Hail "César"s. France's Favorite Pictures

If by some stroke of bad luck or homegrown Hollywood love for The Descendants or Hugo,  The Artist is derailed at the Oscars on February 26th, it could still take home double handfuls of trophies at the Césars. While I'm sure all countries hate their own awards being called "_____'s Oscars", it's easy shorthand. Oscar was first, after all, thus laying the groundwork for all of this "Best Movie This, Best Movie That" until the end of time. 

France's Best Picture lineup has homegrown hits, successful exports and their Oscar submission

The Artist is up for 10 awards at the Césars... same number as the Oscars! The Cesars allow more than 5 nominees a category so it seems a bit like everyone is nominated. Other favorites from the French industry are two female-helmed films: Valerie Donzelli's gutsy vivid memory piece War is Declared (opening today in the States. Highly recommended!) and another actress turned director Mäiwenn's Polisse. (I always feel the need to remind people that Mäiwenn was the blue opera diva in The Fifth Element.) 

Film Experience favorite Carmen Maura is also up for a statue for her work in Women on the Sixth Floor.

Finally, in this quick take, we always get a kick out of the "foreign film" categories across the oceans when things are suddenly flipped and Hollywood itself is the foreign entity. Incredibly, The King's Speech is still with us (ARGH!) and it's up against other previous / current Oscar nominees like Black Swan, Incendies, and A Separation as well as films that were far too auteurist or contemporary for Oscar like Melancholia and Drive. Rounding out their foreign category is The Dardenne Brothers The Kid With the Bicycle. Great lineup, eh?

Full list of nominations after the jump and sexy pictures of a few "newcomer" nominations, since we love the French and we love eye candy. Who would you love to run into if you had a ticket to the Césars?

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Oscar Loves Two Women. In The Same Film. Often.

Amir here. Since the Oscar nominations were announced on tuesday we’ve all heard tons of new stats about this year's slate. All the ‘oldest’ and ‘youngest’ and ‘most’s aside, the one thing that caught my eye was the double nomination for Best Supporting Actress for The Help’s ladies Jessica Chastain & Octavia Spencer. This is now the fourth consecutive year that the category has included two nominees from the same film. For the trivia lovers among you, this equals the previous longest streak of double supporting actress nominations from 1947 through 1950: Gentleman’s Agreement, I Remember Mama, Come to the Stable, Pinky and All About Eve... (though the earlier run is more impressive since 1949 had two sets of double nominees.)

Trivia: The two longest double supporting runs (though 47-50 actually had a year with two double noms."Pinky" is not pictured by accident. Apologies). In both one actress appeared multiple times (Amy Adams and Celeste Holm) and one of those times she played a nun!!!

Last year’s winner, The Fighter’s Melissa Leo, was accompanied by her co-star Amy Adams, who had been nominated along with Viola Davis for Doubt two years earlier. When Adams was taking time off inbetween, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick filled in for her for their performances in Up in the Air. Had it not been for 2007's spread of wealth, the record could have been extended another two years since Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza were both nominated for Babel the year before.

If you look back through the history of the shiny gold man you'll find that in the 76 years since the Supporting categories were introduced 28 films have managed two supporting actress nominations. That’s an astonishing number but here’s what's more interesting. (Continued... with Pie Charts!)

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The Art Direction I Live In

I always try to finish the "Oscar Categories" of my own Film Bitch Awards before the Oscar nominations. I was racing to the deadline, panting heavily, sweating profusely and then I collapsed. I am now crawling towards the finish line. If anything can revive me it's eye candy! So here are my nominees for Art Direction and Cinematography. I would post Costumes too but I'm still arguing with myself over 8 films. (So many worthy efforts!) 

But while I have your eyeballs, I want to talk about one film in particular. Film is a visual medium so you'd think it would be a given that filmmakers would convey their themes and moods and characters visually. But many of them don't, relying on dialogue as exposition or voiceover profundities or leaning heavily on the gifts of their actors to get themes and nuances across. In other words, we have too few Pedro Almodóvars behind the camera.

In the two stills above from The Skin I Live In (which went without any Oscar nominations and was not submitted by Spain for Best Foreign Film) you can see how visually rich and how carefully planned every beat in an Almodóvar film is [MORE AFTER THE JUMP]

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Video: "The Artist" Team. Live Nomination Reactions!

Given the frequent flyer miles they're collecting en masse, it's impossible to know where The Artist's team is at any time. But the French site "About My Star" was in the room with them when the nominations were announced and they filmed this live video. As you can see, producer Thomas Langmann, writer/director Michel Hazanavicius and his stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo were wide awake; no one in this crowd can use the always suspect "I was sleeping when I heard!" line.

Bejo, Hazanavicius, Dujardin and Langmann watching the nominations

Of course if they were in France during the announcement, it would have been 2:30 PM and that would be a strange time to be sleeping. 2:30 PM is a much more reasonable hour to be wide awake with champagne bottles uncorked! VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

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Pretty Panem Princesses

JA from MNPP here. Have you guys seen the bizarre (and wonderful, genius even, if you ask me) merchandizing choices that the team behind The Hunger Games movies have been making? First I assume we all know the basic story, but if not here's the quick take - in a future dystopia, The Hunger Games are a televised battle fought every year by the children of this society's twelve districts. Fought to the death, that is. The survivor of the battle wins food (yes, food) for the starving people of their district. Such a light and airy premise! Happy, happy stuff.

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Anyway this is a big Hollywood movie they're making so they have to make money somehow, and so naturally they have decided that the best way to sell this movie's premise is with nail polish.

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Naturally! Okay a little more context is needed. The first district is The Capitol, and it's a city and it's filled with rich vain types. There are good people and there are bad people there, it's not cut and dry, but there's  a definite focus on the ways in which we distract ourselves with frivolity in the face of the world's horrors. If you've seen the trailer then you've most definitely seen Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket, who typifies the people therein. That's her in the ad above, and now there's an entire website devoted to "Capitol Couture" and it looks like any old fashion website. Except, you know, with an undercurrent of violent, horrible death.

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Since the books are very critical of this thoughtless extravagance by the super-rich and the literally life-or-death inequalities deeply embedded within these societies, I've seen a lot of people online who have gotten upset that the movie is using these same kinds of frivolous extravagances as its marketing tools. But I dunno... it seems kind of brilliantly ballsy to me. I haven't seen the nail polish in person but if I'd been the one designing it I'd have really wanted it to say somewhere on the label that this bottle was bottled by only the most downtrodden of serfs, working the most horrible hours you can imagine. And when you're done getting dolled up, you're going to look like a crazy purple clown lady, won't that be just terrific?

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 Can you imagine? But even without getting that explicit, I really do feel as if the nudge is there. Come for the pretty fingernails, and stay for the state-sanctioned murder of innocents! Or am I projecting? What's y'all's take on this?