The Oscars aren't until Feb. 22, and the nominations won't be announced until Jan. 22, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is steadfastly whittling away the contenders. Shortlists were announced Tuesday for the Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects categories, helping us narrow down which films will eventually be nominated.
Next Thursday, members of the Academy's visual effects branch will gather at L.A.'s Goldwyn Theater to watch 15-minute highlight reels from each of the films, then vote to select the three nominees. As Varietyreports, this is already causing headaches because Journey requires 3D projection and The Dark Knight has IMAX scenes, and the theater isn't equipped for either. Maybe the filmmakers should have thought of that before they got all "innovative" and "different"!
(The reason they only show 15-minute highlights is that they can't expect every voter to have seen all seven contenders in their entirety, especially since the visual effects candidates are often really bad. Remember, it's because of this category that one must properly refer to Hollow Man as "the Oscar-nominated Hollow Man.")
The Producers Guild of America has officially existed since 1962, when separate groups for TV and film merged, but the PGA didn't start giving out awards until 1990. Since then, the PGA best picture winner has matched the Oscar winner 12 out of 19 times. They lined up last year (No Country for Old Men), but conflicted for three years in a row before that. So whichever film wins the PGA award on Jan. 24 has a reasonably good chance -- but by no means a slam-dunk -- of winning the Oscar, too.
But the more immediate question is whether The Dark Knight will even be nominated for the Oscar. The other four PGA nominees are likely Oscar candidates; it's The Dark Knight that's had the big ol' question mark next to it in people's guesses and predictions. A comprehensive list of past PGA nominees is hard to come by, even at the guild's own website, but Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil has done some number-crunching. He reports that of the 95 Best Picture Oscar nominees between 1990 and 2008, 72 were also PGA nominees. Statistically speaking, that means The Dark Knight now has about a 75% chance of getting an Oscar nomination.
A lot of the time, watching a movie, we recoil or start at something in it: That's fake, we say, and dismiss the whole film. On many occasions, that impulse is correct because the film is fake, but on rare occasions, we feel that sensation of dislocated wrongness not because the film is fake but because our world is; we can't wrap our heads around the facts and ugly truths of what we see, can't comprehend how such things are possible, and recoil from them out of refusal to believe, not because they aren't believable. This is one of the challenges Defiance, the newest drama from Edward Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond) faces as it tells the true story of the Bielski brothers, three Belorussian Jews and outlaw petty criminals who, during World War II's pogroms and purges, protected hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, some surviving and others actively fighting back.
We witness Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) make the decision to kill his horse so it can be eaten, and we cannot imagine such hunger. We watch Zus Bielski (Liev Schrieber) fight alongside Russians who hate him to stop Germans who hate him, and we cannot imagine such a grim choice. We watch Asael Bielski (Jamie Bell) fall in love, or a quick quip between two supporting characters, and we cannot imagine love, or laughter, in such a place. But there must have been such hunger; there must have been such anger; there must have been laughter, and love, in the years of exile. It's hard to imagine, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
Last Monday, yours truly was invited to help a friend of a friend out by offering to review Frost/Nixon on their podcast. As it turns out, it was the /Filmcast we were talking about, and it happened to be the same night that head honcho here Erik Davis was due to join in. Small world, eh?
So we tag-teamed our film chatter with the cool guys over at /Film -- David Chen, Adam Quigley, and Devindra Hardawar, to be specific -- and you can listen to that episode right about here. When Erik isn't twirling his hair around his finger and gushing about MTV's episodes of True Life, he and the gang manage to get around to discussing all the latest film news from Terminator: Salvation to the potential Suck Rogers with Frank Miller at the wheel.
I also took part in the /Film After Dark podcast and a recent year-end horror wrap-up extravaganza with just about everyone over at Bloody Disgusting, so with any luck and nearly no shame, we hope to share those as well. For those of you wishing to listen to David, Devindra and Adam record their next /Filmcast live, they'll be looking back on 2008 in film this coming Monday at 9 PM EST/6 PM PST.
Which year-end lists are really worth caring about? What films got a boost from the Broadcast Film Critics and Golden Globe nominations, like Happy-Go-Lucky, and which ones got lost in the shuffle? What's Iron Man doing on the AFI Top Ten Films List, anyhow? And what long, epic films are perfect for enjoying with a turkey sandwich on Boxing Day? Joining James this week to talk about all these topics and more is Kris Tapley of the weblog In Contention. You can listen to the podcast here at Cinematical by clicking below:
As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.
