The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted a piece that supports my 8.21 view that Bruce Dern‘s “Woody” role in Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska screams “snarly eccentricity for its own sake”, and that the smartest strategy on Paramount’s part would be to campaign Dern not as Best Actor but as a Best Supporting Actor contender. I laid out my case in a piece called “Can Dern’s Woody Get Traction As Best Actor?”. Hitfix/In Contention’s Kris Tapley and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone disagreed and sent along their arguments, which I posted with their permission.
As I’ve said for many, many years, the inspiration, tenacity and toil that go into winning any Oscar will always warrant honor and admiration, but it’s not the win-or-lose aspects of the Oscar race but the award-season arguments that provide the real pleasure and uplift. Community-wise, I mean. Because these arguments serve as a kind of communal therapy session or Socratic dialogue about who and what we are — as individuals, as a culture — and why. It was certainly a form of self-expression to say that you were a fan of The King’s Speech or even to predict in a wink-winking Dave Karger sort of way that it would win the Best Picture Oscar. If you went for The Kings Speech you were with the Soviets in an August 1968 kind of way, and if you stood with The Social Network guys you were more of a Prague Spring kind of guy.
So with award season about to commence with the start of the Telluride Film Festival six days hence, what will this year’s arguments be about?
“Inside Llewyn Davis is a sardonically funny American art film about frustration and wintry despair and the Sisyphusian struggle of a folk singer who’s talented and cares about his art but isn’t good or lucky enough to make it to the next level, and the week-long journey he goes through that takes him from a kind of semi-resigned ‘fuck me’ slumber mentality to an ‘oh, to hell with it…this shit is infuriating…I hate folk music!’ feeling. Bob Dylan, trust me, is going to love this thing. He’s going to effing swear by it.” — posted from Cannes on Sunday, 5.19.
As noted, first-time-anywhere showings of Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, Spike Jonze’s Her and Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty will highlight the 51st New York Film Festival (9.27 to 10.13). But otherwise the fest will screen a slew of Cannes repeats — Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, J.C. Chandor‘s All is Lost, Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue is the Warmest Color, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive and James Gray‘s The Immigrant.
Other Cannes pop-outs screening in Manhattan: Claude Lanzmann‘s The Last of the Unjust, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (winner of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Prize) and Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar (winner of a Certain Regard prize).
Yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a list of 2013’s likeliest Best Picture contenders along with lists from Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil. For what it’s worth my own list is as follows (and in this order): American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, All Is Lost, August: Osage County, Gravity, Fruitvale Station, Saving Mr. Banks, Inside Llewyn Davis, Captain Phillips, The Monuments Men, Before Midnight, 12 Years A Slave, Foxcatcher, Parkland…what is that, 14? Maybe half of these will be nominated. Okay, eight or nine.
But we also know that one or two will be subjected to takedown campaigns for this or that reason. It’s in the nature of what Oscar campaigning has become over the last 10 or 15 years.
I was told today that three significant award-season films that are probably going to play the 2013 Telluride Film Festival — Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost and Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis — will not make the trek to the Toronto Film Festival, which starts just a few days after Telluride ends. Telluride films almost always go to Toronto so this is…well, it’s interesting.
I hope this information is wrong, or that the distributors of these films will think things over and change their minds. I saw all three at Cannes and suspect they’d all get a rousing reception at Toronto.
Seven years ago I ran a piece called “The Old Toronto Sidestep.” It was about a decision by Sony Pictures to not screen Ryan Murphy‘s Running With Scissors at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. A week earlier I had written that Fox Searchlight had made the same decision about Nicholas Hytner‘s The History Boys.
If I was planning on attending the 2013 Venice Film Festival (8.28 to 9.7) I would be especially keen on catching the absolute, first-time-anywhere world premieres of….well, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, of course, but also Errol Morris‘s Donald Rumsfeld doc The Unknown Known — how can this not be a fascinating drill-down? Absolute determinism and resolution in the face of contradicting facts, etc.
I spoke to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn at last night’s The Entrepeneur screening, and we agreed…okay, I said and Kohn went “yeah, I suppose”…that it’s highly likely that J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, which I fell 100% in love with at the Cannes Film Festival, will be one of the U.S. premieres at this year’s Telluride Film Festival (which begins on 8.29). An absolute natural for that gathering. Kohn also believes/suspects (as do I) that Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis and Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color will be shown. But what major fall-holiday films? Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips? My brain won’t function.
Nick Clement to HE: “I absolutely cannot wait to see Inside Llewyn Davis, which is probably my most anticipated movie for the rest of 2013. I don’t want to hear any spoilers but what’s the deal with the cat? Is the cat as big of a part of the movie as one might think due to how many shots of it that are featured in the trailer? Is the calico cat a “character” in the film? My wife and I are cat lovers so we’re both curious.”
HE to Clement: “The Llewyn Davis cat is cool but you should probably take it easy and not look for anything special or…you know, nirvana-like to happen. The cat has an identity, yes, and is a life force of a certain kind, but he’s basically a motif. He certainly has no ‘cat personality’ except that he’s willful and crafty enough to escape apartments and run off into the streets of Manhattan and travel dozens of city blocks on his own. He’s basically just an orange object to be held and lost and found and held and lost and found. In and of himself he’s more or less meaningless. At most I see him as a kind of wandering Manhattan Ulysses. But he’s really a kind of MacGuffin.”
Clement to HE: “Love it! I watch A Serious Man every few months, so your recent comparisons have gotten me very excited.”
I don’t know anything and neither does anyone else, but it’s at least somewhat likely if not more so that the following will end up as big-time award winners/nominees at the end of the year and early 2014. Please forward suggestions about any other potential contenders.
