is whether both Black Swan and 127 Hours, both masterful, artful, commercial films will make the cut. And that’s when distributors have to decide how they are going to craft their efforts. Does a Sony Classics move forward on all fronts or do they decide which of their films is the most realistic nominee? Does a Roadside Attractions, which has very strong candidates in Best Actor and Best Actress, push for more… aside from maybe screenplay nods? Does Lionsgate believe that either of their actor-nom chasing films are BP candidates? And how does Sony balance what feels like a lock for The Social Network when they have a Jim Brooks movie with Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Jack Nicholson in the hopper?
But the thing that really, really strikes me at this moment is that it is a very competitive race for a dozen or so movies looking to fit into a few slots (anything can happen in Phase II… there is no such thing as a frontrunner to win at this point), GREAT is not necessary. In fact, GREAT may be a problem for some of these films. This is the Oscar season of Really Good.
There is no The Hurt Locker… no film offering itself up as one. There’s no deep underdog like Precious. There is no Avatar. Toy Story 3 and Inception will be the highest grosser amongst BP nominees (assuming TS3 makes it). But neither film has had the kind of impact that Avatar had and will be two of at least five $700 million worldwide grossing films this year.
So we may be back to the best liked movies over the best movies. How lovable is Made in Dagenham? Is Ed Zwick at an advantage making his first comedy in almost 25 years instead of another drama? Do Academy members really want to wrestle with the heaviness of Never Let Me Go and Winter’s Bone and Biutiful and Rabbit Hole when Black Swan and Shutter Island feel both a little weighty, but are also movie movies that leave you leaving the theater excited by the craft of filmmaking?
I’m really curious. All six of the still unseen non-Coen films could be left on the sidelines. Or they could represent 3 or 4 of the final 10.
In any case, we’ve all been whining about the first half of 2010 and I have to say, there are a lot of good times at the movies coming down the pike. And if even half the unseen films are Really Good, it’s kind of a thrilling year… all of a sudden… out of nowhere.
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.
Tyler Perry was on Oprah this week. After all, it’s a little more than two weeks until his award aspirant, For Colored Girls, goes into theaters. But he didn’t say more than a couple of sentences about the film. Hmmm… But he’s going to be on again on his film’s opening day, November 5. And that episode was described by Oprah as being like no Oprah episode before. Interesting. So the movie… oh… no… the show will have 200 grown men who were molested as children, including Perry himself.
I was going to write about how tight the Oscar race already is as we enter the month of October. But looking back at last season’s post-Toronto column… 8 of 10 of the eventual nominees were already well in focus. And had I not been so stubborn about believing that District 9 could make it, I would have had every film except The Blind Side in my Top 13 possibles at the time.
