Look: We know that you're incredibly busy people, with barely enough time to skim, much less absorb, all the pre-Academy Awards coverage competing for your attention on the Oscarnet™. And so in the interest of delivering you only the most essential information in the most efficient way possible, we've mustered every ounce of our Photoshop skills to render everything you need to know about this year's ceremony in a single, easy-to-understand infographic. Don't waste your time with beautifully designed infographics that squander your precious mental bandwidth by filling your head with useless, but very interesting, trivia!
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As a faithful Movieline reader, we want you to win your Oscar pool this year. Still, let's be realistic: This goal is going to take determination, focus, drive, and a lot of cribbing from Movieline's fully completed Oscar predictions ballot. Read on for our informed guesses, and good luck!
- Kyle and Seth
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There are just two sleeps to go to the big night! The odds have been calculated and the prognostications made! The votes are in and now can't even be changed by Harvey's semitic signage, Nicolas's nincompoop e-natterings or James revealing that the Na'vi aren't actually CG but real genetic freaks he cooked up in his garage. Yet we can't keep having the same conversations for the next 48 hours. What we need is something to feed the appetite and stoke the fever -- something that's of the Academy Awards but not about their 82nd iteration. And The Oscar is that filmic fondue, a cauldron of cheese cooked up by director Russell Rouse, writer Harlan Ellison, stars Stephen Boyd and Tony Bennett, and a who's who of Hollywood donating cameos.
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More than month after Tyler Perry's executive-produced labor of love Precious was nominated for six Oscars, the media impresario finally sent a fan message recognizing the film's standing at the Academy Awards. Also: He's presenting! "So strange," Perry wrote. "I became an Academy member last year and, this year, I'm asked to present. How cool is that?! Catch it this Sunday night if you can. 6 Nominations for PRECIOUS -- I'm so happy for them." If I can? If I can? Yeah, well, Bad Boys II is on NBC that night, I guess, so... If I can. God, I love this guy. [TylerPerry.com]
In a shocking bit of interspecial backlash, an intransigent rabbit named Smokey begs to differ that Inglourious Basterds is "the thing that happened in cinema this year." In fact, the real thing that happened in cinema this year is that a rabbit has more of a clue than our psychic pals and much of the Hollywood establishment about what will win the Best Picture Oscar come Sunday. Maybe it's just Smokey's savant-like understanding of the preferential ballot, or maybe he took Nicolas Chartier's impassioned e-mails to heart -- it really could be anything. But this is as informed and credible an Oscar forecast as any we've yet seen at Movieline HQ, so consider yourself advised. That said, Smokey also chose David Carradine as a dark horse on my "In Memoriam" Montage Pool ballot, so grain of salt, etc. Click through for the most adorable Oscar prognostication ever.
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Oscar producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic are trying to banish winners' thank-you speeches to a backstage camera, leaving precious time at the podium for tearful blubbering, one-armed pushups, and cute-but-in-retrospect-creepy-and-unsolicited French kisses, but I'd wager that we're still going to hear more than a few winners thank God, and more importantly, their agents. At least it will provide more material for this helpful montage (after the jump), which collects just about ever salient Oscar thank-you ever committed to YouTube, I'm guessing. Marvel at the uniformity of gush, and remember what Anna Paquin once looked like with clothes on. [Buzzfeed via Vulture]
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Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's weekly showcase of up-and-coming nonfiction cinema. Usually each installment features one new film and filmmaker, but hey: It's Oscars Weekend! This calls for an exception. As such, Movieline reached out to this year's nominees for Best Documentary Feature, hosting a virtual roundtable including:
· Rebecca Cammisa (Which Way Home, about Latin American child migrants to the U.S.)
· Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith (The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, about the famous Vietnam War-era whistleblower)
· Robert Kenner (Food Inc., about the grave implications of U.S. food production)
· Anders Østergaard (Burma VJ, about citizen journalists documenting uprisings in Burma)
· Louie Psihoyos (The Cove, about the secret slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan)
Congrats to them! But now we have some questions. Take a moment to get to know them, their stories, their takes on the race, and, of course, their respective Oscar-night dates.
