There is nothing sweeter than the idea of The Hurt Locker winning Best Picture, or its director, Kathryn Bigelow, taking home the big prize. But, and I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, this was an expected win. Not only that, the Gothams and the Film Independent Spirits are outside indie awards — more indicative of potential nominations than Oscar wins. What...
Monthly Archives: November 2009
via IndieWire: Best Feature The Hurt Locker — Kathryn Bigelow, director; Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier, Greg Shapiro, producers (Summit Entertainment) Best Documentary Food, Inc. — Robert Kenner, director; Robert Kenner, Elise Pearlstein, producers (Magnolia Pictures) Best Ensemble Performance The Hurt Locker — Jeremy Renner,...
Indiewire’s Peter Knegt does a good job laying out the award precursors coming soon to an Oscar blog near you. Actually, you could probably say it will becoming from all sides, from every angle and outlet and social networking tool near you. I’m scared of Oscars 2009 where Twitter and Facebook are involved. There might turn out to be such a thing as too...
by John Villeneuve Every year some painfully half-baked, ill-conceived or inept films get submitted by countries from around the world for consideration in the Best Foreign Film category. However, this year seems to have more than usual. Which begs the question, if you don’t have a respectable film to present, and if it is clear that it will never get nominated,...
In the same TIME feature Sasha quotes below (and I now see was the platform for The Lovely Bones preview a few days ago), Richard Corliss has high praise for Colin Firth in A Single Man, and for first-time director Tom Ford: For close to three decades, Colin Firth has been a reliable, gently seductive leading man… But he never got that Role of a Lifetime that actors...
Like Jason Reitman, Noah Baumbach has mastered the near-impossible knack of writing smart, memorable, quotable dialogue that doesn’t sound like a stand-up routine in search of a rim-shot. I suppose George Hickenlooper would mock a movie like this as a “puerile masturbatory self examination of stone dead emotional detachment and characters who no longer...
I’ll bounce off Sasha’s angle once more to feature a second Variety tribute from one actor to another: I had the privilege of playing Hal Holbrook’s gay lover in the landmark TV film “That Certain Summer.” His character was a divorced father with a teenage son, and in one powerful climactic scene, the boy rejects him when he discovers he’s...
Richard Corliss, in a Fall Movie Preview, writes up Invictus admiringly: If there’s a whiff of colonialism in casting Hollywood stars as renowned South Africans, the actors work hard to find strength and nuance in their roles. Damon, beefed up for the occasion, makes Pienaar a stalwart yet courtly figure. Freeman infuses Mandela’s speeches with the same gentleness...