The same steamroller-lemming-mob mentality that has pushed The Artist all through awards season has presumably sunk in among the Directors Guild membership. It is therefore likely that Artist helmer Michel Hazanasidvicious will take the top prize at this evening’s DGA Awards. The “anything but The Artist” contingent (i.e., myself and I don’t know who else) is hoping for an extremely unlikely upset by Hugo‘s Martin Scorsese.
The 2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival’s “It Starts With The Script” happened at 11 this morning at the Lobero Theatre. The paneiists included JC Chandor (Margin Call), Jim Rash (The Descendants), Mike Mills (Beginners), Will Reiser (50/50) and Tate Taylor (The Help). IndieWire columnist Anne Thompson moderated. For the first time since I’ve attended this festival I missed it, but at least I got some photos.
(l to. r) J.C. Chandor, Will Reiser, Anne Thompson, Mike Mills, Jim Rash, Tate Taylor, Roger Durling.
SB Film Festival director Roger Durling, Descendants co-writer Jim Rash.
All day long I felt last night’s Moet & Chandon circulating through my system. Moet & Chandon is sponsoring the 2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival so the stuff is abundant. The waiters kept filling my glass at last night’s Viola Davis after-party, and I kept slurping it down like a fool. A champagne hangover is like a disease. Puffy face, a distinct sense of having been pleasurably poisoned, a lack of concentration, depleted spirit.
Deadline‘s Mike Fleming has posted an R.J. Cutler tribute to the late Bingham Ray that will be shown at tonight’s Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony. Cutler has basically dusted off a 15 year-old piece about October’s success with Mike Leigh‘s Secrets and Lies. I tried to find an embed code and gave up after five minutes or so.
Bingham Ray after hearing that Secrets and Lies, which October Films distributed, had been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
Here’s a riff on Favorite Conservative Movies (i.e., “Rise of the Planet of the Apes — the birth of the Tea Party.”). Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.
This 1.20.12 Romney riff is good also.
Gifted people always know they’re gifted. Some allude to this knowledge but they usually indicate otherwise, feigning modesty and humble uncertainty, because it plays better. Last night it seemed to me that Viola Davis, Best Actress Oscar nominee for The Help, conveyed a little bit of that “I’m good and I know it.” Good on her. The last time I heard this in a public forum was from Errol Morris, and before that from Frank Lloyd Wright in a Mike Wallace televised interview.
I arrived late for the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Viola Davis tribute at the cavernous Arlington theatre last night. She was introduced by Octavia Spencer, interviewed by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, career-clipped and given the Outstanding Performer of the Year Award. There was an after-party in Montecito at the home of festival president Douglas R. Stone for a small gathering of festival elites. That group included Davis, Spencer, Samuel L, Jackson, myself, Thompson, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg and Deadline‘s Pete Hammond.
Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre — Friday, 1.27, 9:25 pm.
LAX — Friday, 1.27, 7:45 pm.
Over L.A.’s Marina del Rey — Friday, 1.27, 8:22 pm.
During the 2012 Sundance Film Festival I noticed at least two films (Red Lights, Black Rock) in which a protagonist who’s recently been in an ultra-violent altercation walks around in public view with dried blood on his/her face. (I think at least one other Sundance film went in for this.) This is similar to Ryan Gosling walking around during the final 25% of Drive with brownish blood stains on his white scorpion jacket.
This is a bullshit affectation favored by wanna-be-cool directors, and I’m saying right now to Nicholas Winding Refn and all the others that it ends here and now. Nobody in the actual world ever walks around with globs of dried blood on their person. It would be like walking the streets with a big sandwich-board ad that says “HAVE JUST BEEN IN VIOLENT ALTERCATION” and “LOOKING AROUND FOR NEXT PERSON TO HIT OR SHOOT.” It would obviously attract attention, especially from the law, and anyone who’s just beaten up or killed somebody usually wants anything but that. Plus blood is unattractive and sticky, and I think there’s some kind of instinct that we’re all born with to wash it off as soon as possible.
A 1.27 Sundance Film Festival article by N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis proclaimed that “nothing else…came close to stirring up the excitement and sense of discovery generated by Beasts of the Southern Wild…a hauntingly beautiful [film] both visually and in the tenderness it shows toward the characters.”
