Each year, we meet the Grammys with the kind of grudging obligation we usually reserve for medical check-ups: no, we don't really want to bother, but we'll show up because of the remote chance we might discover something interesting in a place where nothing interesting should be happening. And so on Sunday night, out of this sense of self-preserving curiosity, we flipped on the show (on a three-hour tape-delay; nice work, Recording Academy! Very brave of you to take a principled stand on the encroachment of technology and make half the country wait to see the things everyone was twittering/blogging/sexting about), blasted through several hours of the usual nonsense on the DVR, and then went to bed, assuming this show would at best mirror last year's decent-but-not-great ratings performance. But imagine our surprise to wake today, the morning after the show had faded into nightmares in which Beyonce's heavily armored, backup-dancing SWAT team invades our home to demand we immediately "put a ring on it," to discover the telecast was nothing short of a Nielsen Bonanza™ for CBS, pulling in the best numbers in six years. How could this have happened? After the jump, we try to work through the mystery of the 52nd Grammys Awards' sudden, blockbuster success:
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After two or three months of observing the generally inert culture around the 2009 Oscar race, it's not too difficult to predict who or what will remain standing when the Academy announces its nominations Tuesday morning. Mo'Nique, Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz and a group of other elite, well-known front-runners might go ahead and stamp their tickets for the Kodak Theater on March 7, but after the jump, find a few others who might wake up tomorrow to a pleasant (or not-so-pleasant) surprise.
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Despite Movieline's best attempts to parse and/or salvage each film, the mega-hit Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the mega-flop Land of the Lost led the crop of 2009 Razzie Award nominees with a shared total of seven nominations. Even more impressive: Sandra Bullock's achievement as a Worst Actress nominee for All About Steve -- earned the day before she is expected to earn an Oscar nomination for The Blind Side. Quite the achievement! Read on for all of the star's fellow nominees, including the Jonas Brothers, Hugh Hefner and "Taylor Whatz-his-Fang"... as well as the entire Worst-of-the-Decade collection.
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Talk about peaking at the right time: Days after The Hurt Locker took home the Producers Guild of America prize for Best Picture, helmer Kathryn Bigelow hit the jackpot at Saturday's Director's Guild of America award ceremony. She knocked out Avatar kingpin (and ex-husband) James Cameron for the organization's Best Director platter, becoming the first woman to be so recognized -- and the generally accepted front-runner to win the directing Oscar next month.
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Tomorrow night, Sundance will host the official Closing Night Awards Ceremony -- but if utterly subjective hardware-distribution is what you seek, your wait is over! The First Annual Movieline Sundancies Awards are about to get underway, its twenty gleaming trophies -- each painstakingly hand-cast in the shape of a pair of golden Ugg boots -- lined up and ready to be presented to this year's list of illustrious winners. Click on for the results!
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In the week and a half since Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner's conspicuous, Cold War-ish hostilities at the Golden Globes, pundits and awards-season observers haven't hesitated in taking sides in the duel over which writer deserves the most credit for Up in the Air. But at a recent Writers Guild screening, the accidental writing partners -- who apparently hadn't even met until well after Reitman finished shooting the film -- sought to protect their Oscar luster with a "Kumbaya" moment of unity, togetherness and some long-overdue transparency. Or damage control -- you decide.
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The Producers Guild of America dared Sunday to unsettle the Avatar juggernaut, reintroducing The Hurt Locker into the awards mix with its Best Picture prize. The Screen Actors Guild Awards, meanwhile, honored most of the same folks you've seen on the hardware circuit for the last month, with only Sandra Bullock's Best Actress trophy for The Blind Side offering any relative surprise amid fellow winners Jeff Bridges, Christoph Waltz and Mo'Nique. Even the TV side didn't offer much in the way of upsets, with perennial prize-hogs Mad Men and 30 Rock joining HBO's Grey Gardens among 2009's best. Click through for a quick bit of analysis and full lists of winners.
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Though An Education has lost some awards steam this season (particularly when it comes to lead actress Carey Mulligan), a more British film you will not find, and thus it's only fair that it should tie Avatar and The Hurt Locker to lead the Orange British Academy Film Awards nominations with eight each. Inglourious Basterds kindly allowed An Education to take its Best Picture place, though Christoph Waltz and Quentin Tarantino still picked up plenty of nominations. And what of Bright Star, whose Jane Campion and Abbie Cornish looked awards-bound last summer? All it could manage was a Best Costumes nod.
