Oscar Chatter: If It's Yours To Lose, You Can Still Lose

Each year as the first "wow" factor players emerge in the Oscar race, pundits (professional and amateur alike), jump all over themselves to declare "winners!" in each of the acting races several months in advance. I always want to pass on analgesic creams when this begins to happen but then I'm more patient than some Oscar fans and prefer the slow sexy fight for nominations to the wham bam foregone conclusions of Oscar night.  If you believe the internet Cate Blanchett has it locked up in Best Actress (on the strength of her work in Blue Jasmine) and Oprah Winfrey has it locked up in Supporting Actress (on the rush of excitement that's greeted Lee Daniels' The Butler and her against type work... if you can have a type when you rarely act.) The only trouble is that no one has seen their competition. And your competition is half the equation at least as to whether or not you'll win. (One example: Does Reese Witherspoon's Walk the Line win in a highly competitive year? I think not.)

Oscar loves a drunk. Can Cate & Oprah both win while boozing it up?

The male categories are less clear though we've already heard quite a few "Leonardo DiCaprio finally has it for The Wolf of Wall Street!" (on the strength of his meme-worthy dancing and lively charisma in the trailer) and some have floated Bruce Dern as your future Supporting Actor winner for Nebraska... though his campaign remains a question mark. Nebraska, we know, is one of those Two Lead/Same Gender films that Oscar's acting branch has forgotten how to parse. Nobody ever tried to suggest that Salieri or Amadeus were supporting each other or that the true lead of Thelma & Louise was Thelma OR Louise but they would if those films opened today because times have changed and fans and campaign managers got increasingly shameless. 

So will any of these four win? Quite possibly, sure. But they could also all lose. One or more of them might not even be nominated! We haven't seen most of the competitive sets and until the great winnowing of December begins when the precursor awards race in to borify the entire race... let's keep an open mind and enjoy the wide world of possibilities!

OSCAR CHART UPDATES
Best Actress - Will Amy give Cate B a run for her money with Meryl maybe dropping out?
Best Supporting Actress - Can Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer stay in the conversation as Oprah sucks up all the late summer oxygen?
Best Actor -It might come down to Leo vs. Matthew unless Old Hollywood rallies for career honors for Dern or Redford or someone else surprises. Oh god, please let there be surprises this year!
Best Supporting Actor - only the editors know... seriously... nothing has happened yet. (sigh)

more updates to follow on the remaining charts

"The Newest Hottest Spike Lee Joint" Begins Filming

I've bitched about millionaires crowdfunding their projects already but I do want to say that of the three most egregious recent examples on Kickstarter, I'm most interested in Spike Lee's. I like that he's taken to social media with such enthusiasm, which negates some of the ickiness of crowdfunding by focusing on the its first syllable.

The film already has a promotional poster...

...and is about human addicted to blood because the vampire genre is so woefully underrepresented in current cinema.

Anyway, Lee reached his $1.25 million fundraising goal two days ago (a few days early) and by the time people were blogging about its success, the director had already started shooting and that kind of enthusiasm and commitment is as infectious as bloodlust in the movies!

Today he instagrammed this photo with the caption: "Shooting Opening Credit Sequence For The Newest Hottest Spike Lee Joint."

anyone know who these guys are? None are Spike's regular DP Barry Alexander Brown

Spike Lee makes great opening credit sequences -- Do the Right Thing did the right thing. And that's the truth, Ruth -- but this shot cracks me up because of the years I've spent searching for First & Last images. That series taught me that the biggest filmmaking cliche for opening shots is non-descript images of the sky or sea. 

Still... we can probably trust Spike Lee & team to mix it up. He makes fine title sequences and that's the truth, Ruth. Remember Do The Right Thing? 

I (will always) ♥ Rosie Perez.

You Must Be My Linky Star

In Contention goodbye to the goodcity. In Contention's head honcho leaves NYC for LA. He tried it for a year. (I'd kind of like to do this in reverse as I could never leave NYC for good.)
EOnline Ethan Hawke regrets his marriage to Uma Thurman, thinks men shouldn't marry before 28 years of age
Buzzfeed the ultimate Mean Girls alphabet is made of rainbows and smiles
Buzzfeed 26 reasons why Grease 2 is better than Grease (I do not agree with the thesis but I heart the argument
Mental Floss 11 things you never see in movie theaters anymore
Animation Mag possible sci-tech awards for Oscar this year. But what I wanna know is which actress will host it people. Guess in the comments! 

How Did You Celebrate Madonna's Birthday Yesterday?
I listed my opinion of her best "acting" and I listened to a million songs by the queen. I also read a few blogposts celebrating her special day my favorite of which by far was this one at Flavorwire which stereotypes you by your favorite Madonna song.

I went straight to my two favorites...

“Like a Prayer”
Potentially lapsed Catholics.
“Erotica”
People who have the “vintage” tab on RedTube bookmarked in their browser. 

...which just made me cackle and those aren't even the funniest ones. I especially LOL'ed at  "La Isla Bonita," "Who's That Girl" and "Express Yourself." It's a must read if you love Her Madgesty.

