Annie Award Nominations - A Real Race For Once

Michael C here to see if the Annie Award nominations shed any light on this year’s rare neck and neck Oscar race for Best Animated film.

Frankenweenie captured critics and Annie noms. But not audiences. Will Oscar take to the (un)dead dog?

Animated Feature

• "Brave" – Pixar Animation Studios
• "Frankenweenie" – Walt Disney Studio
• "Hotel Transylvania" – Sony Pictures Animation
• "ParaNorman" – Focus Features
• "Rise of the Guardians" – DreamWorks Animation
• "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" – Aardman Animations
• "The Rabbi’s Cat "– GKIDS
• "Wreck-It Ralph" – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Without a slam-dunk frontrunner draining the suspense out of the category for once it's worth sifting through the tea leaves looking for omens. Unfortunately the Annie's nominated everything so it doesn't clarify much. At least they had the good taste to leave out The Lorax, Madagascar 3 and Ice Age 25, which I believe takes place in the early 1970’s.

Lots more after the jump including predictions and celebrity voice acting.

Click to read more ...

From Russia With Link

i09 the best of the new Disney/Star Wars mashup art
Vulture "Matthew McConaughey's awards campaign for Magic Mike begins now"...it's about f***in' time!
NPR on an Asian remake of Dangerous Liaisons 
MovieLine Daniel Day-Lewis doing an Eastwood in London 
/Film Tom Hanks as Walt Disney in Saving Mr Banks

Stale Popcorn Glenn, our favorite fellow fan of Burlesque, has words about the proposed Diane Warren jukebox musical. So many Oscar nominated power ballads from that one!
In Contention on the new Les Miz trailer. Why haven't I written it up, you ask? I can only write about Les Miz so often people and the movie isn't even out yet. Plus I already did a Yes No Maybe So once and my policy is not to repeat that with a single movie... I mean, some movies release five trailers, people!

Natasha VC "Ja!" 
Pajiba wonders why all the best Bond girls have the worst names. (If by worst they mean best... because those campy names are essential! They're so missed in Skyfall!)
The Mary Sue Willow and Oz reunited!!!... but on How I Met Your Mother. zzzz...
PopWatch Jennifer Lawrence on complaints that she's too well-fed for The Hunger Games

In Hollywood I'm obese.  I’m Val Kilmer in that one picture on the beach."

Ha! This make me love her so much more. 

TODAY'S MUST WATCH

I thought about writing a review of the revival of Annie on Broadway but Adam Feldman's Time Out Review is so incredibly spookily spot on on ever single point I might have made (seriously go and read it)  that it's not worth writing my own -- hate it when that happens! So Annie is in my brain currently and "Tomorrow" is the only song that's battling "I Dreamed a Dream" for earworm revival of 2012. I nabbed the video above from my friend Tom's Broadway Blog. He's always worth a read and he finds the most incredible videos. This one is the musical comedienne Christina Bianco doing various über famous divas doing Annie. They may as well cast Bianco right now in an American remake of Little Voice (1998) she's so good at impersonating other vocalists!

Which Annie Nominee Has Your Vote For Animated Feature?

The New York Film Critics Circle recently opted out of honoring a best animated feature (and unless I'm mistaken it was an afterthought win for Rango at the NBR since it wasn't in the first wave of articles). Will awards bodies lose their keys to this category since realizing Cars 2 was a lemon? If you stop to think about it for more than two seconds it's decidedly ungenerous at best and horribly offensive at worst. It sheds an unflattering light on the initiable embrace of the animated ghetto categories, suggesting they were only created to honor Pixar to begin with. Which is... rather shameful if you ask me. If the only reason you created a category was to honor Pixar, you shouldn't have created a category. Nobody gives out prizes for "Best Paramount Pictures Release of the Year", you know? Nobody gives out prizes for "Best Weinstein Co. Release of The Year" ["The Academy does!" cried the anonymous heckler. *rimshot*]

What? Rango wasn't good enough for a badge of honor?

So, even if this wasn't the single greatest year for animated film, if you're going to honor the medium, honor the medium. If you change your rules every year who will respect you? (That's a general warning to wishy washy committees, The Golden Satellites, and to the Oscar board of directors themselves who are weirdly starting to act like all their imitators these past few years by second guessing themselves constantly).

But, since the Annie Awards have been honoring animated work for 38 years -- long before Oscar or the critics groups ever thought to honor it --  they'll continute to do just that. They've selected ten "Best Picture" nominees for their 39th annual awards. And even if they felt the need to include Cars 2 to get there, at least they didn't cancel their ceremony when they realized it wasn't revving anyone's engines. I promise to brake break with the car puns no. So sorry!

