The Screengrab : oscar

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 1, 2009 - December 31, 2029

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Pay attention, humans. This is very important. I know the Screengrab gang did a great job this week with their list Fond Farewells: The Best and Worst Death Scenes in Cinema. I wish I’d had time to read about Fox pulling the plug on the Terminator TV series and the review of Terminator Salvation – but there is no time! I have been sent from the future to prevent a terrible calamity – the end of the Screengrab as we know it. Some say that time is a closed loop and that it cannot be altered – that the Screengrab is destined to die no matter what we do. But I have seen one possible future where the Screengrab is not only alive, but thrives! Here are but a few of the thousands of posts you will miss out on if we cannot prevent this catastrophe!

Video of the Day: Scarlett Johansson’s Nude Scene

Oscar Roundup: Footloose Remake Sweeps Major Categories, Glenn Beck Bombs as Academy Awards Host

Technicolor Yawns: The Greatest Vomit Scenes in Movie History (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve)

That Guy! Skeet Ulrich

From Hogwart’s to Her Majesty’s Secret Service: Daniel Radcliffe Named New James Bond

Yesterday’s Hits: Gravity’s Rainbow (2017, McG)

Surviving Olsen Twin Accepts Lifetime Achievement Award

Morning Deal Report: Big Screen "Galactica"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

As you may have read somewhere around here, the 81st Annual Academy Awards took place last night – actually, I think they just handed out the last award about 15 minutes ago – and Slumdog Millionaire was the big winner. Meanwhile at the box office, it was a whole other story as Madea Goes to Jail took the top honors with an astounding $41.1 million haul. I think Tyler Perry gets to keep pretty much all of that, doesn’t he? Taken and Coraline held strong at second and third, but Friday the 13th plummeted 81%, taking in only $7.8 million.

Battlestar Galactica may be coming to the big screen, but fans of the current SciFi Channel incarnation shouldn’t get too excited. “Universal has quietly entered into negotiations with Glen A. Larson to write and produce a big-screen version of the property he created,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “The movie effort would have no connection to the series and would relaunch the story in a new medium. However, staples such as the characters Adama, Starbuck, and Baltar will remain.” Here’s hoping they bring back the adorable robot dog Muffit.

The good news is: David Lynch has a new project. The bad news is: it’s Twittering. Yes, you can follow the real David Lynch here for such scintillating daily insight as “You can’t fight City Hall” and “Let a smile be your umbrella.” Lynch confirms his tweeting (or whatever the kids today are calling it) in the video below:

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 14-20, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. You look marvelous. I must confess I was touched, as am I every year, when the good people at AMPAS called once again to ask me to host the Oscars. Although they begged and pleaded and cajoled and nearly stooped to bribery, as they always do, I simply could not work the telecast into my very busy schedule. I’m currently touring with my very touching one-man show about going to Yankee Stadium with my dad, watching Mickey Mantle gracefully prancing through the lush green outfield of the House That Ruth Built, sharing the laughs and the tears that only a father and son can truly know. So I don’t have time to do all the research, such as reading Up the Academy: The Screengrab Salutes the All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). Truly I wish I could squeeze Phil Nugent’s Oscar Predictions, In Other Blogs: Oscar Overload, Harvey Weinstein Predicts Another Great Oscar Year for Harvey Weinstein, Oscar Prospectus and Academy Awards Show Cuts Best Song Nominee "Down to Earth" Down to 65 Seconds; Peter Gabriel Vows Silent Protest into my busy schedule. But I cannot.

Nor can I read any of the following:

If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Time for Another Post About "The Godfather"

Screengrab Review: "Must Read After My Death" and "Eleven Minutes"

Mike White’s Amazing Race

Counting Down to “Watchmen”

Reviews By Request: How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford)

Unwatchable #51: “Simon Sez”

Steve Spielberg's Recession-Era "Lincoln" Biopic: Brother, Can You Spare $50 Million?

Loki Rourke, 1991-2009

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Good news, ladies! It looks like Mickey Rourke now needs a date for the Oscars. Unfortunately, this development has come at the expense of Rourke’s longtime companion, Loki, the 18-year-old Chihuahua who has been at the actor’s side throughout the red carpet season. The poor critter passed away on Monday, less than a week before the Academy Awards ceremony (and, as Defamer points out, this tragic event happened too late for the beloved pooch to qualify for the annual “In Memoriam” segment.)

