Awards

The 83rd Academy Awards ceremony is days away, and prognosticators' tongues are wagging.

Will this year's Oscars ceremony feature a royal sweep for Tom Hooper's historical drama, The King's Speech? Could enough Academy members click "Like" for David Fincher's contemporary, relevant Social Network? Or does David O. Russell's underdog boxing flick, The Fighter, have a puncher's chance at pulling off an upset in the evening's Best Picture category?

James Franco and Anne Hathaway host the Academy Awards this year, which will be televised live on Sun., Feb. 27. Ahead of Hollywood's Super Bowl of cinema, we make our picks in every major category, followed by a line or two of explanation for our choices. Use our piece to help you win your office Oscars pool, then tune in this weekend to see how right (or woefully wrong) we were.

Overall, the 2011 Academy Award nominations weren't rife with shockers, except perhaps for those who seriously believe that the Golden Globe Awards are a genuine bellwether for the Oscars. Those misguided souls no doubt got quite a shock when they saw that Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit, a hit with both audiences and critics that was snubbed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the group that nominated the Angelina Jolie-Johnny Depp thriller The Tourist in its Best Picture, Comedy or Musical, category), racked up an impressive ten nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor (for Jeff Bridges), and Supporting Actress (for newcomer Hailee Steinfeld).

True Grit landed squarely between the other front-runners, The King's Speech and The Social Network, which received twelve and eight nominations, respectively. Both received nods in the Best Picture, Director, Actor (for Colin Firth and Jesse Eisenberg, respectively), and Original Screenplay categories. The King's Speech also earned Best Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress nominations for Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter.

Now in its second year, the Oscars' ten-nominee Best Picture category again performed as it was designed to and spread the wealth around. The nominees are a healthy mix of box-office hits like Toy Story 3 and Inception, which grossed some $415 and $293 million, respectively, and low-grossing critical favorites like Winter's Bone and 127 Hours. The remaining six nominees -- True Grit, The Social Network, Black Swan, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, and The King's Speech -- all fall somewhere between the two extremes, and Black Swan, True Grit, and The Social Network have all attracted an impressive number of mainstream moviegoers. Black Swan has done especially well for a movie about classical ballet, suggesting that star Natalie Portman was onto something when she quipped that everybody likes a good lesbian scene. All that said, there are some juicy conversation starters scattered throughout the mix.

Three actors were nominated for two Golden Globes apiece this year which isn't unheard of since Jamie Foxx racked up three nods in 2005. But this year, the nominations are particularly noteworthy because they acknowledge three of the greatest actors working today. Of course, one of them is Streep who last won a Globe in 2003 for Adaptation but even she's had an unusually strong year. As have her fellow two-time nominees.

Kate Winslet
Anyone who doubts Winslet's ability to bend a role to her will need look no further than the one-two punch of The Reader and Revolutionary Road. In the former, she plays an aging German woman accused of war crimes; in the latter, a frustrated '50s suburban housewife in Connecticut. One would think that such parts would call on different resources yet Winslet brings a similar ghostly intensity to both performances. This isn't range exactly; it's fierce intelligence well applied. Much of The Reader's emotional drama plays out on Hanna Schmitz's face; Winslet keeps her mysterious and hypnotic. In Revolutionary Road, that same intensity tells us everything about April Wheeler, a failed actor whose marriage to Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank is in mid-unravel. She may struggle to remain stoic but again, look at that face: In her eyes, she's falling apart.

Why some movies stay in the heart while others quickly fade has always been a mystery.

The fact is, the movie business, at least the one currently practiced by the major studios, is a very different animal now turning out "product," the same types of films designed to fill release slots year after year. Real movies featuring memorable characters who can make you laugh and make you cry -- sometimes in the same scene -- are fleeting. Getting a film through the studio system that is designed for thinking adults in no minor feat.

It's hard to say when the studios stopped caring about grownups having conversations with each other, but it's been almost 25 years exactly since James L. Brooks' multi-Oscar winning comedy/drama, Terms Of Endearment. It's just about the last time I can remember a movie with so many distinct human elements, one that wasn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, to be funny one minute, melodramatic the next, to generate huge laughs and big tears.

Here are the winners of the 2008 Spirit Awards. A complete list of the nominees, as well as interviews with nominees, can be viewed here.

Best Feature: Juno, Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Mason Novick, Russell Smith (producers)

Best First Feature: The Lookout, Scott Frank (director); Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber, Laurence Mark, Walter F. Parkes (producers)

Best Director: Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

John Cassavetes Award: August Evening, Chris Eska (writer/director); Connie Hill (I) (producer); Jason Wehling (producer)

Of all the 20-something-year-old actors to emerge in the last ten years, none seemed to have come out of nowhere as assuredly as Heath Ledger. In 1999, he was Julia Stiles romantic foil in 10 Things I Hate About You. In 2001, he was that cute blonde thing in the inexplicable blockbuster A Knight's Tale. No one ever questioned this man's ability to charm. Nevertheless in 2005, his Oscar-nominated turn in Ang Lee's tragic romance Brokeback Mountain made America sit up and take notice (and not just because he was kissing Jake Gyllenhaal on the lips). Ledger's portrayal of the closeted cowboy, at odds with himself as much as he is with society, revealed emotional depths that previous roles in Monster's Ball and Ned Kelly had only hinted at.

"Good books make bad movies," said director Otto Preminger so he spent his entire career proving the opposite by adapting mediocre material into intelligent, controversial fare.  Unfortunately his reputation as a bully earned him few friends in Hollywood, and overshadowed his rep as a trailblazer.  In New York City, the repertory theater Film Forum is out to right that wrong with a retrospective of his work—23 films spanning four decades—from now until Thursday, January 17.

After proving himself a man worth watching in the 1940s with noir classics like Laura and Fallen Angel, Preminger rocked the boat in the 1950s with two huge musicals with all-black casts: Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess. His disregard for the status quo led him to introduce coarse language in his indie flick The Moon is Blue, tackle drug abuse in 1955's The Man With the Golden Arm, and depict a gay bar in Advise and Consent in 1962.

I hear that some viewers who have seen I’m Not There are put off by the use of six different actors to play Bob Dylan, often with no attempt to look anything like Dylan. (The one who comes closest, amusingly, is actress Cate Blanchett.) I guess those people were expecting a standard biopic instead of the more intellectual examination of identity the movie presents. (Remember that it’s directed by Todd Haynes, who first made a name for himself telling the story of Karen Carpenter with Barbie dolls in his 1987 short Superstar.)

One of the reasons I think I’m Not There works so well is that the multiple-actor strategy avoids the common problem with biographies of contemporary subjects: the discomfort we feel watching an impersonation of someone who is already famous to us. Jamie Foxx did an astonishing job of capturing Ray Charles in Ray, but it was hard to shake the awareness that what you were watching was an imitation, no matter how well done. To play the young Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix opted to do an interpretation of the character rather than mimicking the person, and he gave an interesting performance. But in the end he faced the same problem: we’re so familiar with Johnny Cash that it makes it hard to lose ourselves in the story to watch someone else play him.

Tamara Jenkins, the writer and director of the just-released film The Savages, was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air this week. As in her 1998 film Slums of Beverly Hills, Jenkins is concerned with the forces – both beneficial and detrimental – that bind families together. It's a worthy topic at this time of year, as we hurtle from Thanksgiving toward the December holidays. 

Jenkins based the narratives of both films on incidents from her own life, altering events to suit the story. She said, "I've been differentiating from (The Savages) being strictly autobiographical vs. it being really personal, 'cause if I said it was autobiographical I'd end up like that guy James Frey (author of "A Million Little Pieces").

Slums of Beverly Hills is the story of a teenage girl whose father moves her and her two brothers around the wealthy zip code, always one step ahead of eviction, so the kids can attend good public schools. They are an unusual bunch, and Jenkins takes care to preserve their quirks without resorting to revelations of "hearts of gold" or other mainstream clichés. 

During a recent New York press conference for his brilliant new Bob Dylan exploration I'm Not There, writer-director Todd Haynes talked about some of the classic films and filmmakers he drew on to recreate the different eras of which Dylan was such an important part.

After revealing that parts of the film were inspired by Fellini and Godard, he spoke about the closing section starring Richard Gere (pictured) as Billy, a western hermit who may be Billy the Kid trying to live a quiet life after faking his death:

“The Billy story was inspired by the hippie westerns that came out in the late 60s. Prior to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid westerns were these big overdone studio productions made on soundstages. But the genre was reinvented by the counterculture, and the actors with stringy long hair were often scored by the artists of popular music scene, from Burt Bacharach, Leonard Cohen, and of course Dylan.“

Alexander Godunov, who would have turned 58 today, was a stunningly-acrobatic Russian ballet dancer who caused an international uproar when he defected from the Soviet Union in 1979, one that pitted President Jimmy Carter against Soviet  Premier Leonid Brezhnev. While Godunov got to stay in the U.S. and dance with the American Ballet Theater, his wife returned to the U.S.S.R. The two eventually divorced.