Annie Awards Best Animated Feature Nominees

• A Cat in Paris - Folimage
• The Adventures of Tintin - Amblin Entertainment, Wingnut Films and Kennedy/Marshall
• Arrugas (Wrinkles) - Perro Verde Films, SL
• Arthur Christmas - Sony Pictures Animation, Aardman Animation
• Cars 2 - Pixar
• Chico & Rita - Chico & Rita Distribution Limited
• Kung Fu Panda 2 - Dreamworks Animation
• Puss in Boost - Dreamworks Animation
• Rango - Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies present a Blind Wink/GK Films Production
• Rio - Blue Sky Studios

And even if he isn't nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor, Gary Oldman could still win an Annie Award. He's up for best voice acting as "Lord Shen" from Kung Fu Panda 2.

Find this... 'panda'... and bring him to me.
FIND this 'Panda'. And bring him to me.
FIND THIS PANDA AND BRING HIM TO ME!!!"

A complete list of their nominations is after the jump if you'd like to dig deeper. (I was sad that this year they didn't include the info as to which animated characters the individual animators are being honored for designing or animating. If I recall correctly they used to specify which characters, just as in the voice acting honors.)

Click to read more ...

Ryan Murphy's "Normal Heart"

Looks like it'll be television giant Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck, Glee) in the directing chair for the first film version of Larry Kramer's AIDS drama The Normal Heart. That righteously angry 80s play, which has long flummoxed would be adapters (most famously Barbra Streisand), was all the rage on Broadway this past season during its revival (I was less impressed than most but boy did the Tonys love it).

According to Playbill Murphy is planning on going with Mark Ruffalo in the lead role of Ned Weeks and wants his Eat Pray Love diva Julia Roberts in the awards-magnet supporting part of "Doctor Death". That part won Ellen Barkin the Tony and throat pains (we're guessing. It's very shouty!) but apparently not enough renewed career heat to get her an offer for the film version. Between this role and "Barbara" the eldest daughter in August: Osage County Julia seems to cornered the market on famously angry/exhausted stage-to-screen female roles. 

But before we scream "Oscars all around in February 2013!", it's wise to remember (always) that that stage-to-screen teleportation magic is an eternally difficult trick to master. Murphy is enjoying great success with Glee but both of his films thus far, Eat Pray Love (2010) or Running With Scissors (2006), have had mixed results critically and at the box office. One of the dangers of success is that artists get spread very thin and that could obviously be a problem here with Glee still going strong despite its own occasional  "spread to thin" feel.

on the set of Eat Pray Love

But we wish him good luck. He was once the president of a Meryl Streep fan club ferchrissakes. And though I couldn't find the copy that interview that Playbill is quoting he supposedly recently expressed regret that he had to turn down writing the Annie remake meant for Willow Smith, saying: 

So now she's got Emma Thompson who is 50 million times better than me. LOVE HER.

So, see? Murphy really loves actresses and musicals. The Film Experience officially has no choice but to root for him. 

Daddy Dearest / Daddy Warbucks

Willow Smith: Daughter of WILL SMITH in case you forgot!You guys... 

I was going to talk about this last week but decided against it under the umbrella "if you don't have anything nice to say..." But now Willow Smith had to go and remind me by wearing her dad when she hit the red carpet for the BET Awards. Just in case you forgot why you should care about her!

It wasn't enough for Will Smith to foist his son upon the world by way of co-starring roles when he was 9 (Pursuit of Happyness) and a leading gig (The Karate Kid) by the time he was 11. Now, he wants his daughter to be equally famous: cue record deals and movie contracts; she's 10. 

You've heard by now -- though some of you may have blocked it out --  that Smith is hiring Emma Thompson to adapt the musical "Annie" for his daughter to whip her hair back and forth in in the starring role.

♫ The fame'll come out tomorrow
Bet Will's billion dollars,
that tomorrow
there'll be fame. ♪

How long before we start hearing disturbing things about this family? His kids just seem awfully young to be pushed so aggressively towards global fame. There are many famous Hollywood dynasties of course -- nothing wrong with following in your parents footsteps -- but how often does the second generation get this big a push this early? 

Okay, maybe I did just spend way too much time watching Ryan O'Neal talk up Tatum O'Crazy the other day. But believe me when I say that if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie suddenly decided that they needed to produce movies to star each of their children before they hit puberty, I'd worry about that family, too.

Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan in "Annie" (1982)Or maybe I'm just annoyed that one of the great actresses of the past century -- that'd be Emma -- has been relegated to behind the scenes scripting duties for the vanity projects of another star's offspring. Vulture suggested last week that Emma would make an awesome Miss Hannigan (played by Carol Burnett in the last movie version and Kathy Bates in a telefilm) and we concede that if that happened, we'd totally be interested. I hope Will Smith is going to pay Emma very very well but the thing is ...I'm starting to think that we should get compensation pay from someone for every year that we don't have Emma Thompson on our movie screens (sans Nanny McPhee makeup, I mean). 

Hopefully Emma's "Oh" character in next summer's Men in Black III is a fun one.