The Hollywood Reporter‘s Nicole Sperling, writing on Anne Thompson‘s Riskybiz blog, feels that Universal “is spending considerably less energy and marketing dollars on an Academy campaign for what many are calling the best film of the year, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men.
“The film was just released on Christmas Day, so it’s understandable that much of their work is dedicated to the film’s theatrical release.” (It expands to 1200 runs today.) “Still, shouldn’t more of an effort be made to promote this dramatic work of art to the Academy?”
A voice from the “other side of the aisle” has written the following in response:
“The United 93 ad push is a tactic in one [Los Angeles] paper only, whereas Children of Men is getting a nationwide marketing push right now, with both significant print (double trucks today) and television. Also, Children of Men is in the middle of its theatrical publicity campaign, whereas there’s next-to-no residual publicity on United 93.
“The United 93 awards campaign is designed to bring attention to a picture that has been out of the public consciousness for awhile. Children of Men is peaking following a many-months revving up. Sperling didn’t consider (at all) the whole picture.
“As to your first talkbacker, I don’t know what organization he might be in but Children of Men screeners were made available (in plenty of time) to full AMPAS and BFCA membership.”

“If you’ve gotten tired of seeing the names Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker over the past month or so, well, so have I,” rants Reeler columnist Lewis Beale. “Worthy actors, for sure, and most likely Oscar shoe-ins, but the ubiquity of their mentions on Oscar prognostication lists has me feeling like one of those fuming cartoon characters, with steam coming out of my ears.

“How many times have we been told that Marty [Scorsese] might finally win his Best Director statuette, that Dreamgirls‘ Jennifer Hudson is a showstopping Best Supporting Actress contendah or that Volver could be nominated in multiple categories? No surprise that Oscar Season 2006 striking some of us as the Tinseltown equivalent of the famous Casablanca order to ’round up the usual suspects'”
Beale’s response is to nominate some unsung contenders in the major categories — The Proposition for Best Picture (sorry, Lewis, but I hated this film), Casino Royale‘s Daniel Craig for Best Actor, Phyllis Somerville for Best Supporting Actress in Little Children (hear, hear!) , Ashley Judd for Best Actress in Come Early Morning, and Ray Winstone in The Proposition (nope…too skanky & greasy, sorry…I far preferred Ray’s performance in Sexy Beast).

I’m once again patting myself on the back for my movie-parenting skills while pointing to a good piece about this topic (and particularly the omnipresence of corporate family fare) from N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. (It ran this morning.) He worries that “the dominance of the family film has had a limiting, constraining effect on the imaginations of children. How are [kids] going to grow if the images they see are carefully vetted for safety and appropriateness by the film industry? Parents of America, take your children to the movies you want to see!

“Within reason, naturally. I cringe at the sight of strollers at Apocalypto or Saw III. But I also cringe at the timidity and cautiousness — the hypersensitivity — that confines family viewing to movies with a plush toy or fast food advertising tie-in. At their best, movies not only offer glimpses of fantastic imaginary worlds, but also inklings of what is, for children, the most intriguing and enigmatic world of all: the world of adulthood.”
Two years ago Jett and I co-authored a piece for iVillage editor Beth Pinsker that, when you boiled the snow out of it, was basically about how to raise a film buff. The actual title was “Kazan for Recess? Kubrick for Snack? How to Create a Passion for Film in Your Kids.”

Sample graph: “You can’t necessarily create a cinephile. There’s no protecting them from kids’ programs on TV, which are largely about greed and toy-buying and cheap highs. And you also can’t instruct or guide a kid into loving movies deeply. But you can help to shape their vistas by keeping them away from poor-quality films and by exposing them to the good stuff — and more is better.
“Good films expose kids to intangibles, and once the fundamentals sink in, your kids will respond more to great movies and less to crap on the tube.”

Finally, the breathtakingly idiotic Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD battle is coming to an end with several announcements that players that can handle both types of discs are about to be offered. “Time Warner has said it will promote an alternative format, called Total HD, that can be used in either Blu-Ray or HD DVD players,” says a recent ZDNet report. “South Korea’s LG Electronics has announced it will release a combo Blu-ray/HD DVD player after months of flip-flopping on the issue. (It plans to provide details this coming Sunday, on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.) Component manufacturers such as NEC and others have begun to prepare parts that could be used in combination players. And Hitachi, which has announced a Blu-ray camcorder, said in October that it wants to look at the issue again.”

