Awards Season 2015

[solaris72]

And in the 21st century they've both made five features. All of Stone's were potential Oscar bait;

I'm not about to defend Savages, but really? Oscar bait?

[Ribs]

Bruce Beresford has a new film coming sometime this year with Eddie Murphy as a mentor and friend to a child called Cook; I think it's possible they'll make a big bid for Supporting Actor for this one.

[RSTooley]

Oscars thinking about going back to five nominees for Best Picture -- Thank God

I understand your "Thank God" reaction. It's hard to think that films like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Les Miserables, and American Sniper would have made the cut if the Academy still had their five film cap over the last few years.

However, I hope they keep the current ten film format. It's hard to deny that getting nominated for the "best picture" Oscar increases public interest for a film, which is great when a few of those ten nominated features are small independent films. If keeping the ten film format sheds some light on fantastic indies (Whiplash, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Kids Are All Right, Winter's Bone, An Education, etc.) and occasionally foreign films (Amour) that would have otherwise been potentially left off the list, then I'm all for it.

[ordinaryperson]

How to win Best Picture
How to win Best Actor or Best Actress

[ordinaryperson]

"Son of Saul" is the first submission for Best Foreign Language Film this year.

[domino harvey]

Next year's Oscars will have two hosts-- The baseless suggestion in the article of Key and Peele hosting would actually be brilliant, and a much better way to integrate minority voices into the broadcast than this year's embarrassing trotting out of token actors. And we'd actually have hosts who are funny, which would be a nice change of pace of late

[EricJ]

Oscars thinking about going back to five nominees for Best Picture -- Thank God

I understand your "Thank God" reaction. It's hard to think that films like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Les Miserables, and American Sniper would have made the cut if the Academy still had their five film cap over the last few years.

The ten-nomination stunt happened the year following the resentment over Slumdog Millionaire being "the closest thing we had" to a Best Picture, while there was such non-suspense that Wall-E was going to pick up its annual Best Animated Feature, it was practically an insult to the winner and the other BAF nominees.
One reason was the continuing campaign to actually get a nice, populist Pixar movie ushered into the big-league nominations, and the other was all the fans disgruntled that Dark Knight wasn't hailed as the Best Picture Ever Made in The History Of Like, Ever. (Look, you only saw it because of Heath Ledger, and he got it, whaddya want?) Most of the latter folk eventually became the fans hounding the Oscars about the Lego Movie last year, and demanding that The Muppets win Best Song the year before that.
Ten nominations was supposed to create more room for "Films we've heard of", and ended up having the ultimate opposite effect--Shortened voting periods and desperation for filler eventually turned the Picture nomination into something that was automatically tacked on to a Best Acting lock to make it look better, which means, ironically, Dark Knight probably would have gotten up there in a ten-nomination year, and that's not meant as a compliment.

As for Pixar, we did finally manage to get Up symbolically nominated, and then an actual deserving voter push for Toy Story 3 the year after. (And then Pixar had their brief crappy phase with Cars 2 and Brave.)
Now that we're back to the good sense of five well-established populist/critic big-studio movies again, what's the next step?
Well, they say that even with five majors, it may be a tight contest between Inside Out and Straight Outta Compton...What's YOUR bet?

(Then again, black hosts does make it feel like they're doing a "tribute" show to the winner when they think there's no suspense, like with the Hero theme for the show the year "everyone knew" 12 Years a Slave was going to win...Could be bad news.)

Next year's Oscars will have two hosts-- The baseless suggestion in the article of Key and Peele hosting would actually be brilliant, and a much better way to integrate minority voices into the broadcast than this year's embarrassing trotting out of token actors. And we'd actually have hosts who are funny, which would be a nice change of pace of late

I knew it. I KNEW it. I had it called on Monday morning last year.
Every time the awards show "disappoints", they think they have to go with a "new, edgy" host to give us, as the last time they paired hosts said, "We're the Young, Hip Oscars!"
(I even predicted they'd make another try at a black host, despite the fact that Chris Rock didn't seem to know any movies, except for black jokes about what hit movies crazy white people were going to see.)

And even after the above thank-God revelation that they should go back to five nominations, they couldn't let go of their old default scapegoat:
Sheesh, they looked over the edge of the cliff, they finally figured it out, and then they still thought the host and a younger audience was the problem??

And after Neil, Seth, and Ellen's second gig, we can establish three Don't rules for future hosts:
1) Neil: This isn't the Tonys, and they're not as self-effacingly love-hate about what they do. Cut down on the shmoozing snark, and try to act like you actually LIKE movies.
2) Seth: Forget the TV audience. (We, after all, have already forgotten you.) The only laughter, or lack thereof, will come from the live folks sitting in the seats waiting to get their moment onstage, and, like Chris Rock and Jon Stewart before you, you will find no love joking about how long and annoying the show is running. If you really don't like being there that much, you are free to leave, we can find a replacement. (Oh, and you had Sally Field there--at the Oscars--and you considered a Flying Nun joke as pop-culture edgy? Seriously?)
3) Ellen: Okay, schmoozing with the actors is good. But this isn't "The Cradle Will Rock", and we did pay to see someone ON stage once in a while.

