Nominating films from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to The Imposter, the British Independent Film Awards cast a wide net with their nominations announced this morning. The aforementioned Best Exotic manage to nab 5 nods including Best British Independent Film, and acting notices for Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Tom Wilkinson. Also showing up in acting races are Elle Fanning for Ginger and Rosa and Oscar queen Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady (which also picked up a screenplay nomination. The Foreign Language race might prove to be the most interesting with films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amour, and Rust and Bone battling it out to take the crown. View the full list of nominees after the jump!
Some would say it took Meryl Streep 29 years to win her third Oscar. Others would say it took her 29 years to work with the Weinsteins, who produced The Iron Lady, for which Meryl finally won that elusive third award. Having won back-to-back Best Picture titles with The King’s Speech (2010) and The Artist (2011), most people recognize how far down Oscar’s pants the Weinstein’s hands are. Heck, even their documentary, Undefeated, took home the Oscar for Best Doc Feature last year. So when it comes to getting long deserved artists their due recognition, who would doubt the power of the Weinsteins?
It seems odd to type or say the name Meryl Streep without inserting “The Great” before (or after) her name. The finest actress of this era (or perhaps ever) turns 63 this week. Mary Louise Streep was born June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey, the daughter of an artist and a pharmaceutical executive. She achieved her B.A. in Drama at Vassar College, receiving brief tutelage from actress Jean Arthur (Shane), as well as her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. From there she would perform in New York and New Jersey theatre productions, where she met and began a relationship with actor John Cazale (The Godfather).
Glenn Close for “Albert Nobbs”
Oscar Scene: “I could live here.”
Viola Davis for “The Help”
Oscar Scene: “You’re a Godless Woman!”
Rooney Mara for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
Oscar Scene: “He’s had a long standing sexual relationship with his co-editor of the magazine. Sometimes he performs cunnilingus on her. Not often enough in my opinion.”
Meryl Streep for “The Iron Lady”
Oscar Scene: “It used to be about trying to do something. Now it’s about trying to be someone.”
Michelle Williams for “My Week with Marilyn”
Oscar Scene: “People always see Marilyn Monroe. As soon as they realize I’m not her, they run.”
Makeup is a wonderful thing. I put it on every morning and I am transformed into a better looking version of myself and a happier and hotter Anna. In cinema it’s used to transform an actor into a character, to display wounds and massive injuries or just to make an actor look damn good in the role they are playing.
I actually hate this category because most of the time the films that deserve the nomination don’t receive it, and the winner is usually predictable. The winners the past few years include, The Wolfman, Benjamin Button, La Vie en Rose, and Star Trek. It’s like the most elaborate makeup is the winner and after sometime it gets a little boring. So, Harry Potter pretty much doesn’t stand a chance.
I have a confession to make. It may shock you, but then again, it may not. Here it comes…I’m not a huge Meryl Streep fan. Some of you may have gathered this already, but for those of you who don’t know…now you do. I say this because I was never going to be blind to the flaws that ‘The Iron Lady’ has in order to blindly praise Streep. I found her performance fine but nothing special at all, and one of the most wildly overpraised of 2011. The film itself is rather terrible, and for my money one of the poorest biopics in recent memory (yes, even ‘J. Edgar’ is superior to me, and I didn’t care one bit for that one either). Director Phyllida Lloyd barely improves on her poor work on ‘Mamma Mia’ (which also wasted Streep), writer Abi Morgan makes me suspect her work on the script for ‘Shame’ was a fluke, and the acting on the whole is unworthy of much praise. Streep is doing the same sort of imitation acting that some love, but I didn’t like in ‘Julie & Julia’ either. Her voice sounds like the former Prime Minister, but she never goes any deeper than that in her performance. Honestly, Jim Broadbent gives a better performance to me. The story of Margaret Thatcher was always going to be a difficult story for me to embrace politically, but I’m relieved to say that its politics are the least of my issues (it’s actually rather mild overall). I can safely dislike this film on its own merits and failings as a biopic. And boy does it fail. The movie is incredibly self important without telling us why, as well as being boring and slow to the point of almost causing pain…perhaps its biggest failing.