While trashing the intramural industry attitudes of some of the Left Coasters who’ve dissed David Denby‘s New Yorker piece about Hollywood ‘s digital future while at the same time (almost in the same breath) allowing that Denby’s piece “isn’t that good,” N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.as., the Bagger) offers some interesting side-sights:

#1: “Denby’s story is just more Chicken Little hollering about the same old pieces of the sky. iPods, downloads, home theaters — all of them represent additional programming space for an industry that can’t find a place to land a movie that is not based on an ancient sitcom or comic book character. The studios are so busy putting up tents that they haven’t noticed that the ground is shifting under their feet.”
#2: “Meanwhile, a new, if still-nascent, industry, one that will bypass traditional tastemakers and marketers, is growing up of its own accord. And that is a far more interesting story than the blundering of the studios. Digital in, digital out, to be consumed at a time and place and on a device of one’s own choosing. Consu- mer-driven choice, the ultimate capitalist algorithm, will tunnel beneath the studio system.”
#3: “Why is Hollywood so stuck, given that they make a product we can’t resist and the world continues to ingest in spite of our country’s tattered global image? Hollywood is a fundamentally conservative industry. The seven sisters are The Blob that ingests everything — talent, innovation, enterprise. They not only don’t enable innovation, they eat it in hopes it will go away. Anything that comes over the hill is worth shooting at and if doesn’t die, it is ignored.”
#4: “Remember when VCR’s were going to gut the industry? They spun film libraries into gold instead. It was lucrative enough that Sony was able to buy the software — a studio no less — to go with the hardware. And DVD’s, another shot straight to the heart, now serves as the product after the trailers — that blockbuster opener — has come and gone.

#5: “The studios generally treat people with new ideas the way China does, by parking them in padded cells. Mel Gibson gets tagged as a nutter when he taps into a massive Christian market, while Mark Cuban is judged to be an Antichrist when he suggests alternative means of distribution. Audiences, of course, want plain English, the dumber the better, but the impact of films where dialect is rendered in text — Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima and Volver, to mention a few — suggests an increasing consumer openness to a combination of image, text, and sound.”

It’s a good thing that MPRM, a very savvy Hollywood p.r. company co-run by Mark Pogachefsky and Rachel McAllister (and also steered by Michael Lawson and I forget who else…MPRM staffers are always getting stolen by “the dependents”) is growing its digital media and technology division, i.e., DMT.
Things change. I remember sitting in MPRM’s offices about five or six years ago and looking at piles of clippings they had assembled to show some heavyweight Hollywood client, and every last one was from a print publication — not one print-out from an entertainment website.
I haven’t smoked DMT (i.e., dimethyltryptamine) since I was in my late teens. I remember trying it with two friends at the home of some macho blowhard guy I didn’t know — a guy who was boasting that he’d seduced a girl he’d just met after only two dates. The guy called the chunks of DMT we were about to smoke “little ratshit.” And then he toked up. In less than a minute he was starting to freak. He started rubbing the couch he was sitting on and going “uh-ohhh” and making odd little acck noises.

January moviegoing looks one flatliner after another. The only film that may do some decent business this weekend is that Hilary Swank– saves-the-students-from-their-self-destructive-street- environment-and-street-attitudes movie Freedom Writers (Paramount). General awareness is 64, definite interest 32, first choice is 10. New Line’s Code Name: The Cleaner with Cedric the Entertainer (“You want tact, get a tactician!”) is at 47, 25 and 3. The animated Happily Never After (Lionsgate) is 53, 22 and 2.

Borat‘s Sacha Baron Cohen talks to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross (in his fey British accent) on National Public Radio. They have a moderately cool discussion that really goes into the nature of his comedy and what it says about — and how it may potentially affect — anti-semitism.

