Day: October 31, 2007

Update: No one has yet seen Charlie Wilson’s War, but the Gurus of Gold consensus so far is that Julia Roberts is a prime Best Supporting Actress contender. The Gurus are voting this way for the usual reasons — i.e., to show obeisance before the power of Roberts’ legend and the economic power of Universal Pictures. (Note: I erred earlier today in thinking that Variety‘s Anne Thompson had herself decided that Roberts in a likely contender in this category. She was in fact quoting from the Gurus of Gold list.)

The bottom-line is that I’ve read an ’06 draft of Aaron Sorkin‘s script of Charlie Wilson’s War and Roberts’ role — she plays Joanne Herring, a real-life Houston multi-millionaire — is fairly small. Sorkin and director Mke Nichols might have enlarged the part since, but it was almost cameo-level on the page.

On top of which the trailer suggests that Roberts’ performance is mainly about that not-quite-right Texas accent and selling that openly scheming, anti-Communist, sexually-provocative routine with Hanks as they discuss finding a way to help Afghanistan’s Muhjadeen resistance fight the Soviet invaders. Buttressed, of course, by that problematic blonde coiffure favored by conservative Houston ladies of a certain age.

So forget it, okay? Not enough screen time, no dimension to the role, limited acting chops, big hair = not in the game.

The N.Y. Times has now jumped into the Band’s Visit vs. Beaufort spat, with the Jerusalem-based Isabel Kershner reporting in a 10.30 story that “unnamed producers” of The Band’s Visit have been quoted as “accusing the makers of Beaufort — and director Joseph Cedar in particular — of having drawn the academy’s attention to the rule about the predominance of English, leading to the disqualification of The Band’s Visit.

After this story appeared in an Israeli newspaper on 10.14, Cedar “was quoted…as acknowledging that his producers had raised the issue with the Israeli academy, but denying any contact with the American one.

Cedar tells Kershner that “having to defend himself against accusations of being behind the disqualification of The Band’s Visit is “ludicrous, preposterous. I can understand the argument that the academy rules may be too strict, [but] we have absolutely zero to do with the disqualification. We didn’t make the rules, or put the English in that script.”

It’s very…I don’t know, reassuring to see that Cate Blanchett‘s Dylan performance in Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There is the far-ahead favorite among MCN’s Gurus of Gold and the The Envelope‘s new Buzzmeter prognosticators.

Having read my clarification on Sunday, 10.28, about some of the maneuvers that may or may not have lead to the disqualification of The Band’s Visit over language issue (i.e., over 50% of the films’ dialogue being in English, according to the Academy’s foreign film committee), the film’s producer Ehud Bleiberg has written to explain his position on the qualification issues.

“One, the team of The Band’s Visit believes that the English dialogue in the film is around 23 to 25 minutes in an 85 minute film and isn’t predominant in the film. The silence, expressions, and music are the predominant elements of the film.

“Two, The English is incorrect a lot of the time, requiring subtitles throughout the entire film.

“Three, In the (Beverly Hills) Academy rule book there is one important rule that says that Academy reserves the right to make rulings that do not follow their guidelines .

“These are the three main reasons why we felt our film would be eligible for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award, despite having been told in the late stages there may be an issue with the dialogue.

“Also, he Academy decided to disqualify the film based on dialogue vs. dialogue only. From what we have heard, the only person who has seen our film is the person who was clocking the dialogue. We have reason to believe that if there wasn’t so much noise and controversy surrounding the film before their viewing, they might have seen the film differently.

“As it is, they didn’t seem to take into account points A and B above or the difference between English, Arabic and Hebrew. For example, if a film has the English dialogue ‘he was walking,’ that comes to three words, whereas in Hebrew it’s only two. Also, the songs that are sung in Arabic were not included in the dialogue clocking, even though they were significant to the story.

“At the time of our appeal, to our disappointment, none of the other members of the (LA) Academy had seen the film in order to consider points A, B, and C. The team of The Band’s Visit believes that after winning the majority votes in 8 of the top categories of the Israeli Film Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay, it is the film that would have best represented Israel at the upcoming (U.S.) Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language category.

“Sony Pictures Classics has faith in this film,” he says, “and we are now trying to push the film for other categories including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. We hope that once the Academy has had a chance to see the film, they will be as impressed with it as the rest of the world has been.”

Bleiberg questions the accuracy of Yair Raveh‘s story “that he heard Beaufort‘s producers sent the Israeli Academy a letter from their international sales agent Bavaria Films, saying they counted the words in The Band’s Visit, it has 60 percent English and therefore will be probably be disqualified.”

Bleiberg says that Bavaria’s sales agent couldn’t have precisely tabulated the amount of English, Hebrew and Arabic in The Band’s Visit because “no DVD screeners were made available to anyone.”

However, he says, after The Band’s Visit won Israel’s Ofir Award for Best Film, Ilana Sharon, director-manager of the Israeli Academy, requested and got from Eilon Rtzkovsky. Bleiberg’s partner producer, two DVDs of The Band’s Visit in order to screen the film and determine if the language issue might be an issue before sending the film on to the L.A. Academy.”