Is Skyfall's Oscar Buzz Real or Just Really Convincing Hype?

Though each new James Bond film lands with a media frenzy of sorts, Skyfall's box-office crushing tour of the Globe has even come with Oscar buzz. As an Oscar pundit, at first I felt I needed to do my killjoy duty and remind Bond-fans that the Academy has never been eager to have a martini with Bond, no matter how he orders it. But lately I've begun to wonder if, should the hype not subside much, the world's favorite super spy might finally win a nomination or two again. Two nominations would be a major win for Team Skyfall though the current hype would have you perceive that as a disappointing haul since it suggests that multiple nods and even a Best Picture citation are just around the corner. 

It's this overreaching by fans and the more excitable pundits that keeps forcing me back into Killjoy Corner. But let me repeat: a Best Picture nomination is not happening; Ten spots is not Twenty. And Bond Films aren't even close to the top of Oscar's Favorite Franchises heap anyway. Even with the fast Oscar-dream fade of The Dark Knight Rises and the artistically suspect decision to make The Hobbit into three films, history suggests that AMPAS is more likely to join Bruce Wayne or Gollum in the shadows again than James Bond. 

I should explain with facts (after the jump) before they go out of style again...

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Oscar Horrors: A Shark in the Edit Suite

Oscar Horrors looks at nominated contributions to this non-Oscar bait genre. Here's Craig on Jaws.

HERE LIES... a beautifully cut shark by the name of Bruce. Oscar-winning editor Verna Fields did the celluloid slicing and dicing...

Spielberg made it a star of fearful proportions. John Williams gave it an iconic theme tune. Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw obsessively stalked it. And Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown looked on, clutching the purse strings, as they all went about their blockbusting business. But the person who gave Amity Island’s Great White unwanted visitor fierce presence and a sinister personality most could arguably be the editor Verna Fields. Alongside Spielberg and Co. she was instrumental in terrorizing the world with Jaws, summer 1975’s maiden blockbuster movie. She manoeuvred the shark’s arrival and departure – in tandem, of course, with Williams’ score – helping to create cinema’s scariest PG-rated, non-human villain.

Fields worked wonders with Jaws’ spatial particulars. The film is a feast of horizontal expanse and vertical depth cut with sharp attention to the terrors evoked by the mysteries of distance. When poor Chrissie (Susan Backlinie) – in the instantly memorable and terrifying first, post-titles, scene – feels the pull of (mechanical) death on her water-treading legs, we vicariously retract ours. The endlessness of the ocean is reason enough to inspire terror, but Fields mercilessly positions us alongside, then below, Chrissie to establish instant fear: she’s a gliding silhouette on the surface, Bruce’s first victim; a meal. And we’re right there with her.

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NYFF: "Frances Ha" Dazzling Brooklyn Snapshot

Michael C. here to report on the first home run I've seen at the New York Film Festival. Frances Ha is the type movie experience I’m hoping for every time I plunk down my ticket money. It knows exactly what it wants to do and how it wants to do it and as a result it grabs you by the sleeve and pulls you right in. It is Noah Baumbach’s finest film to date and the big breakout due for Greta Gerwig for some time now. 

Frances (Gerwig) is a dancer who shares a Brooklyn apartment with her bestest buddy Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Pushing thirty and stalled professionally and personally, she is right at the age when spending her nights flitting around the city getting wasted with her girlfriend stops being cute and starts being a cause for concern. When events transpire to threaten Frances' holding pattern the wheels quickly come off her cushy existence.

With this film Baumbach has not expanded his style so much as smashed it into a thousand pieces and arranged them into a collage. [More...]

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Yes, No, Maybe So: "Django Unchained"

If Quentin Tarantino can make us wait an average of 2 years and ten months between each movie (I'm counting Kill Bill as one and assuming Django Unchained will arrive on schedule. But will it?) than you can all forgive me for not jumping on every piece of Tarantino news-- even the excitement of a trailer -- the minute it arrives. 