As the owner of a Chihuahua-American myself, this news hits me particularly hard. And while I don’t necessarily want to place any blame for this tragedy on the grieving owner, I do wonder if the notoriously hard-partying Rourke overestimated the geriatric Loki’s ability to keep up with the rigorous award season party schedule. My boy Maury is only ten, and he needs a nap after a particularly strenuous poop. On the other hand, part of me wonders if this is all a publicity stunt designed to win over any swing voters in the Academy. I guess we’ll know if Mickey shows up to accept his award with Loki tucked under his arm. But don’t show up on the red carpet with a new doggie, Mick! Too soon.

Related:
Mickey Rourke Gets Up Off the Canvas
Mickey Rourke and Darren Aronofsky Q & A

Oscar Prospectus

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

We’ve already presented our Oscar predictions, and we assure you we put as much thought into them as the next guy…assuming the next guy isn’t Nate Silver. That name may ring a bell if you’re either a baseball fan or a political junkie. His statistical work for Baseball Prospectus, including PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm), has long been invaluable to statheads and fantasy players, but it was his FiveThirtyEight.com project, which proved to be the most accurate predictor of the 2008 election results, that made him a household name (at least in households where MSNBC plays more than three hours a day).

Now Nate Silver has turned his statistical genius toward helping to win your office Oscar pool. “Formally speaking, this required the use of statistical software and a process called logistic regression,” according to New York magazine. “Informally, it involved building a huge database of the past 30 years of Oscar history. Categories included genre, MPAA classification, the release date, opening-weekend box office (adjusted for inflation), and whether the film won any other awards.”

Among Silver’s findings: Heath Ledger runs away with the Supporting Actor category, with an 85.8% chance of winning, Taraji P. Henson is his somewhat surprising pick for Supporting Actress, and Slumdog Millionaire is a slamdunk with a 99% chance of taking home Best Picture. “Slumdog Millionaire won all three awards associated with Oscar success: the Directors Guild Award, the Golden Globe, and the bafta. It’s also a serious film, which the Academy favors. If there’s an upset (which would be a shocker), it will be Milk; guilt over Prop 8 and the Brokeback snub of ’06 could split the vote, with Boyle getting Director and Milk getting Picture.”

In Other Blogs: Selected Shorts

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

If you checked out our Oscar picks yesterday and are planning to use them as a basis for your own office pool, you should know that I, for one, pulled my short film predictions out of my hat. But at Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir has actually watched all the nominees. “Short films, at least as the category is defined by the Academy Awards, have even less to do with one another than feature films do. I mean, think about it: With very few exceptions, the films nominated for best picture over the years have all been three-act stories with plot, characters and a script, costing multiple millions to make and running somewhere between 80 and 160 minutes. A short, on the other hand, is any motion picture less than 40 minutes in length, and as in previous years, the 2008 nominees in animated and live-action shorts run the visual, conceptual and philosophical gamut.”

Hollywood and Fine uses the brewing Faye Dunaway/Hilary Duff feud as a jumping off point to discuss aging stars and plastic surgery. “The unkind thing, of course, is that Duff speaks a certain truth. Dunaway is yet another star who has let the fear of natural aging turn her to the sci-fi world of cosmetic surgery. This has given her face a certain computer-generated look – not quite real, not quite human. Put it this way: Dunaway makes Joan Rivers look normal. Or Cher… It’s dismaying to see the give-away cat eyes of cosmetic surgery on once-beautiful women – women who would be beautiful at any age if they just let themselves – like Catherine Deneuve, Jessica Lange and Candice Bergen. But you also detect the pursuit of elusive youth - in the form of Botox needle’s weirdly smoothing qualities - on the faces of favorite male performers as well.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny talks Swanberg. “In January, in the midst of some armchair commentary on the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I noted Mr. Joe Swanberg’s pronouncements at a press breakfast at which IFC announced a partnership with the film arm of South By Southwest, in which IFC would provide VOD screenings of varied SXSW premieres simultaneous to those films’ screenings at the festival. One of the films is the latest from Swanberg, the young filmmaker whose works (frequently tagged as components of a not-quite movement dubbed ‘Mumblecore’) are noted for their improvisational ‘realism’ and the unusual candor of their depictions of sexual matters (e.g., Swanberg himself and varied other members of his casts engage in unsimulated sex acts therein). Swanberg’s musings on where the ‘interest’ in his films began and ended solicited this rejoinder from your correspondent: ‘I think I speak for myself, and for many others, that when I hear about a new Swanberg picture my first question is "Does he show his schlong in it?" and if the answer is "Yes," my "interest" shrivels up like a Pac-Man that's just gotten it from Inky, Winky, Blinky AND Sue.’”

