Week seven of Movieline's Oscar Index brings a few resurgent, big-money forces into the awards-season spotlight, where a few familiar faces hold fast to their own power positions as well. And the cash is starting to flow. Exciting! Get back, recession! Read on to view the lay of the land and weigh in with your own assessments.
The Leading 10:
1. The Social Network
2. The King's Speech
3. 127 Hours
4. Inception
5. Black Swan
6. True Grit
7. Toy Story 3
8. The Fighter
9. The Kids Are All Right
10. Winter's Bone
Outsiders: Another Year; Blue Valentine; Love and Other Drugs; Made in Dagenham; For Colored Girls; How Do You Know
Notes: Two things this week about Picture: First, Toy Story 3 is riding a very healthy wave of buzz thanks to its DVD release on Tuesday. It's a canny maneuver by Disney, which had previously pushed Pixar's Best Picture hopefuls Up (which was nominated last year) and Wall-E (which narrowly missed the cut in 2008) in their respective seasons' first For Your Consideration ads. This year, meanwhile, Disney is doing what it has to do for the producers of Alice in Wonderland, whose billion-dollar worldwide gross apparently entitled them to the first FYC ad of the year. It'll go exactly nowhere except maybe the Golden Globes' Musical/Comedy pool, but at least everyone's sort of happy, and the studio's bases are covered either way.
Second, and actually totally fascinating, spend some time with David Poland's awards-season breakdown to date -- which features a long, persuasive reader comment about how and why Inception will be a force this winter. Among the eight reasons:
Warner Bros has played this game before and won twice before in the past 7 years.
Having played the long game before with both Million Dollar Baby and The Departed, WB have a good blueprint to work with Inception. They are also going to let the movie speak for itself and they have the goods: a engaging movie, an attractive & well-liked cast, and a director whose work has been consistently admired but not yet awarded. So, let The Social Network or 127 Hours or True Grit strike now and burn itself out to get the nomination. Just like The Departed, Inception is the elephant in the room not moving but always still there aiming for the Best Picture award. Voters will have to come back to it just to appreciate the detail put into the story and the characters again.
It's really a great read, and I'm impressionable enough (read: not so jaded this early in the season) to think if Warners can in fact move the needle this way in the weeks and months to come, why couldn't Christopher Nolan and Co. be near or at the front of the pack? I mean, it's not like anybody is writing awards-season exegeses about The Kids Are All Right or Black Swan right about now.
Oh, and big ups to The King's Speech for those eight British Independent Film Award nominations. Too bad that appalling poster cancels them out; better luck next week.
The Leading 5:
1. Danny Boyle, 127 Hours
2. David Fincher, The Social Network
3. Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
4. Christopher Nolan, Inception
5. Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit
Outsiders: David O. Russell, The Fighter; Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan; Mike Leigh, Another Year; Peter Weir, The Way Back; Edward Zwick, Love and Other Drugs
Notes: Everything above goes for Christopher Nolan, too, except his big story of the week was deflating Batman Nation with a sequel title like The Dark Knight Rises. On the one hand, I agree with Lane Brown at Vulture: "[Nolan] may make comic-book movies, but he reminds us this week that his are serious, 3-D-less, Riddler-free ones." On the other hand, they're still a laughingstock -- at last until they come out, and then we can all be depressed again and fight over said comic-book movies' Oscar chances.
Anyway, how about Danny Boyle! Fox Searchlight is pretending to downplay word that 127 Hours' amputation scene has caused fainting among multiple viewers, all while making Boyle available for every public appearance and/or interview and/or party and/or car-dealership ribbon-cutting in the continental United States. And he does so cheerfully as usual, the not-so-grizzled veteran alongside his freshfaced young star, both just happy to be here and to spread the gospel of cinema. I know Fincher is off shooting right now and everything, but even if he weren't, you'd have to wonder how or even if he and Sony would combat this momentum after such a torrid if aloof early-season run of their own. Developing...
