The First Ones, a black-and-white N.Y. Times short film, directed by Jake Paltrow. It’s basically seven big-name actors — Brad Pitt, Helen Mirren, Leonardo DiCaprio, Penelope Cruz, Cate Blanchett, Abbie Cornish, Ken Watanabe — talking about the films that made early vivid impressions. Not bad.
A video preview of a 33-page film-noir spoof section — “Killers Kill, Dead Men Die” — in the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, which will reportedly be purchasable on Wednesday. Photos by Annie Leibovitz, conceived and styled by Michael Roberts, and narrated by Ben Shenkman.
I’m truly stunned that the Vanity Fair gang, which is always supposed to be a little bit in front of everyone else, has gone in for something as retro-cheesy as this. The smoky romance of ’40s noir has been aped and re-aped to death over the last 30 to 35 years. Why Liebovitz & Co. would want to play dress-up with an idea that high school talent shows in Iowa, inspired by Steve Martin‘s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, have probably been fiddling with since the early ’80s is beyond me.
The poseurs are Amy Adams, Ben Affleck, Jessica Alba, Pedro Almodovar, Alec Baldwin, Adam Beach, Jessica Biel, Abigail Breslin, Jennifer Connelly, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Robert De Niro, Robert Downey Jr., Kirsten Dunst, Aaron Eckhart, James Franco, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Hudson, Anjelica Huston, Rinko Kikuchi, Diane Lane, Derek Luke, Tobey Maguire, James McAvoy, Helen Mirren, Julianne Moore, Jack Nicholson, Bill Nighy, Ed Norton, Peter O’Toole, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Kerry Washington, Naomi Watts, Forest Whitaker, Bruce Willis, Patrick Wilson, Kate Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood.
Oh, and Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Chris Rock and Jack Black are on the cover.
The SAG Awards will air on TNT and TBS Sunday evening. My eyelids, trust me, are at half-mast as I type these projections/assessments:
Forest Whitaker — whose performance as Idi Amin Dada was hugely enjoyable in a frightening sort of way, although I never felt it went past (i.e., deeper than) that level of engagement — will almost certainly win the Best Actor award.
Helen Mirren is oppressively locked as the winner of the Best Actress trophy, although I really and truly feel that Penelope Cruz gives a much stronger, earthier, fuller performance in Volver.
Leonardo DiCaprio (who was totally screwed by Warner Bros. marketing/publicity’s handling of his two acting award campaigns) ought to win the Best Supporting Actor award for his Departed performance hands-down, although the winner will probably be Eddie Murphy or Jackie Earl Haley.
The Best Supporting Actress race is between Dreamgirls‘ Jennifer Hudson and Little Miss Sunshine‘s Abigail Breslin, and I can’t tell if the recent LMS surge and the Dreamgirls downturn will affect the voting, but I’m /guessing presuming Hudson will eke out a victory. Maybe.
The Departed gang gets my personal vote for the SAG ensemble acting award, but the smart money is going with the Little Miss Sunshine team winning in this category, which will probably happen.
An above-average, all-star Oscar roundtable — Helen Mirren, Penelope Cruz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Forest Whitaker — by Newsweek‘s Sean Smith and David Ansen, including streaming video clips. From the 1.29.07 issue.
After every major awards show, year after year, the same thought is on everyone’s mind: “Good for this or that film (or this or that creative player) for winning — the voters have spoken. But my God, the final decisions in some respects were so clueless, so behind-the-curve, so old-farty, so off-on-their-own-island.”
I know that Children of Men, United 93, Paul Greengrass, The Lives of Others, Volver and Penelope Cruz (to name but a few) are probably going to get the shaft on Oscar nomination day (1.23), and that’s okay — not the end of the world. It’s just that they could all use the extra attention that nominations always bestow. And it just doesn’t feel right.
I have a theoretical equation in mind. How much more on-target would the Oscar show be if, say, the blue-hairs who haven’t really been in the game for the last 15 or 20 or 30 years had, let’s say, half a vote, and the active members — people caught up in the rough-and-tumble of the present tense, people half-familiar with cyber-space, etc. — kept their full votes?
