100 Days 'Til Oscar. A Short Clean Sweep

We're all used to the Oscar ceremony drawing monotonous "it's too long!" complaints. Yours truly doesn't share that view. Hell, if they wanted to do 9-hour broadcasts and include all the honoraries again and give more attention to the craft categories, and never skimp on any of the four category clip reels for the actors, I'd gladly watch each additional minute. But the super long Oscar ceremony is actually not a historic consistency. The earliest Oscars were short banquets and once they started televising them in the 50s the lengths varied.

Gigi made a clean sweep with 9 Oscars but with no acting nominations. Burl Ives (The Big Country), Susan Hayward (I Want To Live!), and David Niven and Wendy Hiller (not pictured) from Separate Tables won the acting Oscars.

The shortest of all televised ceremonies was the 1958 Oscars, broadcast live on April 6th, '59. It was only 100 minutes long. Can you imagine it? 

Of course if you're just going to hand all the statues to something as dull as Gigi, which made a clean sweep with 9 wins from 9 nominations PLUS an Honorary Oscar for Maurice Chevalier, you'd best do it quickly you know? Fun fact: If you started watching Gigi as its Oscar ceremony began you'd still have 15 minutes of the movie left when the Oscars wrapped.

Gigi gets a bad wrap but it wasn't a terribly competitive film year and at least it wasn't quite the worst of the nominees. The other nominees were Auntie Mame, The Defiant Ones, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and (ugh) Separate Tables. I suspect the dread sixth 'just-missed' slot belonged to Robert Wise's I Want to Live! which received 6 nominations and a long awaited win for Susan Hayward. Which would you have voted for?

And no write in votes for the actual best movie of 1958, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo which got a measly two nominations and no gold. I suspect it was nowhere near a Best Pic nomination given the initial chilly response from audiences, critics, and the Academy. 

AFI: Selma Premiere or, We Ate Cookies With Lorraine Toussaint!

Safely happily physically ensconced back in New York City, my head is still ping-ponging around that exciting week in Los Angeles. My thoughts take scary stumbles back in time to 1960s Alabama when white politicians and racists were trying to stop black citizens from voting. Sound familiar? The first part, I mean. Sadly in 2014 we're still fighting efforts to surpress the vote, making Ava DuVernay's upcoming Christmas release Selma a historical drama that is also uncomfortably contemporary.

The AFI FESTIVAL PRESENTED BY CORPORATION (don't make me say it, publicists!) closes tonight with Foxcatcher but we'll have a few more days of coverage to catch up. My closing night film was the world premiere of Selma. It was so fresh from the editing bay that the great cinematographer Bradford Young was brought up on stage five days earlier for that A Most Violent Year premiere (he's busy) only to instantly return to the film for color corrections. It was so new that a couple of visual effects and a few sound issues had not been fully resolved. The event was pitched as a preview of 30 minutes of the film but Oprah Winfrey, who produced, convinced Ava to seize the opportunity to present the (nearly) completed work. We were actually asked not to review it though I see that the rest of the internet has thoroughly disobeyed this studio request. Virtually the whole cast was there with the exception of the white guys (Allesandro Nivola, Giovanni Ribisi, Tom Wilkinson) and Carmen Ejogo who plays Coretta Scott King.

More on Ejogo, Oscar play, and a party photos after the jump...

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Foreign Submission Review: Panama's "Invasion"

Here's Jose to look at the first Oscar submission ever from Panama. They sent a documentary.

On the early morning of December 20, 1989, the United States invaded Panama. Under code-name Operation Just Cause, the US deposed de-facto leader Manuel Noriega and president-elect Guillermo Endara was sworn into office. Setting a precedent of inexplicable, unjustified foreign invasions under the command of presidents named George Bush, the Panama intervention was notorious for its lack of transparency; while US officials set the casualties tally at 500, local records report up to 7,000 civilians and soldiers who were never heard of again. Even more interesting is the fact that the invasion is simply something people don’t talk about anymore.

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AFI Fest: 'Tales of the Grim Sleeper' and the Politics of Telling Other People's Stories

Margaret reporting from the AFI Fest...

The new documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper, on the long list of eligible Oscar doc titles, screened for the first time in Los Angeles not ten miles from the scene of the brutal crimes it addresses. The feature investigates a serial murderer and his staggering number of victims over two decades in a close-knit South L.A. community-- and these are not the kind of crimes that "could have happened anywhere." Visited on an already underserved and overlooked neighborhood, the killings targeted upwards of one hundred black women, many prostitutes and drug users, whose lives the police disregarded so entirely that for years the crimes were designated by the LAPD as NHI-- No Human Involved. 

