Thanks to Craig over at LiC for the tip-off that first, Steve Pond (Oscar guy who wrote for The Envelope – often has the inside scoop on the goings on within the Academy, and almost always pro-Academy, in my opinion, not that there’s anything wrong with that) has written that there will be a change in Oscar’s final vote for Best Pic – it all makes my girly head spin but why don’t you give it a shot:

Instead of just voting for one nominee, the way Academy members have almost always done on the final ballot, voters will be asked to rank all 10 nominees in order of preference — and the results will be tallied using the complicated preferential system, which has been used for decades during the nominating process but almost never on the final ballot.

As a result, a film could be the first choice of the largest number of voters, but find itself nudged out of the top prize by another movie that got fewer number one votes but more twos and threes.

It sounds crazy, but there’s good reason to make the change at a time when dividing the vote among an expanded slate of 10 nominees could otherwise allow a film to win with fewer than 1,000 votes (out of the nearly 6,000 voting members).

And:

Voters will be asked to rank the 10 best picture nominees in order of preference, one through 10. Davis says that the category will be listed on a special section of the Oscar ballot, detachable from the rest so that a separate team of PricewaterhouseCoopers staffers can undertake the more complicated tabulation process.

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Richard Roeper has named (500) Days of Summer his number film of the summer.  As follows:

Best movies of the season:

1. “(500) Days of Summer”
2. “Inglourious Basterds”
3. “Up”
4. “The Hurt Locker”
5. “District 9″

Honorable mention: “Public Enemies,” “Julie and Julia,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” “The Hangover,” “Funny People,” “Star Trek.”

And speaking of Inglorious Basterds, I was remiss in not posting this interesting Mark Blankenship column from HuffPo on the deeper meanings of the Tarantino film:

Maybe I’m alone here, but I say the film is about something more.

To begin, I’d argue that Tarantino has consciously chosen to make a movie about hating Nazis because Nazis are the only people that most of the Western world agrees to hate. And since most of us concur that their actions were evil, Hitler and the Nazis often become abstracted into general symbols for dark deeds. I mean, it seems like every time one politician wants to belittle another, or a student wants to complain about a teacher, or hell, a fry cook wants to bash her shift manager, they all resort to calling their enemy a “Nazi” or “Mrs. Hitler” or some such thing.

I haven’t seen all of them so I would feel uncomfortable with such a list.  I know that Hurt Locker and 500 Days would be on it.  Off to see District 9.

Click here for the full poll. Please choose five favorites based on your impeccable judgment, keen insight, and fleeting glimpses of purty shots in trailers.

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In a deal worth $4 Billion, thousands of Marvel superheros, sidekicks and villains are being blended into the Disney family. THR has details:

Disney acquires ownership of 5,000 Marvel characters to be overseen by Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter, who is charged with cherry-picking when and where they’ll show up within Disney’s vast empire, including online and in video games.

What does this mean for Iron Man, Thor, X-Men, and Spidey?

“We’ll take a look and see, but the bottom line is we like what they’ve been doing so far,” Disney studio head Richard Cook told The Hollywood Reporter.

Translation: the bottom line is the bottom line.

“We believe that adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation,” said Robert Iger, president and CEO of Disney.

Enchanting! Well then, when you put it in those terms, it makes my soul want to be devoured!

Why Film Awards Are Still Important

As Oscar season wakes up from its long nap, there are yet still more voices, every day more voices, flooding the niche.  Can the niche hold?  It seems as though the beast that is the “Oscar blogger” has not scaled back – most film bloggers and journalists are now Oscar bloggers somehow.  It’s the contest, no, it’s the movies.  No, it’s the celebrity, no, it’s the movies.  No, it’s the excitement.  No, it’s being right.  No, it’s the movies.  It’s the movies.  It’s always about the movies.  Isn’t it?

Although it’s still early yet, Venice and Toronto are right around the corner.  Twitter has spun the spindle even tighter so that now, instead of one sentence judgment calls on films like District 9 and the Avatar footage, we’re going to get one sentence conclusions, those of us choosing to read, on films we’ve all been waiting to see.  If you think it was a pointless, shallow practice before, just wait until Twitter chews it up nice and bloody.  On the other hand, the immediacy of the event will be heard, experienced, in real time to give followers a taste of what it is like to discover films that could be this year’s Oscar contenders, just as it also will give us a taste of which films will not.
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It seems strange that the American Cinematheque would be honoring Matt Damon with a Lifetime Achievement award already, yet that is exactly what they’re doing.  This is probably going to be Matt Damon’s year in that he’s got two big films coming out – The Informant and Invictus, now that the Green Zone has been pushed to next year.  The Informant has Damon gaining 30 pounds to play disgraced corporate whistle blower Mark Whitacre, and in Invictus he plays Francois Pienaar.  Two completely different roles for the versatile, under-the-radar Damon.  Matt Damon was one of the best and most underrated performances in The Departed, overlooked by the Academy.  But the real crime i his career is being snubbed for his brilliant portrayal of a sociopath in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwIoPnikvnA[/youtube]

The Broadcast Film Critics Association may provide one of the more reliable pools from which the year’s 10 Best Picture nominees will be drawn. We’ll update this chart whenever a new film ranks high enough to be named ‘Critics Choice’ — with a score higher than 85.
(If there’s a title I’ve forgotten, let me know so we can insert it.)