Finally...
Why don't you vote in more of our polls? I see the stats. There are way more of you than are voting in the polls! Insert Gentle Grumbling At You! Rather than polling you about why you're not joining in on the fun (perhaps your fingertips are too sensitive for clicking?) I'll just remind you that we have polls running like these...

 

Click 2 vote!

"Hit Me" Season 4 - Last Three Movies !

As we move into prestige Oscar buzz season and restore old internet favorites like the Smackdown and _____ time gets tighter. Hit Me With Your Best Shot must ride off into the sunset until its revival in the spring. So here are your last three movies. Let's go out with a bang. 

08/21
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Amazon Instant | Netflix Rental
Vincent Minnelli's noir was up for a ton of Oscars and Minnelli's films always look great. Which will be your favorite shot and will it incorporate Gloria Grahame's Oscar winning turn in Supporting Actress (which we'll be discussing on Sunday 08/25 in the Supporting Actress Smackdown)?

08/28
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Netflix Instant Watch |  Amazon Instant 
We'll be looking back at a few key Robert Redford classics in the build up to All is Lost, his comeback Oscar bid in October. Let's start right here since we've never done a Western in this series. This buddy movie with Redford and Paul Newman won Best Cinematography at the Oscars. 

09/04
Spring Breakers (2013)
We never do anything brand new in this series so let's investigate this divisive hypno-oddity before everyone (and the blog) goes 'Back to School' for the fall. We're talking a cue from Nick's suggestion on the podcast that this cinematography is worth fussing & FYCing over. 

On a Housekeeping Note: You wouldn't believe how hard it is to choose films for this series as so many movies that are suggested or that I think would be good choices are increasingly difficult to find with the ever fragmented dvd/bluray/streaming wars going on among studios/stores/sites/netflix. Even things as recent as the 80s are often hard to get a hold of. For instance, I wanted to do Married to the Mob (1988) for its 25th anniversary and given that Michelle Pfeiffer is returning to the mob comedy genre but it's not available for rental on iTunes, Netflix OR Amazon if you can believe it! And the movie is from an Oscar winning director, stars familiar actors who are still working and is only 25 years old.  I own it but the whole point of the series is for many people to be able to talk about the same movie (sigh)

In the comments, please let me know how / what service you use to rent movies since Netflix no longer has the huge library they used to have but their vault is still better than anyone else's. These are dark dark days for non new-releases. 

Foreign Oscar Buzz: Denmark & Argentina

Which films will Denmark and Argentina submit for Oscar consideration this year? Both countries have won the Best Foreign Film prize in the recent past and could compete again this year.

Denmark
They've announced their three finalists for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submission. I think the likeliest of their three finalists is The Hunt, directed by Thomas Vinterberg (A Celebration) which won Mads Mikkelsen Best Actor at Cannes a year plus ago as a teacher under attack due to false allegations from a child. It's currently in release in the States which means it's eligible for the Oscars in general if not for this specific category (which requires official submission... and each country may only choose one film). The major obstacle to its submission might be its lack of newness. It played in Cannes during last year's eligibility period (Oct 11- Sept 12) but not in its home country (making it ineligible for selection last year) and opened within the 2013 window in Denmark making it eligible for submission this year. Got it? But still... it could end up feeling like old news to the Danish powers that be if they vote anything like our Academy who have that notoriously short term "what did I just see?" problem. If the Danes vote for their current hot property they could go with either The Act of Killing, the very buzzy documentary (also in Stateside release right now) about the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s or Northwest from director Michael Noer (who co-directed A Hijacking) a crime thriller about a man named Casper who is moving up in the criminal world selling stolen goods.

Regardless of what they choose, Denmark is popular with Oscar voters. A Royal Affair (2012) was their 9th nominee in the category and they've already won three times (back to back wins in the 80s with Babette's Feast and Pelle the Conqueror and a win for Susanne Bier's In a Better World recently) 

Argentina
This South American country has been nominated six times and won twice. The first statue came for 1985's arthouse hit The Official Story. Argentina won again just a few years ago with Juan José Campanella's crime thriller The Secret in Their Eyes starring Ricardo Darín, who pops up regularly in the country's submitted films. Both Campanella and Darín could factor in again though not together this time.

Darrin stars in Thesis of a Homicide, another crime thriller, and Campanella directed the animated hit Metegol (trailer embedded below). Darín might have competition for familiar Argentinian face this year though since Diego Peretti stars in two films: Wakolda (from the director of the Oscar submitted XXY) about a family who lived with Nazi war criminal/physician Josef Mengele without realizing who he was and La Reconstruccion about a lonely man on a trip. My current guess is that it'll be Wakolda that gets Argentina's vote, both for the subject matter and because most countries tend to repeat directors in their submissions over the years. [Thanks to reader Marcos for his thoughts on these possible submissions.]

P.S. For what it's worth though only one animated film (Israel's Waltz With Bashir) has ever been nominated in the Foreign Film category, that doesn't stop countries from trying with their submissions.