Jeffrey Wells

The Academy Awards represent “the self-assessment of a self-interested, self-involved professional clique,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. “It can be argued that, over the past decade or so, this roughly 6,000-member [Academy of Motion Pictures] has become more discerning, more willing to confer its blessings on quasi-independent, medium-budget films instead of the lumbering, middlebrow prestige productions it used to favor.
“Nowadays the main divisions of the studios — Columbia, Paramount, Universal and the rest — specialize in big-ticket entertainment aimed at a global audience. Their art-house subdivisions — the Miramaxes, Searchlights and Vantages — have taken over the business of supplementing cash with cachet.
“Connoisseurs may be satisfied with this arrangement — we can watch the broadcast without superciliousness or slumming — but a showbiz populist might complain that, in honoring the products of the studio specialty divisions, the academy has lost touch with the mass audience.”
Yes, it has — that is exactly what has happened — and thank heaven for that. The tastes and ticket-buyings of Gorilla Nation keep the film industry stable and flush, for the most part, and allow for the funding of the No Country‘s and There Will Be Blood‘s. But in the privacy of one’s home and in the company of trusted friends, there is nothing to do when discussing most of the Gorilla Nation favorites except shake your head and say, “What a bunch of fucking peasants.” And then maybe go outside and spit.
I found this Scott paragraph perplexing,by the way: “The system is not exactly winner-take-all, but it does leave behind a distressingly high number of designated losers, among them some of the most interesting and daring films of the year.
“It should not make a difference that, say, Into the Wild, Starting Out in the Evening and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead are barely represented in the Oscar sweepstakes. Your list of glaring omissions may be different, but if you’re among the passionate admirers of Lust, Caution or We Own the Night or 3:10 to Yuma, you are similarly stuck savoring the sour grapes of your own good taste.”
With the exception of Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, each of the above-mentioned films is an unqualified short-faller that has disappointed or offended or bored the pants off the vast majority of the people I know and suss things out with on a regular basis.
Yuma had a stirring and satisfying second act and a fine Russell Crowe performance, but it didn’t begin to approach the time-machine realism and visual majesty of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (On top of which way too many guys got shot, and I really didn’t like those snow- covered plains being plainly visible just outside of that snow-free town where the final shoot-out occured.)
Starting Out in the Evening had too faint a pulse.
Much of Lust Caution was exquisitely made, but it had a perverse and incomprehensible ending that left most people stranded. Endings matter enormously.
We Own The Night had a great car-chase-in-a-rainstorm, but the rest of it was borough garbage.
And Into the Wild was finally alienating because Emile Hirsch‘s character was too selfish and egoistic.

There was grumbling and shoulder-shrugging at the Spirit Awards after-bash about Juno winning the best picture prize. Nobody dislikes it (myself included) but nobody I know thinks it aspires to greatness, much less achieves it. Over and over I heard “why?,” “I don’t get it,” “Whatever,” “I don’t know…obviously people like it,” “they were sucking up to Fox Searchlight,” etc.

Juno‘s Ellen Page

No problems in this corner with Juno star Ellen Page winning the best actress award, or with Diablo Cody winning the best first screenplay prize. They’re fine, but it just doesn’t seem right on some level to give Juno the absolute Big Kahuna top prize. Likeable, touching and well-made though it may be, it doesn’t drill into the groundwater. (A fear that Little Miss Sunshine definitely achieved.)
It’s supposed to mean something to win a Spirit Award, and right now, the Juno win has lowered the bar and made it all seem a tiny little less.

Once director-writer John Carney

I’m Not There‘s Cate Blanchett

Spirit Award-winner Diablo Cody

I have to be somewhere. I’ll get into it later. Above are four Spirit Awards snaps.

The wi-fi in the backstage press tent at the Spirit Awards is so pathetically weak that it insults the name. If I could find a 28 k dial-up connection, I’d take it. I’ve taken some good photos and have many impressions to share (80 % of which will evaporate by tonight or tomorrow morning) but it might as well be 1987 for all the connectivity here. (Typed on the damn iPhone.)

NPR’s Kim Masters and Pete Hammond talk about the unbridgable gulf between the savorers of Oscar-nominated films and performances (not to mention worshippers of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) and those enjoyed by Gorilla Nation.

I’m leaving now for the Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica. Well, within 15 or 20 minutes. They’ll be broadcast on IFC Channel starting at 2 pm Pacific. I’ll try to post reactions and photos as they happen.

Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner is reporting that “a major documentary” about Sen. Barack Obama is being produced by Edward Norton‘s Class 5 Productions and directed by Amy Rice, sister of Andrew Rice, an Oklahoma state senator and U.S. Senate candidate.
Rice and Norton have shot “staggering amounts” of “revealing behind-the-scenes footage for the untitled project, which has been ongoing for roughly two years.” One advantage these filmmakers enjoy, says Ressner, is “near-exclusive access,” having “engaged directly with Obama and won his staff’s trust in the year before he even announced his presidential candidacy.”
But “it could be years before the Obama doc is even seen, much less has an impact on his reputation,” Ressner qualifies. “The film is still being shot and producers won’t begin editing until his race for the presidency has ended.”
What? Why wouldn’t Rice have been editing all along? Alex Gibney or Oliver Stone or Michael Moore would never play it this way. If she’s only just shooting and assembling footage with plans to start editing after the campaign is over, then I’m saying here and now that she’s a novice and a dilly-dallyer who’s not to be taken seriously.
A serious pro would have the final doc assembled no more than four to six months after this November’s election. If I were directing it I would try to get it into the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Ass-dragging doesn’t cut it anymore in documentary circles. If Rice is only going to start editing nine months from now, forget it. Nobody will see anything until late ’09 or perhaps even 2010 this way. She’s not for real. The train is moving too fast these days with fortunes and changes in the national mood changing much too quickly to abruptly for documentarians to dither and delay and piddle around.

