I’ve been slacking on Oscar Poker podcasts so long they look like up to me. This morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I discussed the leading Best Picture contenders and all the attendant issues. Principal topics: 12 Years A Slave (including the “Steve McQueen problem” and the coming pushback), American Hustle, Saving Mr. Banks, the probable (if not yet confirmed) postponement of Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street, Nebraska, Captain Phillips (which is having its big L.A. premiere tonight), Spike Jonze‘s Her, Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the possibility that George Clooney may be punking everyone with current Monuments Men assessments, and ongoing concerns about Bruce Dern possibly not making it as a Best Actor nominee for Nebraska. We’re pulling for you, Bruce! Again, here’s the mp3.
Every year a Hollywood Foreign Press Association committee decides that this or that award-quality film should be categorized as a comedy or musical. Their calls are sometimes bizarre, to put it mildly. A story by Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg says that Blue Jasmine, for example, will end up in a Musical/Comedy slot because it costars “funnymen” Alec Baldwin, Louis C.K. and Andrew Dice Clay. This for a film that is clearly modelled upon and in many ways resembles A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the great dramatic tragedies of the 20th Century.
Feinberg also foresees the HFPA labelling Before Midnight, Frances Ha, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska and Philomena as comedies — the standard apparently being that if characters in the above films say anything snippy or snarky or sardonic or smartly allusive (which they do on occasion)…anything that results in a slight chortle or guffaw during a screening…they’re comedic. June Squibb briefly flashes her privates in Nebraska? It’s a comedy. The snooty Steve Coogan makes a few smart cracks at Judy Dench‘s expense in Philomena? It’s a laugh riot. I’ve at least agreed with the HFPA in one respect — Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man (’09) is definitely a comedy.
“It also seems [as if] Bruce Dern‘s position in the Oscar race is questionable,” Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet wrote yesterday. “Many have issues with him being pushed in the lead actor category, feeling his role is secondary to that of [Nebraska costar] Will Forte‘s, which means both he and Robert Redford are skating on thin ice with some strong contenders at their heels.”
Just to be clear, I’m no Dern disser. I want this legendary actor to have his Day In The Sun. I’m just saying I’m concerned and all-but-convinced that the poor guy will be nudged out of contention if he and Paramount stick to their Best Actor campaign. If he makes it, great…but I worry for him.
Leonardo DiCaprio‘s The Wolf of Wall Street performance “looms large, though the dark comedy nature of the film’s marketing has me doubting its overall chances,” Brevet continues. “Ditto Foxcatcher‘s Steve Carell, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty‘s Ben Stiller, American Hustle‘s Christian Bale and Her‘s Joaquin Phoenix are still unknowns at this point and could quickly climb into the race, leaving Dern and Redford in the dust, and perhaps even Forrest Whitaker.”
Sayeth a friend of All Is Lost: “I’m not sure I follow Brevet’s reasoning about Redford being on thin ice…to use the quote of the week, ‘It’s September, for God’s sake!'”
The just-released poster for Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska (Paramount, 11.22) tells you it’s a serious award-season film about the stark realities of aging. (Obviously similar to the 2002 one-sheet for Payne’s About Schmidt.) My white hair is so sparse that I might as well be bald plus I have a neck wattle plus I’ve won a million bucks from Publisher’s Clearing House plus I’ve been an abusive drunk for most of my life plus my old friends and relatives sit around their living rooms and watch TV like immobile zombies. No sedatives, no soothing bromides to speak of, no emotional comforts of the usual sort.
In order for Nebraska‘s Bruce Dern to elbow his way into one of the five nominee slots for the Best Actor Oscar he’ll have to…look, I’m in no way rooting against the guy. Dern is one of the great fellows of our time. I’m just saying he’s making it hard on himself by not going for Best Supporting Actor. As far as I can see 12 Years a Slave‘s Chiwetel Ejiofor, Dallas Buyers Club‘s Matthew McConaughey and All Is Lost‘s Robert Redford (also the most likely recipient of a Gold Watch career tribute nomination) are locked and loaded. That leaves two slots and that means standing up to Wolf of Wall Street‘s Leonardo DiCaprio, American Hustle‘s Christian Bale, Captain Phillips‘ Tom Hanks and The Butler‘s Forrest Whitaker. Does anyone honestly think Dern’s got the horses to push aside three of these four guys? Man up, eat humble pie and go for supporting. The blogoscenti will stand up and cheer.
