We waited for the Golden Globes to happen before recording our sixteenth discussion. We began with the Ricky Gervais issue (how pissed off are they?, “the one bright spot”), and acknowledged that there seem to be no surprises yet to come. It’s all pretty much settled down at this point, and we’ve got six weeks until the Oscars.
“I don’t know what to say to my fellow prognosticators about this kind of phenomenon [represented by The Social Network],” Sasha said early on. “You’ve got two, maybe three films fighting for second or third place.” Me: “Some gurus may want to dig their heels in deeper…what does it take? They seem to think that some kind of mind-blowing, what-just-happened? kind of Best Picture decision is in the offing.” Could it happen?
“I know you’re a Social Network supporter,” Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet wrote a few minutes ago, “but do you find it a good thing (for movies, for awards, etc.) when we have such an uninteresting, unanimous decision on one film and only one other film is really even being considered as a potential runner-up? Yeah, I know The Fighter stands as a third contender, but the talk is all about The Social Network with a whisper of King’s Speech.” Here‘s his article, written in the wake of the Golden Globes.
I don’t know why I’m leaving tomorrow for Park City and Sundance 2011, but I am. I guess I wanted to really settle in and get everything squared away before it all starts. Whatever happens later this evening HE won’t be transmitting from roughly 8 am tomorrow until I get to JFK around 9:30 am. When the plane leaves I’ll really be dark until 4:30 pm or so. Wait…does Delta offer airborne wifi?
And I’ll never get to see Ivan Reitman‘s “predictable, cutesy” No Strings Attached without paying for it. The Manhattan all-media is tomorrow night.
Ricky Gervais “will not be invited back to host the show next year, for sure,” a member of the HFPA has toldPopeater‘s Rob Shuter. “[And] for sure any movie he makes he can forget about getting nominated. He humiliated the organization last night and went too far with several celebrities whose representatives have already called to complain.”
Ricky Gervais during last night’s Golden Globes awards telecast.
That’s the HFPA for you — all about image and politics and scumbaggery. “Any” movie that Gervais makes “can forget about being nominated”? In other words, this person is saying it’s about more than just not hiring Gervais again. If he/she can be believed the HFPA is going to do what it can to blacklist Gervais by indirectly scaring producers into not hiring him or funding his projects for fear of any Gervais film being shunned by the Globes. This, at least, is the import of the quote that Shuter has ran.
I’m putting this down to heat-of-the-moment emotion. A cooler perspective will no doubt prevail. But if any sort of anti-Gervais prejudice or blackballing is ever detected, wouldn’t it be lovely to somehow make life equally problematic for HFPA chief Philip Berk ?
From Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci: “It seems like the only person in the room last night who knew that a grotesque farce was happening was Ricky Gervais, and he was shiningly spectacular in his attacks on the smug self-satisfaction rampant among the shallow guests who had just answered, with a straight face, questions like ‘Who are you wearing?’ on the red carpet. And honestly, he didn’t go far enough. How can you take this shit seriously? The fact that the HFPA is being sued for breach of contract in what amounts to a bribery situation is enough to make anybody throw up their hands and wonder what the point is.”
From Marshall Fine: “I’m ready to start a Facebook campaign to dump Anne Hathaway and James Franco as hosts of this year’s Oscars to give the job to Ricky Gervais. Snarly responses from his targets aside, Gervais was the only thing that made the patently bogus Golden Globe Awards broadcast bearable Sunday night. Obviously, Hollywood stars don’t like to have their praise parade rained on by a comedian calling, ‘bullshit!’ from the opening minutes of the whole proceedings. But really — what other sane response was there?”
When I saw the initial teaser for Jonathan Liebesman‘s Battle: Los Angeles (Sony, 3.11) two months ago, I was feeling Skyline-d, District 9-ed, 2012-ed and Monster-ed out. It looked to me like just another shaky-cam disaster/alien-invasion movie in a military Cloverfield vein. 11.12 Quote: “What’s my level of interest in seeing it on a scale of one to ten? About a seven, if that.”
But now I’m feeling Oscar’ed out and pining for the start of Sundance, and that plus the usual mid-winter fatigue factor has me in the mood for aliens. Maybe it’s the shots of the surfers.
Battle: Los Angeles costars Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan, Michael Pena, etc. Asd I wrote before, “It would appear that 34 year-old Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) is a very ambitious Spielberg-Abrams-Kosinky-Cameron eager-beaver wannabe.
It was announced yesterday that Larysa Kondracki‘s The Whistleblower had won the Palm Springs Film Festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. I missed it at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and I hadn’t heard any particulars until today. Conspiracy thriller, American cop in Bosnia, human trafficking. Rachel Weisz, Vanessa Redgrave, Monica Bellucci and David Strathairn.
It’s not playing Sundance 2011, of course, but it will show later this month at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
Greg Jacobs and John Siskel‘s Louder Than A Bomb, about a major youth poetry slam competition held annually in Chicago, received the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature.
So every time Andrew Garfield‘s Peter Parker has to drop everything and become Spider-Man, he has to remember to take the web-shooter device with him. And God forbid if the device malfunctions, as they all do sooner or later. MTV’s Josh Horowitzobtained confirmation last night from Spider-Man costar Emma Stone.
During his infrequent stints as the Golden Globe jokemeister/commentator, Ricky Gervais skirted the line between delightfully wicked and boorishly cruel. He went with the taboo-ignoring, see-how-far-you-can-go sensibility of a roast. Coarse, obviously, but he was only speaking to the way things are out there and the things we dare not say. And every so often we heard the crack of a slugger’s bat.
The richest jokes are always flecked with brutality. And Gervais kept the energy up — you have to give him that. But I wonder what happened backstage? After the monologue he didn’t hake the mike as often as you might expect. Was that a simple time-clock issue or…?
I think he went as far as he did because of Mike Russell’s lawsuit. We’ve always known about the HFPA’s character, but Russell’s charges were bannered in trade headlines only two or three days ago, and for Gervais, I’m guessing, this required a commensurate response. He probably figured if he didn’t tear down the temple walls his comedian credibility would be sullied. The radical part was Gervais’ decision that once the floodgates were open in terms of HFPA material, he might as well thrown caution to the wind all around.
He was reflecting, I think, the sensibility of 2011 celebrity culture as much as the material used by Oscar emcee Bob Hope in the ’50s and early ’60s reflected the undercurrents and boundaries of that world.
“The jokes might have been more daring than funny, but the risk felt exhilarating because Gervais wasn’t being outrageous for its own sake. He was targeting the hypocrisy of Hollywood and the inanity and self-importance of awards themselves. The idea of rewarding excellence in film and TV is a crazy, politicized business, which makes these awards shows full of smoke-and-mirrors pretense. It’s as if no one is meant to notice the Wizard behind the curtain, orchestrating the big-money campaigns, and Gervais’ specialty is pulling that curtain back.”
“The general idea, naturally, would be to convey awe, delight and enthusiasm, and not, you know, come off like any kind of, you know, pooper. Opposite of that. Gotta be into it. But at the same time…how to say this?…you don’t want to oversaturate by using the same term too often. Perhaps if you got out a note pad and…I dunno, wrote down as many enthusiasm exclamations as you can think of? Ones you’re comfortable with, of course.”
