Slightly less intimidating when they take out the sexuality. Equally compelling. If you want to draw a more general audience crowd, you have to do a little hand-holding.

For another in our ongoing series, Thelma Adams, Susan Wloszczyna and I discuss the preliminary stage of the Best Supporting Actor race. It could and will likely shift, but how I believed it is standing right now is:

Jonah Hill
Christopher Plummer
Albert Brooks
Nick Nolte
Max Von Sydow
Von Sydow wins. Best guess right now.
SUSAN: I would give it to Max, too, performance unseen. He should have gotten one for Hannah and The Exorcist let alone his Bergman classics.
Oh, and Mr. Brooks wants to win. He even stuck a fork in it.
THELMA: Sasha’s right: in this category, we still have too many gaps in knowledge, although I think we’ve covered pretty much what we’ve seen so far in 2011. Is there a problem when an actor wants the Oscar so badly — you should look like you want it, and shake every old Academy member’s hand, and yet be humble, and praise every body else. It’s such an act — and Colin Firth nailed it last year.

Head on over to Thelmadams.com and read the rest.

Thanks to Garth at Dark Horizons

Initial thoughts – it is already breaking my heart. Can there be an Oscar nomination for a horse?

Like In Contention’s Kris Tapley, I too marvel at the innovative ways the Dragon Tattoo team is marketing the upcoming Fincher film.  Of course, there isn’t a movie I’m more looking forward to so any droplet from the team is appreciated.  Tapley points us to this Youtube video of the making of the new poster, modeled after the Dragon Tattoo’s Mouth Taped Shut Tumblr and Twitter razor blade theme – music by Trent Reznor and Atticus.

An interesting essay over at  Fandor.com comparing two stage adaptations being released this year, Carnage and A Dangerous Method (The Ides of March and War Horse are two other prominent stage productions to be brought to film this year).  I agree with the writer who says that the trick in making Carnage is successful is choosing the right actors.  Polanski, I think, did a marvelous job as director hemming in the story.  At any rate, the subject of Keira Knightley in A Dangerous Method is brought up:

Knightley has taken a lot of undeserved flack for the extremity of her performance in the early scenes of A Dangerous Method, when her character is manically all-over-the-place. Her sexually unhinged Sabina often falls into a jutting mannerism with her chin when she’s really unsettled, a bold choice on Knightley’s part; it looks like she’s chosen an animal of some kind as a pattern for Sabina’s physical behavior, and she goes all-out with this choice. As someone with more than a passing acquaintance with the mentally disturbed, all I can say is that Knightley’s chin mannerism here is exactly the kind of protective physical thing that people who are clinically ill often cling to, and it is also exactly the kind of thing that actors shy away from when they are playing mentally disturbed characters because it is wildly unflattering.

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This year’s shortlist is:

360
The Artist
The Deep Blue Sea
The Descendants
Faust
The Kid With A Bike
Shame
Trishna
We Need To Talk About Kevin 

The shortlist for Best British Newcomer is:

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