Dargis has an eagle eye and highly refined taste buds, but there are two things I can usually count on when it comes to her Sundance Film Festival coverage: (1) She’ll never share or suggest what it’s like to live in a film as you’re watching it — how it actually tastes and feels from a non-eltitist, Joe Popcorn journeyman perspective, as I attempted to do in my Beasts review; and (b) her Sundance sum-up pieces will almost always focus on films that I missed for whatever reason or chose to bypass (For Ellen, Celeste and Jesse Forever, Bachelorette) or which I respected but wasn’t especially thrilled by (2 Days in New York).
Dargis acknowledges that Beasts “inspired a minor critical backlash” during the latter part of the festival. That may or may not be Dargis-ese for “people of varied pedigrees dared to express their gut feelings in addition to mulled-over aesthetic responses.”
In a deliberate effort to take ad money out of Hollywood Elsewhere’s pocket, a piece by “agent turned manager turned producer” Gavin Polone about the over-ness of the Oscars appeared in New York magazine on 1.23:
“Any film thought to have a shot at an [Oscar] award has to be released in the late fall or early winter, meaning that almost every film released between January and September is pretty much out of the running. Distributors select the films they think can garner awards and release them during the last quarter of the year all at once, meaning that the holiday season is hugely overserved by prestige projects and all other seasons woefully undersupplied.
“As a result, the Oscars damage the prospects of the very movies they’re designed to promote. If there were no Academy Awards, there would probably be a more even release of quality films throughout the year, making it more likely that additional people would see those films, since most moviegoers don’t schedule their year to make room for increased movie attendance in November and December. Instead, it’s a battle royale for ticket buyers, and too many movies lose out.
“Many in Hollywood would say that the financial reward of Oscars success makes the cost and loss of dignity worthwhile, but the facts indicate otherwise. A detailed statistical analysis of the Oscars’ box-office effect by Boxofficequant.com showed that almost all of the ticket money flowed in after the nomination, not the win. But this is also misleading, since it is difficult to know how a film that was nominated would have performed had it not received a nomination.
“Of course, some people do benefit from the Oscars, aside from publicists, the trade press, the New York and Los Angeles Times (have you ever seen any kind of anti-Oscars article in those publications?), and Los Angeles billboard owners: the individuals who win. Directors, screenwriters, actors, editors, and anyone else with a nomination or a win gets a big bump in pay after being so honored — as much as $5 million, it’s said, for a Best Actor trophy.
“Unfortunately for the payer of this Oscar bonus, there is no correlation between anyone’s winning an award and future box-office success, despite the big deal made about Oscars in marketing campaigns. PopEater‘s Jo Piazza showed that of the top 100 highest-grossing films of 2010, 40 percent of the top twenty featured Oscar winners, while 50 percent of the bottom twenty did. If possessing a statuette was actually worth something, shouldn’t there be some direct correlation between casting an Academy Award winner and higher box office?
“Really, I see no point to any of it, other than the kitschy fun of the spectacle, which, as with the Miss America Pageant, certainly can be entertaining in limited doses. But by the third speech of someone thanking his spouse, agent, manager, psychic, dog walker, and the person who clears his chakras, I am always bored and left wondering why he couldn’t just have a private conversation with the person to whom he wishes to express his gratitude, and then find something more interesting or entertaining to talk about on television.
“Fortunately, the public seems finally to be losing interest. The Oscar broadcast has evidenced a pretty steady decline in audience share since the mid-seventies. Last year, obviously feeling the need to bring in a younger viewership, the Academy hired James Franco and Anne Hathaway as hosts. The plan didn’t work; there was a 12 percent drop in the 18-to-49 demographic and a 9 percent decrease in overall viewers. Clearly, this is because the audience feels alienated from the choices of nominations and winners, not how they are presented. As with any cultural institution, when the interest and support of the young are lost, it is just a question of when, not if, that institution becomes fully irrelevant. I can’t wait.”
I reviewed Matt Ross‘s 28 Hotel Rooms on 1.22. The trailer went up hours ago.
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