Last year’s BFCA Top 10 after the cut.

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AJ Schnack is talking up The Cove not being included (so far) in the Tokyo Film Fest lineup.  The fest is funded by the Japanese government and is it so surprising they wouldn’t want the movie shown?  There is some disagreement on it, however, and no one at the Tokyo Fest is every going to admit that they’d were given orders not to include the film.  But what’s kind of funny is how the supposed theme of the thing is “green.”

Meanwhile, Schnack reports that, unfortunately, The Cove is not doing well box-office-wise, “slipping 40% from the previous week and now down to 29 theaters and total box office of $537K.”  This is perhaps because it is a subject that is very difficult to digest, so to speak.  In tough times, audiences seek happier films, that sort of thing.  Awards attention, that’s what this film needs.

Scott Feinberg isn’t working at the LA Times anymore but he’s gotten back on the horse anyway and has updated his predictions for the year on his blog.  Here are his Best Pic projections.  Invictus, gee, no pressure.  Clint can take the heat, though.  You have to admit, it’s kind of cool to contemplate the Big Ten this way:

BEST PICTURE
Projected Nominees
[1] “Invictus” (Warner Brothers, 12/11)
[2] “Nine” (The Weinstein Company, 11/25, trailer)
[3] “Amelia” (Fox Searchlight, 10/23, trailer)
[4] “Up in the Air” (Paramount, TBD)
[5] “Precious” (Lions Gate, 11/6, trailer)
[6] “Avatar” (20th Century Fox, 12/18, teaser)
[7] “The Lovely Bones” (Paramount, 12/11, trailer)
[8] “An Education” (Sony Pictures Classics, 10/9, trailer)
[9] “Capitalism: A Love Story” (Overture, 9/23, trailer)
[10] “The Hurt Locker” (Summit, 6/26, trailer)
Major Threats
[11] “The Informant!” (Warner Brothers, 9/18, trailer)
[12] “Up” (Disney, 5/29, trailer)
[13] “A Serious Man” (Focus Features, 10/2, trailer)
On the Outside
[14] “Where the Wild Things Are” (Warner Brothers, 10/16, trailer)
[15] “District 9“ (Sony, 8/14, trailer)
[16] “Star Trek” (Paramount, 5/8, trailer)
[17] “The Cove” (Roadside Attractions, 7/31, trailer)
[18] “The Road” (The Weinstein Company, 10/16, trailer)
[19] “Bright Star” (Apparation, 9/18, trailer)
[20] “Julie & Julia” (Columbia, 8/7, trailer)

As much as we’ve talked about An Education here over the past few weeks, is it possible we haven’t featured the trailer yet? We ran an extended clip montage several weeks ago, but I stumbled across an official trailer by accident this morning so it’s time we took a look. Our friend Craig Kennedy at LiC who sees everything and isn’t that easy to please, saw An Education last night and tells me it’s an “Easy Top 5 up to this point.”

Nice stormy Agora character banners. I like that this is getting the full-court marketing treatment reflects the epic flourish of the film. Two more after the cut, (And, as always, you can click on these compact shots to supersize them.)

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Widely reported a couple of days ago, David Fincher’s movie about the creation Facebook has been officially greenlit and will begin shooting in October on a budget of $47 million. The movie is based the book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. Here Aaron Sorkin talks about how quickly he became convinced he wanted to adapt it. I’ve seen Sorkin’s script, Social Network, and can assure you there’s no reason to be skeptical — it’s a great story, a great read, and it’ll be interesting to see Fincher scale back from effects-heavy films to work in a more intimate vein for a change.

[Note: I'm told that this video has been floating around for several days, but it's new to me so maybe new to some of you too. Clearly the interview itself has to be a few months old because he's talking about being almost done with a first draft of a script that's been in the wild for weeks.]

Directed by Grant Heslov, starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Rebecca Mader.

Based on true events described in Jon Ronson’s 2004 book of the same title, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” involves a down-on-his-luck reporter (McGregor) who gets more than he bargains for when he meets a special forces agent (Clooney) who reveals the existence of a secret, psychic military unit whose goal is to use paranormal powers to end war as we know it.

(enlarge)

More good news for The White Ribbon, as a day after it’s submitted as Germany’s entry for Best Foreign Film, it wins a prize for Best Film of the Year. (Period. Foreign or otherwise.) Awards by the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique, recent winners of the FIPRESCI Best Film of the Year include There Will Be Blood, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, and Volver, so not only is this a prestigious honor, it’s prescient.

See more somber stills after the cut, via desmontandohollywood.

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“We respect directors in our country.”
– Mélanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus (Inglourious Basterds)

We do here too. So much that the list of names you guys suggested outnumber your favorite actors this year. The poll is way too long to have on the main page so click here, or on the sample below, to find it after the cut.

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