Roger Durling’s wildly successful Santa Barbara Film Fest is underway with tributes and with honors being handed out for the next week or so. Last night, Brad Pitt was honored with the Leonard Maltin Modern Master award.
After a lengthy interview with Maltin, which covered all of Pitt’s work with directors like both Ridley and Tony Scott, the Coen brothers, Tarantino, and beyond, Pitt’s frequent collaborator David Fincher made a rare appearance to hand Pitt his Modern Master award. They have made three films together, if you didn’t know (which of course would be insane to not know). Pitt is a muse of sorts for Fincher, starting with Se7en (1995), then Fight Club (1999), and finally Benjamin Button (2008). Pitt said when accepting his award that he hoped the two get to do five more collaborations together. Wouldn’t that be something?
Brad Pitt is having quite a season. It’s as though we’ve never seen a movie star. Movie stars of his stature are “as rare as albino pandas, and here’s one of them,” said Fincher. What that means is that it’s rare indeed for an actor to possess that thing — that movie star thing. Charisma that could power an entire planet. You can’t teach it. You can’t learn it. It’s there or it isn’t. And with Pitt, it was there from his first appearance onscreen.
Here are the videos from last night:
Apologize in advance for posting this to as many threads as possible, for obvious reasons! It’s easy to skip over, though, once voted.
All who have seen each of the nine Best Picture nominees at the Oscars this year (give or take a Ford v Ferrari, which clearly cannot win either the online simulation or the Oscar, and maybe also Marriage Story, for the same reason, although I’m less decided in that case) are invited to post their ranked ballots in reply to this comment – with sincere thanks in advance -, for my 9th Annual Best Picture Preferential Ballot Simulation!
Since I myself haven’t seen Little Women (or Parasite or Jojo Rabbit – but at least the first of these I’m seeing very soon) and won’t be able to until the 7th or 8th (which is when it premieres over here), I will refrain from voting this year. (My mom also won’t be able to vote, for similar reasons.) Unofficially, here is my ranking of the six movies I’ve seen thus far:
1. Marriage Story
2. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
3. 1917
4. The Irishman
5. Joker
6. Ford v Ferrari
(I also didn’t vote last year, as I didn’t see The Favourite in time. My mom did, though.)
The interesting thing about this is that there is now a six-year streak going of the likely runner-up for Best Picture at the Oscars finishing either runner-up or, in one case, tied for second place, in this simulation (as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was eliminated in third place only after a tie with Call Me By Your Name). The beginning of this streak coincides with when I started holding these at both Awards Daily and the now defunct IMDb Message Boards. (The first two years I only did it on IMDb.) So, perhaps, with everybody’s help, we can once more get a not insignificant clue about which of the contenders will NOT win Best Picture…
The history:
2011 The Social Network —– details not saved (second place was Black Swan, I believe)
2012 – not held –
2013 Zero Dark Thirty ——— 37-24 over Silver Linings Playbook
2014 Her ————————– 33-33 tied with Gravity, won 19-18 on total first place votes
2015 Birdman ——————– 62-61 over Boyhood
2016 Mad Max: Fury Road — 51-37 over The Revenant
2017 Moonlight —————— 41-32 over La La Land
2018 Phantom Thread ——— 39-33 over Call Me By Your Name
2019 The Favourite ————- 45-30 over Roma
I will more than likely both tally the votes and announce the results on Monday.
1 parasite 2 once upon a time 3 marraige story 4 the irishman 5 1917 6 jojo rabbit 7 joker 8 ford v ferrari 9 little women
.most of them wouldn’t make my top 10
Thank you for the vote!
That’s great, Brad. Now say ‘yes’ to Damien Chazelle. and start filming ‘Babylon”.
Not that Craig wasn’t great in it but I am still a bit bummed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo didn’t end up being the fourth Fincher-Pitt movie. So now a decade later I am still waiting for that fourth. Where is it already ? And on that note, where is the second and third Tattoo film with the Fincher-Mara-Craig trio ?
https://twitter.com/filmystic/status/737436973170888705
You gotta love Brad Pitt!!!!
and David Fincher.