In Hollywood, Godunov helped to pave the way for other ballet dancers dabbling in acting. Godunov, who became involved in a relationship with the beautiful Jacqueline Bisset, starred in nine movies, everything from the well-reviewed Witness with Harrison Ford, Die Hard with Bruce Willis, The Money Pit with Tom Hanks to the much lesser Waxwork II. 

It's Christmastime, and that means it's Bing Crosby season.

A while ago in a small nook at a Broadway Theater, I picked up a first edition of Bing Crosby's 1953 autobiography, Call Me Lucky (Simon and Schuster). The book is full of old movie anecdotes and shoots that were slapdash, but full of a DIY attitude that made these pioneers of cinema stand out. Crosby's first role in film was singing as part of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, but he soon graduated to starring roles.

Crosby's slapstick shorts were 20 minute films that were conceived on the fly with Mack Sennett, the slapstick comedy producer and director. Says Crosby, "The way we made those Sennett shorts reads like a quaint piece of Americana. For two days, we'd have a story conference. I was in on it. In fact, everybody was in on it -- actors, cameramen, gag men and Sennett. We sat upstairs in Sennett's office, a large room equipped with plenty of cuspidors because Sennett was a muncher of the weed.

I had to laugh when I heard John Waters being interviewed on NPR this morning, giving his picks for movies worth renting on DVD. I was equally amused by how shocked the interviewer seemed to be at Waters’ relatively tame admissions (didn't everyone play car crash when they were kids?), and at the notion of people trying to find some of the films Waters picked at their local Blockbuster. (For the record, Waters selected (Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), Baadasssss! (2003), Final Destination 3 (2006), Wanda (1971), The Honeymoon Killers (1969), David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Head-On (2004), and In A Glass Cage (1986). If the place where you rent has more than two of these, you should congratulate the owners.)

The one-time “Prince of Puke” (his own description), Waters succeeded beyond his wildest dreams when he decided to go mainstream, first with his original Hairspray in 1988 and much more lucratively with the Broadway adaptation and subsequent film remake. A lot of other viewers only know Waters as the maker of Cry-Baby, Johnny Depp’s first hit film. Is it possible that fans of these movies, or of Waters’ amusing interviews (that seems to be his primary career these days) don’t know about his past as the filmmaker who brought the underground into the mainstream via the back door of the midnight movie?

One of the most beloved stars in the history of movies, Boris Karloff would be 120 years old today had he not passed away in 1969, which doesn’t sound all that old if you compare it to the 3700 candles on the birthday cake of the character he played in one of his films, The Mummy (1932). And he’d be delighted to know that nearly 40 years after his death he may be best remembered not as the star of horror movies but as the narrator of the much-loved children’s classic “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Karloff always loved children, and recorded many albums of stories for them. He also had one of his biggest career successes on Broadway starring as Captain Hook in Peter Pan, and when he appeared on the quiz show “The $64,000 Question,” he correctly answered every question in his chosen category, children’s fairytales.

Karloff was a little-known character actor, age 43, when he got the role of the monster in Frankenstein. If it typecast him for the rest of his life, it’s because he did more with the role than anyone could have expected, bringing a depth of pain and tormented humanity to what on paper was merely a monster. He only played the role three times, but was always grateful for the career break it gave him.

There aren't many actors who became stars in the 1960s and are still working at the top of their game, but Dustin Hoffman is one of them. Still boyish at the age of 70, Hoffman is ideally cast in his new film, the delightful fantasy Mr. Magorium’s Magic Emporium, as a 235-year-old “toy impresario, wonder aficionado and avid shoe-wearer.” Like Willie Wonka without the mean edge, the impish Magorium runs his magical toy store with blithe indifference to the demands of economics.

Hoffman flew in from the London set of his new film Last Chance Harvey to give a press conference in Manhattan on Monday. Despite an obvious case of jet lag (or maybe he was just tired from lugging around a copy of the new translation of War and Peace—must be quite a long plane trip!) the always affable star chatted at length about work new and old, including some of the people who have been the biggest influences on his career. You can read some of his remarks after the jump.