Month: February 2011

“It’s not hard to see why films such as The King’s Speech, The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love play so well in Peoria. They work as pure escapism, presenting American audiences with a world that seems at once reassuringly familiar (people speak English) and excitingly different (they like drinking tea and hate talking about their feelings). For two hours, they allow us to forget the messy anxieties of the present and wallow in an idealized, romantic past.

“The silver screen Britain is a courteous, orderly place. Women wear dresses. There is no crime. Everybody is white. The political and social conflicts that marked Britain’s history — the strikes and demonstrations, the suffragettes and socialists — are entirely absent. It’s like Tolkien’s Shire, only with worse weather and stodgier food.

“The Britain of Colin Firth and Helen Mirren is the Britain of the imagination, a world of half-timbered cottages and country pubs, draughty palaces and foggy skies: an exact opposite, in other words, of modern-day America.” — Dominic Sandbrook, a proper Englishman, in yesterday’s N.Y. Daily News.

With no reported change in AMPAS attitude/policy since yesterday, it appears as if Deadline‘s Michael Fleming‘s Oscar-covering press credential ban is being upheld. Nikki Finke revealed early yesterday afternoon that Deadline‘s press pass had been revoked over Finke having posted a spoiler-heavy rundown of the show’s schedule.

“There’s a long history of entertainment journalists besides us publishing multiple scoops about the show during the week leading up to the Academy Awards broadcast, including this year,” Finke claimed. “But none of those news outlets were banned from coverage. True, until now, no media outlet has ever published so many scoops as Deadline did yesterday. The fact that we did our reporting job too well put the Academy on tilt.”

Finke speculated that the revoke order was apparently due to the particular ire of AMPAS exec administrator Ric Robertson. I’m guessing that Robertson didn’t pop his cork entirely over Deadline‘s scoop (although that was obviously the main reason), but also because Finke prefaced the rundown by saying “what’s confirmed at this point looks to be yet another snorefest…the highlights or lowlights depending on your point of view when it comes to the overly long and usually boring Oscar telecast.”

The au natural honesty of Spirit Award winner James Franco‘s press tent q & a was highly appealing. I described a similar vibe on 1.30 after Franco’s appearance at the Santa Barbara Film Festival: “Zen and relaxed and articulate in a kind of shoulder-shrugging way…didn’t try to turn on the charm or win anyone over…’I’m easy, I’ll talk, sure…no worries.'”

Notice the tent material rippling and buckling from the almost gale-force winds. It was by far the chilliest, most assaultive, least physically pleasant Spirit Awards ceremony ever.

Yours truly at gallery viewing of Black Swan-inspired sculpture & paintings at Regen Projects on Almont, just south of Santa Monica Blvd., in West Hollywood — Friday, 2.23, 6:35 pm.

Photo by Svetlana Cvetko

4:17 iPhone filing: Black Swan has won the Spirit Award for Best Feature. Four of the top five awards nabbed by Aronofsky/Portman/Libatique & Co.

4:09 iPhone filing: I was expecting Annette Bening to win the Best Actress Spirit Award for The Kids Are All Right, but nope — Natalie Portman has won it for her work in Black Swan. The winner of Sunday night’s Best Actress Oscar is so decided.

3:56 iPhone filing: Black Swan‘s Darren Aronofsky has just won the Spirit Award for Best Director. Affirmative!

3:47 pm: The Kids Are All Right‘s Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg have won the Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.

3:34 pm: I’ve been working off the laptop battery since 2:15 pm or thereabouts, and I’ve got about 20 minutes left. Thanks, Toshiba! I just plugged into an outlet and the laptop won’t charge so I’m dead. I’ll have to file from the iPhone. This plus the cold blustery winds buffeting the tent…forget it.

3:31 pm: I had to get some food and then answer nature’s call. As I stepped back into the tent John Hawkes had just won the Best Supporting Actor award for his Winters’ Bone performance. Before that The King’s Speech won the Best Foreign Film award. (British is “foreign”?)

3:04 pm: Banksy‘s Exit From The Gift Shop has won the Spirit Award for Best Documentary.

