“The Show Must…” “Go On…” – SAG Preview

January 27, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, SAG | Leave a comment

The actors will chime in with their favorites this Sunday when the Screen Actors Guild awards unfurl.  We can expect little surprises, I’m guessing, as the buzz for some contenders simply overwhelms the competition.   It feels like a natural progression towards Oscar, this.  And much will be decided.  For instance, Oscar ballots are still outstanding.  Who wins the DGA (cough cough Hazanavicius) and who wins the SAG will determine, very likely, how those contender fare on ballots. When the winners take to the stage did it feel well earned? Was it a beautiful moment? Or was it a tiresome slog?  There are speeches and then there are speeches. Sometimes it really doesn’t matter.  No one gave worse speeches than Jennifer Connelly who won for A Beautiful Mind, but that hardly mattered.

ENTER OUR CONTEST TO PREDICT THE SAG WINNERS!

But let’s go through them, shall we? We have our expected winners, our potential surprises and our upsets. Make sure to check Gold Derby, where many more pundits are making predictions.

January 27, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, SAG | Leave a comment
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Poliss & The Minister lead César nominations

January 27, 2012 by Ryan Adams in AWARDS CHATTER, Cesar Awards | 12 Comments

Poliss with 13 nominations
The Minister with 11 nominations
The Artist with 10 nominations
Untouchable with 9 nominations
House of Tolerance with 8 nominations

Meilleur film :

  • The Artist de Michel Hazanavicius
  • La Guerre est déclarée de Valérie Donzelli
  • L’Exercice de l’Etat de Pierre Schoeller
  • Intouchables d’Eric Toledano et Olivier Nakache
  • Polisse de Maïwenn
  • Le Havre d’Aki Kaurismaki
  • Pater d’Alain Cavalier

Meilleur réalisateur :

  • Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)
  • Maïwenn (Polisse)
  • Valérie Donzelli (La Guerre est déclarée)
  • Alain Cavalier (Pater)
  • Eric Toledano et Olivier Nakache (Intouchables)
  • Aki Kaurismaki (Le Havre)
  • Pierre Schoeller (L’Exercice de l’Etat)
January 27, 2012 by Ryan Adams in AWARDS CHATTER, Cesar Awards | 12 Comments
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DGA Preview – The Story Plays Out by the Numbers

January 26, 2012 by Sasha Stone in DGA | 81 Comments

With The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo showing up in the DGA/WGA and Ace awards, it’s always going to be bittersweet telling the Oscar story of 2011.  Everyone knows that the Academy’s choices for nine Best Picture nominees no more represent the best of film in 2011 than the GOP candidates represent the best in leadership in 2011. Most of us regard them as the kindly relatives who show up for Thanksgiving every year.  We carefully hide the films we know they won’t be able to handle and put on the movies we know they’ll love.  That impulse?  That little piece of knowing? That’s the key to the Oscar race.  Drill down into it and you’ll see that man behind the curtain pulling the strings and you’ll want to close your eyes, click your heels together three times and end back in Kansas – because Kansas might have tornadoes but at least it isn’t lulling you to sleep or blinding you with a beautiful illusion.

The DGA will be announced this weekend and there isn’t a lot we can write about, is there? We all pretty much know how this race is going to go and at some point, be it now or later, you will surrender to the inevitability of it. And you probably are wise to do so, to spare yourself the heartbreak if you don’t believe in the frontrunner as being the best film of 2011.

January 26, 2012 by Sasha Stone in DGA | 81 Comments
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Hugo and the Continuum

January 26, 2012 by Editor2 in BEST DIRECTOR, Hugo, Martin Scorsese | 23 Comments

Guest essay by Michael in Florida

Right after the first dreadful Hugo trailer premiered in July, I conjectured that Hugo was Martin Scorsese’s Schindler’s List, i.e., a film outside the director’s comfort zone. After seeing the film several times now, I can safely say that prediction turned out to be prescient, but for a different reason. While both films stretch their respective filmmakers as artists, they remain anchored to their hearts and their obsessions, arguably turning into their most personal works. Scorsese’s cinematic touchstones are still evident in Hugo: society’s self-loathing outcasts, living on the fringes with a last chance at redemption. The final shot in Hugo is a closeup of a machine, built with a movie camera’s parts, which brings the two grieving lead characters together. Georges grieves for a lost passion and Hugo grieves for a lost family. The machine is the redeemer of the forgotten artist and the abandoned thief. It gives their life purpose. If it sounds autobiographical, it is.