Can’t happen, won’t happen….but the unhip, out-of-touch element is definitely sapping the vitality of the enterprise. Deadwood almost always gets purged in other groups and organizations — why not the Academy?
“Today is the first truly bad day for Dreamgirls in terms of the movie’s box office and the awards race,” a certain party admitted earlier today. “To expand by 1000 or so screens and still be off from last Friday is not a great thing…one could argue that it dropped a lot less than the other holdovers. Still, it can not be said that this is a banner day for the film.
“As I have written for a while now, the box-office life of Dreamgirls is a big part of what will or will not make it win Best Picture. (And yes, I have always believed in the ‘win.’) And if the film does not continue to perform at a very high level, then it does become a multi-horse race and the dynamic changes…which is not to say that it won’t win in that dynamic. But quite a different kettle of fish.
“On the other hand, if the film picks up this weekend and gets stronger in the next expansion, it should still win easily.”
It has been a multi-horse race for several weeks now, but this is not a time to argue. This is a time to retire to a bar in Santa Monica for an hour or two, and then take a walk on the beach. There’s a party for United 93 tonight at a nice restauant on Melrose in West Hollywood, and there’s another bash being thrown for the radiant Penelope Cruz in the Westwood area, and all I really, really want to do is ride around town on a bike.
Stephen Frears‘ The Queen corralled 10 BAFTA (i.e., British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nominations this morning, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Peter Morgan) and Best Actress (Helen Mirren). And Casino Royale tallied nine nominations, including a deserved Best Actor nom for Daniel Craig. Wait….could all this have a little something to do with nationalistic solidarity?
The winners will be named on a BBC telecast of the London award ceremony on Sunday, February 11.
The Queen has it in the bag, of course, but for the sake of phony suspense The Departed, Babel, The Last King Of Scotland and Little Miss Sunshine have also been nominated for Best Film. And the other Best Director nominees besides Frears are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel), Martin Scorsese (The Departed), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) and Paul Greengrass (United 93).
Morgan’s Queen script aside (i.e., another slam-dunk), the other Best Original Screenplay noms are for Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 script, Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinthand Michael Arndt‘s Little Miss Sunshine.
The Best Adapted Screenplay noms are for Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis‘s Casino Royale script in the adapted screenplay section, with William Monahan (The Departed), Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada), Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock (The Last King Of Scotland) and Patrick Marber (Notes On A Scandal) rounding out the pack.
The Best Actor noms are Craig, Peter O’Toole (Venus), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed), Richard Griffiths (The History Boys…forget it), and Forest Whitaker (The Last King Of Scotland) .
Best actress will be won by Mirren, of course, but for appearances sake the great Penelope Cruz (Volver), Judi Dench (Notes On A Scandal), Meryl Streep (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and Kate Winslet (Little Children) have also been nominated.
I’m supposed to be feeling excitement or at least a moderate sense of urgency about the Screen Actors Guild nomina- tions, partly (I’m thinking) because they announced them at 6:05 ayem Pacific, which was no skin off my ass sitting here in Brooklyn. The three biggest statistical beneficiaries (because they each got three nominations) are Babel, Dreamgirls and Little Miss Sunshine — make of this what you will. Here’s what I make of it: go, Babel! Yay, Sunshine! And despite divided loyalties, an “attagirl” to Best Supporting Actress nominee Jennifer Hudson.
The Departed getting only an ensemble acting nomination plus a Best Supporting Actor nom for Leonardo DiCaprio means…aahh, probably nothing. (It just would have been cooler if The Departed‘s Mouthy-Boston-Attitude King Mark Wahlberg had snuck in alongside DiCaprio.)
The big news as far as the Best Actress category is concerned is…no big news. Penelope Cruz for Volver, Judi Dench for Notes on a Scandal, Helen Mirren for The Queen, Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada and Kate Winslet for Little Children. Right down the middle, totally expected, etc. Likeliest Winner at This Stage: Judi….kidding! Obviously Ms. Mirren.
No surprises in the Best Supporting Actress category either: Adriana Barraza for Babel, Cate Blanchett for Notes on a Scandal, Abigail Breslin for Little Miss Sunshine, Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls and Rinko Kikuchi for Babel. Breslin’s inclusion plus Alan Arkin‘s nomination for Best Suppporting Actor plus Little Miss Sunshine‘s acting ensemble nomination obviously means there’s lots of love for the little movie that might. Likeliest Winner at This Stage: Jennifer Hudson, no?
