No Strings Attached may not be Natalie Portman's Norbit, but is the recent admission by the perceived Oscar frontrunner that she is engaged (gasp!) and pregnant (choke!) a golden ticket to the most elusive of acting statuettes? A look back at some of Oscar's former parties of two suggests that Natalie's personal bliss may not serve to guarantee any professional lauds.
Three months down, one to go as Movieline's redoubtable Oscar Index tracks the cutthroat dynamics, strategies, tea-leaf analyses and total flukes leading up to the 83rd Academy Award nominations. This week's SAG Award nominations and continued critics prizes led to an blippy array of movements, with most occurring (perhaps obviously) in the increasingly competitive actors categories. Let's break it down.
Listen, let's just make this quick: No Strings Attached is not Natalie Portman's Norbit. Don't let anybody tell you differently. Of course, they won't tell you per se -- they'll ask or insinuate or poll (or offer some epic, perverse combination of the three), pretending to be on the forward edge of a significant moral-cultural quandary that will define this year's Oscar race for Best Actress, advancing and attempting to rationalize a conversation with no rational foundation in the first place. We're better than this, folks, and now is the time to eradicate this non-issue from the Oscar 2010 books.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that 248 feature films have qualified for this year's Best Picture Oscar race -- a surprising downturn from recent years. (To wit, 274 films in 2009, and 281 in 2008.) But let's face it: Like everything in Hollywood, we are dealing in quality, not quantity. With this in mind, let's hear it for the official 2010 nomination ballot wherein the likes of Grown-Ups, The Bounty Hunter, Furry Vengeance and Hot Tub Time Machine will share space with The Social Network, The King's Speech, Black Swan and the rest of the cognoscenti's informally sanctioned seasonal darlings. They're all after the jump if you want to see anything in particular you want to launch a dark-horse campaign for. [Why Did I Get Married Too, FTW.]
When the Academy Award nominations are announced next month, it is expected that Black Swan, The Fighter, True Grit and The Kids Are All Right will be among the most recognized films. Just not in the Best Original Score category. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences music branch has ruled that all four Oscar contenders are ineligible for the award.
Oscar's "Best Original Song" category is unusually thrilling; you might not remember the nominated tunes (or even the movies), but you cheer when Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up" defeats three Dreamgirls contributions, and you groan when Phil Collins's monkey love medley from Tarzan beats Aimee Mann's "Save Me" from Magnolia. This time, Movieline is offering to help the academy by drawing attention to three underdogs who deserve more recognition than, say, anything from the Burlesque or Country Strong soundtracks.
As William Goldman told us -- or maybe it was David Poland -- nobody knows anything. With that in mind: Let's assess the meaning of the SAG nominations! Since actors make up the Academy's largest voting block, these must mean something, right? Maybe not: Inglourious Basterds won the SAG equivalent of Best Picture last year (Best Ensemble) and we all know how well that worked out. Still, there were a few winners and losers following this morning's announcement; time to name them as such.
Another day, another epic showing for The Fighter and The King's Speech among a group's annual award nominations. This time around it was the SAG Awards -- meaning we've got TV to recognize, too, which naturally indicates it's that time of year to move over for leading nomination-getter Modern Family, followed by Mad Men (don't be sad, Don Draper!), 30 Rock, Dexter and Glee. Read on for the full list of 2010 nominees.
What a week for Movieline's Oscar Index, which spent hours upon hours parsing all the riffs, renouncements, meditations, hyptotheses, 140-character Burlesque dismissals, projections and whatever else the punditocracy managed to summon in a frame overwhelmed with year-end awards frenzies. How does it all apply to the Oscars? There is only one way to find out. To the Index!
The Hollywood Foreign Press fell down the stairs this morning and accidentally nominated Burlesque and The Tourist for Best Picture on its way down. Sad, but this is the way with the Golden Globes: Weird stuff gets honored, you hit yourself with a coconut, and you laugh about it. But where do Burlesque and The Tourist rank among the worst Golden Globe "Best Motion Picture -- Musical or Comedy" nominees ever? Join us for the hideous retrospective.
More awards! Hoo-ahhh! This time it's the august New York Film Critics circle doing the laurel-fitting, delivering its best-of-2010 prize to the redoubtable Social Network. Like their peers out in Los Angeles, the NYFCC also went with best director David FIncher and best actor Colin Firth; The Kids Are All Right took over from there, winning three prizes including best actress for Annette Bening. Jacki Weaver was cruelly stiffed in supporting actress once again in favor of The Fighter's Melissa Leo, though Animal Kingdom did win best first feature for David Michod. So that's nice. Click through for the full list of winners.
Awards! So many awards. What will we do with all these awards? Awards everywhere! Awards in your refrigerator, awards in your morning coffee. Awards clogging the 405 and the Holland Tunnel. Sarah Palin shot and killed an award last night on TV. The Metrodome roof didn't collapse under the weight of snow, as you've heard; it was actually from a storm that dumped 17 inches of awards on Minneapolis. And now look: More awards!
Director David Fincher's take on the creation of Facebook had a banner day today, as The Social Network was named the Best Film of the year by the L.A Film Critics Association and one of the top ten movies of the year by the AFI. Fincher also tied for Best Director, and writer Aaron Sorkin won for Best Screenplay, courtesy of the L.A. Critics. The full list of winners for both groups after the break.
The Blue Valentine awards show freight train pulled into the Kips Bay AMC in New York City on Thursday night and the perpetually stoic stars of the film, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, got downright hysterical. In the span of just ten minutes the prettier-than-thou duo were retelling stories of nipple bleeding, the recent overturn of their film's controversial rating and the rumored trysts of Marilyn Monroe. Are these two joking their way to (deserved) Oscar nominations?
So I know this ballet teacher in New York who was all jacked up on Black Swan before it opened here last weekend. She admits she doesn't see many movies in theaters, but from the trailer ("It looks scary; is it scary?") and a few previews ("The pointe work is on; I'd have to see the rest of it"), she knew enough to be despondent after having been shut out of two sold-out shows on Sunday evening. Thus is the curiosity and anticipation guiding many dancers to Natalie Portman's performance -- a physical, uncompromising bit of work that, so far, has dancers relatively unanimous in their approval. Relative, that is, to those lesbians who wrote off Portman's chief Oscar rival Annette Bening in that "f*cking disgusting" dramedy The Kids Are All Right.
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