Around the corner at our own Paul Clark’s blog Silly Hats Only, the Third Annual Muriel Awards are getting underway. Some of your other favorite Screengrabbers are participating, wink wink. “What, not excited yet? Well, you should be. After all, we’ve got plenty of new goodies to go along with all of your old favorite Muriels traditions- that is, if you can call something two years old a tradition. I’d tell you what they are, but that would ruin the surprise, now wouldn’t it?”

Our partners over at Cracked (hey, it says over there in the right-hand column that they’re our partners, so who am I to argue?) have turned up 20 Baffling Foreign Movie Posters. That is, not posters for foreign movies, but posters for American movies as they appear in foreign lands. Such as the one pictured here for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Little known fact: The Turkish Director's Cut featured Shelly Duvall and swashbuckling zombies. Seriously, can you fuck up the poster for a Jack Nicholson classic any worse than this?”

Screengrab Predicts The Oscars: Winners (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back, we here at the Screengrab gave our predictions for this year’s Academy Award nominees in the six major categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress, and yours truly won the bragging rights as Top Prognosticator (with 24 correct guesses) with Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark tying for the steak knives in second place with 22 correct guesses apiece.

But now the play-offs are done and it’s time for the Super Bowl as we make our predictions about the winners in every category (except those weird technical ones Jessica Alba presents in a Denny’s on Sunset before the official ABC-televised Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, February 22nd (8:00 PM Eastern/5:00 PM Pacific)).

If you’d like to play along at home, just submit your own winner predictions in the Comments section below!

And now, without further ado, THE OFFICIAL 2009 SCREENGRAB OSCAR PREDICTIONS!

BEST ACTRESS

And the nominees are...

Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie – Changeling
Melissa Leo – Frozen River
Meryl Streep – Doubt
Kate Winslet – The Reader

Paul Clark Predicts: Kate Winslet

With six nominations under her belt already, you can’t say she’s not due to win one. Shame that sentiment wasn’t in the air for a better performance.

Andrew Osborne Predicts: Kate Winslet

Sorry, Anne and Melissa, you’ll have to wait your turn. (And quit scowling, Angelina.) SAG-winning Meryl’s the spoiler, but I think this is finally Kate’s year.

Leonard Pierce Predicts: Angelina Jolie

This has been Kate Winslet’s year in a lot of ways; she laid down two terrific performances in 2008. Unfortunately, the great job she did in The Reader was in service of a truly mediocre and vastly overhyped film. Meryl Streep’s nomination is more or less a formality at this point. Anne Hathaway deserves the gold for her compelling performance in Rachel Getting Married, but it’s likely to go to Angelina Jolie in a role that presses the Academy’s buttons.

Should Win: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Will Win: Angelina Jolie, Changeling

Nick Schager Predicts: Kate Winslet

The Reader is almost a parody of an awards-season prestige pic, but since the Academy usually eats up such faux-serious drivel – and because none of the other actresses seem to have much heat going into the race’s final stretch – count on Winslet to win. And then, if we’re lucky, to accept the statue in her awful Reader old-age make-up.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg Predicts: Melissa Leo

Melissa Leo will be this year's surprise win in a major category. Meryl Streep is nominated mostly for being Meryl Streep, and Kate Winslet winning for playing a Nazi prison camp guard would be too predictable.

Scott Von Doviak Predicts: Kate Winslet

Voters who didn't actually see The Reader but did see Revolutionary Road will vote for her anyway, so it's like she's nominated for two movies in one.

SCREENGRAB CONSENSUS PREDICTION: KATE WINSLET!

Stay tuned for a very special tribute to Heath Ledger and appearances by Amy Adams, Josh Brolin, Peter Gabriel and Alexandre Desplat as the Screengrab 2009 Oscar Special continues!