I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button weeks ago, and yet every time I tried to think about it -- whether it was to contemplate a decision in David Fincher's direction, a deviation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, a moment in Eric Roth's script or a note in the performances of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett -- I would soon find myself, invariably, distracted from the large-scale visions and moments of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and instead contemplating the smaller-scale moments of my own life. This was at best annoying; what did it say about the film that I couldn't hold it in my attention? What did it say about my attention that I couldn't even focus it on a film? But Zen gives us the parable of the master who points to the moon, and the student who looks at the master's finger. Fincher, Roth, Pitt and Blanchett have all, in their way, made a film of true sincerity and (ironically enough in light of its technical achievements) real simplicity; resting your gaze on the film, without directing it onto the things it encourages you to look at, seems like staring at the pointing finger.
Fitzgerald's tale is a brief fantasia, the story of Benjamin Button, a man who, born old, ages backward; at the same time, the slenderest books often become the best films, the lush drapery of moviemaking lending their slight grace weight, the stark simplicity of the plot a place for a director's vision to find purchase and grow. Within moments -- as an old woman lies dying in a modern New Orleans hospital, slate-gray rain battering the windows, her daughter (Julia Ormond) paging through her diaries and scrapbooks as the old woman fades in and out of consciousness, flickering between past memory and present reality -- we know we're not in the world established in Fitzgerald's 1922 short story. The woman's diaries are not just hers, and as the daughter reads, we learn about the birth and exile of Benjamin Button, born old in New Orleans in 1918 just after the Great War. ...
It's hard to ignore the Oscar polish involved in Revolutionary Road; an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes, reunites the stars of the Oscar-gobbling Titanic. To that end, Mendes does his best to make the film look serious and prestigious. And if you give it a cursory glance it's possible to come away with the impression that it is indeed a great and important film. But in truth, it's both relentlessly grim and nearly pointless.
It's "nearly" pointless because the subject matter -- that the suburbs have mutated and destroyed the American spirit -- has already been covered, many, many times in far better films, ranging from scary (Blue Velvet) to romantic (Far from Heaven) to funny (Edward Scissorhands). In a way, those outside genre elements helped keep the material from becoming overbearing. For Revolutionary Road, Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe have adapted a novel by Richard Yates, which was groundbreaking for its time; Yates wrote it in 1961 when polite society just didn't discuss such things as infidelity, ennui, drugs and booze and insanity. But Mendes creates a period picture and thus fails to justify why the material is still relevant in 2008, especially when this stuff has by now become its own movie subgenre. (Click on "Suburban Dysfunction" at allmovie.com.) The main factor for Mendes is that it's an "important novel." Never mind why -- or when.
Cinematical has received this exclusive final poster for Doubt, which proudly displays its many much-deserved award nominations. Based on the play by John Patrick Shanley (who also adapted and directed this big-screen version -- listen to our audio interview with him here), Doubt is exceptional because of its cast -- with all four players (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Viola Davis) turning in sharp, powerful performances. Set in the Bronx, New York in 1964, Doubt plunges right into the heart of a Catholic School and follows the two nuns who suspect a priest of making unwanted advances toward the school's first black student. Easily one of my favorite films of the year, this is definitely one you don't want to miss -- especially on a cold dark weekend in the middle of winter.
Doubt is in theaters now. Check out a larger version of the poster by clicking below.
(We're reposting our review of The Wrestler form the Toronto International Film Festival to coincide with the film's theatrical release.)
By James Rocchi
After winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler rapidly became the must-see of the Toronto International Film Festival, with huge lines at the press and industry screening this afternoon seemingly unaffected by the news that Fox Searchlight had purchased the film. After seeing The Wrestler for myself, I feel the need to extend a note of caution about the film, which sailed into Toronto buoyed by advance raves for Mickey Rourke's performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a low-level professional wrestler -- and we soon see how really, both those words could be in quotation marks -- whose '80s glory days are long over, scraping by at low-level, low-paying matches until a heart attack forces him to leave the ring and look at his life in the shadow of death. Many have already written about the parallels between Mickey Rourke and the swaggering, scarred wrestler he plays -- early success, fame and notoriety, a series of mis-steps and mistakes taking it all away bit by bit as the years advanced -- and the charge Rourke's own rise and fall offers a filmmaker like Aaronofsky looking to explore ruin and redemption.
But don't believe the hype -- or, more importantly, look past it; if a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke's work as Randy is physical, invested, powerful and sprawling -- but it's also quiet, sad and hauntingly wounded, too. And The Wrestler offers viewers far more than just Rourke's performance -- which, it must be said, is excellent -- if they're willing to not flinch from what it has to say: The Wrestler is a fascinating, rich, unblinking look at the dark, hunched mean streak that lies curled and poisonous inside of so much American popular entertainment and of so much American life. It's early to say this, but The Wrestler is one of the most grimly exciting, magnetically repellent movies we've had in a long time; it's flat-out one of the best American movies of 2008.
