Ewan McGregor's Link Saber

Fin de Cinema appreciates Tilda in Julia. More people need to
Spiegel Online "we make lists because we don't want to die" Good point. But also because they're fun
In Contention the animated shorts finalist list
Movie|Line interviews Hal Holbrook for That Evening Sun. The performance of his career?


Hollywood Elsewhere asks an understandable question regarding The Twilight Saga: New Moon's box office numbers
Awards Daily wonders whether Sandra Bullock is a safer bet than previously thought for The Blind Side
Vanity Fair handicaps the Oscar race and makes a case for Fantastic Mr Fox costumes (hmmm) but falls into the age old lazy schpiel about "not enough best actresses to fill a category". I swear to god that people say this every f***ing year and it is never ever true. You just have to be willing to look at performances that people aren't talking about for various reasons: Tilda Swinton in Julia, Abbie Cornish in Bright Star, Michelle Pfeiffer in Chéri, Saoirse Ronan The Lovely Bones, Melanie Laurent in Inglourious Basterds, etcetera... and that's just off the top of my head beyond the contenders that people are talking about at the moment (Bullock/Cotillard/Mirren/Mulligan/Sidibe/Streep) which already equals more than an entire shortlist can hold. The lists are always at least twice as deep as most pundits are ever willing to admit. Why is that? Why won't these blinders ever come off?

Finally, you've probably seen Forbes' list of Hollywood's most overpaid stars by now. This isn't something I think about a lot given that my favorites tend to be people whose salaries aren't reported. But I do think lists like this are problematic. They underline obvious truths (no star is foolproof... even when they stick to formula and some people are just lucky / some people are grossly overpaid because they happen to star in franchises that would be hits without them) and often obscure some real truths.

Ewan McGregor's diminishing filmography

Ewan McGregor comes in at #2. Is he grossly overpaid or is he just making films that his core audience isn't remotely interested in? I'd guess the latter or somewhere inbetween. I'm hardly an accurate judge of box office appeal -- in my world Tilda Swinton is a way bigger name/draw than Tom Cruise or Adam Sandler and the name "Pedro Almodóvar" would put more asses in seats than "Michael Bay" on opening weekend -- but I am a huge fan of McGregor's and frankly, he hasn't made a movie that I've been excited about since the twofer of Big Fish and Young Adam back in 2003. I really love him but I have little interest in seeing him play second fiddle to Renée Zellweger (Miss Potter) or Hilary Swank (Amelia) in stale prestige biographies or do ensemble work in lame Tom Hanks franchises (Angels & Demons). Ewan came to fame doing edgy, boisterous and inventive cinema (Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge!, Velvet Goldmine, The Pillow Book) and might that not still be what his base is hoping to watch him do? That won't keep him in the lap of luxury or anything but it might be more artistically satisfying.
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The Oscar Race Begins on November 6th

That's just 5 days away. That's the (un)official start date. I'm declaring it. It used to be the NBR's announcement of their top ten list but with more and more awards groups clamoring to yell "first!", "first!" has lost virtually all its meaning. Or rather, it's meaning has changed. It now means "We're desperate for attention!" ...though maybe it always did. So, Nov. 6th is the day...


...since that's when a lot of folks will get their first look at Precious ["for you consideration..." in virtually every category save Best Actor and Supporting Actor. No, Lenny Kravitz's male nurse doesn't count]. That's when that particularly buzzy contenduh goes from being a movie with deafening hype and buzz (huzz? bype? hypzz?) to being a real thing, a movie audiences can react to in a less abstract, more honest and less controllable-by-campaign-and-hype way. As it should be.

[tangent] I always find it strange when people call me an elitist (I assume because I generally prefer unravelling female protagonists to superpowered men in costumes?) because I'm actually populist at heart. I demand that cinema of all types readily available to the masses! The Oscars are frustrating in this way because the type of films that matter to the Academy -- and to drama nuts like you (I assume if you're reading TFE) -- are ever more skittish about being seen, hiding in tiny little theaters in only the biggest cities, as if too many curious eyeballs would ruin their strenuous beauty.

If it were up to me you'd have to open by Christmas at the absolute latest in the top six to eight markets (something like that -- thus making you an actual release in the year in which you're asking for statues and top ten lists) instead of just Los Angeles by the 31st for a one week run on one screen. (I fail to see how such tiny in-name-only "releases" within a calendar year are any different in practice than festival showings which do not make you eligible). [/tangent]

On a smaller scale November 6th is when Best Actor contender Hal Holbrook emerges with the senior-wants-his-farm-back drama That Evening Sun. This promising debut feature from writer/director Scott Teems has other fine performances (particularly Ray McKinnon as Holbrook's nemesis) but none of the other actors have anything in the way of an Oscar-ready profile. But after the year Carrie Preston has had -- dropping some humanity into the arch Duplicity, reliably entertaining us as Arlene on True Blood and this affecting portrait of a wife who loves her husband but isn't blind to his flaws -- we should all be new fans.

Yes, from November 6th onward each and every weekend brings us new Oscar contenders of one type or another.