Contributors: Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Scott Von Doviak

In Other Blogs: Oscar Grumbling

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

What could be more predictable than the announcement of the Oscar nominees yesterday? Bloggers bitching about said nominations, of course! At Scanners, Jim Emerson has no love for frontrunner Slumdog Millionaire. “Not since Crash -- or possibly Mississippi Burning -- has a movie packaged brutality in slicker, shinier, tighter shrink-wrap. It's asphyxiating. You will never have to worry about what you are supposed to feel and when you are supposed to feel it because the movie will always feed you the answers, then smack you when it's your cue to emote. You can "surrender" completely to the experience (it demands nothing less), and you needn't worry that you will be given an idle moment in which you will be left to feel, or breathe, on your own.”

Dana Stevens and Troy Patterson debate the nominations at Slate. “Scanning the list of nominees, I find myself in the odd position of feeling indignant on behalf of a movie I didn't like much, Revolutionary Road,” Stevens writes. “I don't think I would mind this handsomely mounted yawner getting what amounts to a jumbo-sized dis—Leo not up for best actor, Mendes not up for best director, Justin Haythe not up for best adapted screenplay, the movie itself ignored for best picture—if it weren't for the alarming number of accolades beings heaped on Revolutionary Road's evil twin, The Reader. Everyone knew Kate would get a best-actress nod, and as a five-time loser, she still seems likely to win the category. But it somehow besmirches her honor to be recognized for the execrable Reader (aka Boohoo, I Bonked an Illiterate Nazi).”

The Defamer offers up 5 Plots and Subplots to Watch in This Years’ Oscar Race, including: How much will Harvey Weinstein spend to buy Kate Winslet an Oscar? “The Reader's extraordinary showing this morning owes everything to Harvey's secret formula of marketing, publicity and assiduous word-of-mouth since last fall. But the cash-poor Weinstein Company doesn't stand a chance against Slumdog Millionaire in Picture, Director or Adapted Screenplay, so it comes down to Actress. It's one of the weakest categories of the year, with Winslet facing her stiffest competition probably from Anne Hathaway. Or Harvey can take the nominations — and the advertisement/DVD box copy that accompanies them —- and run. Ha. Right.”

Of course, some are upset about the perceived snub of The Dark Knight, but as Dateline: Hollywood reports, that won’t happen again. “In an move that the director said had nothing to do with this morning's Oscar nominations, Christopher Nolan has announced plans for a Dark Knight sequel that will take place during Nazi era Germany and reveal that Batman is gay and aging backwards.”

Finally, the folks at Funny or Die have noticed something about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that you, too, may have noticed:

The Curious Case of Forrest Gump - watch more funny videos

Oscar Host Announced

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The speculation has been mounting. (Somewhere, I guess. Not really here, but we’ll report it anyway.) For a while, the hot rumor was Ricky Gervais as host of the 81st Annual Academy Awards, but didn’t you know deep down that was too good to be true? So who would it be? Surely not Whoopi. Please merciful Academy, not Robin Williams. How about Jon Stewart? We like the Jon Stewart. That sounds good, let’s go with…no? No Jon Stewart? Stephen Colbert, perhaps? No, the host of the 2009 Oscar ceremony will be…

Huh. Hugh Jackman. Well, that’s…really? Hugh Jackman? I know he can sing and dance, but can he deliver a comedic monologue? React quickly to televised faux pas? “With new producers, a new set director and even a new music director, the Academy has been hinting at an all new look and feel for this year's Oscars telecast on Feb. 22,” the AP reports. OK, fine. Just saying: Stewart would have been fine by us.

The Terrorists Win

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:45:00 GMT

We've lost a lot because of the terror attacks of September 11th. Thousands of lives; our sense of safety and security; odd little bits of the Constitution which seem to have fallen off and are yet to be located. Some would even argue that in a very profound way, we have lost our soul. But perhaps no loss is as incalculable, as tragic, as utterly horrifying as...Forrest Gump 2.

Yes, according to screenwriter Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his script to the feel-mawkish movie of 1994, he turned in a treatment for a sequel to the tale of a Zelig-like dullard -- which was meant to pick up immediately where the first movie left off, with Gump seated on a park bench eating drugstore candy and dispensing chain-restaurant-menu-ready platitudes -- on 09/10/2001. The events of the next day led to some serious soul-searching by star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis, who decided that "the world had changed" and "we don't think this is relevant anymore", as if it had been before a handful of maniacs flew planes into some buildings. Says Roth today, "Maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are." You'll never make it in today's Hollywood with that attitude, young man!