Best Picture: American Hustle, Wolf of Wall Street, Inside Llewyn Davis, All Is Lost, Saving Mr. Banks, Fruitvale Station, August: Osage County, Monuments Men, Foxcatcher, Before Midnight.
Best Director: David O. Russell, American Hustle; Martin Scorsese, Wolf of Wall Street; Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis; John Lee Hancock, Saving Mr. Banks; Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station; George Clooney, Monuments Men; Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher; Richard Linklater, Before Midnight.
I’ve contemplated the suggestions for HE’s Best of 2013 At The Six-Month Mark, and I just can’t blow off the top-notch films I saw at the Cannes Film Festival (Inside Llewyn Davis, All Is Lost, The Past, Blue Is The Warmest Color, et. al.). If I were to ignore them because they haven’t been released I’d give HE’s Halftime Award for Best Picture to Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight, but I can’t ignore Cannes — it happened, hundreds saw and wrote about these films, they’re part of the conversation, they’re too accomplished and important, etc.
So here’s the breakdown so far on 2013’s Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress…right? Little thought is given to likely Oscar/Academy recognition given my lack of respect for mainstream Academy attitudes, although any/most of these faves will probably be Oscar-nominated. This is just me talking right now. The Academy bullshit can wait.
Best Halftime Picture Award of 2013: Tie between Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis and J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost. I’m sorry but Davis is one of those less-is-profoundly-more films that not only works and coheres perfectly when you first see it, but also gets better and better the more you think about it weeks down the road. And All Is Lost is just fucking brilliant — easily the most novel and gripping survivalist suspense drama ever made, and particularly striking for the zero-dialogue element. Leagues and light years beyond Life Is Pi.
Other Best Halftime Picture Nominees: 3. The Past, d: Asghar Farhadi (Cannes 2013); 4. Blue Is The Warmest Color, d: Abdellatif Kechiche (Cannes 2013); 5. Before Midnight, d: Richard Linklater; 6. Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station (Sundance, Cannes); 7. 20 Feet From Stardom, d: Morgan Neville; 8. Frances Ha, d: Noah Baumbach; 9. Behind The Candelabra, d: Steven Soderbergh; 10. Mud, d: Jeff Nichols, 11. Upstream Color, d: Shane Carruth; 12. Shadow Dancer, d: James Marsh; 13. The Attack, d: Ziad Doueiri.
Best Halftime Director Award of 2013: Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis. Other Best Halftime Director Nominees: J.C. Chandor, All Is Lost, Asghar Farhadi, The Past, Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station; Richard Linklater, Before Midnight.
Best Halftime Actor Award of 2013: Robert Redford, All Is Lost. No other performance so far has come close to conveying as much gravitas, alone-ness, sadness, decency, humanity. And no other performance so far has elicited such flat-out admiration and exhilaration on my part. There’s nothing to do but celebrate Redford’s luck in scoring perhaps the best role of his career and delivering bis best performance since he played…you tell me. Jeremiah Johnson in Jeremiah Johnson, Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men, David Chappelet in Downhill Racer, the goodbye scene in front of the Plaza in The Way We Were, etc.
Best Halftime Actor Nominees besides Redford: Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis (there’s often a new guy/outlier nominee among Academy’s Best Actor contenders), Michael Douglas, Behind The Candelabra (I don’t care if Candelabara debuted on HBO — it opened theatrically in Europe); Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station; Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight. Wells Exception: If Michael Shannon hadn’t played General Zod in Man of Steel his Iceman performance might have some Best Actor traction at this stage, but he has to pay the penalty for being in Steel, which was and is an act of mercenary paycheck-ism.
Best Halftime Actress Award of 2013: Tie between Berenice Bejo in The Past and Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue Is The Warmest Color (although the latter’s unpronounceable, unspellable last name probably puts her behind Bejo at this point). Best 2013 Halftime Actress Nominees besides Bejo & Exarchopoulos: Julie Delpy, Before Midnight; Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha; Andrea Riseborough, Shadow Dancer; Rooney Mara, Ain’t them Bodies Saints.
Best 2013 Halftime Best Supporting Actor Award of 2013: Bruce Dern, Nebraska. (Wells to Paramount: Dern having won the Best Actor award at Cannes is great advertising, but there’s no way his Nebraska performance will get any traction as a Best Actor contender with the Academy — it’s a supporting performance through and through. Runner-up: Ali Mosaffa, The Past.
Best 2013 Halftime Best Supporting Actress Award of 2013: Pauline Burlet, The Past. Runner-Up: June Squibb, Nebraska. HE Exception: Kristin Scott Thomas is striking and, yes, memorable in Only God Forgives, but the movie is so Godless and Godawful that nobody having anything to do with it can be nominated. There may even be a penalty carrying over into 2014 and 2015. I haven’t finally decided — let me think it over.
Some months ago producer and former 20th Century Fox honcho Peter Chernin spoke to producer Lynda Obst for her book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales of The New Abnormal in the Movie Business, and here’s how he described things: “[The] studios are frozen…terrified, not necessarily inappropriately, to do anything because they don’t know what the numbers look like.”
What they don’t know, more specifically, is “how to run a P & L” — a profit-and-loss statement for their board members — “because [they] don’t know what the DVD number is.’ The DVD number used to be half of the entire P & L!” Wait…today’s home video “numbers” are mainly about VOD and streaming before DVD/Bluray, right? Bluray is niche and DVD is strictly bargain-basement. I realize that the collapse of the DVD market four or five years ago cut heavily into profits and that VOD and streaming sales are delivering…what, a third of what the DVD market was at its height? But studio guys can’t at least project what VOD and streaming revenues will be?
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