There are few movies that make teaching look more quietly unappealing than Won't Back Down, which is quite an achievement, given its naked aims to inspire. The film, directed by Daniel Barnz (Beastly), who also co-wrote the screenplay with Brin Hill, doesn't by any means hate teachers — it merely holds them to impossible, wild-eyed standards. Inside every classroom instructor, it posits, is a Stand and Deliver-worthy saint who's merely being kept down by those pesky teachers union regulations that are crushing spirits and encouraging them not to try. It's the system that's preventing them from handing out their home numbers so students can call for help. It's the system that's holding them back from staying after school to work with anyone who needs it, and from loving their students even more than the kids' parents do. The film is all for teaching as a calling. What it doesn't do is offer it the dignity of also being a job.
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Rounding out Wednesday morning's mostly film news briefs, Tribeca Film takes rights to one of its winners, Focus Forward heads to LA Film Festival with prizes ready to hand out, Amazon teams with MGM titles and CBGB movie picks up another actor to play a singer
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For the 14th consecutive year, the folks at Time Magazine have once again passed me over when considering their annual roster of the world's 100 Most Influential People. Heretics! So be it — even an incomplete list is worth visiting judgment upon. Let's check out (and rank, naturally) the film personalities included this year. And to my publicist: You're fired!
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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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Each Wednesday for the past five months, my colleague S.T. VanAirsdale has fearlessly navigated the ever-shifting Academy Awards tides with his weekly Oscar Index, a gig that’s enough to make even the most intrepid seafaring mortal long for dry land. It’s in sight, Stu! By this coming Monday morning, all of our meticulously calibrated predictions, as well as our wayward hopes for our own personal favorites, will amount to little more than scraps of speared whale blubber, receding in the distance as we move toward next year’s Oscar broadcast. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s still time to savor the last-minute glitter wave. To that end, here are my own Oscar predictions for each category, followed by the candidates I wish would win.
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And why? Because they're based on hype. But that's OK, Ben Zauzmer — Harvard freshman, analytical whiz kid and proprietor of the new "matrix algebra"-based awards prognostication site Ben's Oscar Forecast! Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics has the science down and is soliciting interns for next year's awards-season death march. Inquire within.
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*: As determined by Movieline's Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics after crunching 23 weeks of data from the awards cognoscenti and beyond. Thank you for reading; our work here is done.
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You know that when two of the most respected pundits in all of Oscardom argue (within days of each other!) for curtailing both the epic Academy Awards season race and the ceremony in which it culminates, patience for all this crap is wearing thin. With that in mind — and also considering that the "race" for most of these categories ended weeks or months ago — who's up for an Oscar Index lightning round? (The entire staff at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics raises its hands.) OK, then — to the Index!
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From Meryl Streep to Martin Scorsese and awards season juggernaut The Artist, Hollywood's finest came out in full force Sunday in London for the 2012 BAFTA Awards. (Get the full list of BAFTA winners here.) Hit the jump to see who dazzled on the red carpet and celebrated backstage at the last big hurrah before the Oscars.
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"Let's have a moment of silence for the suffering Oscar bloggers as they enter the most trying and mortifying weeks of their labors." Such was Glenn Kenny's tweeted lament earlier this week -- one eerily anticipating today's latest, sanity-thrashing edition of Oscar Index. And that's just its effect on readers! You really don't want to see the catatonic pall saturating Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. On the other hand, we're gonna make a fortune recycling this mounting pile of wine bottles. To the Index!
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It's a little difficult for the specialists at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics to come into work these days, what with the pall of predictability settling in over the awards landscape and the painstaking studies into backlash physics yielding less and less of practical substance. What's a frustrated kudologist to do? Besides drink for the next four weeks straight, I mean. Let's look for ideas and encouragement for all in this week's Oscar Index.
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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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"Only on afternoons when the cinema offers retirees half-price tickets has there been much of a crowd for The Iron Lady, the controversial film about Mrs. Thatcher, who is now 86. [...] A therapist, Lauren Hall, 24, had her own perspective. 'People who come to Grantham are more interested in Isaac Newton,' who attended school in the town from 1655 to 1661 and has a statue in the town’s main square, she said. In case the visitor had not grasped Newton’s place in history, she offered a prompt. 'Did you know he invented the cat flap?' she said." Huh. This can only benefit Viola Davis, right? [NYT]
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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