What's your name?"

His name is Django. The D is silent. Let's stay silent no more about the trailer ... or the teaser the teasler... the traiser? Aren't teasers support to be 1 minute long? We'll break this traiser into three pieces as we do.

YES

• Things that are off the chain: the shot of the blood sprayed cotton, the self-aware zoom-in on Leonardo DiCaprio casts gleefully against type, Django throwing off his coat, the shot reverse shot of Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington in the water (dream sequence?). More after the jump...

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Yet More Hardware For... The Help, The Descendants, The Artist

ACE and IMAGE statues. Why are trophies always nude men? Is Emmy the only girl among trophies?It's the last exhausting stretch of awards season and the mantles of everyone involved with The Help, The Descendants, and The Artist are about to collapse even before they take home their respective Oscars.

The ACE Awards which is short for American Cinema Editors has four film prizes each year for features and the winners this year were

Drama: The Descendants
Comedy: The Artist
Documentary: Freedom Riders*
Animation: Rango

* I mistakenly read this as Freedom Writers when I saw the release and momentarily panicked that the Hilary Swank teaching drama had resurfaced in non-fiction form. The Making Of... Now With More Swank.

The Drama winner at the Eddies generally goes on to win Best Picture, but this year may prove a semi rare exception since The Artist is expected to take home the Oscar. In the hoopla over The Artist being a silent film people keep forgetting that it's also a comedy and if it wins, we have our first comedy winner since Chicago (2002). They're all too rare on the big night.

It's also worth noting that Patton Oswalt hosted the ACE Eddie Awards, his third awards hosting gig of the season. This Just In (Inside My Head): Patton Oswalt To Host The 13th Annual Film Bitch Awards in January 2013! (Well, he does says "yes" a lot. Maybe I should ask?)

USC Scripter goes to an adapted screenplay and the book it rode in on each year and The Descendants won for what we assume was arduous carpel tunnel syndrome-laden man hours of copying and pasting the book's prose into onscreen voiceover. Yeesh. (I'm tired. I don't like The Descendants. Forgive me. Soon we'll be able to move on.) I'd feel worse for Moneyball, a far more graceful screenplay, if Aaron Sorkin hadn't just had a big year with The Social Network.

NAACP Image Awards were almost certain to fall in The Help's win column given its blockbuster status. But it was interesting to see it happen so soon after watching Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress winners Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer have it out with Tavis Smiley about trophies going to black women playing maids in 2011. [Rant: When this Oscar season is over I think we need to have a long discussion in this country about class rather than race for a change. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a maid. It's honest legal work and why should someone feel ashamed about having a job and doing it? Maybe it's because I used to work in the hotel industry and knew a lot of people who struggled with people looking down on them because of the job they performed. These conversations about The Help feel very tone deaf to one particular fact: there are actual maids in the world and there always will be. These conversations always seem to be saying 'oh god. could there be anything more demeaning than being a maid?' and I'm just not sure how cleaning people's houses or hotel rooms is horrible work you should feel ashamed of but you know, it's fine if you're a white collar person destroying entire swaths of people's livelihoods with shady business practices or pension-fund robbing or lobbying the government for horribly unfair tax codes. I really wish we could over the deeply embedded notion that you're somehow a better person if you have money. The actual quality of a person's character has zero to do with the amount of dollars on their paycheck. The only thing a lot of dollars on the paycheck does, in terms of character, is make it more visible. You can do a lot of evil or a lot of good in the world when you have money but the money itself isn't the determining factor on which you'll choose. /Rant]

Ahem. Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. Speaking of...

Damn, Viola! She's proud of hers, apparently.

So...  The Help took Best Picture. Off the Oscar track, Pariah won best independent movie and Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey won best foreign film. Laz Alonso and Mike Epps took home the actor prizes for the wedding drama Jumping the Broom which also won Best Director. LL Cool J and Regina King won the top TV acting honors for their procedurals, one of those NCIS's and Southland respectively.