Now that we’re just one week away from the Academy Award nominee announcements, some categories are becoming narrowed down in a more literal sense. Best Makeup and Visual Effects have a “Bake-Off,” where only a few eligible contenders are squeezed into a small group until being squeezed further into the final set of nominees. It’s one of those arbitrarily weird competition rules that strikes me as unnecessary and even a little douchey, especially in Visual Effects, since inspired and creative minimal uses of special effects are grouped in with films that are crammed with varying qualities of CGI and are almost always the ones that suffer (see: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for last year’s ceremony). “Hey guys, good job making the finali-oops, you didn’t get nominated LOL!” Luckily, Makeup’s Bake-Off had many sighing a breath of relief with their choices, or, more perhaps more accurately, omissions… Read more on Sizing Up the “Bake-Off” Fields…
New Year’s Eve weekend is a no-show for wide releases, and is even somewhat bare in quantity of limited releases (though quality is a different story). Let’s saddle up and see what we have to work with…
For Oscar-watchers, the most important new release of the year is arguably The Iron Lady, Phyllida Lloyd’s flattering biopic of Margaret Thatcher. Many of our more vociferous readers have been hopeful that this would net the distinguished actress her third Oscar (because my God, if she doesn’t win another one, it will be as if the Academy is spitting in her face!). Who knows, she just might do it this year: she’s already been singled out as the Best Lead Actress of the year from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Southeastern Film Critics Association, and has been nominated for a Golden Globe. Then again, a younger and more ubiquitous contender has been snatching up even more precursor prizes, and many critics have not taken kindly to Streep’s vehicle (because let’s be honest, The Iron Lady exists mainly as an acting vehicle for her). Many reviews have slammed the film’s by-the-numbers biopic approach to storytelling and its noncommittal, doting treatment of one of the world’s most hotly controversial politicians. The film expands wider on the 13th of January. Read more on Weekend Openings (December 30-January 1)…
As my colleague Joey Magidson wraps up his series on the contenders for the “major” categories, I’m going to take a look at the Oscar chances of those hard-working folks behind the camera. Also known as the “technical” or “below-the-line” categories, these award fields honor the building blocks of cinema, the kind of work that most people don’t pay attention to. Unfortunately, even fewer people seem to truly understand the technical aspects of filmmaking, and the Academy isn’t that much better. The rule for predicting the nominees and winners of these categories usually boils down to how noticeable and obvious is the technical element in question.
Take for example today’s installment: Best Art Direction. Despite its title, this trophy is not actually awarded to the Art Director of a film. It goes to the Production Designer and the Set Decorator(s) of the film with presumably the best use of set design in its overall mise-en-scène. Looking through Oscar history, it’s apparent that truly unique production design most essential to the overall effect of a given film rarely even get nominated (see: The Ghost Writer or Synecdoche, New York), yet showy sets that draw attention to themselves – even if the effect is intrusive – have the highest chances of victory (see: Alice in Wonderland or Memoirs of a Geisha). This is why period pieces and fantasy films have the most successful track record here. It also helps if a film is an Academy darling overall. As we’ll be observing in this series, this is a pattern that manifests throughout just about every category at the Oscars.
There is little argument that Meryl Streep is the greatest actress in the history of the cinema, she has held the title for more than a few years, deservedly so. She long ago surpassed the best performances in the history of the cinema, work from Jane Fonda in Klute (1971), Vivien Leigh in Gone with the wind (1939), Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Katherine Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962). Streep in fact gave her finest performance at the age of twenty eight in Sophie’s Choice (1982).
