I saw the promos for this last night but can’t find any info online about it.  Footage will be shown at some point during tonight’s new episode of Fox’s runaway hit, Glee.  I suspect it will eventually find its way to YouTube so keep a look out for it.  One of the best things about Avatar now are the low expectations involved.  Heading into the Oscar race, that is, for the most part, where you want to be.  This seems to only apply to big Hollywood movies – the little indies really need the pre-season buzz to stay aloft.  The only problem has been the rumblings about the budget and the cost.  Point made here, and then debated here. Box office is the last thing on my mind with Avatar – the movie is going to kill.  Even if it tanks domestically, it will have a long life overseas.  From what I can tell, the film, like Titanic before it, has something for everyone.  Parents will take their kids, tweens and grandparents to it.  It looks like old school sci-fi mixed with new fangled digital 3-D.

Alex Billington at FirstShowing has unearthed this unearthly version of a new Fox Avatar promo aimed at… somebody else besides me. I kept waiting for Simba, Tarzan and Lassie to pop up. But I understand the effort to cover all the quandrants.

It’s probably a no-brainer that Avatar is take that title home so perhaps it isn’t worth doing an actual contest on this, but I really like the way Loyal has laid it all out at the Corner Cinema, showing that the lowest grossing of the nominated five has won in a long while.  But the highest grossing only sometimes wins.

Of the possibilities, which do you think will crack $100 mil?  Obviously cracking that number means different things to different productions.  A film like Precious getting anywhere near that would be extraordinary circumstances.  But these films, I expected, will do at least $100:

1. Avatar
2. Sherlock Holmes
3. The Lovely Bones
4. Nine
5. Invictus
6. Up in the Air (or very close to it)

Which films have already gotten there? (according to Box Office Mojo)

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince $300 mil
2. Up, a staggering $293 mil
3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs $121 mil
4. Inglourious Basterds $119 mil
5. District 9 $115 mil

And then the squeakers:

1. Public Enemies $97 mil
2. Julie & Julia $93 mil
3. Coraline $75 mil
4. Where the Wild Things Are $69

EW’s Dave Karger takes a look at Precious’ opening numbers and comes up with the possibility, I think for the first time in the mainstream press, that this film could be the frontrunner.  However, he doesn’t come out and says he thinks it is – just that the possibility is there:

Playing in just 18 theaters, Precious grossed a phenomenal $1.8 million, according to studio estimates. If those numbers hold, Precious will become only the third live-action to score a per-theater average of over $100,000, following in the heels of multiple Oscar nominees Dreamgirls and Brokeback Mountain. Considering all of this was accomplished by a film by a relatively new director with no big movie stars in it, it’s an amazing achievement. It was well on its way to becoming a Best Picture nominee already, but now Precious is seeming more and more like a front-runner. The question now: Can it distinguish itself from Dreamgirls (which missed out on a Best Picture nod) and Brokeback Mountain (which lost to Crash) and actually win? Between Invictus, The Hurt Locker, The Lovely Bones, Up in the Air, and Nine, it certainly seems to have some stiff competition.

Up in the Air is really the crouching tiger, hidden dragon here.  The studio has done a great job of quieting the film’s hype – and Jason Reitman has been traveling all over the US and abroad giving q&a’s and screenings of the film.  He is one hard-working dude.  But as Karger says, the race is starting to look more solid.

No matter what anyone says, no matter how much they want to believe it isn’t true, no matter how many times people tell you that the National Board of Review doesn’t matter — they do matter and they will especially matter this year. The NBR and the Critics Choice are the two groups that will deliver a solid top ten of best pictures that could start to help the Academy’s daunting task of finding ten.  I do suspect that one or two titles will sneak into the Oscar race that none of us sees coming (there will always be that person who steps up and says “I saw it coming.”)

The Golden Globes will offer ten but they will be split between comedy/musical and drama.   The American Film Institute will also offer ten, as will the many critics’ groups.  The NBR is usually first and therefore it can have significance.  You can get mad about it if you’d like but it doesn’t change what I’ve seen over the past decade of doing this.

It is perhaps too soon to know about the films that no one has seen.  They will have to start screening them to get on some of these early lists, unless their strategy is to avoid the many pre-Oscar awards.

The list is alive! From the Times Online, UK.  This is a very Brit-centric list — it’s therefore laughable, really, but hey – we take what we can get this time of year.

Here are the only two of this year’s Oscar contenders to make the list:

In the Loop – 81
The Hurt Locker – 72

More interesting placements after the cut.