In a speech he delivered two years ago right before he started principal photography on Hugo, Martin Scorsese said that “making films and preserving them are the same thing.” Losing a film through deterioration would be as if it was never made at all, as if it never existed. This is something that Georges palpably feels in Hugo.

January 26, 2012 by Editor2 in BEST DIRECTOR, Hugo, Martin Scorsese | 23 Comments
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Oscar Flashback – Driving Miss Daisy and Do the Right Thing

January 26, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, THE ACTORS, THE ACTRESSES, Viola Davis | 143 Comments

It’s really hard, isn’t it, to defend, spend time on, invest any emotion on an institution that could continually, and repeatedly, up to and including this year, make such ridiculous choices when the better films are staring them right in the face. Blame the public too, blame the critics especially, and blame our human experience, which seems to like narratives separate. For all of our liberal talk, Hollywood has still not figured this whole racism thing out.

Two decades ago, racism played itself out uncomfortably at the Oscars, when a young filmmaker and upstart named Spike Lee, one of the best filmmakers working in and outside of Hollywood, released Do the Right Thing. It was by far one of the best, if not the best film of that year. However, Oscar, in all of his progressive glory, decided to nominate Do the Right Thing for only supporting actor for Danny Aiello, and screenplay for Lee. The Best Picture nominees that year were instead:

Driving Miss Daisy (9 nominations, won 4, director NOT nominated)
Born on the Fourth of July (8 nominations, won 2)
Dead Poets Society (4 nominations, won 1)
Field of Dreams (3 nominations, won 0)
My Left Foot (5 nominations, won 2)

January 26, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, THE ACTORS, THE ACTRESSES, Viola Davis | 143 Comments
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Vulture: “Great Oscar Farce”

January 25, 2012 by Ryan Adams in 84th Academy Awards | 143 Comments

Gavin Polone describes himself as an “agent turned manager turned producer.” Today for NYMag’s Vulture he turns into Oscar analyst. His prognosis is Cinematic Psychosis as the Academy increasingly loses touch with reality.

As a kid I remember sitting in front of the TV with my family, like millions of others, in one of the largest non-sports audiences of the year, absorbing the drama and the gaudy clothing worn by beautiful people, and staying up past my bedtime to find out who won the big award: Miss America. But, over time, our changing values and the obvious irrelevance of the beauty pageant caused me and most Americans to dump the silly institution on the trash heap of cultural obsolescence. Soon, lying next to Miss America on that dump will be Oscar.

Whereas at one time Miss America represented the ideal for a woman in this country, the Academy Award may still be associated with the pinnacle in filmmaking achievement; but like Miss America, the Oscar has lost its relevance and value. Whether people realize it or not, it would be a benefit to the entertainment industry, as well as the moviegoing masses, if we just learned to ignore the Oscars.

January 25, 2012 by Ryan Adams in 84th Academy Awards | 143 Comments
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The State of the Race – Don’t Look Back

January 25, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, State of the Race | 210 Comments

If I could call back
All those days of yesteryear
I would never grow old
And I’d never be poor
But darlin, those days are gone.

Stop dreaming
And live on in the future
But darling, don’t look back

And so it was with this that the 2011 Oscar race dipped so deeply and distinctly into the nostalgia of the past it would be hard to tell what era we were living in. Films stripped of sexuality, stories about mostly white males – buttoned up collars, ladies in dresses – memories of mother, father, of the beginning and of the end. War horses from World War I, black maids from the Civil Rights South, Paris in the 1930s, Paris during the birth of film magic, Hollywood’s silent era, And then roaring forward to how it all looks like now – the echoes of 9/11, Baseball and what changed it – there’s Brad Pitt,  sinewy biceps hugged by knit shirts, yet no hot sex in sight.  There’s George Clooney as faithful sad sack to his unfaithful wife. His daughters need focus and he’ll provide it.  But sex for either of the sexiest men alive? Forget it.  There is no time for sex this year – not when you look back to then, not when you try to settle in to now.