The entry point for the film is an investigation of Lonnie Franklin, Jr., the suspect in custody who is still awaiting trial, but as the documentary picks apart layers of the case it instead becomes a scathing indictment of a broken justice system.

Director Nick Broomfield, a white British man whose background gives him little in common with the subjects of his narrative, has significant advantages in accessing and broadcasting this story. A pioneer in the self-reflexive documentary style that has since been employed by Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, he inserts himself into the narrative just enough be transparent about his outsider relationship to the community, and his platform as an affluent white filmmaker.

Thankfully, Broomfield doesn't seem to labor under the impression that it's his story to tell. For his Q&A after the AFI Fest screening, he brought up Pam Brooks, who makes invaluable contributions to the movie as a neighborhood guide and storyteller, and Margaret Prescod, tireless spokesperson for the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. Broomfield deftly redirected audience questions about the victims, miscarriage of justice, and the apartheid in L.A. to Margaret and Pam. 

Lonnie Franklin's public defender, a minor presence in the documentary who came off as a sloppy, hapless suit, emerged from the audience to make a tone-deaf bid to co-opt the Q&A, talking over Margaret and Pam and offering unsolicited advice. This tasteless move only served to underline the film's point about invisibilization of the affected community, and the importance of supporting their voices.

Someone in the audience asked, "What can we do?" Nick Broomfield deferred again to Margaret Prescod. "This film should be shown all over this city. Make sure people see it. Make sure city officials see it. How many black women died, were murdered? We're still waiting to find out. It took a British filmmaker to come here and tell this story... We are not done here."

So, what can we do? We can think about who gets to tell these stories, and try to listen and respect the people who are telling their own.

Stockholm Film Festival: The Franco and the Faulkner

Glenn has been attending the 25th Stockholm Film Festival as a member of the FIPRESCI jury. Today he looks at James Franco's latest creative endeavour, 'The Sound and the Fury'.

James Franco’s latest isn’t a part of the films I was sent to Sweden to judge, but in my apparent need to one day become the pre-eminent expert on the 36-year-old’s career, I decided to find time for The Sound and the Fury. His second Faulkner adaptation after last year’s As I Lay Dying shows that Franco is improving as a director when it comes to the creation of coherent and engaging cinematic worlds, but while somebody like the equally fast-moving Xavier Dolan is able to take his inspirations and weave them throughout his own auteurial style, Franco’s films still feel like he’s merely copying what he has seen elsewhere without putting his own stamp on it.

For instance, his misguided debut film about the murder of Sal Mineo, titled simply Sal, was Gus Van Sant lite to say nothing of My Own Private River, while last year’s Child of God was incredibly indebted to Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone. Faulkner’s novel, from what I gather, isn’t the easiest to make work on screen and Franco with his editor Ian Olds have chosen an elliptical form that layers flashbacks upon memories within sun-drenched images of nature and human innocence to symbolize how precious this life is. It’s style is representative of the source material’s structure, but it comes off visually as derivative of other films, predominantly The Tree of Life and it’s swirling, time-skipping narrative.

For those unfamiliar, The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the Compson family, a formerly rich and powerful Mississippi dynasty who are devoured by misfortune and resentment. Divided into three chapters (the book’s fourth chapter is integrated throughout), each devoted to one of the family’s three brothers: Benjy (Franco, clearly having never seen Tropic Thunder), Quentin (newcomer Jason Loeb, anchoring the film’s strongest segment) and Jason (a slimy, cowardly Scott Haze, much improved over his similarly hot-tempered role in Franco’s Child of God). It was wise of Franco to not indulge in a lavish adaptation, keeping the ensemble low-key (he does, however, find time for cameos by Seth Rogen and Danny McBride – most unexpected Pineapple Express reunion ever!). Yet at the same time his devotion to the novel means more interesting characters don’t get the attention they deserve.

Ahna O’Reilly as scandalous sister Caddy, Joey King as her deserted child, and Loretta Devine as the long-serving family maid are all impressive – Devine especially gets one killer showdown with Haze that begs for a director to capitalize better on her intense face. Despite their stories feeling redacted with large blank holes of history left untouched, they are the more emotionally and dramatically complex characters. Perhaps a narrative shift to these unsung female characters is the brave direction Franco needed to allow his film to truly separate itself from both the novel and similarly-themed films. The film looks handsomely made, the period details appearing nicely deteriorated, but in terms of impact I was left wanting. The Sound and the Fury is a step in the right direction for Franco the director, but it still doesn’t quite suggest he’s on the verge of something truly great. Yet, at least.