I love that the last-minute Oscar situation seems fluid and uncertain enough for odd and unlikely predictions to be advanced by serious people. One example of this is The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil predicting a George Clooney Best Actor win for his performance in Michael Clayton. It won’t happen but I love flirting with the possibility. Any Oscar win that surprises or freaks people out is “good” in my book.

Boiled down, O’Neil is making the Clooney call because, like me, he’s impressed with the pro-Clayton, pro-Swinton, pro-Clooney sentiments voice by Real Geezer commentators Marcia Nasatir and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who’ve become the most distinctive (influential?) voices in the Oscar-prognosticator community of late. I love these guys. They’re a window into the thinking of Hollywood’s over-the-hill gang.

O’Neil isn’t saying Clooney deserves the Oscar more than There Will be Blood‘s Daniel Day Lewis. He’s simply saying that the “yuts” like Clooney more because they love his clubhouse smoothie aura, and that’s that. They don’t care about the rest.

Newsweek‘s David Ansen has joined those predicting a win for Michael Clayton‘s Tilda Swinton in the Best Supporting Actress category. He’s not calling this a certainty as much as confessing he has a hunch along these lines, the rationale being that voting for Swinton is “a way [for Academy members] to honor a movie they like, and an uncompromising actor who’s paid her dues in movies both far-out and mainstream.”

Ansen informs, incidentally, the Cate Blanchett‘s name is supposed to be pronounced “BLANCHIT and not BLANSHETTE, as if it were French.” He got it straight from the horse’s mouth.

In a 2.23 Washington Post story, an anonymous Clinton campaign adviser tells reporters Anne Kornblut and Shailagh Murray that Barack Obama‘s 17-point Wisconsin victory last Tuesday “[has] started to sink in as a decisive blow, given that the state had been viewed weeks earlier as a level playing field.”

“‘The mathematical reality at that point became impossible to ignore,’ the adviser said. `There’s not a lot of denial left at this point.’ He added that despite Clinton’s public pronouncements of optimism, `She knows where things are going. It’s pretty clear she has a big decision. But it’s daunting. It’s still hard to accept.'”
“Some Democratic political sources said discussion has begun about encouraging Clinton to transition into a different party leadership role, one that could carry her on a path to becoming Senate majority leader.” Obviously this scenario could be adversely affected if Clinton continues the battle past the point of numerical reality and assumes the role of a spoiler.
It’s at least comforting to realize, considering the gist of this story, that Clinton advisers with their feet on the ground have managed to scotch the idea of burning the house down by fighting all through the summer for every last delegate and super-delegate. Thank God for cooler heads. If Clinton splits the Texas vote with Obama and just narrowly edges Obama in Ohio, it’ll be time to hit the showers. She’ll withdraw on March 6th or 7th. The Pennsylvania primary will not be hotly contested.

Vantage Point did about $7,963,000 last night with a projected weekend tally of $24.6 million, and it’s a total piece of shit. (Doesn’t matter, nobody reads reviews, America the Beautiful.) But three other openers have completely tanked. Be Kind Rewind will do about $4 million, Witless Protection will grab a pathetic $1.9 million, and poor Charlie Bartlett will only do about $1.6 million.
The Spiderwick Chronicles will come second in Sunday night with $12.7 million. Jumper will be third with $12 million even. Step Up will do about $9.2 million. Fool’s Gold is expected to take in $6.1 million. Definitely Maybe is $5 million even. Juno should do about $3.9 million.
Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting similar but slightly different figures.

“With the pressure to recognize big films declining, the Oscars’ role in movies has become more like that of Oprah’s Book Club in promoting literature: highlighting the obscure, unusual or unexpected.

“‘The academy is more concerned with rewarding the best film now than they ever have been. They’re less concerned with rewarding popular entertainment,” says Sasha Stone, who runs the industry blog AwardsDaily.com.
“That trend expands the eternal disconnect between the tastes of the academy and the tastes of the public. Would even fans of last year’s top box office-earner — Spider-Man 3, which took in $336.5 million — call it the best of the year?
“There Will Be Blood has to have awards success to do anything. It has to prove itself within that landscape,” says Kristopher Tapley, who follows award season for Variety‘s Red Carpet District column. “You can’t ignore that Juno is the biggest (platform release) since My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the 2002 film that took in more than $240 million.
“No Country for Old Men, which has taken in $61.3 million, ‘is the Coen brothers’ highest-grossing film to date,’ Tapley says, referring to filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, known for their offbeat storytelling. ‘So there is obviously box-office bulk to be had (from the Oscars). There is an algorithm there.'”