Is there anyone who’s seen Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (i.e., not Mark Harris) who doesn’t feel that Lupita Nyong’o‘s performance is searing and breathtaking and yaddah-yaddah? Is there anyone who’s seen 12 Years A Slave and The Butler who believes that Oprah Winfrey‘s very good-but-not-quite-stupendous performance in the latter even approaches the calibre of Nyongo’s, much less competes with it? I’ve been contending all along that if Winfrey wasn’t a super-mogul billionaire she wouldn’t be in the conversation in the first place, but at least now she’s up against someone who’s hit a genuine grand slam. The other contenders in this category are, in this order, Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine, Margo Martindale in August: Osage County, June Squibb in Nebraska, Octavia Spencer in Fruitvale Station and (maybe) Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis. What does Mark Harris think about all this other than “it’s September, for God’s sake”?
In a 9.10 piece called “Should There Be (Gasp!) 20 Best Picture Nominees This Year?”, Variety‘s Timothy Gray has written that the 2013 Best Picture race could include 12 Years a Slave, August: Osage County, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Fruitvale Station, Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Philomena, Prisoners and Rush. Not to mention…wait, he’s calling the drop-dead brilliant All Is Lost a “dark horse”? He’s lumping All Is Lost in with no-chance-in-hell 42, The Fifth Estate, Invisible Woman and Kill Your Darlings? What does Gray have against J.C. Chandor and Robert Redford?
Other dark horses, Gray says, are Labor Day, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and Nebraska. And then you need to add the unreleased American Hustle, The Counselor, Foxcatcher, Her, Lone Survivor, The Monuments Men, Out of the Furnace, Saving Mr. Banks, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Wolf of Wall Street.
I don’t know anything but the Best Picture nominees will most likely be the following: 12 Years A Slave, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, All Is Lost, Foxcatcher, Saving Mr. Banks, Inside Llewyn Davis, Dallas Buyer’s Club and (I find this absurd but everyone keeps telling me it’ll happen) Lee Daniels’ The Butler. In a fair and just world Fruitvale Station — a much, much better film that The Butler — would also be a nominee.
On 8.13 I riffed on a relatively new fall-festival phenomenon — “the Oscar-contending, Telluride-only, Toronto-blowoff movie.” This referred to three Telluride Film Festival headliners — J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis and Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska — having bailed on Toronto, possibly because their producers felt that the Toronto clusterfuck factor (i.e., so many films, so little time) meant that their films might get overlooked in the shuffle. I wondered if this indicated a significant shift in thinking among award-season strategists. Is Toronto losing some of its lustre to the Venice, Telluride and New York Film Festivals, which happen right before and after Toronto?
Today Variety reviewer and Motion Picture Blog editor/essayist Joe Leydon, a longtime Toronto Film Festival veteran, shared some thoughts along these lines:
“Considering how many Toronto-bound films are premiering this year at Venice and Telluride, I wonder how long it will be before someone suggests that TIFF go back to calling itself the ‘Festival of Festivals,'” Leydon wrote. “Not that there would be anything wrong with that, you understand.
I have to leave (and I really wish it weren’t so) by 9:15 or thereabouts in order to make a 12:30 flight from Durango to LAX. I’m missing the 9 am Salinger screening. There’s a huge aesthetic gulf between your film-festival journo-distributor-buyer elites (endless merriment for Glenn Kenny) and regular Joes & Janes with mainstream sensibilities. People like Nebraska and Labor Day, which I’m not so high on. And they seem to be cool or mezzo mezzo toward the films I love/worship — Inside Llewyn Davis, All Is Lost, 12 Years A Slave, etc. Everyone likes Gravity. I never saw Tim’s Vermeer although not for lack of trying. I meant to share a brief chat I had with Michael Fassbender at the 12 Years A Slave party — I’ll do that this afternoon. I finally uploaded the mp3 of my chat with Alfonso Cuaron — here it is.
I read about the Telluride lineup when I touched down in Pheonix, but there wasn’t time to plug in and post a riff. Almost every film I predicted would be here is playing here (All Is Lost, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Labor Day, Nebraska, The Invisible Woman, Under the Skin). The exception is 12 Years A Slave, but that’ll be one of the three TBA add-ons — trust me. There’s also Errol Morris‘s The Unknown Known, the Donald Rumsfeld doc. Plus Ritesh Batra‘s The Lunchbox, Gia Coppola‘s Palo Alto, Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa‘s Milius, the opening of the Werner Herzog theatre, tributes to Robert Redford and T Bone Burnett and the Coen brothers, conversations between Bruce Dern and Leonard Maltin. Plus Don DeLillo, author of Libra and one of the great American novelists, is here…wow.
My final predictions for the lineup at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, which won’t be revealed until Thursday (or will it be Wednesday?), are the same that everyone else is kicking around: Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis, J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Alfonso Curaron‘s Gravity, Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska, Ralph Fiennes‘ The Invisible Woman, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color, Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day…what else?
The Telluride departure countdown (40 hours to go) is intensified by the fact that I’m still in Santa Barbara as we speak. I won’t be back in LA until the early afternoon. I’m starting to grind away at the enamel on my teeth.
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.
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