Day: October 24, 2011

Tonight’s Hollywood Awards ceremony was the first awards show of the season, and it occured to me early on that the major award recipients — George Clooney, Glenn Close, Viola Davis, Christopher Plummer, Bennett Miller — were using this event (as they do every year) to try out and refine their acceptance speeches, like a Broadway-bound play playing Boston or Los Angeles. So who fared best?

For most of the show I thought Close was the shit. Her words were eloquent, heartfelt, well chosen. Plus she got a long standing ovation as she walked to the podium. Well loved. But then Davis, glammy costar of The Help and a likely Best Actress nominee, took the mike near the end of the show, and she blew Close out of the water. Calm, sassy, impassioned — it was easily the finest acceptance speech of the night.

A friend tells me that’s not enough. It doesn’t matter if an acceptance speech is really superb unless it’s been captured for broadcast and seen all around. Davis’s speech (along with the show) will presumably be broadcast by Starz, although it’s not listed on their website.

I knew Davis was hitting it right 20 seconds after she began but I was too slow and too stupid to shoot video of her speech right away. I finally picked up the camera toward the end and caught the last 78 seconds’ worth. I knew then and there she’s going to win the Best Actress Oscar. She knew it, the room knew it. You could just feel it.

George Clooney handled himself with assurance and charm. Candid, amusingly blunt, self-effacing, gracious…the usual one-two-three shazam. And Beau Bridges‘ introduction of Clooney was choice. Christopher Plummer delivered with wit, class and aplomb. But Quentin Tarantino‘s introduction of Diablo Cody was the most pizazzy and high-voltage of all. Cody clearly felt he’d oversold her.

By the way: Cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki (Tree of Life, Gravity) told me earlier tonight that his next film, he believes, will be for Terrence Malick (again)…the one with Christian Bale that was filming in mid September in a park outside Austin.

George Clooney

Carey Mulligan

Viola Davis

Michelle Willliams

Ben Affleck

Diablo Cody

Jonah Hill

I’m blowing off a screening of Tower Heist to attend the Hollywood Awards at the Beverly Hilton. It starts with an hour of cocktail chit-chat from 6 to 7 pm and then will run from 7 pm to 9 pm (or something like that). Every actor, director and producer chosen for an award has to attend because if they don’t, someone else will be chosen and they’ll attend so there’s no way to win except to show up, etc. Everybody gets that. Nobody cares. It’s the first pre-, pre-, pre-senior prom.

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George Clooney will accept the Actor award for his performance in The Descendants, Moneyball director Bennett Miller will be handed the Director Award; the cast of The Help will receive an Ensemble Award, Williams will get an Actress award for her performance in My Week With Marilyn, Christopher Plummer will be handed a Supporting Actor award for Beginners, Mulligan a Supporting Actress Award for her work in Shame, Diablo Cody will get a Screenwriter Award for Young Adult, and Albert Nobbs star Glenn Close will receive a Career Achievement Award.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Gold Derby‘s Tom ONeil and I riffed on the usual-usual yesterday. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

A few days ago Spike Jonze, Simon Cahn and Olympia Le-Tan‘s stop-motion short Mourir Aupres de Toi (To Die By Your Side) surfaced online. It was first seen at last May’s Cannes Film Festival as some kind of partnership deal with Jonathan Caouette‘s Walk Away Renee. It’s set inside Shakespeare & Co., the old-time Paris book store.

One of the interesting things is that the Macbeth skeleton’s head looks like the skeleton of a cat’s head.

This is one of the most overtly carnal stop-motion shorts I’ve ever seen. Particularly due to a couple of hand gestures made by the red-haired vampire girl.

Here’s a “making of” short that appeared last April.

Why does the trailer allow us to hear Asa Butterfield pronouncing his character’s full name, i.e, Hugh Cabret? Won’t that alienate the bubbas out there who don’t like to hear any French-sounding words? Paramount changed the title from Hugo Cabret to Hugo for precisely this reason, right? In fact, why not play it safe and dub the film so that Hugo’s last name can be changed to Flabbergast or Appleseed or Wishbone? Wipe that French off the map!

Question for those who saw Hugo at the NY Film Festival: Is Hugo specific enough to identify the Paris train station where most of he action takes place? Is it Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est, Gare d’Oreans, etc.? Or it just a generic storybook Paris with a single unidentified train station? Because giving it a name would confuse the kiddies?

Q: What’s with the Metropolis-like wire-framed robot figure? A: Brian Selznick‘s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” “is the true story of turn-of-the-century pioneer filmmaker Georges Melies (played by Ben Kingsley in the film), his surviving films “and his collection of mechanical, wind-up figures called automata,: says the Wiki page. “Melies actually had a set of automata, which were either sold or lost. At the end of his life M√©lies was broke, even as films were screening widely in the US. He did work in a toy booth in a Paris railway station, hence the setting.”

Paramount will release Hugo on 11.23.

This is bad. This can’t be good. Okay, maybe it’s better than it seems but if William Shakespeare‘s ghost had the ability to keep tabs on Hollywood adaptations of his plays, there would be much concern right now. “It’s bad enough for Roland Emmerich ‘s Anonymous (Sony, 10.28) to assert that Edward de Vere was the actual author of my plays,” the outraged ghost might complain, “but the idea of sci-fi/fantasy journeyman-drone Joss Whedon (The Avengers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel) shooting an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing…that’s past the point of tolerance!”