Like every red-blooded American, I dread the interminable Best Original Song presentations during the Oscars. More often than not, the songs suck, the presentation is elaborate and boring, and the insistence on playing the songs in full drags out an already too-long evening. But this year there's one song I'll actually be excited to see -- assuming it actually gets nominated. Thankfully, none of the Academy's arcane rules disqualified it.
Variety has the just-announced list of 49 eligible Original Songs from 2008. It features the entire soundtrack to High School Musical 3, the memorable "Jai Ho" from Slumdog Millionaire, the worst Bond song of all time, and -- the one I'm rooting for -- Bruce Springsteen's "The Wrestler" from, uh, The Wrestler. If you haven't heard it yet, you can do so here. You'll probably want to bookmark that until the official soundtrack is released on a date to be determined.
Needless to say, a Dark Knight snub's got nothing on the possibility of the Boss not getting to perform this amazing song at this year's ceremony. I might boycott the damn thing. Though, if Steve Coogan gets to perform "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" instead, I could be persuaded to reconsider.
What are your favorites from 2008? Any of them not on this list? (Ahem, Pineapple Express, anyone?)
Looks like the Austin Film Critics Association have become the first critics group to name The Dark Knight as their favorite of the year (the flick tied Slumdog Millionaire in votes in Chicago). Variety tells us those crazy cats from Texas (drunk off the intoxicating vibes at the Alamo Drafthouse, perhaps) handed out a total of five awards to the Batman sequel, including Best Picture, Supporting Actor (Heath Ledger), Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Score. Other notable Austin Critics awards went to Let the Right One In (Best Foreign Language), Sean Penn, Milk (Best Actor) and Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (Best Actress).
While The Dark Knight has pushed its way onto more than a few top ten lists (AFI included it in their top 10), the film has taken somewhat of a backseat to frontrunners like Slumdog Millionaire, Milk and WALL-E. In the last round of critics awards, Boston showed a tie between Slumdog and WALL-E -- giving the latter yet another push toward a potential Best Picture nod at the Oscars. Will The Dark Knight continue to remain on the sidelines, or will other critic groups refuse to let Baby sit in the corner?
For a lot of movie geeks, it's unnerving when the Oscar nominations are announced and there are films on the list that we haven't seen. (Except for the short-film categories, because no one's seen those.) This happens most regularly with documentaries, which often play only for a week or two at the local art house, if they play there at all.
On Jan. 8-10, Tribeca Cinemas in Manhattan will do its part to help this problem by screening six of the 15 docs that are on the shortlist for the Oscar nomination. The filmmakers, all of whom are alumni of the Tribeca Film Festival, will be on hand to present their work and participate in Q-and-A's. The event is sponsored by the Tribeca Film Institute and Gucci (because when you think of high-quality documentary filmmaking, you think of Gucci).
The films on the schedule are: At the Death House Door (about a prison chaplain who ministers to Death Row inmates), The Garden (about a community garden in South Central L.A.), I.O.U.S.A. (about America's debt problem), Man on Wire (about the crazy French guy who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974 -- this will probably win the Oscar), Pray the Devil Back to Hell (about Liberian women bringing peace to their country after years of warlords), and They Killed Sister Dorothy (about the murder of a Catholic nun and social activist in Brazil).
Full details on the screenings are here. If you're in the NYC area, this is a great opportunity not just to see the films (Man on Wire is out on DVD anyway), but to meet the filmmakers. Every now and then, the rest of us get envious of you NYC dwellers. Every now and then.
OK, this topic might only interest a few movie nerds, but that includes me, so I'm writing it.
Most people know that to be eligible for Academy Award consideration, a film must play theatrically for at least a week somewhere in Los Angeles County within the calendar year. But what about short films? There are categories for those at the Oscars (usually announced coincidental with the viewing audience's bathroom breaks), but surely those little live-action and animated flicks didn't play theatrically somewhere. I mean, when do you ever see short films in a theater other than in front of the new Pixar movie?
The answer, which you can read for yourself in the Academy's rules, is that for short films, they either have to play theatrically (for three consecutive days, at least twice a day), OR win a best-in-category award at an Academy-approved film festival. And that makes a lot of sense -- the only way most of us ever see shorts at all is at film festivals.
So which festivals "count" for Academy purposes? I'm glad you asked, because it brings us to the reason for this post. The current list of approved festivals is here, and it has the usual suspects -- Toronto, Sundance, Venice, Cannes, Berlin, etc. -- plus about 60 others all over the world. And the news that's a semi-big-deal for our friends in Austin is that our beloved South By Southwest Film Festival has just been approved as an addition to that list. From now on, any short film winning the top prize at SXSW is eligible for Oscar consideration. SXSW is legit now!
