Unless you count the viral video cat named Lil Bub, the winners of the Tribeca Film Festival's annual awards ceremony are not a glitzy lot, despite the event's reputation as a celebrity-studded affair. more »
To quote Patton Oswalt from his great KFC Famous Bowls routine, “America has spoken,” and for Oscar pundits bemoaning Lincoln’s loss to Argo, this Oscars truly was a “failure pile in a sadness bowl”: A reported 40.3 million people tuned in to the Oscars telecast, making it the most-watched entertainment show in three years, Entertainment Weekly reports. (Suck it, Golden Globes.) more »
Jennifer Lawrence's Best Actress Oscar win is more than a career milestone. During awards season, Lawrence got dinged by people like me for speaking her mind and not being more politic during the campaigning process. She didn't really listen, and, guess what, it didn't really matter. more »
The early ratings for last night's Oscars indicate that the telecast may have racked up its best numbers since 2007, according to Deadline. Which is good news for Seth MacFarlane, especially if you ignore that the biggest viewership increase came after The Walking Dead ended on AMC and that six of the nine Best Picture nominees had done more than $100 million at the box office. Otherwise, what do you really remember from last night's telecast besides Jennifer Lawrence's face plant, the Jaws play-off theme (which was funny exactly once) and the steamed look on Ben Affleck's mug when he came out on stage after MacFarlane's Gigli remark?
And that brings me to my first Oscars recap observation:
1. Was everybody in the Dolby Theater on Ablixa? Beginning with the show's weirdly cold opening, the telecast was devoid of the emotional highs and lows, pomp and circumstance that the Oscars used to have and haven't had for a few years. During the Movieline liveblog, I wondered if Harvey Weinstein had gotten Trazodone, which is name-checked in Silver Linings Playbook, added to the Academy Awards gift bag. But I now think the Side Effects antidepressant reference is more appropriate. Even MacFarlane's most out-there insults seemed even-keeled. New York Magazine slammed the Family Guy creator for being sexist, but I thought his bigger sins were being mediocre and cold. It's as if the digital revolution didn't just rewrite the way the film industry makes and releases movies, it reduced the way Hollywood generates excitement into a kind of binary code. Everything's either a 1 or a 0. That's what last night felt like, and the only time some of that old-timey Oscar excitement crept back into the broadcast was when Affleck gave his speed-speech. The privilege of being able to make movies is obviously still exciting to him, and he's good at spreading that giddy feeling.
2. The Oscars should not aspire to be the Tonys. So, I understand why there was a preponderance of musical numbers last night: MacFarlane is a show-tunes freak, Les Miserables, Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway were all nominated, and Barbra Streisand was on board to perform a tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch. But that doesn't mean they were a good thing. The show was listless to begin with, and all those musical numbers didn't help. Plus, the Chicago (2002) and DreamGirls (2006) tributes left me wondering if I'd slipped and fallen into the Hot Tub Time Machine. I half-expected to see Jackman join MacFarlane for some sort of tribute to The Music Man (which Family Guy has parodied more than once). I'm not going to suggest this is part of a trend, by the way, but have you noticed that a similar things has been happening over at Saturday Night Live? The practice of having musical guests hosting and performing — as Justin Bieber just did — is not helping the show's comedy cred, and, for a number of seasons now, an unusual number of skits seem to be built around musical performances. (On a related note, as a big Lonely Island fan, I just have to say that "YOLO" clip with Adam Levine and Kendrick Lamar was lame.)
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3. The only real surprise of the night was Christoph Waltz's win: Coming as it did near the beginning of the telecast, Waltz's Best Supporting Actor Oscar — which had been predicted in some quarters but mostly as a longshot — left the impression that a night of surprises was ahead. And then everything unfolded as predicted. If you followed all of the pre-season Oscar punditry, I bet you were bored.
4. Was Ben Affleck's comment about not holding grudges directed, in part, at Seth MacFarlane? One of the more interesting observations Affleck made during his Best Picture acceptance speech was, "You can't hold grudges. It's hard. But you can't hold grudges." The Argo director could have been referring to the Academy's decision to snub him for a Best Director Oscar, but, he just as well could have been referring to MacFarlane's remark that he'd gone from "starring in Gigli to becoming of the most respected filmmakers of this generation." The line didn't seem so sharp to me. Gigli is an awful movie. But Deadline reported that Affleck was pissed off by the remark, and the filmmaker did launch a half-hearted jab at MacFarlane when he came out on stage shortly after the Oscars host uttered the punchline. (Affleck said something about it still being possible for MacFarlane to "turn the show around," but wouldn't it have been cool if he just said, 'Argo, fuck yourself"?) The grudges remark, which Affleck delivered during his Best Picture acceptance speech, was a nice zen-like catch-all that demonstrated that Big Ben wasn't just an Oscar winner, he was an enlightened Oscar winner.