Not only do we now know the degree to which the terrorists truly damaged America, by depriving themselves of the right to hear an overrated actor mouth two more hours worth of wise-fool cliches, but we know that among the victims were Zemeckis and Roth, who had to find some other way to make a hundred million dollars, and, of course, Gump author Winston Groom, who was screwed out of the sequel money the same way he was screwed out of money for the original. Hollywood's sense of self-importance, fortunately, survived uninjured.

Related Posts:

Yesterday's Hits: Forrest Gump

Terror Hits the Heart of Bollywood

Oscar Launch: The Silly Season Commences

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As the days of 2008 dwindle down to a precious few, the year-end think-pieces, Oscar prognostications and meta “we’re not really prognosticating, but rather ironically commenting on the ridiculous awards process” articles proliferate at an alarming rate. How to keep up? How to ensure that you’re familiar with not only the consensus Academy Award front-runners, but also the reasons they have been anointed, while more worthy efforts have been snubbed? Now more than ever you need to the Screengrab, where we consume and digest this information, then regurgitate the salient points in tasty bite-size increments.

We begin with The New York Times, where David Carr calls himself The Carpetbagger, an alias that lends him the aura of being above it all while he’s actually wallowing in it. “Against the backdrop of a historic presidential election and a vortex of economic dysfunction, the burgeoning Oscar season seems even sillier than usual,” Carr harrumphs. “After all, who really cares about the throwdown for best supporting actor at a time when the citizenry seems poised for a run on its own banks?” With that out of the way, he proceeds to handicap the horse race thusly: “This year, by the Bagger’s count, seven or eight films have a shot at best picture. The consensus, in no particular order — well, O.K., in a little bit of a hierarchy — includes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Milk, Doubt and The Reader. And a surprise may be waiting in the wings: Clint Eastwood, a durable crush object of the Academy, has a habit of swinging out of the trees late in the game, as he did two years ago with Letters From Iwo Jima, so keep an eye on Gran Torino.” This all seems commonsensical enough, although to my eyes The Changeling looks more Oscar-y than the “get off my lawn” movie. I guess Gran Torino has the advantage of not having already flopped, however.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik wonders if indie film awards have become redundant. “The indie film movement sprang up as a reaction to mainstream Hollywood, so its awards should do the same. It's also good. The awards business may be awash in star and industry back-scratching, but in the Spirits and Gothams, a category of writers, directors and producers have trophy shows to call their own. But there's one thing these awards didn't count on as they forged their contrarian mission: They'd become too successful. Indie movies are now such a part of the awards mainstream that they regularly trump studio movies… the downside is that the shows now no longer seem like a necessary antidote to the Academy Awards; they seem like the Academy Awards lite.” Zeitchik suggest setting a ceiling of a $10 million budget and making previous Oscar winners ineligible for consideration for “indie” awards. Methinks the horse is already out of that particular barn; adopting these stringent guidelines is the best way to make these awards disappear entirely.

Dan Zak of The Washington Post would like the Oscars to lighten up. “In February, the Oscar for Best Picture went to No Country for Old Men, a highbrow slasher movie, the bleakest contender to take the top prize since -- well, since the year before, when The Departed won. Further cementing the notion that bleak movies get made in order to strike gold, three out of four acting Oscars were given to people who played villains: Daniel Day-Lewis as the monstrous oilman in the nihilistic There Will Be Blood; Tilda Swinton as the sniveling attorney in Michael Clayton, a movie in which every person has mortgaged his soul; and Javier Bardem as the dead-eyed killer Anton Chigurh, who cattle-gunned the entire cast of No Country save for Tommy Lee Jones, whose character ended the movie on a note of despair, not death. This year, that might count as a happy ending. Big movies have tent-poled 2008 with a tarp of cruelty. No resolution, no absolution. Just the raw misery of the human condition. Buh-leak. We expect this of fringe foreign films, the confounding subgenre of torture porn, and most documentaries, but not the biggest hits and highest-praised movies of the year.” How to cure this case of the bleaks? Why, the recession might just be the ticket! Expect an onslaught of inoffensive feel-good movies, which is good news for everyone except those of us who find the likes of Beverly Hills Chihuahua infinitely more depressing than any Cormac McCarthy adaptation.