Yet with Oscar season in full swing, the question again comes up as to whether or not Streep will finally win her second Oscar for Best Actress, or lose the thirteenth consecutive time to inferior nominees. Most recently she lost the Academy Award as Best Actress for her work in Julie and Julia (2009) to Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side (2009) lost the year before for her work in Doubt (2008) to Kate Winslet in The Reader (2008). In previous years Streep has been the victim of losing to sentimental choices of the Academy, such as Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond (1981), defeating Streep in The French Lt.’s Woman (1981), Geraldine Page in A Trip to Bountiful (1985) who won over Streep in Out of Africa (1985), and Cher in Moonstruck (1987) besting Streep in Ironweed (1987). Sometimes it has been the Academy deciding it “is time” to honor another actress, which has been the case with Bullock (for sure), and very likely for Jodie Foster in the Accused (1988) who beat Streep for A Cry in the Dark (1988), a performance that won her the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress. In fact in years that Streep has lost the Oscar, she has often found herself the winner of the critics’ awards, guild awards or the Golden Globe!!
They bitched, they moaned, and after all this about David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo not being screened in time, the New York Film Critics ignore the film completely. The big win of the day was Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist which landed a Picture and Director win respectively. I felt when I first saw the film that it would be a Sideways-type of affection among critics throughout the season but then Alexander Payne’s The Descendants swooped in and started gaining a lot of momentum. The film, which garnered three four-star reviews from our own writers here at the site, was looking signed, sealed, and delivered for some true awards attention. Clooney even failed to get a mention today and he’s one of the best things to come out of an actor’s performance this year.
With J. Edgar and The Iron Lady likely to play big roles in the upcoming awards season and Oscars, I though a look at the great biographical films might be kind of cool. Let me know which ones you like.
Far too often film biographies play like a “greatest hits” album, focusing only on the best known events in the subject’s life. Other times the character’s life is glossed over, overly sentimentalized so that we barely recognize the subject or life being explored. For me, the hope is that I will emerge from the film knowing more about the subject than when I entered the theater, but far too often that has not been the case. Only in recent years have film biographies (biopics) really come into their own, as there has been more pressure on the storytellers to tell the real story, to get to the meat of the character and try and find out what made them tick. Show them warts and all, because it is the flaws that we human, those flaws connect each of us to the human race. Most film biopics tell the story of a lie or events surrounding a real happening, and for many years they were romanticized by Hollywood to be a pale shadow of what had really happened. As previously mentioned, in recent years, there has been a great deal more honesty on screen when dealing when a biographical subject or true events. Certainly the person(s) being portrayed deserve that respect, and the historical events deserve to be shown as they were rather than as moviemakers imagine them to be. Read more on On Great Biopics…
As a continuing feature here at Awards Circuit, here are the latest ratings provided by the MPAA Ratings Board – The Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA).
In this edition, dated 10/26/11, the long-expected NC-17 arrives for Oscar hopeful “Shame”, we learn whether Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher biopic will play to a wider set of eyes, the sequel to an Oscar winning Animated Feature dabbles with mild peril and the awesomely strange collaboration between Steven Soderbergh and former women’s MMA fighter, Gina Carano, would like to take a meeting. All this, and more after the cut!
Some studios have made their 2011 Awards or For Your Consideration sites LIVE. They’re up and running and it’s so fun to look at them when considering what films will or will not be on Oscar’s radar. Not everyone is up yet and some aren’t listing categories but it’s good to see the roster that some of these studios have on their hands. Weinstein has a squad this season. Another Weinstein Oscar ceremony? We’ll see. Check em’ out below.
The Weinstein Company:
-The Artist
-Coriolanus
-The Iron Lady
-My Week with Marilyn
-Undefeated
-W.E. -No categories listed.
20th Century Fox:
-Rio
-Rise of the Planet of the Apes -No categories listed.
Nominating films from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to The Imposter, the British Independent Film Awards cast a wide net with their nominations announced this morning. The aforementioned Best Exotic manage to nab 5 nods including Best British Independent Film, and acting notices for Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Tom Wilkinson. Also showing up in acting races are Elle Fanning for Ginger and Rosa and Oscar queen Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady (which also picked up a screenplay nomination. The Foreign Language race might prove to be the most interesting with films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amour, and Rust and Bone battling it out to take the crown. View the full list of nominees after the jump!
