Over at Entertainment Weekly, David Fincher plays coy joking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Oscar chances. [Some spoilers follow, though they'll come as no surprise to those familiar with Stieg Larsson's book or Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 film adaptation.] How likely is is that the Academy will be so turned off by the extremes seen in Fincher's film that they'd pass it over come nomination day?
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Although Albert Nobbs has made the festival rounds and has long been generating awards-season buzz -- particularly for star and co-writer Glenn Close -- the film only had its Hollywood coming-out party of sorts over the weekend.
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If Billy Crystal's Twitter is to be believed, the funnyman has been tapped to replace Eddie Murphy as host of the Oscars in the wake of RatnerGate, as the comedian Tweeted today. "Am doing the Oscars so the young woman in the pharmacy will stop asking my name when I pick up my prescriptions," read Crystal's post. "Looking forward to the show."
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It's been quite a day, and quite a week for Oscar watchers, but just imagine what Academy president Tom Sherak and Co. have been dealing with on the inside of the RatnerGate hullaballoo! They're probably thanking their lucky stars for Oscar-winning uber-producer Brian Grazer, who has agreed to step in to patch together the 2012 Academy Award telecast. Hit the jump to read invisible sighs of relief between the lines of the AMPAS official press release.
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In this weekend's Real Steel, Hugh Jackman stars as a boxing promoter who bonds with his estranged son over a junkyard robot that they train towards a fictional, futuristic boxing championship. So just how did an amnesiac prisoner on an Australian television series transform into a Tony and Emmy Award-winning movie star?
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Beginning January 24, 2012, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will begin cracking down on the lifeblood that arguably keeps awards season flowing each year: Oscar parties. (Gasp!) "To the extent that the public dialog about the Oscars is who threw a good party or ran a successful campaign versus the quality of the work, that's off-point for us," Academy COO Ric Robertson told The Hollywood Reporter. "We want people to be talking about the work."
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The entertainment world may have been a little shocked earlier this month to learn that Eddie Murphy would be hosting this year's Academy Awards but three-time Oscar host and Murphy's Bowfinger co-star Steve Martin has complete faith in the comedian's statuette-presenting ability. And a few mildly funny words of advice.
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The King's Speech -- the cutest Best Picture winner about compelling speech patterns since Rain Man -- is rumored to be ticketed for Broadway in Fall 2012. Yep, real actors will be stuttering live, onstage, in an epic epiglottal drama for the ages. That should be adorable -- and family friendly -- but are you worried that other Best Picture nominees from 2010 are better suited for a stage adaptation? Good! Ahead, some better options.
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Well, isn't this quite the youthful shake-up! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has announced the producers who will create next year's Oscars telecast: previous telecast director Don Mischer and Rush Hour/X-Men 3 director Brett Ratner. Does this mean less snooze and more explosions for the annual awards season centerpiece?
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced to its members that online voting is in the works for next year's Oscar race -- and could possibly be implemented as early as this year. But will the digital move make the Oscars susceptible to hackers and disrupt the Academy Awards race as we know it?
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Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Tom Hooper's Best Picture winner The King's Speech got its own XXX parody, but who could have anticipated such... quality?
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The folks at Rotten Tomatoes have tabulated their annual Best of the Best list, inserting Tom Hooper's 2011 Best Picture winner The King's Speech into the annals of Oscar history. But comparing great films to other great films has always been something of an apples to oranges situation; how can you measure, say, The Godfather Part II against An American in Paris -- two very different films that occupy adjoining slots on the list and have the same Tomatometer ranking (98 percent)? With a carefully calculated algorithm, that's how! Still... why does The King's Speech not quite feel right sitting so high above other bona fide classics?
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Movieline hit the red carpet at Saturday's Spirit Awards, where Exit Through the Gift Shop took home Best Documentary, with one guiding mission: Find out who Banksy really is! But just in case we couldn't get to the bottom of that enigma, we had a backup mission: Find out what he'd look like if he came to an awards show incognito! Hit the jump to watch the results of Movieline's investigation into The Banksy Identity, as aided by a few celebrity informants.
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Yes, yes. The King's Speech will win, and no matter how hard we try to tell ourselves any other film has a chance in hell, its abiding safeness will triumph Sunday night. But I'd like to think the Academy will spread the love around -- a win for The Social Network here, a Natalie Portman winner's guffaw there, and some gold for Hailee Steinfeld. Hope she brings her blingitude for the big night.
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It used to be you could count on David O. Russell to be Hollywood's resident actor-alienating, on-set yelling enfant terrible. Not anymore. As the director told MSN Movies, he's well aware that years of bad behavior landed him in movie jail. And now that The Fighter has put him back in the industry's good graces with a Best Director Oscar nod as the cherry on top, Russell's all about making nice.
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