5. You know that the media is burning out on Oscar coverage when... Reporters are asking Jennifer Lawrence if she tripped on purpose. I'm surprised no one asked if Jessica Chastain was the culprit.
[Deadline]
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The weeks of punditry and teary talk-show performances are over! Seth MacFarlane is about to take the stage and Movieline is about to liveblog the Oscars. Grab your favorite cocktail, enable your hand-held device and join me for Hollywood's most holy night. Let the pageantry and snarky comments begin!
“Argo to win it all.” This has been the Oscar pundit thesis statement ever since Ben Affleck was left off the Best Director list and promptly blew over the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe Awards in a whirlwind weekend of Oscar analysis. Every award Argo has gathered since that weekend last month has added to the confirmation bias. Affleck and his film established themselves as the storyline of the 2012 Academy Awards. more »
The Oscar season enters its last weekend, but one suspects it is far from over. Even if Academy members ultimately hewed to tradition and voted Lincoln and Steven Spielberg Best Picture and Director, respectively — as is the customary coronation for films with the most Oscar nominations — this outlier season will be studied and debated. For at least days to come.
With the Academy Awards just three days away, the Internets are being overworked by bloggers and moviegoers obsessed with staying up on the latest in Oscar news. I also wouldn't put it past awards season's prime navigator Harvey Weinstein to have a boiler room full of trained chimpanzees plugging in Jennifer Lawrence's name and "Silver Linings Playbook" into all the top search engines, such as Yahoo!, for instance. The web portal has collected some interesting data about Oscar-related searches, which I've culled below: more »
The mailing of the final Oscar ballots this week signals the final stage of what has been the most volatile and tumultuous Oscar race in years. Between the snubs and the snark (that Anne Hathaway spoof has topped 500,000 hits), this year’s races rival for drama Frank Fane’s ruthless pursuit of Best Actor in The Oscar. At this late date, several races are still very much up for grabs. Let’s go to the Gold Linings Playbook to see how the major Oscar categories are shaping up this week. more »
Here's a novel way to keep from getting worked up about your main Oscar rival: forget his name entirely. For Time magazine's Great Performances video feature on this year's Oscar nominees, Les Miserables co-stars and Oscar nominees Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman spend some time lauding their competition. Hathaway even praises the computer-generated tiger in Life of Pi. But watch what happens around the 2:09 when Jackman slyly raises the topic of Lincoln. more »
Here’s a shout-out for Naomi Watts, and I am afraid she'll need it. She's the sole Oscar nominee from director J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, and that means she has a real uphill climb for a win. Watts is up against four other nominees in the Best Actress category — Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty), Emmanuelle Riva (Amour) and 9-year old Quvenzhane Wallis (Beasts Of The Southern Wild) — whose movies have the additional momentum of a Best Picture nomination. It's a huge disadvantage now that the Academy at large is voting, not just the actors branch. more »
Two weeks after carrying home the big prizes from the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe Awards, Argo firmly established its Oscar front-runner status with another one-two punch in the form of the PGA's Motion Picture Producer of the Year honor and the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. And in a season of confusion and contradiction, that front-runner status gives Argo traction that none of its Best-Picture rivals have. more »
It’s one month before the Academy Awards: Do you know where your Oscar buzz is? This week has been rife with distractions from the main event, including the Sundance Film Festival and the presidential inauguration, not to mention the public spectacle of admitted liar Lance Armstrong and online hoax victim Manti Te’o. And then there’s the little matter of new Academy rules that prohibit campaigning following the Oscar nominations. more »
If you need an idea of how intensely competitive Oscar campaigning has become, look no further than Jennifer Lawrence's opening monologue for Saturday Night Live. Given the ridiculous media tempest that arose from Lawrence's First Wives Club "I beat Meryl Streep" reference at the Golden Globe Awards, I figured that the show's writers were going to address the issue in Lawrence's opening segment. And they did — in such a half-hearted way that it sounds like some negotiating went on to make sure that the Silver Linings Playbook star and Best Actress nominee didn't say anything that would hurt her chances to bring home a statuette. more »
This is getting exciting — not so much the Oscar race; but the recent spate of news about the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 24. Things are shaping up for a evening that may be less cringe-worthy than usual and that could improve on last year’s slight ratings boost. You’ve got Adele to perform Skyfall" you’ve got the 50th anniversary James Bond tribute, and now comes confirmation that Barbra Streisand will perform for the first time in 36 years. (Just please, God, not with Seth MacFarlane.) Plus, the “In Memorium” segment should feature some especially beloved character actors (Andy Griffith, Ben Gazzara, Ernest Borgnine and Jack Klugman). more »
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