Congrats to L.A. Times reporter Geoff Boucher (pronounced “booshay”) for winning the press award at today’s 48th Annual ICG Publicists Awards. It was just nice to have been nominated. Thanks to all concerned for honoring and having me. It was cool to watch and hear Jacqueline Bisset read my name off as one of the nominees.
The parking situation at the Beverly Hilton hotel was absurd. The huge multi-level concrete lot out back is closed so the small adjacent garage was filled very quickly, and then there was a ridiculous line for valet. I finally gave up and parked three blocks away on little Santa Monica Blvd.
Forbes guy Bill McCuddy says “it just dawned on me that The King’s Speech is Leno and The Social Network is Letterman. Everyone agrees Letterman is smarter, hipper, cooler. But Leno is the bread-and-butter, audience-friendly guy.”
McCuddy wrote this prior to going on CNN International to handicap Oscars and talk Harvey Weinstein‘s coup in getting The King’s Speech a new PG -13 rating, which director Tom Hooper “has always seemed cool to when I asked him about it several times over the last few weeks.” And yet the new rating, especially after Sunday night’s Oscar win, should net Speech another $30 or $40 million.
Side note. “What’s the over/under out there on how soon in the show show we get a Charlie Sheen joke? I say 5:42 seconds.”
USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna (a.k.a. “Suzie Woz”) today ran the umpteenth King’s Speech vs. Social Network Oscar culture war story. I wouldn’t have paid much attention (no offense) except that she said I was “among the most vehemently appalled” by the prospect of Speech beating Network, and also ran my quote about “comfort, contentment and middle-class Masterpiece Theatre milquetoast values [having] prevailed…kick me, shoot me, run me over with a double-decker bus.”
The fact that it’s 10:58 am means I have to get over to the Beverly Hilton right now for the 48th Annual ICG Publicists Awards, which “recognize excellence in movie and television showmanship and publicity.” John Lasseter and Sylvester Stallone are the big name presenters. Tony Angellotti, veteran publicist Murray Weissman and Jerry Bruckheimer Films publicist Michael Singer are among the nominees for the Les Mason Lifetime Achievement Award. Press award nominees include L.A. Times reporter Geoff Boucher, EW‘s Jeff Jensen, Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman and yours truly.
An unlikely quintet of critics — Lou-Lou Lumenick, Drew McWeeny, Pete Hammond, Jolene Mendez and Ethan Alter — are standing by Hall Pass, which otherwise has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 24%. I panned it in my Wednesday, 2.23 review.
You have to hand it to Cameron Diaz for having cornered the market in term of unabashed “this is who I am” talk-show rap. She has serious cojones. Intuition tells me Bad Teacher is going to be big. Side-issue: There are few things that I despise more than embed codes that go on for seventeen or eighteen lines. As far as I can discern the principal offender is brightcove.
Roadside Attractions, distributor of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful and Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone, threw an exceptionally smooth, not-too-crowded, just-the-right-size party last night at Soho House. Hotshot attendees included Inarritu, Granik, Biutiful Best Actor nominee Javier Bardem, Fighter director David O. Russell, director Michael Mann, Inside Job co-dp Svetlana Cvetko, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, Hurt Locker producer-writer Mark Boal, Circumstance director-writer Maryam Keshavarz and costar Reza Sixo Safai.
Javier Bardem, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond — Thursday, 2.23, 9:35 pm. Bardem was expressing his delight with the supportive words Pond had written about the worthiness of his Biutiful perf. I got into it also, but Pond got all the credit.
Soho House screening room — easily the swankiest, pure-luxury screening room I’ve ever seen in Los Angeles or the continental United States, for that matter. There’s a screening room in Paris that resembles this (I saw The Breakup there), but the Soho House theatre is larger. It only seats 50. Each chair has an ottoman and extra pillows.
Ten months ago The Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauthreported about a possible 12.10 DVD release of Rick Schmidlin‘s four-hour reconstruction of Eric von Stroheim‘s Greed (1924). Irving Thalberg butchered the epic-length classic down to a 2 1/2 hour cut. So far Schmidlin’s four-hour version has appeared on iTunes but not on a small disc.
I don’t know why I’m posting this (an L.A. virus has begun to affect my brain?), but this and other similar tutus worn in Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan will be on display at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art starting on 3.4.
I happened to glance at The Piers Morgan Show a little while ago, and I couldn’t recognize the woman being interviewed. My first thought was Faye Dunaway but I discarded it a second later– this lady has had “work” done, but her face doesn’t have that extreme, over-stretched quality. Then I thought it was Alana Stewart Hamilton, Rod Stewart‘s ex. Wrong again. And then a title card appeared: Sharon Stone. She’s had decent work done, I’ll give her that, but she’s become someone else entirely. She physically no longer exists.
Any comedy that shows two characters fainting and falling backwards at the same instant is dealing really cheap cards. Any alien-encounter comedy that mentions Reese’s Pieces is looking to appeal to the lowest and stupidest people out there. It’s hard to understand how Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland) could decide to willfully devalue his brand by making something like this. I can’t wait to see this with the hoo-hoo crowd at South by Southwest.
Last night I attended a q & a at the Writers Guild theatre with Susanne Bier, renowned director of the Oscar-nominated In A Better World (Sony Classics, 4.1), which had just screened. One of her most interesting answers came when a guy asked about the film not really saying one precise thing about pacifism vs violence and forgiveness vs. revenge, and whether her views on these subjects were less ambiguous than those in the film.
In my Sundance review I said that World “is like a moralistic cousin of Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven” in that Bier “shows us how violence can sometimes feel better and more ‘right’ than gentleness and compassion and turning the other cheek.
“By the finale Bier has shown us the upside and downside of gentleness and patience, and of angry brutality and push-back action. She’s clearly saying that we need to be strong and wise enough to not surrender to violent impulses, but she doesn’t make it an easy choice. Sometimes the Clint Eastwood blow-em-away approach is the right (or at least the understandable) thing to do, and sometimes not.”
In A Better World director Susanne Bier and composer husband Jesper Winge Leisner — Wednesday, 2.23, 10:10 pm.
Interviewer Pete Hammond (l.) and Susanne Bier (r.) — WGA theatre, Wednesday, 2.23, 9:40 pm.
