ADG Nominees: Period, Fantasy, and (Our Favorite) Contemporary

The Guilds Have Spoken! Or rather, they're beginning to speak. We've just heard from the producers and now the art directors. This time AMPAS will cut the guilds off mid-sentence since Oscar nominations are but a week away. But here are the nominations from the Art Directors Guild which includes production designers, art directors and set decorators. Production Designers are the bosses of this field and when it comes to Oscar only the production designers and set decorators and not the art directors share the Oscar nominations which is why it's a bit odd that it's always called "Art Direction" but AMPAS has finally changed the name of the category so it'll now be 'Production Design'

Anna Karenina may be dressed for grief but her bedroom sure is lusty.

Expect that the five nominated films for Oscar will be (mostly) culled from these three groups. And obviously, given that Oscar is Oscar and "Best" =  "Most" the bulk of the eventual Oscar shortlist will come from Period & Fantasy. TFE's favorite thing about the guild awards is that you can see what the craftsmen and women like best in contemporary work... which sadly rarely goes on to Oscar glory despite being difficult and creatively challenging in its own right.

Some notes on their nominees... and their nominee's past filmography glories after the jump

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Tolkien at 121

JA from MNPP here to wish the author JRR Tolkien a terribly post-mortem happy 121st birthday. Here he was born (in 1892) and there he died (in September of 1973) - twas hardly a moment for you, you took no notice. (Sorry I have that Vertigo quote permanantly on tap, even if inappropriate.)

Anyway! Even if Nathaniel's boycotting The Hobbit, there's a lot of us (a whole heckuva lot, judging from its receipts) who weren't so strong and submitted ourselves willingly to another three hours in Hobbiton and beyond - my reaction to the film was actually one of surprised like, if not really love; I'd convinced myself in a post-Lovely-Bones world (shudder) that Peter Jackson had lost that ineffable something that made him so special, and I was wrong. I thought the film was like slipping back into a warm bath - cozy and quite fine. If I weren't so enamored with PJ's take on Tolkien's world I might find the probably obscene money-grab (point Nat) of stretching this lil' book out to nine hours less palatable, but I do, I do like PJ's take on Tolkien's world an awful lot, so I ended up more okay with it than I anticipated myself being in the end. Ask me again after he's piled the latter six hours on and we'll see how I feel but for now, he's reconvinced me at giving it a go. What's did y'all think?

I saw a joke going around on Twitter about how we'll be getting an epic series of films for The Silmarillion next; nevermind that all the good stuff's apparently somehow making its way into the three Hobbit movies already - where there be gold, there be dragons. Where would movie-making even be without JRR today? How many helicopter shots of groups of people striding across pretty landscapes would we have missed out on? I shudder to think.

Interviewlapalooza

pssst. 7 Days Until Oscar Nominations!

Oscar ballots are due tomorrow, and for whatever problems AMPAS had with its non beta-tested new online voting system, only one measly 24 hour extension came their way. So we have to start drawing barely visiblie lines in the blog sand and collect ourselves to look back now that we're in the before & after week... "This is where we've been!". Just in case you've missed any of this film year's interviews *thus far* here they are collected for you. (I'll update this index when more 2012 related interviews come our way, via DVD releases, continuing Oscar campaigns and whatnot.) 

Actors

Alan Cumming in Any Day Now
Ann Dowd in Compliance
Eddie Redmayne in Les Misérables
Kerry Washington in Django Unchained
Logan Lerman in The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy
Nicole Kidman on the 10th anniversary of her Oscar win in The Hours
William H Macy in The Sessions 

Behind the Screens 

Costume Designer Julie Weiss on Hitchcock
Documentarian Jeffrey Schwartz for Vito 
Documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams) on Head Games and Oscar's documentary branch
Writer/Director Ben Lewin for The Sessions 
Writer/Director Michel Franco for After Lucia
Writer/Director Jonathan Lisecki for Gayby
Writer/Director Travis Mathews for I Want Your Love

Impossibly Brief Chats

Kristen Stewart in On the Road
Jack Black in Bernie 

Last Season's Interviews: 
Charlize Theron, Jessica Chastain, David Cronenberg etc...