Related:
Top Five Oscar Moments
Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

Batman vs. Batman

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Batman has lawyered up. No, not Gotham’s Dark Knight, although he may want to send a team of attorneys to Hollywood when he hears that the score for his latest cinematic adventure has been deemed ineligible for Oscar consideration by those jokers in the Academy. The litigious Batman in question is actually a city in southeastern Turkey – that’s right, the city of Batman, Turkey.

Batman mayor Huseyin Kalkan is suing Warner Bros. for a share of The Dark Knight’s royalties for using the city’s name without permission. According to The Independent, “Mr Kalkan, who received a 10-month jail sentence at the beginning of this year for praising a Kurdish rebel leader, says the film's psychological impact on Batman inhabitants is to blame for a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate. Former natives of Batman are also said to have encountered obstacles when attempting to register their businesses abroad.”

Many questions spring to mind, but the first one is, of course…you’re just now hearing about Batman? Batman, the guy who’s had his own comic book for nearly 70 years? Who had a hit television show in the 1960s? Who starred in six feature films before The Dark Knight? The most recognizable fictional character on earth besides maybe Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald? That Batman?

Nevertheless, Mr. Kalkan claims “"There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us.” Somehow I don’t think the Warner Bros. suits are breaking a sweat over this one. “No one from the town of Batman has explained why it has taken so many years to take legal action,” The Independent reports. “Cynics have suggested that the latest film's hefty profits – it is about to pass the $1bn (£670m) mark at the box office – may have played a part.” Ya think?

Related:
Wall Street Meltdown Boosts Dark Knight's Oscar Hopes
Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Wall Street Meltdown Boosts Dark Knight’s Oscar Hopes

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Another unforeseen aspect of the financial crisis has been dubbed “The Oscar Recession” by former Radar magazine editor Willa Paskin. Writing for The Daily Beast, Paskin makes the case that the economic slowdown “is changing the dynamics of the Oscar race, and narrowing the Best Picture field. Since full-fledged Oscar campaigns can break the bank, some studios are pushing potential Academy Award into 2009, taking them out of the running. Paramount’s The Soloist, an uplifting tale of a schizo, homeless violinist, and Weinstein’s The Road, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s soul-crushing apocalypse novel, have both been pushed back to next year.”

Paskin makes the somewhat more dubious claim that “an unusually high number of films are also being released late in the season, which means they may not have time to build the word-of-mouth momentum to clinch votes,” citing Revolutionary Road, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Gran Torino, among others. In fact, this happens every year: a certain number of Oscar contenders open very late in the year, often only in New York and LA (for qualification purposes), before slowly rolling out nationwide. (For example, 2004 Best Picture winner Million Dollar Baby opened in limited release on December 15, 2004 and didn’t go into wide release until January 28, 2005.)

Nevertheless, Paskin has a point: The Dark Knight would seem to have a better shot at the top honors than anyone would have imagined before its release. Critical acclaim is part of the reason, but as with Wall Street, it’s the bottom line that counts. “The Dark Knight is exactly the kind of film that may help the Academy itself, which makes revenue off the Oscar telecast, weather the financial crisis. Ratings for the tinsel town extravaganza tend to correlate with the popularity of the films nominated. Last year 32 million Americans tuned in to see indie No Country for Old Men win in the least watched awards ceremony ever. In 1998, 55.3 million people watched all-time box office champ Titanic triumph in the most watched awards ceremony ever. Dark Knight, easily the highest grossing film of the year, could be a corrective to last year’s poor showing, hugely boosting the ratings.”

Related:
Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World
Suppose They Gave an Oscars and Nobody Came

Charles H. Joffe, 1929-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Charles H. Joffe, a talent agent, business manager, and producer best known to casual filmgoers as the producer of a number of Woody Allen's best films, has died in his home town of Los Angeles at the age of 78.

Felled by a persistent lung ailment, Joffe had been ill for some time, but since the 1950s, he had been a powerhouse wheeler and dealer in Hollywood and New York. His Rollins Joffee talent agency, founded with partner Jack Rollins, was the first to book Lenny Bruce, and later handled the careers of some of the biggest names in comedy, including David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, and the team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May. He had a reputation as a tough, old-school, cigar-chewing negotiator whose gift for big-money contracts often saw his clients turning over huge profits within a short time of signing with him.

