This weekend belongs to The Avengers, which brought out crowds for midnight screenings overnight and sparked a Twitter backlash by Samuel L. Jackson against a NY Times reviewer. Those are among Friday morning's highlights in Biz Break along with a BBC denial it's banning Sacha Baron Cohen from its airwaves, a Clooney cash windfall for Obama and more.
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Actor George Clooney once confessed to Oscar-winner Michael Moore that he used the filmmaker's debut Roger & Me as a dating litmus test. Or so Moore told an audience at the Walter Reade Theater in New York, where the hit 1989 documentary had a special screening Tuesday night.
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Friday in Washington D.C., Secret Service agents arrested protesters gathered at the Sudanese Embassy to draw attention to the ongoing humanitarian and food crisis in the North African nation. Among those charged: Members of Congress, Martin Luther King III, the president of the NAACP, journalist Nick Clooney, and his son, George Clooney, whose star power lent the protest an elevated media platform. Ol' George has long been vocal in his political activism, using his celebrity to help shed light on humanitarian concerns, and as evidenced by these 9 most handsomely stoic of Clooney shots from today, he makes social activism look darn good.
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Hollywood's biggest (and possibly most anticlimactic) night is upon us, which can only mean one thing: Movieline's third annual Oscar Liveblog Extravaganza! Join your Movieline editors and loyal readers as we parse the Academy Awards to within an inch of their glamorous lives. The fun begins on the red carpet at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT, with the Oscarcast proper commencing at 8:30 p.m ET/5:30 p.m. PT. And in any case, keep abreast of this year's Oscar class with our commentary after the jump.
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Forty-eight hours to Oscar. Gut-check time — or maybe make that "gut-instinct check" time, a moment to break away from the meticulous zeitgeist-combing science of Movieline's Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics and make a few choices for myself. Not that they'll be so different, but if you can't go with a hunch where 5,765 fickle, insular industry minds are concerned, then what can you go with? We can't all be be Otis the Oscar Cat, you know. Anyway, let's make this quick:
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Kevin Tent had been nominated for three ACE Eddies before winning this month for The Descendants, which the American Cinema Editors deemed Best Edited Feature (Drama). Tent’s work in the cutting room played an important role in placing The Descendants firmly in the drama category. The longtime collaborator with Alexander Payne — Tent's other Eddie nods were for Sideways, About Schmidt and Election — says that much more comedy from the King family was shot than what we see onscreen and that removing it just felt right. In a few days, Tent will vie for the Best Film Editing Oscar for the first time. Movieline spoke with him about how the movie’s dramatic story came together, the attention from the Academy and his plans for Oscar night and beyond.
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Meet Otis the Oscar Cat, Movieline's resident feline awards prognosticator. Like the majority of Academy members, he's white, male, and owns a black tie; his tastes tend toward the traditional, although he'll bite at the occasional tasty treat. To get an inside line on Sunday's Best Picture winner, we consulted Otis for his Oscar picks -- will the Academy Award go to The Artist, starring that rascally pup Uggie? Or perhaps War Horse, by a nose?
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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 most demoralizing awards season in recent memory continued over the weekend, with the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild handing out their hardware to pretty much everyone you expected to receive it. I'll factor all this into Oscar Index on Wednesday for a complete-race breakdown, but here are the five basic takeaways worth keeping in mind:
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There's good news and bad news to begin this post-nomination, next-to-next-to-next-to-next-to-last installment of Oscar Index. The good news? It's kind of almost over! The bad news? Oy. Please don't make me repeat it.
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Give the Academy some credit: They made awards season fun for a little bit longer. At least my mind was blown this morning as AMPAS president Tom Sherak and Jennifer Lawrence announced The Tree of Life, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Demián Bichir and a few other shocks among the 2012 Oscar nominations.
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We're a little more than half a day away from learning who and what will compete for the 84th annual Academy Awards -- an elite class through which Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics had combed for four months in its fail-safe, fool-proof and bracingly handsome Oscar Index. This calls for one last sweep through each of the Academy's categories (with the exception of live-action, animated and documentary short, about which even our pointiest-headed Oscar wonk cannot speak yet with authority); check our team's work against your own, and drop back by Movieline tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. ET/5:30 a.m. PT as we deliver nominations, reactions, analysis and more.
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Here is a video featuring Artist wonder dog and awards-season gadabout Uggie telling viewers what movie made him cry and offering some insights on his Oscar chances. Some guy named George Clooney is in it, too. Did I mention that it's Friday? [W Magazine via PeoplePets]
Smack in the middle of a two-week frame yielding two awards shows and a pair of nomination announcements that will culminate in this year's Oscar nods, the researchers at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics have gained minimal insight into where the Academy may take the 2011-12 awards race in next Tuesday's final nominations. Or maybe they're all just sleeping. It's been that kind of year. Let's check their work in this week's Oscar Index.
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Over the last week or so, film-culture observers witnessed an odd phenomenon sweep the country: A palpable, recognizable feel of anticipation -- for an awards show. Even rarer was the reason behind it. When the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced that Ricky Gervais would return for a third stint emceeing the Golden Globe Awards, we expected a return to last year’s delirious exercise in blunt-force celebrity accountability.
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