2:44 pm: James Franco has won the Best Male Lead Spirit Award for his performance in 127 Hours. Franco kept that film humming from start to finish, but I was pulling for a win by Ben Stiller‘s somewhat braver and more layered performance in Greenberg.

2:44 pm: Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low has won the Spirit Award for Best First Feature.

2:30 pm: Dale Dickey has just won the Best Supporting Actress Spirit Award for her performance in Winter’s Bone. Before air-time Tiny Furniture‘s Lena Dunham won for Best First Screenplay, and Black Swan‘s Matty Libatique won for Best Cinematography. (The show won’t air until 10 pm tonight, so this is newsy stuff.)

2:26 pm: I’m in the Spirit Awards press tent, and it’s no one is especially comfortable due to the blustery cold winds. This has been the coldest Spirit Awards ever. People are huddling, shivering, wishing they’d worn a sweater.

It’s time to drive over to the Spirit Awards, which are back under that big old tent on that good old blacktop lot adjacent to the beach in Santa Monica. I’ll try some filing-as-it-goes from my berth in the press tent…maybe. Okay, probably. It’s nice that it’s sunny outside. It always has been, each and every year. (In Santa Monica, that is.)

I unintentionally slipped into the annual QVC Red Carpet Style party last night at the Four Seasons. It was during last night’s rainstorm, of course, so water was dripping everywhere, and the fake grass lawn was soaked. And you could tell right away that most of the guests were nice-but-don’t-quite-get-it types. They included Kim and Kourtney Kardashian — I rest my case. Notice the girl sticking her tongue out at me during my 360 shot.

Bilge Ebiri‘s idea about giving an Oscar to the year’s best stunt will never fly. In Planet of the Apes jargon, the Oscars are supposed to be an orangutan or at least a chimpanzee thing — certainly all of the categories represent orangutan or chimpanzee-level endeavor — while stunts, no offense, are seen as gorilla-class. The chimps and ‘tans would never stand for it.

But I’ve always felt that the stuntman who flew upwards and hung on during that “accident” in William Wyler‘s chariot-race sequence (around the 4:50 mark) in the 1959 Ben-Hur deserved an award. This sequence has always meant a great deal because it was shot during an era when audiences could trust their eyes — i.e., it actually happened.

At the Four Seasons last night GasLand producer Trish Adlesic told me about a significant quote having been removed from a 2.26 Wall Street Journal story about her film. Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp., told the WSJ’s Ben Casselman that “we have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror.” The quote appeared online but was yanked sometime in the early evening.

GasLand director Josh Fox

After speaking to GasLand director Josh Fox, HuffPost‘s Allison Rose Levy explained the gist in a story that went up around 3:11 am:

“Just as Josh Fox, director of the Oscar-nominated film, GasLand, was heading west to the Academy Awards, the Wall Street Journal reported on the gas industry’s losing campaign to discredit the film. An article, called ‘Oscar’s Attention Irks Gas Industry,’ by Ben Casselman, surveys the unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Academy of Arts and Sciences to pull the documentary.

“GasLand depicts nationwide instances of home water contamination near gas drilling sites that have been fracked. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a novel gas drilling process that introduced the use of large quantities of toxic chemicals.

“When the article was published on Friday night, it was the first time an industry spokesperson deployed a shift in strategy from the industry’s standard denials and repeated assertions that fracking is safe, despite the numerous reports of problems, such as flammable water, contamination of drinking water, trucks leaking toxic and radioactive waste-water on public highways, the pollution of streams, as well as fires, and explosions in which people have been injured.

GasLand producer Trish Adlesic (right) with Inside Job co-dp Svetlana Cvetko (l.) and actress Helen Shaver (center) — Four Seasons hotel bar, Friday, 2.25, 9:25 pm.

“‘We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror,’ Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp., was quoted as saying in WSJ.

“However, if you go to the article, you won’t find Pitzarella’s statement because within the hour the quote disappeared, say citizen journalists, who screen captured it and posted it on Twitter. GasLand director Fox, in Los Angeles, awaiting Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony, has questions:

“Why did this key quote disappear from the article? Why did the WSJ censor its own piece? Does the gas industry get to edit the Wall Street Journal?” Fox wondered. “Who pulled the quote?”

Here’s a screen capture of the originally-posted story: