Catching Up: Oscar Buzz & Blunders, Festival Debuts & Misses

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

Fall Film Season is upon us. And with it the 0 to 60 Oscar buzz. Even if you're blessed enough to have the means to jetset from Telluride to Venice to Toronto to New York, chances are you can't keep up with it all. I know I haven't been able to while juggling other demands. Before I fly up to Toronto on Wednesday for the last heady days of TIFF, I should do my best to catch up on the buzz and update those dusty Oscar charts. They're not yet a month old but.... 0 to 60, you know. The movies are upon us!

BUT FIRST LET ME VENT...
So, they announced the winners of the honorary Oscars this week and as per usual, they've demonstrated their complete lack of respect for Actresses. There are so many fine actresses who never won Oscars who are still alive and yet year after year they ignore all of them to honor various men. I don't mean to take anything away from this year's talented recipients who all deserve a congratulatory round of applause (mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, stuntman Hal Needham, documentarian D. A. Pennebaker, arts advocate George Stevens, Jr.) it's just that the pattern is obvious and concerning.

Worse yet, when AMPAS does honor a woman, it's someone without a rich acting background (Hi, Oprah Winfrey). By the time this year's Oscars have wrapped, for a twenty year stretch from 1993 through 2012, thirty-eight people will have been given honorary Oscars or Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Awards and there are only three women among them (Deborah Kerr, Lauren Bacall, Oprah Winfrey). Oscar has a very real problem with women so if living screen giants like Maureen O'Hara, Doris Day, Catherine Deneuve, Mia Farrow, Eleanor Parker, Angela Lansbury, Gena Rowlands and other classic actresses ever want an Honorary prize, they might want to look into sex change operations or at least a tuxedo rental. Exasperating!

Now on to movies people have talking about...

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Venice: The Golden Lion to "Pieta"

The Venice film festival has wrapped and with it come those winged lions and other elaborately shaped awards. The jury led by director Michael Mann named Kim Ki Duk's Pieta the best film in competition. It's a violent mother/son drama, the son being a loan shark. Kim Ki-Duk, best known stateside for spring, summer, fall, winter and spring (2003) is no stranger to the Venice Festival having won multiple prizes for 3-Iron (2004) eight years ago.

The winners...

Golden Lion (Picture) Pieta 
Silver Lion (Director) & Special Jury Prize (Director) there seems to be some confusion about this as Ulrich Seidl for Paradise: Faith and Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master alternate who won what in various reports
Best Actress Hadass Yaron for Fill the Void
Best Actor (Shared) Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Master
Screenplay Olivier Assasyas for Apres Mai (English Title: Something in the Air)
Cinematography Daniele Cipri for E Stato Il Figlio

Best Young Actor & Best Actress

Mastroianni Award (Young Actor) Fabrizio Falco for Dormant Beauty and It Was the Son
FIPRESCI Award (Competition) The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)
FIPRESCI Award (Orizzonti) The Interval (Leonardo Di Contanzo)

Orizzonti Jury Prize Tango Libre (Frédéric Fonteyne)
Luigi De Laurentiis Award (Best First Feature) Kuf: Mold (Ali Aydin)
Orrizonti: Best Feature Three Sisters (Wang Bing)
Orizzonti Jury Prize Tango Libre (Frédéric Fonteyne)
Queer Lion Weight Jeon Kyu-Hwan

a few notes...

The Weight, the winner of the Queer Lion, is about a hunchback mortician and the people in his life. Here is the NSFW trailer

IndieWire has a full lengthy list of winners since there are dozens of special awards outside the jurisduction of the main jury (including some of those prizes above). Several of these films picked up additional prizes.

Nice to hear the name "Frédéric Fonteyne" again, since he hasn't been on my radar since directing the wonderful romantic drama Une Liaison Pornographique. His new film is about a woman in a tangled relationship with three men. Must See!

PSH and the great Olivier Assayas accepting their prizes

Amusingly, news reports say that Philip Seymour Hoffman flying in at the last minute, barely arrived in time to pick up the prizes on behalf of The Master and apologized for his dishevelled appearance. You mean he's been aware of it all this time?!? The double actor win reopens the whole question of Oscar campaigns again. Will they actually let both stars compete in the leading category as they should? Can The Master leap the hurdle of critical darling Oscar problems like being more "challenging" and respected than actually warmly loved? Did There Will Be Blood set the stage for another Oscar run?

I'm kind of annoyed by The Envelope's suggestion that the jury wanted to give the Golden and Silver lion and Actor honors to The Master (sweeps not being allowed at most A grade festivals, thank god). If they really thought it was the best in every category, wouldn't they have handed it the Golden Lion? Instead let's congratulate Pieta and The Master and Paradise: Faith, all three of them winners to this jury.

 

Melanie Lynskey's Photos from the Set of "Teddy Bears"

[Editor's Note: The Film Experience is pleased to welcome Melanie Lynskey, star of Hello I Must Be Going (opening September 7th), as today's special guest blogger - Nathaniel R]

PHOTO TIME. I'm sharing photos! (Part 1)

Most of my old photos are at my parents house in New Zealand, but I did find one good oldie. So I will post one old one, and the rest are from four films I finished filming in the last year. That way I can totally plug those movies!