• Nov 6th: Precious, That Evening Sun, A Christmas Carol
• Nov 13th: Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Messenger
• Nov 20th: Broken Embraces, The Blind Side (?), The Twilight Sa (oh, I'm kidding)
• Nov 27th: The Road (wide. Holiday appropriate! er....) and a bunch of limited releases: Me and Orson Welles, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, The Princess and the Frog. I have to say I think it was a H-U-G-E mistake for Nine to leave November... even more enormous than I had originally thought. You see, not one major Oscar contender is going to be wide for the entire Thanksgiving period. Unless you count The Road. Not even Precious (which will be expanding in November but not wide until sometime in December). It's like the Weinstein Company is just setting fire to money. They'd have had zero competition. Plus, November is actually from the latin word "novem" which means NINE. Hello... can't the Weinsteins respect the Gregorian calendar!?

• Dec 4th: Brothers, Up in the Air, Everybody's Fine (?)
• Dec 11th: A Single Man, Invictus and The Lovely Bones which is only in limited release till January. Like Nine, it's another Oscar hopeful with mainstream appeal. Plus it's from a hugely successful director (Peter Jackson). It seems like they're just putting money in the trash compactor. Why don't they want those holiday dollars? Are they worried about the movie's bankability?
  
• Dec 18th: Avatar (wide), Nine, The Young Victoria
• Christmas: Sherlock Holmes, It's Complicated (wide releases... Globe contenders?), Police Adjective (Romania's foreign film contender). Nine and Up in the Air, two presumed Oscar giants, also quit hiding and open wide.
  
• Dec 30th: The White Ribbon (More than most filmmakers, Michael Haneke pieces require time to shift and settle and unsettle again in the mind of the viewer. So why they keep sticking him with these maddeningly busy release dates -- Christmas or New Years -- is beyond me. Seems like such a missed opportunity for what his films always need: discussions with room to breathe. Caché in particular was gaining steam -- his films build the further you get away from them -- so had it been released even just a few weeks earlier (sigh) maybe it would have won a Screenplay or Director nod? Or at least more precursor honors. Instead it t'was crushed in the glut. We'll see the same thing happen again this time.
  

So longwinded today.

My point is simply this: Here we go! (Are you excited yet?)
This was all a lengthy awkward way of saying that Oscar Predictions in All Categories are all up to date and I'm more than ready for these movies. Discuss.
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Best of the Fest ~ Goodbye Nashville

As you read this I am quite possibly thousands of miles above you in a huge aluminum alloy vessel, travelling back to NYC. Nashville was a treat and I hope I get invited back to NaFF in some capacity. Here's a quick run down of the cinematic highlights for me. I was on the short film jury and didn't have a chance to see some of the narrative features so this is from a limited pool.

Best Overall Prodigal Sons Filmmaker Kimberly Reed tells me she'll be ineligible for the Oscar for Best Documentary because of something to do with BBC screening or funding (?) which is a real shame because I could see it getting nominated. Other goodies: (500) Days of Summer and That Evening Sun, pictured left. [more on Prodigal / more on Summer]
Best Actress Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer
Best Actor Hal Holbrook as "Abner Meecham" in That Evening Sun. It's based on the short story by William Gay about a farmer who escapes the old folks home and returns to his beloved farm only to find it occupied by new tenants. The film is well directed by Scott Teems, graduating from short films to his first feature, and an Oscar campaign could materialize for Holbrook if this movie gets a solid enough release. Holbrook plays a stubborn old ornery codger... one could say it's an Eastwood'ish role with less of Clint's squinty menace and more of Hal's weary sensitivity. Honorable mention: Joseph Gordon-Levitt in (500) Days of Summer

Best Supporting Actress Three standouts for me. Don't make me choose. It's actresses.

Kaitlin Olsen in Weather Girl pictured right. At first I thought she was doing just an amusing but generic perky blonde sendup. Then she took a late film monologue much farther than I believed it could go. Laugh out loud funny. 4realz. I actually LOLed. Shellie Marie Shartzer in Make-Out with Violence. She has no lines to speak of as dead girl "Wendy" but man does she sell the conceit and work her physicality [more on Make-Out]. Remember that woman that Clive Owen comically seduced over martinis in Duplicity? That's Carrie Preston who is moving in That Evening Sun as a woman who is trying to stand by her man. Mia Wasikowska is also good as her restless friendly daughter. [You'll be seeing the In Treatment regular a lot onscreen soon. She's in Amelia later this year and then Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland]. She wants to get away from Daddy as soon as possible.

...speak of the devil.

Best Supporting Actor Ray McKinnon as Lonzo Choat in That Evening Sun. He plays the tenant of Meecham's old farm. They both want each other off the land. They both intend to stay. McKinnon never once lets his white trash role teeter towards dimensionless bad guy, even though he does despicable things and is pitted against the ultra sympathetic Holbrook. That's quite a feat and this treatment of the character really girds up the central conflict. You might remember McKinnon as Revered HW Smith on Deadwood.

I didn't see the performance that won a special prize for acting from the main jury here (Vincent D'Onofrio in The Narrows) but since the character is disabled I don't know how much to trust that prize. You know how disabled equals kudos as acting goes.

I don't know if I'll have time to talk about the dozens upon dozens of short films I screened but Nick has done a frankly awesome job of relating what our jury decisions were about and reviewing many of the best shorts along his way.

Here's his take on the animated shorts (my favorite was Western Spaghetti) documentary shorts (The Witness was tops and I wanted Steel Homes for our honorable mention but I couldn't convince my fellow jurors to go with it for the prize. grrrr) and several posts on the plethora of live action shorts. We watched for hours upon hours.

Oh, look here's Western Spaghetti. It fills me with delight.

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