Welcome back to the Gold Linings Playbook, otherwise known as the Oscar Index, in which we take the pulse of the pundits handicapping this year’s emerging Oscar class!
Oscar handicapping began in earnest this week with The New York Film Critics Circle’s selection of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty as Best Picture, adding further speculation that the hunt for Bin Laden drama may steal some of Ben Affleck’s Argo’s thunder. In the past decade, four of the NYFCC’s Best Picture winners have gone on to win the Academy Award: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; No Country for Old Men; The Hurt Locker, and The Artist.
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Welcome back to Movieline's Oscar Index, where each week we take the pulse of the awards chatter en route to Hollywood's big day. This week both Tom Hooper's Les Miserables and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty surged through the ranks after debuting in their first, successful, awards screenings, though Spielberg's Lincoln still reigns supreme — but Peter Jackson's 48fps gamble The Hobbit and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained are right around the corner, gunning for the spotlight...
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There's no film festival quite like Fantastic Fest, as the annual Austin event proved Monday night when festival awards were handed out in a rollicking ceremony in which winning filmmakers accepted their prize by receiving a stein/trophy filled with beer. In an awards show filled with chugging winners and festival guest/presenter Doug Benson toking on his beer alternative of choice, Kristina Buožytė's sci-fi drama Vanishing Waves nearly swept the feature competition while Adrián García Bogliano's Here Comes The Devil won its entire category and the kid-battle pic I Declare War took home the Audience Award. Full winners inside!
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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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It took a little while to get out, but this young man's lightning-round riff on all 75 Best Supporting Actress Oscar-winners is the textbook definition of better late than never. Guess who: "I'm only in this movie for four minutes and you gave me an Oscar!"
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Who does the most accomplished canine performer in Hollywood have to lick to get some hardware around here? "He's the toast of this year's award season, now Uggie, the Jack Russell star of this year’s Academy Award-winning silent film The Artist, will walk the red carpet and serve as a presenter at the only major award show where animals take center stage - The Humane Society of the United States' 26th Genesis Awards. [...] 'The Genesis Awards are about honoring the animal protection message, not the performance, but if we had an award for a dog who’s become a poster animal for people not giving up on their unruly companion animals, we’d give it to Uggie... now, there’s a thought!', says Beverly Kaskey, senior director and executive producer of the annual Genesis Awards." [Genesis Awards]
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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Congrats aren't just in order for the winners of tonight's Film Independent Spirit Awards; major props go to Adam Sandler for an outstanding showing in today's Razzie nominations announcement, which found the Jack & Jill/Just Go With It star breaking the previous record for most personal Razzie nominations earned in a year. (Sandler won 11 nominations, while Jack & Jill itself earned 12.) Eddie Murphy, guess you're off the hook for the Year of Norbit. See the full list of fairly obvious nominees vying for Golden Raspberry (dis)honors after the the jump and leave your predictions below.
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Movieline's backstage at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, where Seth Rogen is hosting (and absolutely killing it) at the annual celebration of indie filmmaking, held in a tent on the beach in Santa Monica. Want the irreverent, no holds-barred celeb-skewering monologue that Billy Crystal most certainly will not deliver tomorrow night? Stay tuned for clips of Rogen to hit the airwaves tonight. Meanwhile, follow along on Twitter (at @movieline) and check back here to see this year's winners updated as they happen!
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The Academy Awards telecast stopped being a one-screen experience years ago. An Oscar viewing party is all well and good, but with a computer or phone nearby, a virtual theater full of people will enhance the experience from the first red-carpet arrivals to the music playing over the Best Picture winner’s speech. Yes, your friends are witty and can also fetch you a beer, but the best jokes about the winners, losers and everything in between are on Twitter. Some professionals make watching the Oscars simply worth the hours (and hours) spent. Doug Benson is one of them.
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Everybody knows that George Clooney broke out on The Facts of Life in the mid-'80s. But in the quarter-century before the once and possibly future Oscar-winner and all-around Hollywood royal's media profile encompassed morning-show house tours and magazine covers from Esquire to Vanity Fair, where was the 25-year-old Clooney developing his public persona? Where else? Tiger Beat!
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The latest in a series: "The Oscars have become the golden fig leaves that the industry wears to pretend it’s as committed to being in the quality business as it was in the past." [NYT]
The Writers Guild of America gave out its annual awards on Sunday night, bestowing its hardware to the year's most accomplished film and television scribes... whose work was developed and produced under WGA rules and conditions, which disqualified Artist writer-director (and Oscar frontrunner) Michel Hazanavicius among a few others, but whatever. Congrats to all!
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New to the distribution arena, Alamo Drafthouse co-founder Tim League became enamored of a small Belgian crime drama called Bullhead at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Less than a year later, he and his Drafthouse Films operation have an Oscar contender on their hands. Not too shabby for a company younger than the Obama administration.
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