Sunday, January 17, 2010

From Guild to Oscar: "The Best of ... Everything?"

Oops. Forgot to point you to my weekly Oscar column at Tribeca Film. This one is on the guilds that precede Oscar. If you need a distraction from Golden Globe talk for a minute. Check it out...

"If you’re an inveterate Oscarologist and film enthusiast like me, you may have found yourself following not just the Oscar nominations themselves, but the precursor awards too. Each decade more and more organizations try to muscle in on Oscar’s territory, with varying degrees of success. None of these organizations can quite claim Oscar’s 82 years’ worth of longevity, but subsets of them are actual movie industry institutions in their own right. I’m speaking of movie guilds, the trade organizations and labor unions that account for the people that every movie requires: directors, producers, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, etc. Most of these organizations cropped up out of necessity and opportunity in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, coinciding with the breakdown of the Golden Age studio system, which used to keep creative personnel under long-term contracts..."

1 comment:

Amir said...

"This year The Hangover won a comedy editing nomination from its guild. It’s obviously a well loved picture and, yes, it’s funny but… Best Editing? Really? Over the intricacies of Duplicity, the exuberance of Whip It, and the dark jagged comedy of Observe and Report?"

This is so true.
i don't understand how a movie gets to be good at everything, because they like it as a whole.
(in this, i also don't think the hangover is a good movie, or a funny one anyway)