As we race toward O-Day, Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics has worked tirelessly to parse the latest input, insight and insanity to arise in the build-up to the 83rd Academy Awards. It hasn't always been pretty, but it's as close to empirically accurate as you're going to get without a peephole at PricewaterhouseCoopers. And this week we've been especially busy. To the Index!
Much of the emotional power of Joel and Ethan Coen's Best Picture contender True Grit comes from the contributions of longtime collaborator and nine-time Oscar nominee Roger Deakins, a cinematographer whose compositions and visual choices lend the Western a subtle, nostalgic quality. It's fitting, then, that when Deakins played My Favorite Scene with Movieline recently, he pointed toward a film that also utilizes the understated to great -- but very different -- effect.
It's time once again to return to Movieline's recently undertaken mission to honor this year's acting and directing nominees with a tribute that will surely outlive any trophy they could ever hope to receive: one of our daily inaugural Awards-Season Trading Cards. Today, let's give it up for Best Actress nominee Natalie Portman!
Looks like reduction is the name of the game today! Variety has just asked all five Best Director nominees to sum up their entire film with a one word theme. Well, all of the nominees except David Fincher, who, true to form, had his editors chime in instead. Anyway, just to get your brains fired up in the morning, take a shot at matching each one word theme to the films, which actually have quite a bit overlap... you know, when they are reduced to one word.
"Tom Hanks just announced as presenter. Will be the Best Pic presenter do we think?" And with this tweet today Oscar-watcher Sasha Stone has commenced the speculative chatter around the most influential temp job in Hollywood: Who will present this year's Academy Award for Best Picture? Better still, assuming it's not too late for America's voices to be heard, who should present the hardware?
If you are a member of Team Conan, Team Letterman, the "I Hate People Who Wear Head-to-Toe Denim" Facebook group or any other anti-Jay Leno party, rest easy knowing that Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals didn't just name Jay Leno their 2011 Man of the Year. Those Ivy Leaguers in drag made The Tonight Show host work for his Golden Pot by subjecting him to cruel Conan jokes, a Shakespeare challenge, a dance-off, and even an appearance from David Letterman! Well, his impersonator, anyway. Details of the grisly roast -- and video of Leno lifelessly accepting his hard-earned award afterward -- ahead.
The Oscars are historically a fertile testing ground for bold, strange counterintuition (ask Rob Lowe or David Letterman), and this year is no different: Awardscast producers Don Mischer and Bruce Cohen plan to broadcast Oscar-related tweets from nominees' mothers in the preshow on Feb. 27.
It's time once again to return to Movieline's recently undertaken mission to honor this year's acting and directing nominees with a tribute that will surely outlive any trophy they could ever hope to receive: one of our daily inaugural Awards-Season Trading Cards. Today, let's give it up for Best Supporting Actor nominee Jeremy Renner!
Today's the day this year's Academy Awards darlings convened for the nominees luncheon, that annual ritual where power brokers, megastars, Hollywood up-and-comers and respected craftspeople get together and bond over mutual fortune and the occasional quest to locate some Tide-2-Go for errant wine droplets. Another topic of conversation: The whereabouts of David Fincher and Scott Rudin, the reeling Social Network tandem who were nowhere to be found.
Earlier today we were tickled by tales of Bob and Harvey Weinstein's genius early '80s sexifying shenanigans, but this afternoon brings allegations of shady accounting and legal chicanery lobbied by none other than former collaborator Michael Moore, who claims the Weinsteins deceived him out of millions in profits from his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Naturally, we wonder: What's this mean for the Oscar race?
In a fascinating new essay/tribute, indie publicist extraordinaire Reid Rosefelt recounts how the Weinsteins' three-decade journey to awards-season supremacy began with a single, garish step: "They had taken the Brazilian artwork, unbuttoned the top button of Eréndira's blouse and added extra cleavage to Claudia Ohana's chest. Cleavage! I died laughing. I had never seen anything so crass. Would art filmgoers want to see the film more if they believed that Claudia had slightly bigger breasts?" Ha! Anyway, I love the smell of Weinstein mythology in the morning. [My Life as a Blog]
It's time once again to return to Movieline's recently undertaken mission to honor this year's acting and directing nominees with a tribute that will surely outlive any trophy they could ever hope to receive: one of our daily inaugural Awards-Season Trading Cards. Today, let's give it up for Best Actor nominee Javier Bardem!
We're in the dark heart of Oscar season now, where desperate moves become common and the studios are looking to sink their knives in their opponents any which way they can; whisper campaigns about verisimilitude, anti-Semitism, or Fascist leanings are trotted out to try to discredit the other guy. It's a sad, nasty business, but it's taken an odd turn with Melissa Leo's personal campaign ads for her own role in The Fighter. It's a vanity campaign that might sabotage her front-runner status.
As our Bataan death march towards the Academy Awards continue, another bauble has been awarded, this time the Writers Guild Award for excellence in the writerly arts. Unsurprisingly, Aaron Sorkin picked up his 3,087th award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Social Network. But somewhat suprisingly the award for Best Original Screenplay went to Christopher Nolan for Inception. And although The King's Speech was not nominated, this small bump in the road will not prevent it from winning every Oscar in sight and then retiring to the same memory hole that The English Patient crawled into in 1996. The full list of winners after the break.[ComingSoon]
The filmmaking process and a particular studio head's cojones were among the topics of discussion Friday night when director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) held a Q&A with Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception) to celebrate the 10th anniversary Blu-ray release of Nolan's breakout film, the neo-noir psychological mystery Memento. But while the sold-out crowd at L.A.'s Egyptian Theatre got to witness the playful Del Toro warming up straight-laced Nolan like a looser, geekier James Lipton, a few topics were strictly off-limits.
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