At least when Martin Scorsese set out to make Hugo he specifically said he was making a movie his 13-year-old daughter would like.  My own 13-year-old can’t decide which movie is her favorite of the year: Hugo or The Artist.  These are movies made for her, all right.  And the other seven too.  What is it about movies lately?   Is it the mood of the moment? Is economic uncertainty driving the box office to the economic security of “family friendly” films?

What is it about the Oscars lately?  You know it’s an odd year when Alexander Payne’s most accessible film to date, The Descendants, is the only film in the Oscar lineup with ANY profanity in it.   Tree of Life the only movie with even the slightest hint of sexuality in it.  (And even that’s expressed as a kind of shameful ghost of the beginnings of sexuality — what drives erotic thought?) Still, you have to marvel at the Academy’s most abstract choice for Best Picture ever.  Under the old rules, Tree of Life would not have gotten in, but when we are afforded a look into their passionate choices? It beamed brightly and why wouldn’t it — it is the warm reflection of most of their childhoods played out onscreen.

January 25, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, State of the Race | 210 Comments
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Giving Props — When Being so Wrong is Being So Right

January 25, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, PREDICTIONS, We Are the Story | 48 Comments

Major props must go out to Anne Thompson for sticking hard to Tree of Life and never wavering.  Thompson knew that the passionate support for the film (boomer nostalgia cum familial masterpiece) would drive it over when it was all about the number one votes.  My biggest mistake was assuming that broad guild support would have gotten films in.  That was wrong.  Passionate support is what resulted in the Best Picture lineup, for better or worse.

Major props to Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg for accurately predicting the Academy would go for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

And speaking of that movie, major props go out to none other than the Broadcast Film Critics. For years now they’ve been hoping to be the pre-eminent Oscar predicting moving group — I have always said they should aim higher — but they, not the DGA, nor the AFI, not the NBR, not the PGA, not the Golden Globe or the BAFTA — the Critics Choice and the Critics Choice alone predicted both Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In fact, so closely aligned was the BFCA with the AMPAS that with ten Best Picture choices in their grasp they chose War Horse AND Tree of Life AND Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. NO ONE ELSE DID.

Whether they’re trying to BE LIKE OSCAR or whether they simply THINK like Oscar, there is no denying the truth.  My ritual of combing through the films between 2001 and 2008 to find the near-misses? A total failure.  I might have instead looked more closely at the Critics Choice’s top ten films.  Therein, somewhere, would be, more likely, the Academy’s preferences.  The heart wants what it wants and it defies all logic.  If by some chance the AMPAS actually decides this passionate choosing was a good idea we’ll have to remember that for next year.

When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you.

January 25, 2012 by Sasha Stone in featured, PREDICTIONS, We Are the Story | 48 Comments
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In Celebration of Woody and Max

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 19 Comments

I made a quickie video with Woody Allen — set to Allo Darlin’s Woody Allen – I snagged the Woody Allen clips from YouTube. In Celebration of Woody Allen and Max Von Sydow in the same Oscar race. The quality is terrible – my apologies. Am trying a Quicktime version which might be better.

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 19 Comments
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Your Video Guide to the Oscar Nominees

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 6 Comments

Movieclips has it:

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 6 Comments
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Oscar Roundtable — What Might Have Been

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 53 Comments

Newsweek has a lovely roundtable with non-nominees Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton.  Also Viola Davis, Christopher Plummer and George Clooney.  It’s a good time to remember what the Oscars really are. I feel like I need to remind myself of this, and you dear readers too.  Every once in a while it really matters — the talent was recognized.  But mostly it’s about the balance of power in Hollywood – careers are made on the statues.  The greatest films and performances mostly have gone unrecognized because, to a degree, we need more time to figure out whether it was just a passionate love affair or a lasting one.  That isn’t something that can be decided.  Nobody knows anything was our saying here many years ago before it became the trick is not minding and both sayings remain true.  It is not a bad thing for Charlize that she wasn’t Oscar-nominated, nor was it bad that Fassbender or Swinton weren’t.  Their performances have been recorded and appreciated as two of the year’s best.  But imagine what an Oscar nomination can do, for instance, for some of the unexpected nominees.  It can be a good thing, career-wise, but remember — never forget, in fact — that it’s a game.  Some play it better than others. Some lose better than others.  At any rate, here’s one.

