The Lady of the Link

Off Oscar. Should You Need a Break
Boy Culture attends Madonna's royal premiere here in NYC for W.E.  
David Bordwell "a guide to the perplexed" for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 
Stale Popcorn We need to talk about "Katniss". Good question: What is it with archery these days? 
THR Two Beauty and the Beast related projects coming. Because in Hollywood there always must be double dipping on the limited idea pool. 

Okay. Back to Oscar. Stop Slacking!
Tom and Lorenzo on Jennifer Lawrence's unfortunate morning as the nominee announcer.
Ultra Culture on the best typography among the Best Pic Nominees. Love this.
Towleroad "Hot Movie Moment" from one of my favorite Best Pictures Wings (1927) the first one!
Indiewire The Oscars are moving to electronic voting in 2013. Cue: thousands of articles about whether or not This. Changes. Things. Oscarologists are so excitable.

In Contention looks at the Art Direction category
Examiner plays an "Oscar Replacement" game for the nominations 
Carpetbagger on Glenn Close and her makeup and wig team for Albert Nobbs 
MNPP A rarity: JA sounding off on the Oscars. Yay. He's one of the only blogging voices we love that have virtually no interest in them. (No interest in the Oscars? I know. I know. Difficult to comprehend.)   

Finally... a sad goodbye to British actor Nicol Williamson (1936-2012), my very first "Merlin" (though I've lost track of how many actors I've seen as the sorcerer since).

Mirren and Williamson owning Excalibur (1981)

Daily MUBI has the roundups of obits for the Excalibur (1981) actor. My most vivid memories of that film, aside from the Lancelot nudity (gasp) was the Merlin/Morgana Le Fay rapport. I was way too young to know that Helen Mirren and Williamson had... history. 

Box Office: Kate Beckinsale Still Unstaked, Oscar Hopeful Money

There's just no killing Kate Beckinsale's career. No matter how many terrible movies she throws at you, her undead heart will go on. I think she avoids Heigl levels of hatred because she doesn't make as many movies. That's my theory. But nevertheless the fourth installment of her werewolf vs. vampire franchise Underworld Awakening took the top spot at the box office, besting the George Lucas' produced war drama Red Tails and the third week of the hit action film Contraband, and the wide release of the presumed to be failing Oscar hopeful Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Steven Soderbergh's Haywire (reviewed) had a rough first weekend coming in fifth but there were a lot of other action films fighting it for dollars. Plus wouldn't people who go "ooh!" when they hear 'Steven Soderbergh' have been seeing the Oscar contenders anyway?

What did you see this weekend?

Oscar Money Talking Points...
The Artist finally got a major expansion though it's per screen average is no longer something to celebrate. Nevertheless this is good news. Within the next couple of weeks it's likely to pass The Hurt Locker's gross so if it wins Best Picture it won't be the lowest grossing BP ever. The film has earned $33 million worldwide to date. That's pretty impressive for a black and white silent. It just passed one of its Weinstein stablemates My Week With Marilyn's in terms of domestic gross. Although it's roughly 47 times better than that film I think it only goes to show how mishandled Marilyn was ... such a small release for such a pre-branded "wide" topic! 

The Descendants just crossed the $50 million mark and will soon leapfrog Hugo and Midnight in Paris for the "Top Grosser That Isn't Named The Help" title among the predicted BP nominees. Unless Moneyball or Dragon Tattoo get nominated in which case this milestone is no biggie.

Best Picture Hopeful Grosses as of 01/22/2012

P.S. I was at a birthday party last night attended by a very international crowd (the birthday girl, a good friend of mine, is German). The movie everyone was talking about was... A Separation. I was surprised how many people had seen it and everyone seemed to love it... though one woman told me she just thought it was "good" until about 20 minutes after it ended when it hit her in full force. It just crossed the 1/2 a million mark at the box office but it's still barely at any theaters. One wonders how well it can expand with word of mouth so strong and potential Oscar glory coming? 

Naturally all of these movies are hoping for a boost next weekend to capitalize on their presumed Oscar nominations. How many of them will keep expanding and how many will wither from people losing interest?

Naked Gold Man: Final Oscar Predictions !

I've never been good at math so predicting this year's Oscar race feels especially challenging. You can tell me that a picture requires 5% of #1 votes or that it's 10% or 406 votes or that you need #2 or #3 placements on 69.3% of ballots with odd #1 choices that weren't already tossed aside... None of it will really sink in. For the first time in well over a decade, I had a flashback to my high school algebra class and how my friends (who were in calculus) kept teasing me about my "polynomials?" confusion.  I hate math!*

But in the end what does it matter? Buzz, also an abstraction, is more fun to play with and closer to the truth for non-mathematicians. Best Picture nominations have long required #1 votes, maybe not in the same configurations but they've always required them. And as Joe recently pointed out on the podcast, we're tricked into thinking too deeply about this each and every year. Who thought Frost/Nixon was the best movie of 2008? Who would ever have voted for Chocolat as the best film of 2000? And yet it happens year in and year out. Focusing too much on #1 votes can cloud this certainty: Any film still being discussed as a possibility this late in the game has a fanbase. The question is just 'is that base big / loyal enough within the Academy to secure it a best picture nomination?'