Meanwhile I'm getting dreamy about 2013. It hasn't quite begun for us here at TFE Headquarters. Oscar Nomination Morning (January 10th) is when Santa brings us our presents (and lumps of coal) and Oscar Night is our New Year's Eve. Then the new year (read: the film year) begins. 

Up next: the 12th annual FiLM BiTCH AWARDS and the actual OSCAR NOMINATIONS

Beau's 2012 Bests

Nathaniel's top ten hits this weekend but he's invited TFE correspondents to share their own, so here are my personal loves of the year. [Disclaimer: I have yet to see Holy Motors, Amour, Rust and Bone, and On the Road.]

honorable mentions...  

13) Arbitrage -Nicholas Jarecki's feature debut is a whopper, a palate cleanser for the John Grisham crowd and a showcase for Richard Gere's most effortless work in this thirty-five year career. Coupled with Zemeckis' Flight, you'd be hard pressed to find two more similar and dissimilar anti heroes who crowded the multiplexes this year. Charisma carries the Devil on its cape. You've never wanted the bad guy to win more.

12) Flight -The messiest of messes, a meditation on faith, humanity and temptation that true to form, sways and stumbles and remains standing, a loud, brash bombardment of the amoral and their blinding pain. Washington is Everyman to Goodman's Satan. And who the fuck is James Badge Dale? He pulls a Beatrice Straight and basically walks away with the film.

11) Ted -There is something deeply unlikeable about Seth McFarlane, an addictive toxicity that repulses you and engages you simultaneously. With 'Ted', his watermark (read: pissmark) on network television transfers over to the big screen with a spring in its step and a grenade in its pocket. Defaming the stunted lifestyle of men all the while celebrating its appeal, Ted made me laugh harder and feel worse about myself than anything else I saw this year. It establishes Macfarlane as the newest, crudest uncle of American comedy - you hate him when he's sober, but goddamn, there's nobody else you'd rather get hammered with.

 
top ten from 'Cloud' to 'Cabin' is after the jump...

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The Producers Guild Nominees. Which Film Would Be The Hardest To Get Made?

I thought it might be interesting to look at tonight's Producers Guild nominations NOT as Oscar predictions -- they're always that since the industry end game is the Oscars -- but as what they're ostensibly intended to be: awards honoring producers who shepherded certain movies to the screen. The nominees...

Grant Henslov and Ben Affleck working on "Argo"

The Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures

• Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Grant Heslov for ARGO
• Michael Gottwald, Dan Janvey, Josh Penn for BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
• Reginald Hudlin, Pilar Savone, Stacey Sher for DJANGO UNCHAINED
• Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, Cameron Mackintosh for LES MISERABLES
• Ang Lee, Gil Netter, David Womark for LIFE OF PI
• Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg for LINCOLN
• Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Jeremy Dawson, Steven Rales for MOONRISE KINGDOM
• Bruce Cohen, Donna Gigliotti, Jonathan Gordon for SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
• Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson for SKYFALL
• Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Megan Ellison for ZERO DARK THIRTY

Producing is a very mysterious job from the outside looking in. Every film's producers have different jobs ahead of them based on a) what kind of project it is, b) how much fighting they'll have to do to get it made creatively and financially and c) whether they'll be separate from or very tied to the artistic decisions -- notice that only 50% of the nominated teams include the director of the film in question so some of these producers have far more influence on the final product than some of the others.

Barbara Broccoli with her Skyfall talent

No film has an easy road to movie theaters but if you remove your feelings about which of these ten films is "the best" from an artistic and/or entertainment standpoint and start thinking about what the particular challenges might have been, it feels like a different contest altogether, right? more...

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