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Precious now has a 61 rating on Metacritic.  This might matter more if the film hadn’t yet been screened and won two major awards heading into the race.  Okay, so maybe Sundance isn’t a major award, but for this film it set up a precedent that is likely to continue.  It has heat, it has momentum.  It doesn’t have two New York critics from The New Yorker and from New York Magazine.  Somehow, though, this is kind of beside the point.  If the film were being judged/seen this week for the first time we would all write it off.  But it has been vetted, as I’ve already written in the comments, long before it will have hit theaters.  To that end, the festival route has been great for Precious.  I have read some really great reviews on the film.  This one by Drew McWeeney at Hitfix worth a read.  And here, Scott Foundas of the Village Voice is one New Yorker who went another way – high praise for Mo’Nique and for Sadibe:

A former casting director, [Lee] Daniels shows undeniable savoir faire with his actors, a mix of musicians and comedians effectively cast against type, from a dark-haired, deglamorized Mariah Carey as a tough-love social worker to a subtle Lenny Kravitz as an attentive male nurse. The picture belongs, however, to the gale-force Mo’Nique, who transforms an ostensibly one-note monster mom into a complex portrait of a psychologically damaged woman (no matter that Daniels seems to have edited her most showstopping scene in a blender), and to the magnanimous Sidibe, who carries the alternately exhausting and exhilarating narrative on her formidable shoulders. For most of the movie, her stoically beautiful face stays wrought tight in a mask of sadness and self-loathing. When she relaxes those muscles ever so slightly—one of the movie’s few subtle touches—it is like a weight of centuries has been lifted.

Focus gets the party started – thanks to Dora for sending in:

The LA Times’ Rachel Abramowitz talks to the screenwriters about how to bring the fantasy elements of The Lovely Bones to the screen.  Hands down, this would be the hardest line to walk adapting the novel to the screen. However, it’s worth noting that if there is one director who can do it it’s Peter Jackson.

After young Susie Salmon is murdered by the local pedophile in “The Lovely Bones,” she ends up in a place easily mistaken for heaven, but what she discovers is that this magical terrain is actually an in-between state, “a place she’s caught in until she can resolve the issues of her death,” says co-writer Phillipa Boyens. “This in-between world is a 14-year-old’s idea of what an ideal world can be.”

Hm.  “Local pedophile,” sounds like “local grocer” or “local milkman.”

In Susie’s heaven-like afterlife, a giant camellia lurks in a crystalline mountain lake, nestled beneath snow-capped mountains. “Susie doesn’t understand what it means. The audience doesn’t either, but these things will and do make sense. It’s the language of dreams. That’s what we were trying for,” Boyens says.

The startling images — shot by Jackson’sfellow Oscar-winning “Lord of the Rings” cinematographer Andrew Lesnie and crafted by production designer Naomi Shohan — are a melding of computer imagery and the startlingly beautiful vistas of the South Island of New Zealand.

“She’s running on a beach, which is a real beach in New Zealand,” Boyens says. “That lake is at the top of a mountain in the South Island. They helicoptered up there.”

“It’s the idea of being trapped in a perfect world,” adds Walsh, pointing to the snow globe metaphor that opens Sebold’s book, in which Susie pities the lone penguin locked in his plastic paradise. “Susie’s in her own version of the snow globe.”

Things aren’t anywhere near as quiet as they should be right about now. There hasn’t been a No Country for Old Men stretching its legs for the long haul; there probably isn’t a Slumdog Millionaire poised to eat up every available award known to man. That might be Up in the Air. Is there a showdown between a scrappy underdog and a Big Hollywood Movie ready to emerge? If so, there are little to no indicators. This is going to be a last-minute scramble.

And yet, there is much ruminating online about the race, such as it is. A recent New York Observer piece lamented the absence of Oscar movies. Erik Childress has launched his seasonal series, the Oscar Eye and has started to look at the movies but refuses to count in those that haven’t yet been seen. Tom O’Neil recently polled a few to find out their take. Childress has a list of films he thinks are the frontrunners right now but he also has ten images at the top of his site, and those ten seem to be close to what the ultimate ten might look like, give or take a film or two. Remember, the votes are being counted in order of preference. The list will still show films that are passionately loved by many in the Academy.

Keep reading to delve into Deep Background of Academy history when there were ten nominees for Best Pic.

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These were just posted on Iconvision. It’s a bit hard to tell if we’ve seen them before — I like the one with the humans mixed with the aliens.

Tom O’Neil asked a few of us to send in our thoughts on this idea that the Gothams snubbed Precious and that somehow Oprah was involved.  Or maybe there are two different ideas being floated – one is that Oprah and Tyler Perry are making it uncool to like Precious and the other is that the Gothams snubbed Precious and what that might mean for Oscar.

The Gothams snubbed Precious?  What does it mean to Oscar?  Squat.  That’s what it means.

Here is the NY Post’s Lou Lumenick:

The total snub of “Precious” in the Gotham Award nominations yesterday, which Tom O’Neil calls “shocking” in the L.A. Times, tends to confirm my suspicion that awards-wise, the film could suffer a backlash because of its high-profile endorsement by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry.