The Best Actor rundown played strictly according to mainstream opinion as reflected by the critics groups and the Oscar blogging community…zip in the way of shockers. Leonardo Dicaprio for Blood Diamond, Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson, Peter O’Toole for Venus, Will Smith for The Pursuit of Happyness and Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland. Those critics awards for Gosling and all those Half Nelson FYC ads helped, I’m sure — congrats to ThinkFilm. Likeliest Winner at This Stage: Whitaker, right?
The Best Supporting Actor category is a little weird. Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine. Leonardo DiCaprio for The Departed. Jackie Earle Haley for Little Children. Djimon Honsou for Blood Diamond. (What? “Son! I want my son!”) and Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls. What could the Murphy nom be about? Because he sings well, drops his pants and then dies? I ‘ve been told all along that the SAG rank-and-file regards Murphy as an asshole. Maybe it’s the old animal-kingdom instinct of showing obeisance before power, because Murphy was King Shit in the ’80s? I know this: Murphy isn’t fit to shine Mark Wahlberg’s shoes. Likeliest Winner at This Stage: DiCaprio.
The Ensemble Acting nominations went to Babel, Bobby (hooray for Harvey), The Departed, Dreamgirls and Little Miss Sunshine. Likeliest Winners at This Stage: either the Babel or the Little Miss Sunshine crew. Am I wrong?
The SAG awards will be handed out on Sunday, 1.28.
L.A. Times guys John Horn and Patrick Goldstein in a series of podcast chats about Oscar snubs, the apparent chasm between Academy members and critics regarding Best Picture choosings, the Academy’s problem with violent movies, and the surgings of Volver and Penelope Cruz.
The fascist dictatorship awards mindset known as Mirren-Whitaker prevailed again with yesterday’s Oklahoma Film Critics Circle Awards. Why do I seem to be the only one who’s admitting to feelings of being irked — i.e., almost but not quite “sick of” — this oppressive and monotonous dominance?
There were other actresses (Penelope Cruz, Kate Winslet, Judi Dench, Sienna Miller) who gave beguilingly crafty and affecting performances besides The Queen‘s Helen Mirren, but you’d never suspect it to judge by the 14 critics groups who’ve handed out Best Actress awards this month. It’s been Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren, Mirren and Mirren. The Last King of Scotland‘s Forrest Whitaker has been the Best Actor choice with twelve critics groups, losing out to Borat‘s Sacha Baron Cohen two or three times.
The Oklahoma posse otherwise did well by handing Paul Greengrass’s United 93 its fifth Best Picture award (on top of the New York Film Critics Circle and critics groups from Dallas-Forth Worth, Phoenix and Washington, D.C.).
And cheers (again) to Martin Scorsese winning the Best Director award for The Departed, and Little Miss Sunshine winning for Best First Film (award going to co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris). And to Guillermo del Toro for Pan’s Labyrinth winning the Best Foreign Film.
HE’s first reaction to the Golden Globes Best Picture nominations in the Drama category: Bobby? Say it again: Bobby? The HFPA didn’t need to persuade anyone that their motives and criteria are suspect from time to time, but they’ve sure as hell done it again. A tip of the hat to Harvey Weinstein for his usual backstage persuasions.
It’s well and good that nominations have also gone to Babel, The Departed, Little Children (the efforts of Russell Schwartz notwithstanding) and The Queen, and no surprise at all that the Hollywood Foreign Press ignored United 93 and the groundbreaking Children of Men…but of course. Likeliest winner(s) at this stage: The Queen, Babel, The Departed (in that order).
Babel, which had been seen as a fader over the last two or three weeks, is now back in the shit with seven GG nominations. That is, if you think that the Golden Globe nominations are in some way influential. Congrats to director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, nominated costars Rinko Kikuchi , Adriana Barraza and Brad Pitt, and of course the Paramount Vantage team.
