Yay!

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..."

Read the rest @ Tribeca Film

Oscar Race Ends 23 Days Early

The DGA Awards aren't exactly known for throwing the Oscar race into a frenzy of "what ifs" but last night's crowning of Danny Boyle, or plaqueing of Danny Boyle as the case may be, officially makes this the dullest most predictable Best Picture race (Slumdog Millionaire wins with ease) since... since... Maybe since Titanic. If it wasn't already. Which it probably was. And the 1997 lineup was almost as meh as 2008's.


In the absence of real Oscar drama which category are you clinging to? Which race do you hope can be squeezed like a rock to drip droplets of suspense?

The Directors and the Sound Guys

The Director's Guild of America (the DGA) has a wonderful theater here in Manhattan where I've been able to attend a lot of interesting things -- most recently a conversation with Guillermo Del Toro and last year that PTA/Scorsese interview. I'm fond of them. The DGA holds its annual awards dinner on the 31st this year out in LA, where Roger Ebert is receiving a lifetime achievement award. The following directors will be honored as the best motion picture directors of 2008:

• Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
• David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
  
• Chris Nolan, The Dark Knight
• Gus Van Sant, Milk
  

Don't cry too hard for the invaluable but snubbed Andrew Stanton (WALL•E is his third feature. He previously directed Finding Nemo and A Bug's Life). Turns out the DGA declares animated films off limits for this prize. How sad. Someone has to direct those things! Don't imagine that they storyboard themselves.

The DGA is the single best predictor each year of Oscar's Best Picture lineup --I've been predicting the same five for quite some time now but we didn't really need this reminder. It's proved to be a predictable five. It's the acting categories that have some doubt/action. It is interesting to note that the DGA don't do quite as well in predicting the eventual Director nominees. The DGA has thousands of members whereas the Academy's directors branch has but 374. The latter is a far more elite group so it's understandable that the DGA tilts mainstream. Oscar will sometimes veer from the DGA choices in order to honor smaller critical champs and/or world reknowned auteurs (Woody Allen, David Lynch, Pedro Almodovar or Mike Leigh have all had more luck with Oscar than with the DGA). If Oscar strays from the DGA list this year it could be for Mike Leigh again (Happy-Go-Lucky) or maybe Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler)... but you never really know about that fifth spot. I mean... do we really have to give Ron Howard another shot at the naked gold man?

Today we also got the official announcement of the Cinema Audio Society's nominees (broken by Awards Daily yesterday) who chose these movies as the tops in sound mixing:

• The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Quantum of Solace, Slumdog Millionaire and WALL•E.

The CAS's choices usually line up with Oscars to the tune of 4 out of 5... most vulnerable to a snub in two weeks time is probably Quantum of Solace since Oscar doesn't like Bond movies much. You can see the history I charted of their 007 indifference in this post from 2007. No Bond movie has been nominated in the sound categories since 1971 though the series did win one of its only two Oscars in sound, the sound effects of Goldfinger (1964) to be precise.
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