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Let's just put this out there: If The Hurt Locker fails to win Best Picture this Sunday, it will amount to nothing less than the ultimate, most spectacular come-from-ahead flame job in the history of the Academy Awards. Strike that -- in the history of awards, period. It would be like William Faulkner choking away the 1949 Nobel Prize to Mickey Spillane, or Dakota Fanning defeating Rosario Dawson for a 2008 NAACP Image Award. Don't snicker! It could have happened -- but it didn't, precisely there are some honors that the cosmos just isn't ready to cede to the freaks and flukes of everyday human life. But if his latest ill-advised, leaked e-mail tells us anything, Oscar-barred Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier is challenging the cosmos to a duel. And damn if this guy isn't determined to win. Or lose, depending on your perspective.
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When you think "Oscar week," you think "Sarah Palin," don't you? Admit it, you do -- or, at least, you will, because for some reason, the erstwhile V.P. candidate cut a swath through an Academy Awards gifting suite yesterday in Los Angeles, a practice usually reserved only for actual Oscar nominees or, failing that, AnnaLynne McCord and Bai Ling. "They were like locusts," one vendor told E!, irate that the gifting suite had to open two hours early for Palin's entourage. "She showed up with like 20 people, and they immediately swarmed the place taking everything!" And what did that "everything" comprise?
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Yes, this link is going to send you to playboy.com, but it's OK. There are no breasts, and more importantly, there is no John Mayer. Instead, you'll find an article called "The Man in the Bomb Suit," Mark Boal's original piece for Playboy which spurred, to some extent, his screenplay for The Hurt Locker. Read it, and evaluate Jeffrey Sarver's charges for yourself. [Playboy]
The joy of cruising the movie margins is that one thing leads to another. So, a few years back, after I'd suffered through the 1952 Poverty Row comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for my bad-movie book, I couldn't help but get Googling to find out what happened to its leads, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose comic act in the movie aped Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the very limits of copyright infringement. Turned out that Sammy did not much moviewise after that (he died last year), but Duke burned bright in the last years of his life. Mitchell's first film as writer-director was 1974's Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. While it didn't make him a household name or set the box office aflame, in 1975 Mitchell set about making a second flick, then called Kiss The Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone With The Pope. One viewing of the trailer on YouTube (embedded after the jump) had my jaw on the floor.
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Time now for an introduction: Carly Steel is the newest addition to the Movieline family. A veteran of E! and TV Guide network, Carly will be Movieline's on-camera correspondent at Hollywood awards shows, premieres, parties and anything else you can slap a red carpet in front of. Last night, she attended the Angeleno magazine Pre-Oscar party, where she chatted with British actress Nathalie Press -- nominated for an Indie Spirit Award for her work in 50 Dead Men Walking-- as well as costar Rose McGowan, who offered some awards night tips, spoke of her own paralyzing red carpet fright, and admitted to a bad habit of breaking into architecturally significant homes.
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Breaking! James Cameron would be totally fine with Sacha Baron Cohen dressing up like a pregnant N'avi at the Oscars and angrily accusing him of knocking "her" up! Because, like, ROFL! "If they want to poke fun at Avatar Sunday, that's OK by me," Cameron told a party reporter Wednesday. "The Oscars are a celebration of movies... even the gaffes and out-of-bounds stuff are all part of the fun." How else would Cameron react after the fact? "I'll be damned if some blue dude in drag is gonna pull some Dada-gibberish prank on me in front of a worldwide TV audience, get the eff outta here"? Anyway, as of this writing there will still be no Sachatar. Sorry. [E! via PopEater]
We're at T-minus 96 hours and counting until the 82nd Academy Awards blitz us with glamour, drama and all the cut-off acceptance speeches you can bear. Who's excited? Woot! But do you know what would make the preening spectacle all the more watchable (at least if you're in New York City)? If you were to attend Movieline's Oscar Viewing Party at 92YTribeca. And now, because all this cascading glory is wasted on Mo'Nique, we've even got things you can win. And you won't even have to stand around backstage waiting to get them engraved!
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Sure, conventional Oscar pools are fine ways to impress your friends and make a few bucks on the side. But when it comes to leveling the playing field for even the least film-savvy attendees at your soiree, there's only one pool that does the trick: Movieline's "In Memoriam" Montage Pool.
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