The Best Picture noms in the Musical or Comedy category are Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, The Devil Wears Prada, Dreamgirls, Little Miss Sunshine and Thank You for Smoking. Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: Dreamgirls, Borat.
Nominating Leonardo DiCaprio for both Blood Diamond and The Departed means, as it does with the BFCA noms, a possible cancel-out factor. The other three contenders in this category — Peter O’Toole (Venus), Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) and Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) — were programmed into the communal consciousness weeks ago. Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: DiCaprio.
It’s good to see that an org has finally gotten behind The Lives of Others, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language film along with Apocalypto, Letters from Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth and Volver. Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: The Lives of Others.
Clint Eastwood snagged two Best Director noms (for Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima) along with Stephen Frears (The Queen), Inarritu (Babel) and The Departed (Martin Scorsese). Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: Eastwood or Scorsese.
Best Actor, Musical/Comedy: Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat), Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest….sure thing!), Aaron Eckhart (Thank You for Smoking), Will Ferrell (Stranger Than Fiction….forget it!), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Kinky Boots…rounding out the pack). Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: Cohen.
Best Supporting Actress: Adriana Barraza (Babel), Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal), Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada…good call), Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls), Rinko Kikuchi, (Babel). Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: Hudson.
Best Supporting Actor: Ben Affleck (Hollywoodland, Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls ), Jack Nicholson (
Best Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga (Babel), Todd Field and Tom Perrotta (Little Children), Patrick Marber Notes on a Scandal), William Monahan, (The Departed), Peter Morgan (The Queen). Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: A toss-up. Queer Omission: Michael Arndt‘s screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine.
Best Actress, Drama: Penelope Cruz (Volver), Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Sherrybaby…good for her), Helen Mirren (The Queen), Kate Winslet (Little Children). Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: Mirren or Cruz.
Best Actress, Comedy or Musical: Annette Bening (Running with Scissors), Toni Collette (Little Miss Sunshine), Beyonce Knowles (Dreamgirls), Meryl Streep (Devil Wears Prada), Renee Zellweger (Miss Potter…go, Harvey!). Likeliest Winner(s) at This Stage: Streep.
The Clint-rules faction prevailed in the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voting earlier today, resulting in the org’s Best Picture prize going to Letters From Iwo Jima — a very deserving choice. This is the second such tribute handed to Clint Eastwood‘s Japanese-language Iwo Jima drama following the National Board of Review’s Best Picture honoring two or three days ago.
The big winners beside this were Stephen Frears‘ The Queen and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘ Little Miss Sunshine. The former captured four awards and one runner-up prize, including a Best Actress trophy for Helen Mirren (her second following the Boston Film Critics decision just a couple of hours ago), plus a Best Supporting Actor award for Michael Sheen and a Best Screenplay win for Peter Morgan. Dayton, Faris and screenwriter Michael Arndt won the New Generation Award, and Arndt was named 1st runner-up for Best Screenplay.
United 93‘s Paul Greengrass, however, was named Best Director (with Eastwood getting the runner-up prize for Letters and Flags of Our Fathers). Borat‘s Sacha Baron Cohen and The Last King of Scotland‘s Forest Whitaker tied for the Best Actor prize.
Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore‘s An Inconvenient Truth was named Best Documentary. Happy Feet won for Best Animated Feature .
Volver‘s Penelope Cruz was just behind Mirren in the Best Actress voting, and Pan’s Labyrinth costar Sergi Lopez was the runner-up in the best Supporting Actor category.
A big surprise (and a possible indicator of critical reservations about Dreamgirls) was the Best Supporting Actress award going to Luminita Gheorghiu — who? — for her performance in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. The runner-up in this category was Dreamgirls powerhouse Jennifer Hudson. (There’s no joy in Mudville over this one, let me tell you.)
The great Emmanuel Lubezki won the Best Cinematography award — deservedly — for his work on Children of Men. (Runner-up: Tom Stern for Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima.) The Best Production Design award went to Pan’s Labyrinth‘s Eugenio Caballero, (good call) — the runners up were Children of Men‘s Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland.
Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others won for Best Foreign Language film…yes! (Runner up: Volver.) Alexandre Desplat won the Best Musical Score award for his work on The Queen and The Painted Veil. (Runner-up: Thomas Newman for The Good German and Little Children.
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