Month: February 2007

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke is reporting Seven Oscar-Night Spoilers, the biggest one being that the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards won’t be presented in the early portion of the show, as they always have. Instead, no acting awards will be given out until the last third of the telecast. The Academy is doing this, Finke understands, because Oscar viewership starts out strong and then wanes, and the only real cliffhanger is Eddie Murphy vs. Alan Arkin.

Please, Movie Gods…please don’t let Murphy win. You’re not pro-active and you don’t interfere as a rule, but you know what’s best and “right” and sometimes you step in and push the button anyway. You gave the Best Director Oscar to Roman Polanski for The Pianist despite a whisper campaign by the Polanski haters… bless you for that. Last year you knew Brokeback Mountain should have won and yet you inexplicably stood by and allowed the homophobic geezer contingent to overrun and conquer. You have to make it up to all of us because of that. Please don’t let a Bad Person win this year….please.

The best thing in N.Y. Times guy David Carr‘s Oscar prediction chart [click on “Juicy Subplots & Other Picks”] is the roundabout suggestion that if and when Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture, that the officially nominated producers — David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub — plus the film’s actual hands-on, Michael Arndt-hiring, Jonathan Dayton-and-Valerie Faris-hiring producers who weren’t nominated because of the Academy’s clumsy and insensitive rule-of-three — Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, of course — “perform a rear-guard action” and appear on-stage together as a quintet, arm-in-arm, all for one and one for all.

In a last-ditch attempt to squeeze intrigue out of a dying Oscar season, Rotten Tomatoes has put up an interactive feature called “The Best of the Best Pictures,” a list of 78 Best Picture Oscar winners ranked by how well-reviewed they are — not at the time of their release but (mostly) based on what today’s critics have written. The worst reviewed is Cecil B. Demille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth. The all-time best reviewed is Francis Copola‘s The Godfather; the second best is Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront.

“I know less and less about who I am, or who anyone else is.”

The problem isn’t that Warner Bros. marketers waited too long to start emphasizing Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Best Actor performance in The Departed in trade ads. (It was the problem but no longer, I mean.) The problem is that The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, composing this comparative piece of art for an article he wrote about Leo’s once-upon-a-time Oscar hopes, didn’t properly tweak the November trade ad so it looks as sharply focused as the December one.

I realize that FORA is an acronym for something, but I don’t know what. (Federation of Ravenous Alpha-Dogs?) Obviously it’s a web TV thing. They sent me an excerpt of Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt talking about how how and why he was briefly fired off the project. No, wait…there’s an entire program of Arndt talking about everything. You just have to click on it. It’s free to watch. (Apparently.)

In an interview with USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican, the reigning Oscar Night ladies — producer Laura Ziskin and host Ellen DeGeneres — are a study in opposite attitudes and sensibilities. DeGeneres is a brainy, free-associative, improvisational wit. Ziskin wants to be hip and alpha-like, but she sounds like an affluent ooh-lah-lah control freak who’s terrified (or at the very least alarmed) by spontaneity.

The Oscar show, I’ve just realized, is going to be a kind of war between the two. Ziskin will dominate, of course, being the big-shot producer in the control room, but many of us are going to be pulling for DeGeneres to somehow make things a little more loosey-goosey than Ziskin might prefer.

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “I came up with a really fun idea for the end of my monologue that I think is going to set this room off.”

Humorless control-freak Ziskin: “This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “I want somebody to do a one-armed pushup. I want somebody to streak.”

Humorless control-freak Ziskin: “Those days are gone.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “It’s just that everybody is so body conscious: I would streak, but I’m bloated.’ ”

Humorless control-freak Ziskin: “People are so nervous, so terrified, not just the nominees, but the presenters. She releases us, makes us happy and forget about ourselves.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “I didn’t realize that was my job. I’m going to have to change my entire monologue.”

And yet Ziskin says to prepare for a 210-minute running time, minimum. “You get your popcorn and invite your friends over. Or get in bed by yourself or with someone you like, and you wait to see what’s going to happen.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “We’re taking all the seats out of the theater, and we’re bringing in beds, popcorn and pajamas. We’ll pair everyone up, real nice.”

Washington Times film critic Gary Arnold trumpets the virtues of the Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 — good move — but in the same piece calls The Departed “terminally wretched,” praises Doug McGrath‘s Infamous as “far and away the superior biopic about Truman Capote” and describes Inconvenient Truth avatar Al Gore as “an alarmist pseudo-authority.” I used to admire Arnold when he was the critic for the Washington Post back in the ’70s and ’80s. I don’t know what happened.

Mediabistro.com on all the people I didn’t talk with or take pictures of at last night’s Radar magazine party at the Standard. I mostly stood around and talked about new scripts with a couple of very cool enterprisers, and otherwise tried to smile and not scowl until 9:30 pm or so.

A brotherly pat on the back to all those on Oscarwatch.com’s Final Oscar Prediction Chart who are predicting Alan Arkin to take the Best Supporting Actor Oscar — The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, Award Speculation, Buzzmeter, Spencer Shannon, Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez, N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews and Trailer Spy‘s Julie Stone. Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond (who didn’t send his picks into Oscarwatch, but he’s standing by Arkin in his latest Hollywood Wiretap column)

Almost everyone else is sticking with Eddie Murphy, and two or three stragglers are picking Jackie Earl Haley.

Good things occasionally happen to bad people, and you just have to roll with this when it happens. If Murphy wins, it will be because the anti-Murphy contingent didn’t rally around an alternative with enough uniformity. If you were to conduct an instant e-mail poll of all Academy members right now, Arkin would be the victor…but he only began to really surge over the last two or three weeks. The Movie Gods are, of course, foursquare against Murphy, but they were also pulling for Brokeback Mountain winning the Best Picture Oscar last year.