The Leading 5:
1. Natalie Portman, Black Swan
2. Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
3. Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
4. Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
5. Julianne Moore, The Kids Are All Right
Outsiders: Sally Hawkins, Made in Dagenham; Anne Hathaway, Love and Other Drugs; Lesley Manville, Another Year; Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine; Naomi Watts, Fair Game
Notes: Another week, another J-Law bump -- this despite Oscarphile genius Nathaniel Rogers' inference (I think?) that the 20-year-old actress may be too young to win Actress. (Marlee Matlin currently holds the record for youngest winner at age 21; only Keisha Castle-Hughes at 13 and Keira Knightley and Ellen Page at 20 were younger nominees.) Sasha Stone disagreed: "My reasoning for this is as follows: hers is the only truly selfless and heroic contender in the pack. [...] I don't think Lawrence is in the same position that Carey Mulligan was last year because Mulligan, though lovable indeed, was not caring for her younger siblings, her sick mother, trying to save their home -- all the while delivering a spectacular performance. She's a big threat." This is going to be Page vs. Cotillard all over again -- except of Lawrence and Portman, I don't know which is which. Help!
Also: The Kidman bandwagon is acquiring some speed (she entirely owns the new poster, for what that's worth, which isn't a lot except that it's Nicole Kidman's Movie And Don't You Forget It), and Manville is gonna break through soon, I know it. Hathaway's days are numbered.
The Leading 5:
1. James Franco, 127 Hours
2. Colin Firth, The King's Speech
3. Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
4. Javier Bardem, Biutiful
5. Mark Wahlberg, The Fighter
Outsiders: Jeff Bridges, True Grit; Robert Duvall, Get Low; Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine; Paul Giamatti, Barney's Version
Notes: Uh, this category is still happening? As noted, Firth basked in a little bit of awards afterglow this week while Franco's one-man show became a two-hander on the promo circuit. There is a very real possibility that Franco could run away with this award by the end of this month; the word-of-mouth potential is too strong, the subject matter too substantial, the class too great, the impact too unshakable to counteract. In the battle of true story vs. true story, I mean, this is 2010. You take the guy who hacked off his own arm and can smile about it. I'm just saying. I'm still hopeful for Bardem, of course, but you take the guy who hacked off his own arm.
The Leading 5:
1. Melissa Leo, The Fighter
2. Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom
3. Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
4. Dianne Wiest, Rabbit Hole
5. Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech
Outsiders: Miranda Richardson, Made in Dagenham; Sissy Spacek, Get Low; Amy Adams, The Fighter; Mila Kunis, Black Swan; Barbara Hershey, Black Swan
Notes: I have a very bad feeling about Carter against a strengthening gang of competitors, none more so than the great, great Jacki Weaver. Sony Classics will get its Animal Kingdom villainess her nomination; the cognoscenti is awake to the potential (not least of all as SPC begins allocating cash for phase-one awards ads), and as Steve Pond says in cataloging the craziness he craves from this season, "it's not too much" to consider Weaver making the Leading 5. But this category is likely full of slow burns like that; check out Amy Adams making the climb into contention based on early word over the transom from folks who've seen The Fighter (they still maintain Bale and Leo are the frontrunners, but hey). Dianne Wiest is another, matching Kidman note for note as a grieving mother of a grieving mother. Depending on how Hershey fares next month -- and how amenable the Academy is to Darren Aronofsky's psychodrama -- this might be a whole category of mothers. And Hailee Steinfeld, of course, who, in the vein of Jennifer Lawrence before her, may be too young to win anyway. Anyway, Team Jacki.
The Leading 5:
1. Christian Bale, The Fighter
2. Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech
3. Michael Douglas, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
4. Armie Hammer, The Social Network
5. Andrew Garfield, The Social Network
Outsiders: Ed Harris, The Way Back; Sam Rockwell, Conviction; Matt Damon, True Grit; John Hawkes, Winter's Bone; Paul Rudd, How Do You Know
Notes: Yawn. I keep hearing that Sam Rockwell is coming back, and as much as I'd love to believe it, let's face it: Conviction is simply dead in the water. The biggest buzz The Way Back had all week was some blogger or other bitching that the film was screening in L.A. and not New York, thus keeping him from an early look. Andrew Garfield's fangirls have apparently taken over his campaign from Sony while Hammer's profile nudges higher each week. The Winter's Bone contingent now has John Hawkes on the radar, hoping to take either Garfield or Douglas's spot among nominees. I doubt it, but I can't deny it's nice to see someone who actually wants it right about now.