The full list of nominees:
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The Academy this afternoon narrowed its Best Foreign-Language contenders of 2009 into a convenient list of nine. While a few critical favorites were notably omitted (the acclaimed South Korean submission Mother, historically snubbed Romania's Police, Adjective), the front runners you know and love (or at least expect to see) are represented as usual. The others, meanwhile? Your guess as to the finalists is as good as ours. Let's attempt to make heads, tails and odds of it after the jump.
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Director Kirby Dick issued a statement to Towleroad on his film Outrage's snubbing by the GLAAD Media Awards, who defended the omission by claiming they weren't "the Academy Awards," and that peeking into closets -- regardless of whose -- "doesn't promote awareness," and therefore doesn't fall under their mandate.
He wrote:
[T]he film meets all four criteria listed on their website: "Fair, Accurate and Inclusive Representations" of "the LGBT Community", "Boldness and Originality", "Impact", and "Overall Quality".
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A great movie catchphrase doesn't have to come from some summer blockbuster -- in fact, it can spring from the most unlikeliest of sources, the awards season contender. Whether it's a line that sticks thanks to sheer audacity (like the campy, terrifying "I drink your milkshake!" from There Will Be Blood) or simply through its constant repetition in trailers and Oscar ads (such as "I wish I knew how to quit you!" from Brokeback Mountain), the run-up to the Academy Awards often produces some of cinema's most lasting quotes. How does this year's crop of contenders fare on that front? Let's see!
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One of the most bittersweet moments of last night's Golden Globes occurred during the deployment of the Best Actress - Drama prize. Requisite shots of each nominee accompanied Mickey Rourke's reading of their names: Emily Blunt, grinning in rather extreme close-up; Sandra Bullock, the favorite, perched and ready to rise; Helen Mirren, the distinguished elder; Gabourey Sidibe, the gleeful neophyte... and just prior to Sidibe, Carey Mulligan, the one-time favorite for this prize and perhaps every other in 2009, meekly clapping, dwarfed in the back of the room, all but invisible with the tiny entourage from her breakthrough An Education. The viewer knew just as well as Mulligan did: She didn't have a chance. But why?
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Wes Anderson knows as well as anybody that around this time every year, we all have it pretty easy predicting the winner of the Best Animated Feature prize at the Oscars -- just inscribe the statuette with Pixar's most recent production, and move along to the harder categories. Not so in 2009, when a surfeit of excellent animation resulted not only in an expansion of the Animated Feature category, but a handful of legitimate contenders to upset Pixar come March. Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of them, a lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion gem that signified a creative milestone for a director long prone to accusations of merely repeating himself with every film. Fox's ambition, warmth, humor and style amount to the most accomplished and mature of Anderson's films to date -- a kid's film for grown-ups, a wry meditation on innocence lost. Those qualities -- not to mention its A-list voice pedigree boasting George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Bill Murray -- should position Mr. Fox well in the ongoing Oscar race against Up.
Anderson spoke to Movieline last week about making the most of awards season, the virtues of animation versus live-action, how he accidentally cast himself as a weasel, and how the French messed up his plans to see Avatar.
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Jason Reitman's Golden Globes screenplay win for Up in the Air last night was a fairly expected event -- his film was one of the best-liked of this awards season (though it's been eclipsed somewhat by the full-throttle force of Avatar), and the screenplay category provides the strongest place to congratulate him. It won't all be smooth sailing though, as the LAT just put out an expertly timed article questioning Reitman's claims about his screenplay, and those allegations -- coupled with the sudden appearance of co-credited writer Sheldon Turner -- have people buzzing.
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After a month's worth of NBC promos touting the 67th annual Golden Globe ceremony as the "hottest night in Hollywood," Ricky Gervais warmed up his rain-drenched audience of elites last night with a few shameless plugs and an endless supply of champagne. Like any self-congratulatory celebration for A-listers, the night gave way to a few figurative triumphs (by Chloe Sevigny's on-set P.A., James Cameron's bladder) and even more figurative losers (NBC, Spohia Loren, sincere humility), but the actual group of Globe victors was a welcome assortment of the new, the old and the Avadah. After the jump, a complete list of your 2010 Golden Globe recipients.
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