Joffe's first film as a producer with Woody Allen was Take the Money and Run, the success of which he was able to leverage into a then-unprecedented degree of artistic control over his films for the director. He is listed either as producer, co-producer or executive producer on all of Allen's films up to and including the yet-to-be-released Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and when Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, it was Joffe who picked up the prize in Woody Allen's stead. According to the New York Times, he was a stern and frank figure in the careers of his proteges, and offered up the following advice to a young Allen, frustrated at the dues-paying period he spent making films like Casino Royale: "You're trying to get into the film business. It's going to be a big picture, and you're in it with a lot of stars. You're having a nice time in London, playing poker every night and visiting all the museums. Just shut up."

Jokers Wild About Heath Ledger's Oscar Chances

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT

From somewhere near the intersection of Hype and Necrophilia comes this AP report assessing a dead guy’s Oscar chances for a performance none of us regular folk have seen yet. I realize it’s rare to find anything crass or tasteless about the Academy Awards, but even by the usual standards this piece sticks in my craw. (And I really like to keep my craw free of offending blockages.)

In case you’ve been doing missionary work with that recently discovered tribe in the Amazon, it seems that Heath Ledger, who died in January, plays the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight. Within minutes of his death there were murmurs about a possible posthumous Oscar nomination, but that was before anyone had seen his performance. Now that a few insiders have seen it, the murmurs have become a dull roar that promises to become much, much duller but totally inescapable over the next six months or so.

“Jack Nicholson's Joker was a blast,” writes David Germain. “Heath Ledger's Joker is as dark and anarchic a figure as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the role that brought Nicholson his first Academy Award. Ledger's performance in the Batman tale The Dark Knight is so remarkable that next Jan. 22, the one-year anniversary of his death, he could become just the seventh actor in Oscar history to earn a posthumous nomination.”

Germain goes on to quote an assortment of luminaries, all of whom agree that Ledger is Brando, Olivier, Nicholson and Cesar Romero all rolled into one. I hope it’s true, and I am looking forward to the movie and the performance, although the hype is beginning to make my left eye twitch uncontrollably. Is there not something a little unseemly about the need to turn Ledger into another James Dean? Germain writes, “The aura surrounding Ledger since his death is a sign that, like Dean, he could endure as a mythic figure of talent silenced before his time…That will not necessarily improve his Oscar chances. Dean had two shots after his death and lost both.” Gee, he must have been all broken up about that.

Related:
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?
Batman: The Lost Years

Rep Report Addendum – Rendezvous with French Cinema

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Screengrab contributor Bryan Whitefield reports from the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Rendezvous with French Cinema program.

While this year's crop of films couldn't boast about anything as high profile as last year's opening night film La Vie En Rose, which featured the eventually Oscar-winning performance by Marion Cotillard as French icon Edith Piaf, this popular annual series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center did include several notable films for cineastes and admirers of all things French.

French New Wave director Claude LeLouch (A Man and A Woman) opened this year's series with his latest film Roman de Gare, a thriller about a popular novelist whose life and fiction become intermingled. Another New Wave veteran, Claude Miller, screened his latest film, A Secret, which focuses on the French-Jewish community during World War II. This is one of two films that feature Mathieu Amalric, the star of Julian Schnabel's much-acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The other, Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector/La Question Humaine, could be tagged as a French Michael Clayton with Amalric as an in-house psychologist for a giant chemical company who uncovers some serious big-business skeletons.

Perhaps the most easily digestible film in the series is Cédric Klapisch's Paris which features an ensemble cast led by the consistently excellent Romain Duris and Juliette Binoche. The film certainly has its flaws, and does rely on a multi-line narrative, a screenwriting tool that feels a little too easy at this point, but also gives a view of the city and its many landmarks that feels like a feature-length postcard of Paris itself, sure to invoke memories for those who have been there and further romanticizing it for those who have not.

The shining star of this year's series for me is also likely to be a hate-it-or-love-it film for many — Christophe Honoré's modern musical Love Songs, essentially about a girl-girl-guy threesome. Honoré, no stranger to controversy or mixed reviews, began his career with Ma Mere, a film about mother-son incest generally seen as either a first glimpse of genius or a loathsome pile of shit. His second film, last year's Dans Paris, was met with similar raves and reviles. Love Songs, written by Honoré from a shared personal experience with French songwriter Alex Beaupain, actually uses its beautiful little songs as a narrative trick that allows the characters to stand outside reality and express emotions that would have been lost in a more straight-forward drama. The filmmaking has a stylized yet in-the-moment feeling that evokes the best of the French New Wave. The gifted cast, including Louis Garrel, Ludovine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme and Chiara Mastroianni, allows the songs to fold into the overall action, a big part of why so much of this film works as well as it does. My giving a "musical" a chance is pretty unusual, but this film's inventive storytelling and strong performances won me over immediately and it's certain to be on my year-end list.