Mo'Nique reading the Best Picture nominees last year!

What Happens With The Screens Behind the Presenters?
For the first time in modern history we'll have no idea until the names are read whether there will be five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten nominees. In past years when they announced the nominees you'd see the blank boxes where the nominees would be revealed while they read out the names. You knew, for instance, if there would be 3 or 5 animated nominees by how many boxes were there even if you hadn't been paying attention to the number of eligible pictures released.

My current hourly obsession is wondering whether we'll be tipped off to how many pictures there are seconds before we hear the titles...

When we knew there would be ten they simply appeared as they were read but there weren't actually boxes behind the announcers to be filled in as there were in years with five. You follow? So this year if there are, say, 6 nominees will we first see the empty boxes and KNOW there will be six before the names are read? 

PICTURE
If we only had five nominees, this race would be easy to call. Our nominees would be: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris. And in that order of likelihood. (My preference order, just as reminder from my year in review, would be The Artist, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Hugo and The Descendants.) I believe the nomination tally hierarchy is going to be Hugo, The Artist, and The Help way out in front of other films. Moneyball would, I think, be the spoiler in a traditional shortlist year. No matter how you feel about those films on an individual basis, as a group that's a pretty beautiful spread of the film year: message movies, family dramas, cinematic novelties, smart comedies and releases stretching from summer to Christmas, from critical triumphs to sleeper hits. It's representative and we like the Oscars that way.

More after the jump...

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PGA Noms: "Ides" Resurfaces, "Tree" & "Drive" Ignored

20 Days til Oscar nominations!

Every time the Producers Guild of America announces their awards, I have a split second of alternate universe confusion wherein I imagine the golfers on the PGA Tour breaking to vote on their ten favorite movies of the year. I'm pretty sure they'd have found room for DRIVE.

wocka wocka wocka

(I'm sorry! I couldn't resist.)

The other notable exclusion from the PGA's list is Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE but considering that the two most notable exclusions are auteur movies which didn't exactly light the box office on fire it makes sense that the PGA would embrace bigger and more producer-driven hits in their place. But I don't think this is bad news for The Tree of Life in the best picture race since it's obviously going to get a healthy portion of #1 votes. Enough though? Who knows.

Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures

• THE ARTIST Thomas Langmann
• BRIDESMAIDS Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, Clayton Townsend
• THE DESCENDANTS Jim Burke, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
• THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO Ceán Chaffin, Scott Rudin
• THE HELP Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus, Brunson Green
• HUGO Graham King, Martin Scorsese
• THE IDES OF MARCH George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Brian Oliver
• MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum
• MONEYBALL Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz, Brad Pitt
• WAR HORSE Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg

The inclusion of Dragon Tattoo is the most interesting because it is neither a big hit nor a critical darling nor a sound Oscar contender (though I suppose the last point is debatable). Was it Scott Rudin directed sympathy for Embargo-Gate? Was it just lazy just-saw-that voting? Did they genuinely love it?

The inclusion of The Ides of March might be the most telling since it also scored with the Golden Globes rather unexpectedly. When I first saw it I thought "my god, everyone is underestimating its Oscar chances" but then everyone quickly shoved it to the side as an also ran and I followed suit. Perhaps my initial instinct was closer to the truth than I knew? Do you think there's Oscar life left in THE IDES OF MARCH?

animation and tv after the jump

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Blurb Whore Overachiever of the Year

Top Ten List O' the Day: Peter Travers.
I don't know how many of you watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC but during Herman Cain's brief presidential campaign she began to treat it, hilariously, as a piece of performance art i.e. This just can't be real! I feel much the same way about Rolling Stone's Blurb Whore Legend Peter Travers. I don't mean to fixate on him as much as I do -- every year I marvel for the same reasons --  but I grew up reading and loving his reviews and only later, as I began to read more film criticism did he come to embody the Film Critic as Film Publicist problem. The man can definitely turn a phrase which is why if he wasn't making the presumably big bucks he makes at Rolling Stone, he'd surely be a highly paid ad man.

But this top ten article made me laugh so much. It's performance art. It has to be. He begins with Drive and literally the first words are...

Screw Oscar..."

After which comes a top ten list that includes not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, not eight but  literally all the contenders you'll see on anybody's Oscar prediction top ten Best Picture charts barring the unscreened 'Extremely Loud'. Which is to say that The Artist, The Descendants, Moneyball, Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and The Tree of Life... are all accounted for. To make sure he's covered all the Oscar bases there's a three way tie at #10 between War Horse, The Help and Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2. Seriously. 

I bow down to one of the greatest pieces of year-end list-making performance art that film criticism has ever seen. Peter Travers, you are genius.