In a Hollywood Reporter directors roundtable discussion, interviewer Stephen Galloway asks David Lynch, Emilio Estevez, Nancy Meyers, Guillermo del Toro, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris to name any moment from any film that they would take with them into the afterlife.
Lynch: “Oh, man. Okay. I guess, Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart discovering the mystery across the [courtyard] in Rear Window.
Del Toro: The razor blade cutting the eye in Luis Bunuel‘s Andalusian Dog.
Dayton: “Dustin Hoffman pounding on the glass in the church and Katharine Ross yelling “Ben!” in The Graduate.
Estevez: “The last four minutes of Taxi Driver. It is so brutal;…so uncompromisingly violent and so shocking.”
Meyers: “There is this moment in Bringing Up Baby where Katharine Hepburn lands a butterfly net on Cary Grant‘s head, and he gestures he wants to strangle her. That never fails to crack me up.”
Faris: “Abel Gance‘s Napoleon. When I saw it and the end was projected on three scenes, that made me want to cry. It was all about the future of film and the past.

Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond is saying with yesterday’s Babel-favoring Producer’s Guild nominations and this morning’s SAG noms, “it may be time to jump on the Babelwagon.”

“In Munchkinland when The (Lollipop) Guild spoke, Dorothy listened. In Hollywoodland when The Guild speaks, everyone listens, at least during awards season because, to put it bluntly, the PGA, DGA, SAG and WGA noms and awards — more than all the seemingly hundreds of critics groups awards and top-ten lists combined — are by far the best indicators of where Oscar is heading in any given year.
“Quite frankly they are the only things that matter (of the pre-Oscar indicators),” one prominent awards consultant told us yesterday.
“The reason obviously is that all these unions are made up in part of Oscar voters as well. Of course they all have an even larger contingent of TV people on their membership rolls but that hasn’t kept the strong correlation between a guild nom and an Oscar nom from occurring year after year. 2005’s eventual Oscar champ, Crash, was barely on the map just 12 months ago when the Producers Guild gave it a surprise Best Picture nomination and all the others followed suit.
“Now with the PGA and SAG noms in, the race further tightens but what these nominations have told us is basically what we already know. Four Best Picture slots, most prognosticators seem to believe, will go to Dreamgirls, The Departed, The Queen and Little Miss Sunshine — and indeed they appear to be headed just that way.

“The coveted fifth slot, previously conceded to be a contest between the darker dramas like Babel, Little Children, Letters From Iwo Jima and (because of critical support) United 93, is now edging closer to a lock for — drumroll, please — Babel following up its combined 14 Golden Globe and Broadcast Critics noms with a PGA Best Picture nod and its tie for a leading 3 SAG nominations including Outstanding Cast.
“The latter [is] the guild’s version of a Best Picture prize (won last year by Crash). Perhaps most surprisingly, Clint Eastwood’s dual achievement of Letters From Iwo Jimaand its counterpart Flags Of Our Fathers, was completely overlooked by both groups. Did they cancel themselves out?
“But before we all jump on the Babelwagon, we should note that in fairness to Universal’s struggling-to-be-seen, and star challenged United 93, it was expected to get no action from the actors and little from the PGA. United 93‘s major test comes with the WGA and, especially, DGA nomination announcements next week.
“Right now [the Paul Greengrass film] has won several critics group Best Picture awards and has hit more top-ten lists than any film other than The Departed and The Queen, which are both heavily favored to repeat their success with the Academy.”

So Paramount chief Brad Grey, who yesterday lost “an aggressive bid” to be recognized by the Producers Guild of America as one of the producers of Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (per Claudia Eller’s 1.4.07 L.A. Times story), is this year’s Bob Yari?
“People who have talked to the studio chief said he was angered by the guild’s decision but had not made up his mind whether to appeal to the academy,” Eller reports. “Scorsese reportedly advised Grey on Wednesday to appeal to the guild’s executive committee should The Departed be nominated.”
She adds, however, that “any such move to appeal carries big risks for Grey” because it “could it come off as an unseemly grab for personal glory to Hollywood insiders. To his bosses at Viacom Inc., it would [also] put him in direct competition with his own studio. Paramount’s Dreamgirls and Babel, which also received guild nominations, are strong contenders for the best picture Oscar.”