DVD Digest for March 11, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week finds the recently-anointed Best Picture Oscar winner coming to DVD, as well as some long-overlooked genre offerings, adrift of sea of junk both old and new. In other words, sort of like every week here at DVD Digest.

DVD of the week: What else could it be but No Country for Old Men (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray)? The film's DVD contains some interesting-looking featurette, including a making-of with the Coens, but the primary reason I'm including it here is because when a legitimately great film is honored with the Best Picture Oscar, it's a cause for celebration. Say what you will about the falling fortunes of the Academy Awards, but the Oscar name still means something to people, and the award should bring No Country a bigger home-viewing audience than it would have had otherwise. Yes, I realize there will almost certainly be a super-deluxe edition of the film in six months or so, one which will hopefully include an Easter egg of Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go. But especially in a relatively slow week for DVD (no major box sets, no Criterions), I'd say the arrival of No Country in home-viewing form constitutes an event.

In other new releases, this week brings Paramount's tiresomely overhyped Bee Movie; Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche in Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); the John Woo-wannabe Hitman (Fox, also Blu-Ray); August Rush (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the misbegotten Caine/Law/Branagh remake of Sleuth; last summer's largely forgotten updating of Nancy Drew (Warner); and the anime DVD Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner, also Blu-Ray).

On the classics front, the week's big news is the three new titles in Fox's ever-growing selection of film noir on DVD: Ginger Rogers in Black Widow, Jeanne Crain in Dangerous Passage, and Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda in Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon. Daisy Kenyon in particular has enjoyed a critical resurgence during the past year, and I'm eager to check it out now that it's finally available again. Other titles of note include the Al Pacino double feature of ...And Justice For All and Bobby Deerfield (both Sony), and a new special edition of Gattaca (Sony, also Blu-Ray). The week's Blu-Ray-only releases include Dogma (Sony), I, Robot (Fox), and Independence Day (Fox).

Finally, David Huddleston offers his condolences to the following HD-DVD releases:

Bee Movie (Paramount)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner)
Michael Clayton (Warner)
Fletch (Universal)

I don't know about you, but $20 seems a lot to pay for what will likely be used as a Fletch drink coaster in a few months' time. Although if you use it to hold your Bloody Mary while you eat a steak sandwich and a steak sandwich, perhaps it'll be worth it to you.

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 29-March 2

Paul Clark — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As I predicted in last week's column, arthouse audiences turned out in droves to catch The Counterfeiters (Sony Pictures Classics), Stefan Ruzowitzky's recent Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film. Currently in its second week of release, The Counterfeiters tops this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup with in an average of $10,295 per screen in 18 venues, following a strong second-place finish in its opening weekend.

The weekend's top new release was Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop (Koch Lorber), bringing in $8,745 on a single screen, followed by last week's champ, Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which kept on rockin' at $7,059 per screen after expanding its release to three locations. Rounding out the top five were (stop me if you've heard this before) Sony Pictures Classics' The Band's Visit and Focus Features' In Bruges, the latter expanding to 232 screens nationwide.

Also of note was the release of Chicago 10 (Roadside Attractions), the highest-ranking documentary of the weekend at #6. And let's not overlook the Oscar bump for Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, which found its way back into the top 10 after a nearly three-month absence following an expansion to more than 2,000 screens. Take that, Juno! ¿Quien es mas macho?

Top 10, Weekend of February 29-March 2:
1. The Counterfeiters [Sony Pictures Classics] ($10,295 per screen)
2. Chop Shop [Koch Lorber Films] ($8,745)
3. The Duchess Of Langeais [IFC Films] ($7,059)
4. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($4,553)
5. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($3,342)
6. Chicago 10 [Roadside Attractions] ($3,052)
7. The Unforeseen [Cinema Guild] ($2,496)
8. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($2,300)
9. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($2,121)
10. No Country For Old Men [Miramax] ($2,020)

Source: IndieWire.