Remember all that talk about how True Grit was the new Best Picture front runner because of its muscular box office ($110 million and counting)? Yeah, perhaps not. Joel and Ethan Coen failed to received a nomination from the Directors Guild this morning, meaning True Grit's road to winning Best Picture just hit a major bump in the road. Or it didn't, since the Coens could still grab a Best Director nomination from the Academy at the end of this month. Otherwise, this list features your usual suspects. Click ahead for the nominees.
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I know we're all quick to judge these days, but come on: Who hasn't gravely misspelled an A-list movie star and eventual Oscar nominee's name in the process of tweeting about his rumored third nipple?
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Once every five to seven years, the average American decides he/she is going to see all the Oscar-seeming movies before the ceremony. It's a good way to feel like a part of civilization, just before you dismiss it as contrived, humorless and a misuse of Paul Dano's talents. But as much as you might want to be a completist, perhaps there's one movie you just can't muster the nerve to see: What's your 2010-11 holdout?
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"[W]hy is there so much damn acting in this movie? Melissa Leo is big, all right. She's big all over the place. It's the sort of thing that doesn't just beg to be noticed: It knocks on your door, kicks it down because you didn't respond fast enough, comes in and steals your TV, your laptop, and your toaster, whacks you upside the head with a two-by-four, and finishes by shouting, 'Gimme an Oscah, ya f*ckin' retahd!' Now that's acting." Did we mention Stephanie Zacharek is contributing to the Slate Movie Club this week? [Slate]
Welcome back to Movieline's Oscar Index, your weekly, bulletproof guide to the ever-tightening contention for next month's Academy Awards. And as with last week's awesome "Steak Eaters" theory, the latest edition is dominated by yet another perennially vexing dilemma: Can Hollywood and its ticketbuying public agree once more on Best Picture? Let us investigate...
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The latest Oscar precursor tumbled over the Movieline transom this morning, this time from the Art Directors Guild: The organization announced the nominations for its 15th annual awards, showcasing many of the usual suspects in film and television (The King's Speech, Black Swan, Inception, Mad Men) and a few radical headscratchers (Two and a Half Men's "Hookers, Hookers, Hookers" episode? Say whaaaa?). And snubs! What kind of world do we live in when a union of art directors, production designers and the like will recognize such pedestrian fare as The Social Network but not Grown-Ups? Did they see that water-park montage? Wankers. Anyway, read on for the nominations.
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Well, almost all of them. For those keeping score at home, the only film not nominated by the Producers Guild that's also on the list of Best Picture candidates over at the Movieline Oscar Index was Winter's Bone; the beloved indie failed to make the cut, replaced instead by Ben Affleck's The Town. Otherwise, status quo: The Social Network, The King's Speech, The Fighter, Black Swan, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, Toy Story 3, 127 Hours and True Grit all received nominations from the PGA, meaning they're one step closer to fulfilling their predicted Oscar glory. Click ahead for the full list of Producers Guild nominees.
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As noted in today's edition of The Broadsheet, a writer at VF.com has made a compelling (or at least intriguing, or at least time-killing) case for The King's Speech being little more than a well-produced riff on the original 1984 version of The Karate Kid. On the one hand, tropes is tropes; there are only so many original stories in the world, and eventually everything will have something in common. On the other... I mean, "The unorthodox, uncredentialed teacher is contrasted with a cruel -- but more respected -- educator." Or, "The teacher helps fill a void left by the student's absent father." Is this the beginning of a covert Sony vs. Weinstein Oscar-season war?
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The official list of Academy Award eligible scores numbers 77 in total, but don't expect to see many of your favorites get recognized come nomination time. As previously reported, Black Swan, The Fighter, Tangled, The Kids Are All Right and True Grit were deemed ineligible because of their reliance on previously produced music, and now comes words that Randy Newman declined to enter his Toy Story 3 score in the running. This marks the first time Pixar won't have a nomination in the Best Original Score category since Cars was passed over in 2006. [In Contention]
Well, here we go: Nomination ballots are in Academy voters' mailboxes as of this week, meaning that the "[m]ost over-covered, over-considered Oscar season ever" just became that much more over-covered and over-considered. How can we ever hope to break it down? To the Index!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.]
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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.
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