The Oscars (and other awards)

In other Oscar news,

deadline.com/2014/10/birdman-oscar-chances-box-office-855785/

Thank you, sshuttari. Someone here finally acknowledges the new Oscar host.

‘Captain America’ For Best Picture? Why Its Directors Think The Academy Needs To Take Comic Book Movies Seriously

deadline.com/2014/10/oscars-captain-america-best-picture-comic-book-movies-861019

A Marvel comic book movie as a serious contender for a Best Picture Oscar nomination? My reaction when the idea was recently pitched to me by a top publicity firm was that this publicist must be on crack. Don’t they know the Academy are basically snobs? Comic book movies have no place in the Best Picture race. That became painfully obvious when The Dark Knight was egregiously overlooked as a Best Pic nominee in 2008.

It’s ironic that one of this year’s major contenders, Birdman, does have a storyline involving an actor who played a comic book superhero but it focuses on him trying desperately to run away from that image. Oscar voters can identify with that but real comic book movies are relegated to technical categories like visual effects and sound and there they will stay despite the fact that the public flocks to them and critics actually rate them among the highest rungs of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which was good enough to lure Robert Redford back to blockbuster fare, rated an excellent 89% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Marvel’s summer smash, Guardians Of The Galaxy, the number one 2014 grossing movie to date, ranked even slightly higher with 91% positive reviews. And Marvel’s latest X-Men installment, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, beat them both with 92%. But you don’t see the studios behind them launching major Best Picture campaigns, do you? Certainly when you see companies like Warner Bros staking their future on the genre by announcing a plan for ten comic book movies between 2016 and 2020 you see the importance to the bottom line. The genre continues to explode but these are regarded as cash cows, not Oscar bait.

But you have to ask yourself is that really fair? Recently at the Venice Film Festival where he was promoting his two latest micro-budgeted movies, The Humbling and Manglehorn, none other than Al Pacino became a convert and put Guardians Of The Galaxy on a pedestal, erasing his initial reaction when dragged to see it. “It was not something I would readily go see, but my kids got me to go, and one has to draw the line at where prejudice starts and where it ends – that was good stuff! I recognized the ingenious stuff they were doing: the invention, the attractiveness of the way they were performing it. It had Shakespearean feeling to it at times. I was caught up in the big screen, the big sound…, ” he said. Ironically Pacino remains one of the few actors ever to be Oscar nominated for a comic book movie role in 1990’s Dick Tracy (of course Heath Ledger did take a posthumous Supporting Actor Oscar for Dark Knight).

At a recent meeting at The Four Seasons Bar, Joe Russo and Anthony Russo, directors of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and the upcoming 2016 sequel) as well as Emmy winners for their work in television which includes classic shows like Arrested Development and Community, told me they are frustrated that their critically acclaimed movie isn't getting the kind of Oscar buzz movies that rank far lower on the RT and box office scales seem to be rolling in. It’s almost as if, as far as Oscar is generally concerned these days, making money is a hindrance. Captain America’s gross puts it at number two behind Guardians with nearly $260 million domestically and $714 million worldwide to date. Their film is nowhere to be found on pundit prediction lists and it would be a stunner if any critics group even considers it in their year end awards despite that early praise it got in April. “It’s strange that the comic book film genre is so often thought of only in terms of its economic merits. Yes, it’s shockingly popular and continues to grow, and, yes, the box office success of these films can often embarrassingly outweigh their merits, but as Christopher Nolan perhaps first proved, real and valuable filmmaking can be achieved with the genre. It’s sad that some people, seemingly soured by having to endure the massive cultural presence and expectations that even mediocre or poor examples of the genre can generate, react by trying to reject the genre as a whole,” said Joe Russo. Of course Nolan, snubbed in Best Picture and Best Director races for The Dark Knight, will be back this year trying for the first time to break into the Best Director race with his very human space epic, Interstellar (Nov 5), a film certain to benefit because it is not based on a comic book. Russo says that in many ways comic book films are analogous to the western, a form not ignored completely by Oscar in the Best Picture races of the past. “Snubbing comic book movies because of their ubiquity is akin to dismissing the western as matinee fodder.” Of course many a great western was indeed snubbed including John Wayne’s classic pair of The Searchers and Rio Bravo which between them received zero Oscar nominations, but Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves turned things around, both winning Best Picture. And as Russo points out no fantasy film had ever won until the Lord Of The Rings trilogy smashed that myth with three consecutive Best Picture nominations and a sweeping win in 2003 for the third installment, The Return Of The King.

