Television and theater producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will produce the 85th Academy Awards, the Academy's president Hawk Koch said Thursday. This will be their first turn at producing the Oscars, which are slated for Sunday, February 24, 2013.
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The rules are out and email has been hit. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences have restricted the amount of email that can be sent to its members, limiting it to "only one piece of mail and one email per film company" each week. There are also increased restrictions on third parties distributing materials and the number of screenings Academy members can be invited to (mostly without food or drink).
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Happens to the best of us: "'At the beginning people [say], "You’re going to be going to the Oscars," and you’re like, "Whatever, doesn’t matter, don’t think so." But after a while it does penetrate. After a while you’re like, "Anyway, so I’m going to the Oscars…"' He laughs. 'And you start to believe it. And I did. I thought I was going. And then I found out I wasn’t and I was upset. I was very upset by it. The first reaction was "What the fuck…?"' He sounds frustrated that he had let himself get sucked in. 'It’s a vanity thing. It does become important to you. And it shouldn’t.' On reflection, he decided that he had learned something about misplaced priorities. 'A good little lesson.'" [GQ]
The Oscars are staying put for another 20 years, and before Scarlett Johansson joined the Avengers, another superhero was in line for the feature. Read on for that revelation and more in Tuesday's latest Biz Break.
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Every year, studios, exhibitors and press gather in Vegas for the annual hype harvest that is CinemaCon (née ShoWest), glimpsing first looks, clips and other previews of hotly anticipated movies to come. Surprises invariably appear, for better or worse, and conversations naturally ensue. Fine. What is not fine — at all — is grounding an Oscar frenzy in 10 minutes of footage from an unfinished film with a release date eight months away.
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Are the Central Park Five the next West Memphis Three? The teenagers wrongfully convicted in the vicious 1989 rape and beating of jogger Tricia Meili — and only released after the actual attacker came forward in 2002 — will be showcased in a forthcoming Ken Burns documentary entitled, appropriately enough, The Central Park Five. And while the film was funded in part by Burns's longtime patrons at PBS, the two-time Oscar nominee and four-time Emmy winner (who co-directed the project with his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon) is taking the film to Cannes next month with the hope of finding a theatrical distributor: "We want to do it [theatrically] because the running time makes it manageable, and there's something urgent about it," he told TV Guide this week. This sounds... familiar?
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Having had the chance to work with one of his heroes, Paul Newman (in 1989’s Fat Man and Little Boy), John Cusack turned to a Newman classic for a round of Movieline’s My Favorite Scene. “There’s a scene of Paul Newman in The Verdict that I would use as the best example of economy and what a close-up is supposed to mean,” Cusack explained during our chat for The Raven. “It’s the example where the film does what no other art form can do – a book can’t do it, and theater can’t do it, it’s only for film, and it’s the best example of it.” Pay attention, kids – Professor Cusack’s Film Language 101 is in session.
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ActionFest, the annual all-action-movie film festival in Asheville, N.C., honored stunt coordinator Jack Gill this weekend with its Man of Action Award. Gill used the platform to discuss his ongoing campaign to add an Oscar category for stunt coordinators, explaining to a panel audience why it’s taken 21 years — and how he’s talking to the voting Academy members of a special committee, one by one — to convince them that stunt professionals are artists just like other film technicians honored on Hollywood's biggest night.
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While no one is in any rush to revisit the most recent Oscar season, I'd be remiss not to point you back to our virtual roundtable of nominees for Best Foreign Language Feature — specifically, Canadian filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, whose classroom drama Monsieur Lazhar makes its way into limited release this weekend. He's pretty awesome, having brought a lot of the most poignant and intriguing points of view of any of the generous nominees who spent their Oscar week with Movieline.
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This is pretty much perfect: "since i am blamed whenever people don’t like it, but never praised when they do, and since most critics forget that they liked or hated something two years ago and cite it as a strength or weakness two years later, i’ve come to be philosophical about the show. if people don’t like the comic who hosts, they hate the show. if no comic hosts, they hate the show and demand that a comic be summoned. when he’s edgier, like chris rock, we get slammed. when he’s bland, like ellen, we get slammed. but a few things are clear. this is the oscars. they still mean something after 83 years, at least in the industry. unlike the mtv awards, their audience is not exclusively 9-18 year olds. unlike the golden globes, the voters are people who actually make movies, not pretend to be journalists. some things are simply inappropriate. it’s a dance every year to figure out what those are. every single line on the oscar show is negotiated. unless you’ve been there, you have no idea how it is put together. it’s like nothing else on earth. i’m writing a book about it, but i have to throw in my sexual escapades to make sure it sells." [Filmdrunk]
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I have no idea how this concept eluded me for two years, but there it is: The 3rd annual 20/20 Awards were announced recently, honoring the best films of 1991 after two decades worth of distance and hindsight. Great idea — even though the event turned out just about as anticlimactically as this year's real thing. That's what happens when Oscar apparently gets it right.
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Hint: Not a lot. "Rourke was leaving the gym in L.A. yesterday when he joked about using the movie as a torture device ... 'I'm gonna tie you to a chair and make you watch Moneyball all fucking night.'" [TMZ]
I mean, of all the things bringing down that Oscar intro, Twitter jumped on this? "'I am 100 percent certain that my father is smiling. [...] Billy previously played my father when he was alive, and my father gave Billy his full blessing,' she continues, noting that Saturday Night Live gave the imitation 'legendary status.' [... Tracey] Davis, now 50, does however take issue with using the word 'blackface,' attributing the term born in the 1800s to describe white actors in makeup playing black characters, to early film stars such as Al Jolson, not Crystal, per se." [THR]
It wasn't all tepid, frustrating and demoralizing Sunday night at the Oscars. We'll always have the red carpet with all its bitchy tweets, tuxedo sabotage, wheelchair awkwardness and wackadoodle screen vets getting the live, televised attention they so richly, richly deserve. Take Richard Dreyfuss and Nick Nolte, for example. Who was crazier?
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I had vowed to get on with my life and leave the Academy Awards alone today. That all changed when a friend alerted me to an eye-popping moment on the Oscars red carpet that haunted my dreams and now demands reckoning. Dear readers, does anybody knows what the hell is going on here?
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