Over at In Contention, Kris Tapley points out in his tech support column that the movie Skyfall has three potential Oscar contenders who, between them, have a total number of 34 Oscar nominations with zero wins.
Roger Deakins, 9 Oscar noms for cinematography, 0 wins.
Thomas Newman, 10 Oscar noms for original score, 0 wins.
Greg P. Russell 15 Oscar noms for sound, 0 wins.
Jeff Wells declares, “Lincoln hasn’t a fucking chance in hell of winning the Best Picture Oscar.” It makes me long for Damien Bona to be alive and writing up this Oscar year.
Frustrated at how things seem to be turning out, he queries Oscar pundits to find out how they think about Oscar predicting because he really wants Silver Linings Playbook to take the whole thing. Some interesting responses from Anne Thompson, Pete Howell, Steve Pond, Tom O’Neil, Scott Feinberg and Kris Tapley. At the very end Wells writes:
Wells to Stone: I just heard from a friend who went to see Lincoln last night at the Arclight, and she said she found it slow and slogging, and that a few people walked out. You’re living in a Lincoln bubble. An industry-centric Lincoln bubble. Reality will filter in eventually. It’s a good film but forget the Best Picture Oscar.
His readers disabuse him of the notion of walk-outs in fairly short order.
For the record, Jeff Wells has Lincoln listed all the way down at number 9 on his list. I have Argo in the number one spot, followed by Lincoln with Silver Linings in the third slot. I suspect much in going to change in the coming weeks but, no offense, only someone with limited awareness would dismiss a film like Lincoln. But that’s just me. For now it remains in the underdog spot, which is the best place for it to be.
Melena Ryzik talks with Jennifer Lawrence, a gal with sass, for the NY Times.
How do you push your late entry into the Oscar race? NY Times’ Michael Cieply writes:
For those who have wondered how Hollywood’s studios will get their latest-released movies seen by thousands of awards voters before the unusually early onset of Oscar voting on Dec. 17, Universal Pictures has an answer: blitzkrieg.
On Friday, Universal’s publicity team circulated word of a lightning strike by its “Les Misérables,” which opens in commercial theaters on Christmas Day, with a series of six Los Angeles-area screenings in about eight hours on Nov. 24. The film’s director, Tom Hooper, will attend all of them — and this, after he executes a similar maneuver in New York on Nov. 23, where the screenings cluster in more manageable Manhattan.
Skyfall’s half-billion dollars in incredible worldwide opening
Alexandre Desplat on Zero Dark Thirty:
“I know it sounds like an action film, but it’s more like a Japanese Kurosawa movie. And the way I approached it was very organic and I used a very strange lineup. At Abbey Road I had twin horns, twin trombones, three tubas. I had strings, I had violins, twin celli and twin basses. It’s a very strange sound, very deep, very dark, but as I said very archaic as if the sound was coming from 2000 years ago.”