© Melanie Lynskey for The Film Experience

The first photo was taken at the Venice Film Festival in 1994. I want to tap myself on the shoulder and say, "hey, you're at the Venice Film Festival! Put some mascara on!" But I was going through a time in my life where I refused to wear makeup or high heels or anything form-fitted, partly to drive my mother crazy and partly because I was reading "The Beauty Myth" every few months and getting angrier every time. Also it would really delight Peter Jackson when I showed up to a premiere in Converse, and I love his little laugh, so I was happy enough. I love this picture because I am So. Excited. to be meeting the director of Reservoir Dogs. I love that Quentin Tarantino. (He literally would not stop talking long enough to get his picture taken, he's just carrying on with some amazing comprehensive story.) Sarah Pierse, who played my mother in Heavenly Creatures, is that gorgeous lady to my left. She's one of the greats, I think. An amazing actress. My beloved David Lynch was the head of the jury that year and I got to meet him. I cannot even tell you how into Twin Peaks I was at that point, not to mention the fact that I would re-watch one of his movies pretty much every weekend of my life. I started crying as soon as I was out of his sight. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

This next little group of photos is from the movie Teddy Bears, which we filmed in April. I'm posting these photos to say look at this cast, yo!

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Jessica Chastain Geeks Out Around Celebs, Loves Madonna

I had a really fun chat with the suddenly ubiquitous Jessica Chastain recently. We had to reschedule twice as she galivanted 'round the Globe.

Jessica in Morocco earlier this month!

I'll post tomorrow but given that she's been racking up the precursor award nominations for The Help and winning critics prizes for the rest of her films, I had to ask her about her virginal prize this year, which she received in Venice... from MADONNA.

What a heady way to start your breakthrough year. Here's what she had to say about Madonna.

The first song I always think of is "Like a Virgin" [Laughs] I remember being a little girl and watching that music video. My aunt was obsessed with Madonna. I remember learning to dance and it being so inappropriate. I didn't even know what it meant "like a virgin" but I remember the dance moves and "touched for the very first time", all of that stuff!

There's something about Madonna. I look at her now and her whole career and all of the incarnations she's had and forms of self expression and it's so empowering, especially for a woman. I look at her and think if I could have a smidgeon, a small percentage of the power she has within herself, the strength and desire to tell a story through song, through film? That's what i aspire to.  

Meeting Madonna.

Meeting everyone.

Working with Brad Pitt...

How is she handling being thrown into this world of superstar celebrity?

I geek out on people all the time. I've embarrassed myself in front of Meryl Streep! I've embarrassed myself in front of Zach Galifanakis! I stutter a lot when I first meet people. When i first met Helen Mirren I think I only said 'Hi. Nice to meet you' and three hours later 'Goodbye.' I am not the most comfortable in the beginning!"

She tells me she has to push herself through the uncomfortable shyness. Push away, Jessica, push away. Given the year you've had and the career that's likely to follow, this will clearly need to change.

more Jessica | more Madonna | more interviews

P.S. If you've never seen clips of that award she received in Venice and Madonna's presentation you can do so after the jump.

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One Fassy, Several Cups.

Jose here.

Earlier today the 68th Venice Film Festival came to an end. Awards were given out to what seem to be some strange choices (gotta love when quriky jury members choose the most obscure people, no?)
with the Golden Lion (Best Picture) going to Alexander Sokurov's Faust. 

Just yesterday, our awesome correspondent from Venice mentioned how people expected this one to win and yet it doesn't even show up in the critical consensus. That must've been a dark horse if there ever was one. Apologies to the actual Dark Horse which came out empty handed.

The complete list of winners:

Golden Lion - Faust (Alexander Sokurov, Russia)
Silver Lion for Best Director - Shangjun Cai for Ren shan ren hai/People Mountain People Sea (China)
Special jury Prize - Terraferma (Emanuele Crialese, Italy)
Volpi Cup for Best Actor - Michael Fassbender for Shame (Steve McQueen, UK)
Volpi Cup for Best Actress - Deannie Yip for Tae jie (A simple life) (Ann Hui, China, Hong Kong)
Osella Award for Best Screenplay - Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou for Alps (Greece)
Osella Award for Best Technical Contribution - Robbie Ryan's Cinematogrpahy from Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, UK)
Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Acting Newcomer -  Shôta Sometani in Himizu (Sion Sono, Japan)

Perhaps the most significant thing about this festival, besides having given Fassy his first big acting award (he's just been around in the maninstream for a couple of years but it feels like decades, no?) might be that it probably won't line up in any way with Oscar. After all, when's the last time the little golden guy paid any attention to a two and a half hour long reimagining of Faust with Russian subtitles? In the festival's long history only two Golden Lion winners got into the Oscars' Best Picture lineup - Brokeback Mountain and Atlantic City - both of them lost.  The most "influential" awards here might be the Volpi Cups; in the past decade we've seen the likes of Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven), Helen Mirren (The Queen), Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake) and Colin Firth (A Single Man) repeat their nominations during the long awards season.

Dear readers across the ocean, should we be on the lookout for any of these movies when they are released here? How did you like our Venice coverage this year? How many acting awards did you think Fassy had won by now?