This would be known as the reverse-Oprah effect, which seems to only apply to movies she’s either involved with or films she hypes — like Australia.  The thing is, and I’m fairly sure I’m right about this, the movie itself is what makes the difference.  I really don’t think, sad to say, that Academy members pay that much attention to Oprah (or anyone else for that matter).  If she loves and promotes Juno, people see Juno and love it so it keeps right on going.  If she loves and promotes Australia – people see it, hate it and it goes nowhere.  People have already seen Precious.  That is the part of the equation that reverses the premise of a backlash.  The only reason the Gothams went a different direction is that, at this time of year, awards groups like to distinguish themselves from one another.

So when everyone was lining up behind No Country for Old Men, one group decided to honor There Will Be Blood instead.  It kind of made a difference for that film.  Honoring Precious at the Gothams isn’t going to do much for that movie that it doesn’t already have; honoring The Hurt Locker helps a movie that really does need to be back in the spotlight and doesn’t have Oprah and Tyler Perry pumping up its potential box office returns.

Anyway, please click on over to The Envelope to read what others have to say — people like Steve Pond, Jeff Wells, Gregory Ellwood, etc.

Film Misery (which just updated its Oscar predictions) points us to this great vid of the Nine cast putting together. I just rewatched Chicago the other day and was again thoroughly entertained. I know it isn’t the deepest film film ever made and I know that it’s gotten kind of a bad rap over the years (although with Polanski’s recent troubles somehow I doubt we’ll ever be having the Chicago v. The Pianist argument with as much fervor ever again.) The dance numbers in Chicago are astonishing, especially He Had it Coming (Cell Block Tango), which you can see after the cut.

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More photos found at Avatarplanet.net

“Any fear about this film is long behind us,” Titanic producer Jon Landau told the AFP at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea.  Landau was there to screen the infamous 30 minutes.  The project has been hushed on the web, save for those who were disappointed by what they saw, or let down?  Could it be that Avatar is really a lot like the Segway?  Expectations were in fantasy land but when you accept it for what it is it’s pretty cool indeed.  It’s just a little hard to keep those expectations down when quotes like this keep popping up.

“When we started it was a little like the people at NASA who first went to the moon,” [Landau] said.

“When John Kennedy said they were going to put someone on the moon, they didn’t really know how they were going to do it and when we started we had an idea but we had no idea how we were going to do it either.”

“The excitement for me is that we are finally going to be able to show something that we have been working on for four-and-a-half years. Because a film is nothing if no one sees it,” said Landau.

Unlike landing on the moon, this journey might actually lead some place:

“No single movie can revolutionise the movie industry but one film can be a step in the evolution of movies. What we think we are doing here is unlocking the door for more filmmakers to tell more stories.”

It’s strange that A Serious Man has such a middling score at Metacritic considering the types of reviews it’s been getting.  With a couple of bad ones, the film is picking up raves from the LA Times and the NY Times.

The LA Times’ Kenneth Turan calls it “pitch-perfect”:

Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of “No Country for Old Men,” to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.

Praise for the whole:

Doing their own editing (under the longtime pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) and working with such regulars as cinematographer Roger Deakins, costume designer Mary Zophres, composer Carter Burwell, co-casting director Ellen Chenoweth and production designer Jess Gonchor, the Coens have so exactly made the film they envisioned that it is hard not to be drawn in. Working largely with unfamiliar actors, their trademark blurring of the line between serious and comic has never been as artfully done as it is here.

High praise from Slate’s Dana Stevens:

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers’ technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse. The casting of near-unknowns in all the major roles (Michael Stuhlbarg is a renowned Broadway actor but unfamiliar to movie audiences) was a stroke of genius, and every performance is impeccable, as is the lambent cinematography by Roger Deakins (the Coens’ longtime collaborator). The costume design and set design (by Mary Zophres and Jess Gonchor) brilliantly evoke the staid and clannish world of semi-assimilated Midwestern Jews (a group for whom the new mores of the ’60s arrived much later than for the urban gentiles of Mad Men).

More raves from AO Scott at the NY Times, and NY Magazine’s David Edelstein.

It’s time to look again at how the films are stacking up, critics-wise vis-a-vis the Oscar race.

Current High Scores

Of these films, The Hurt Locker, Up and Ponyo are probably Oscar-bound, though In the Loop most definitely should be (I don’t think enough people will see it, unfortunately, but will catch up with it five years down the road).

The Broadcast Film Critics have it like:

The Hurt Locker – 93
Inglourious Basters – 91
A Serious Man – 88

But the BFCA have a difficult site to navigate.

Rotten Tomatoes is too all over the place to figure out anymore.  And some of the films haven’t even opened yet so their score is still fluid and nowhere near fixed.  But I pulled out a few high scorers:

The Hurt Locker – 98%
Up – 97%
District 9 – 90%
Star Trek – 95%
In the Loop – 94%
Ponyo – 91%
An Education – 89%
Inglourious Basters – 88%
500 Days of Summer – 87%
Bright Star – 84%