Their film, which Anthony Russo describes as a hybrid between a super hero movie and a straight, serious thriller, not only would have to erase 86 years of a voting pattern to land in the race, its early April release date also makes it a real uphill climb. It’s extremely rare for any film released before May, and generally Fall, to land a Best Pic nod. But they aren't giving up hope. They feel having the presence of Redford (snubbed himself failing to get in the Best Actor race last year for All Is Lost) helps put the film in a different league. “The moment we were able to cast Redford changed everything, because it gave a deeper cultural context to the movie. Not only are you taking one of the most famous actors of all time, you’re taking one of the most famous thriller actors of all time (Three Days Of The Condor). And we’re subverting his on-screen persona and his off-screen persona at the same time. He’s a villain in the movie. He’s never played a villain, and not only is he a villain, but he’s a fascist,” said Joe Russo who also points out the film has a true “civil liberties conundrum” at its heart but was actually written six months before the whole Edward Snowden affair exploded. “We went after ideas that we felt were very zeitgeist,” he said.

So with critical acclaim, industry respectability, all the elements, why no chance at Oscar love, or even an attempt? “That’s a very interesting question. I think you look at all those awards ceremonies, there’s a whole process of advocacy for those awards, right? What is the value of the award (to Marvel)? And why should they spend the money required to go down that road? To create the box office? They already have the box office,” said Joe Russo. But Anthony, points out their film feels more like a 70’s-style thriller than anything else. “It’s a real movie, real filmmaking, and it has really high aspirations, in terms of what cinema can be and what it can do, and what our experience of it is. It has every intention on the part of the filmmakers to reach audiences on the deepest level,” he said as he continued to point out the many ways their film differs from standard comic book fare and citing influences like The Manchurian Candidate, The Parallax View, Three Days Of The Condor and The French Connection.

During the course of our conversation they also mentioned how the comedy genre also rarely gets its due from the Academy. “We’ve done comedy and drama. Comedy is f*****g hard. It’s really hard. The very specific craft involved in the rhythm and the pacing and the tone. Tone is so hard to manage. I think it’s the hardest thing for a filmmaker to do,” Joe Russo said.

Perhaps an Oscar campaign could more successfully be mounted if they dropped the name Captain America and just called it The Winter Soldier. Now that the Academy could probably get behind. No trace of comic book origins there! “It’s fascinating, very interesting, very enigmatic how it all works, the Academy,” said Anthony Russo.

The Oscar season is still young.

We certainly have some interesting months ahead of us.

That sounds about right.

But even if it's loved...

Gravity was a different type of movie though. Comparing Gravity to Interstellar is like comparing 2001 to Star Wars.

deadline.com/2014/11/tim-burton-big-eyes-oscars-amy-adams-christoph-waltz-premiere-1201284149/


Tim Burton’s ‘Big Eyes’ Paints Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz Into Awards Race

“I’ve always wanted to do a very serious courtroom drama,” joked Tim Burton at Thursday night's world premiere of Big Eyes, the incredible true story of Margaret and Walter Keane, whose kitschy paintings of saucer-eyed children became mass-marketed sensations in the 1960s. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz play the married artists whose pop success concealed a secret that later exploded in a famously zany 1986 court case: For a decade, the self-promoting Walter claimed he created the Waifs (while making millions from them), when it was Margaret who’d held the brush.

Adams gives a nuanced performance as Margaret, a timid single mother in the male-dominated 1950s who allows her showy second husband to co-opt her painfully personal art, becoming increasingly trapped in the lie as their fortunes swell. The Weinstein Co. has set a Christmas qualifying run and is already aggressively screening Big Eyes for awards voters, pushing it in several categories including Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and screenplay.