More after the cut.

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 53 Comments
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Oscar Nominee Reactions

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 63 Comments

Viola Davis, The Help
“It’s an honor to be nominated a second time, it is a personal accomplishment and triumph for women and women of color. I’m so glad the film has been recognized, it was a labor of love from the moment it was conceived and it is rewarding to see the impact it is having.”

Demian Bichir, A Better Life
“I’m overwhelmed for having my name among those incredible actors. This could have never happened if Chris Weitz had not been the head of this film. He is my brother and I thank him deeply. Hopefully more and more people will jump into iTunes and Netflix to see our film. That will be the biggest reward we could get. I dedicate this nomination to those eleven million human beings who make our lives easier and better in the US.”

Meryl Streep, Best Actress for The Iron Lady:
“I am honored to be in company with such beautiful artists, and touched deeply by my fellow actors for their generosity in giving me this acknowledgment.”

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 63 Comments
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Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Oscar Nominations Morning

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 330 Comments

The trick is not minding.

The good – Hugo out front with 11 nominations – the broad support shown throughout the guilds makes itself known with the wonderfully deserving Martin Scorsese masterpiece.

The Tree of Life with 3 nominations. The Academy has proved that it loves Terrence Malick, as many were saying. The industry at large – where younger, hipper voters reside, not so much. But who can complain, I suppose, with this particular nominee. Not many will.

Rooney Mara and Demian Bichir for surprise acting nominations, even though Mara’s nod came at the expense of Tilda Swinton’s and Bichir’s came at the expense of Leo DiCaprio’s. But okay, fine. It’s nice to see these faces and it shows, despite the way Best Picture and Best Director (and most heartbreakingly of all, best Score) turned out, there was broad support for Dragon Tattoo.

That some films managed so many nominations but no Best Picture placement shows me what I most feared about this preferential voting: that you have to hit at number one. It doesn’t help if you’re a popular choice – you have to be a number one choice. And as we’ve seen by at least two of these nominees today, that isn’t such a great thing. But the trick is not minding. Hear me, brain, stop minding.

JC Chandor for Margin Call – incredibly well deserved and congratulations to him.

January 24, 2012 by Sasha Stone in 84th Academy Awards | 330 Comments
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Hugo leads 2012 Oscar Nominations with 11

January 24, 2012 by Ryan Adams in 84th Academy Awards, AWARDS CHATTER | 443 Comments

Best Picture

  • “The Artist” Thomas Langmann, Producer
  • “The Descendants” Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Producers
  • “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” Scott Rudin, Producer
  • “The Help” Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, Producers
  • “Hugo” Graham King and Martin Scorsese, Producers
  • “Midnight in Paris” Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, Producers
  • “Moneyball” Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, Producers
  • “The Tree of Life” Nominees to be determined
  • “War Horse“ Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers

Directing

  • “The Artist” Michel Hazanavicius
  • “The Descendants” Alexander Payne
  • “Hugo” Martin Scorsese
  • “Midnight in Paris” Woody Allen
  • “The Tree of Life” Terrence Malick

Actor in a Leading Role

  • Demián Bichir in “A Better Life”
  • George Clooney in “The Descendants”
  • Jean Dujardin in “The Artist”
  • Gary Oldman in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”
  • Brad Pitt in “Moneyball”

Actress in a Leading Role

  • Glenn Close in “Albert Nobbs”
  • Viola Davis in “The Help”
  • Rooney Mara in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady”
  • Michelle Williams in “My Week with Marilyn”

January 24, 2012 by Ryan Adams in 84th Academy Awards, AWARDS CHATTER | 443 Comments
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Caption This!

January 23, 2012 by Ryan Adams in AWARDS CHATTER | 66 Comments

For our international wits, early-risers & nomin’insomniacs. I’ll go first.

Uggie has the good breeding to only lift his front leg at the Golden Globes.

January 23, 2012 by Ryan Adams in AWARDS CHATTER | 66 Comments
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