Each year the ratings for the Academy Awards seem to drop, and each year more and more people seem to blame the host for his (or her) inability to keep the world glued to their screens for three-plus hours. Sure, it takes a whole lot of everything to satisfy those tuning in to Hollywood's biggest night, but perhaps with the recession and economic problems, folks aren't itching to watch pretty millionaires congratulate one another with smiles, hugs and gold statues. Or we can just blame Jon Stewart for f**king it all up.
Either way, the Academy might be looking to switch things up this year by bringing on a host who isn't a stand-up comedian or a TV personality. According to Deadline Hollywood, they've chosen someone "way outside the box" to host this year's ceremony, and there won't be "the traditional segment of joke-telling near the start of the broadcast." DH says, however, that this person "is in the movie biz," and an announcement could come as soon as early next week. While some would prefer to see them lose the funny guy (or girl), I kinda liked it when they'd open up the show with some laughter or a musical number or, ya know, something light and entertaining ... since that's what these people do for a living -- they entertain. And if the Academy chooses some bore to walk out on stage and open up the show with a monologue about how "important" and "meaningful" movies are, I'll be switching channels in no time. Or, they could announce the new host as being The Jonas Brothers ... and then, well, we're all screwed.
But what do you think -- who would you prefer: a funnier, song-and-dance host or a more serious one?
UPDATE: Apparently, according to Deadline Hollywood, Hugh Jackman is the "way outside the box" name the Academy wants to nominate as host for the Oscars. He sure does look good, and claw good, but will he host good?
UPDATE 2: USA Today now confirms that Jackman will indeed host the Oscars.
First The Dark Knight gets all but ignored at the Golden Globes, and now this! Members of critics' groups and other organizations have been getting copies of the new Dark Knight DVD as Warner Bros. hopes to boost its Oscar and end-of-the-year top-10-list chances. But members of the Writers Guild of America have noted that their copies have been altered: The words "A Christopher Nolan Film" on the front and back of the case have been blacked out with a marker.
Defamer has the scoop on it, having noticed it on their own copy and then hearing it mentioned by someone else, too. Kyle Buchanan writes: "We called Warner Bros. to find out [what was going on], and a helpful publicist sighed. 'You must be WGA,' she said. 'It's because the guild won't accept a possessory credit for a director.'"
See, the WGA doesn't like it when movies say "A film by Christopher Nolan" or "A Christopher Nolan film." The WGA figures those credits make it sound like the director made the film all by himself, thus detracting from the invaluable work done by others -- like, say, for example, the writers. The WGA prefers a simple "Directed by Christopher Nolan." So apparently, when a DVD is being sent to WGA members, someone at Warner Bros. has to black out the offensive credit, lest the recipients be offended and ... what? Refuse to consider the film out of spite?
It's not clear from Defamer's report whether the WGA asked Warner Bros. to do this or whether Warner Bros. did it preemptively to avoid complaints. Either way, it seems to me that no matter what your position is on the "possessory credit" issue (and I tend to sympathize with the writers), this was a silly thing to do. I know the battle between writers and directors has been raging for decades, though; here's an interesting old Hollywood Reporter article about it, for further reading.
The Oscars aren't until Feb. 22, and the nominations won't be announced until Jan. 22, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is steadfastly whittling away the contenders. Shortlists were announced Tuesday for the Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects categories, helping us narrow down which films will eventually be nominated.
Fans of a certain cave-dwelling rubber-fetishist have cause to celebrate: 
Last Monday, yours truly was invited to help a friend of a friend out by offering to review 
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Like every red-blooded American, I dread the interminable Best Original Song presentations during the Oscars. More often than not, the songs suck, the presentation is elaborate and boring, and the insistence on playing the songs in full drags out an already too-long evening. But this year there's one song I'll actually be excited to see -- assuming it actually gets nominated. Thankfully, none of the Academy's arcane rules disqualified it..jpg)
For a lot of movie geeks, it's unnerving when the Oscar nominations are announced and there are films on the list that we haven't seen. (Except for the short-film categories, because no one's seen those.) This happens most regularly with documentaries, which often play only for a week or two at the local art house, if they play there at all. 
Each year the ratings for the Academy Awards seem to drop, and each year more and more people seem to blame the host for his (or her) inability to keep the world glued to their screens for three-plus hours. Sure, it takes a whole lot of everything to satisfy those tuning in to Hollywood's biggest night, but perhaps with the recession and economic problems, folks aren't itching to watch pretty millionaires congratulate one another with smiles, hugs and gold statues. Or we can just blame 
First The Dark Knight gets 