Harvey Weinstein watched from the back aisles as the audience of 600 in LACMA’s sold-out Bing Theater ate up the seriocomic and seriously weird true tale. “I love this film,” he told me afterward. The first screening of the recently finished film was a first-ever world premiere score for Film Independent at LACMA; also in attendance were costume designer Colleen Atwood and production designer Rick Heinrichs, along with screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, whom Burton first worked with 20 years ago on a biopic of another misfit-artist: Ed Wood.

Burton saw Keanes everywhere growing up in suburban California and had long been fascinated by Margaret, whom he first met in the mid-‘90s when he sought her out and commissioned a painting. Initially aboard to produce, Burton instead made Big Eyes his next pic as director after 2012’s Oscar-nominated Frankenweenie. “Between the art and the dysfunctional relationship, it seemed perfect,” he said.

Adams, who earned her fifth Oscar nod for playing a ballsy con woman in American Hustle last year, revealed she wasn’t keen on playing Keane when she had read the script years earlier. “I was focused on playing confident women (at the time), but when I had my daughter and had been a mom for a while I read it again and saw it from a different point of view,” she said. “I really began to understand that the quietness of Margaret was a strength. When it came around the second time I wrote to Tim and said, ‘Can I do it?’”

To get into Margaret’s skin Adams spent time with the octogenarian painter at her Northern California studio, taking in her quietness. “It took an hour to get eye contact,” said Adams. “It took a while for me to get the courage to ask, ‘Why did you stay?’ For her, it was about telling the truth. It was important to me that I be honest to who she was.”

For years Margaret silently supported her husband as he took credit for her paintings, met celebrities and dignitaries and even released collections of her work under his name. “She felt like she was complicit, and I think that’s why she stayed,” said Adams. “Ultimately she saw his manipulation but she always held herself accountable for the lies that she told.”

To play the charismatic Walter, who died in 2000, Waltz read the man’s 1983 autobiography. “I must admit, after page 27 it’s hard to read,” said Waltz, whose portrayal morphs from charming huckster to master manipulator as Walter clings to the charade to the end. “It’s delusional rambling. Overall, it gave me an impression that the actual man must be beyond portrayal.”

But Keane’s hunger to be acknowledged as an artist was one touchstone Waltz did relate to: “I can identify with the despair, of wanting to be an artist and understanding that you might not be one.”

The real life court case that eventually pitted the Keanes against each other in a “he said, she said” battle over artistic ownership was filled with wacky headline-grabbing antics: Walter acted as his own lawyer, interrogated Margaret, and put himself on the stand before the judge called a one-hour painting bake-off between the Keanes. Margaret was awarded $4 million after completing an authentic Big Eyes painting while Walter begged off with a shoulder injury.

“Nobody believes this, but we toned down the courtroom scene!” Burton said. “That’s what’s so great about the story. Those things really happened.”

Alexander and Karaszewski, who also wrote biopics The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon, based the scene on actual court transcripts. “It must have been the wildest thing ever, but what we did was tame compared to what went on in that courtroom,” said Waltz.

Post screening, Weinstein concurred. “Christoph wasn’t kidding about that scene – he even underplayed it,” he told me with a chuckle.

Alexander and Karaszewski found that the Keanes’ decade-long deception was so convincing, even a friend of the couple didn’t know the truth behind the Big Eyes. “At the time, nobody cared, nobody was paying attention, and nobody could type it into a search engine,” Alexander mused. “That would never happen now.”

Even San Francisco columnist Dick Nolan, played by Danny Huston in the film, played his own role in building the Walter Keane charade. “He was old school, a Sweet Smell of Success type. He would plant Walter in his stories,” Alexander explained.

That never happens anymore, right? I countered.

“Exactly.”

This is the first I'm hearing of this movie....so, it must be a contender.

CBS knows that no one watched this shit last night, so they put everything online.

That's pretty funny if you've seen Birdman.