[movielocke]

The ten-nomination stunt happened the year following the resentment over Slumdog Millionaire being "the closest thing we had" to a Best Picture, while there was such non-suspense that Wall-E was going to pick up its annual Best Animated Feature, it was practically an insult to the winner and the other BAF nominees.
One reason was the continuing campaign to actually get a nice, populist Pixar movie ushered into the big-league nominations, and the other was all the fans disgruntled that Dark Knight wasn't hailed as the Best Picture Ever Made in The History Of Like, Ever. (Look, you only saw it because of Heath Ledger, and he got it, whaddya want?) Most of the latter folk eventually became the fans hounding the Oscars about the Lego Movie last year, and demanding that The Muppets win Best Song the year before that.
Ten nominations was supposed to create more room for "Films we've heard of", and ended up having the ultimate opposite effect--Shortened voting periods and desperation for filler eventually turned the Picture nomination into something that was automatically tacked on to a Best Acting lock to make it look better, which means, ironically, Dark Knight probably would have gotten up there in a ten-nomination year, and that's not meant as a compliment.

As for Pixar, we did finally manage to get Up symbolically nominated, and then an actual deserving voter push for Toy Story 3 the year after. (And then Pixar had their brief crappy phase with Cars 2 and Brave.)
.

Firstly, "slum dog millionaire" was beloved in its year, no one was upset about that at the time, naturally it's received the boring archetypal backlash after the fact. So cliche. Yes, Journalists were upset about "dark knight" nor "wall*e" not making the cut over annual generic awards bait like "the reader". But the decision to go to ten was made later that year not because of the whining of awards bloggers but for probably far more mundane hubris and ignorance reasons.

That summer, the academy ended their decade long "great to be nominated" repertory series and instead ran a 1939 greatest year ever series in which they screened all the best picture nominees. In the second or third week, the academy president got up and made an impromptu speech about 'how amazing it was, ten films, all so great blah blah blah diversity' to huge applause and general acclaim. and a week later the academy shocked everyone with the out of the blue announcement of returning to ten nominees. I think the idea for them was that ten nominees solved all their problems by throwing open the doors to the snubbed films and genres and regain the magic of yore.

As for animated films, they changed the rules from ten nominees to 5-10 nominees because of the Animation bloc voting at the nomination phase. Because animation is segregated from the rest of the film community their nominating ballots were self referential, given more than 1/11 of the academy is animation if the branch was naturally using bloc voting in their best picture ballot they were guaranteeing an animated film would be nominated every year. The solution was the percent rule, since animators vote their own film first and their friends films second third and forth, it is very unlikely all the animators working for dream works et al will nominate a Pixar film as their number one over voting for themselves. So the percent rule breaks up the bloc. It just so happened the first two years were the very worthy "up" and the very decent "toy story three" but the Academy very much did not want an animated film nominated every year and put a kibosh on that.

As a happy side effect it also limited Weinsteins successful and widely imitated strategy of chasing twos and threes. He would get his awards pablum nominated by convincing people to do him a favor with a meaningless (to them) two or three vote on their nominating ballot, but of course he wouldn't think of asking them to change their number one vote from their favorite! As a result his style of awards pablum was always getting nominated, chocolat, cider house rules etc because he knew how to secure placement in the race. By forcing the percent rule change they effectively killed the main reason this strategy is successful, it's still an important component but it's no longer a guarantee to get your "frost Nixon" or "milk" or "reader" genre of films automatically nominated.

[EricJ]

The ten-nomination stunt happened the year following the resentment over Slumdog Millionaire being "the closest thing we had" to a Best Picture, while there was such non-suspense that Wall-E was going to pick up its annual Best Animated Feature, it was practically an insult to the winner and the other BAF nominees.

As for animated films, they changed the rules from ten nominees to 5-10 nominees because of the Animation bloc voting at the nomination phase. Because animation is segregated from the rest of the film community their nominating ballots were self referential, given more than 1/11 of the academy is animation if the branch was naturally using bloc voting in their best picture ballot they were guaranteeing an animated film would be nominated every year. The solution was the percent rule, since animators vote their own film first and their friends films second third and forth, it is very unlikely all the animators working for dream works et al will nominate a Pixar film as their number one over voting for themselves. So the percent rule breaks up the bloc. It just so happened the first two years were the very worthy "up" and the very decent "toy story three" but the Academy very much did not want an animated film nominated every year and put a kibosh on that.

The animation issue goes back farther than that:
All the hoo-hah over Beauty & the Beast's nomination in '91 had basically been out of desperation, as the buzz started in October/November before JFK and Bugsy had their late-December openings, and since analysts were cynically convinced "nobody would remember" Silence of the Lambs from February, columnists were doing their usual August-October act of crying "What do we even have to nominate?" And after the NYFF "work-in-progress" showing of B&B had wowed the critics, it sort of hit the button with adult audiences wanting to put some "important" validation on finding they liked the 90's Disney Renaissance after Little Mermaid. (There was such stigma in the late 80's about how the world would see you if you admitted you were an adult who liked Disney movies back then, you see.) Grownup fans so gushed over the fact that they wouldn't be laughed at for saying good things about a Disney movie in public, they insisted on seeing a second nomination happen at all costs. There was a small blogger push for Aladdin, and a big, BIG push for Lion King, there was that whole mid-90's stretch of Alan Menken picking up his annual Best Song...and then Toy Story 2 came out. You should know what happened after that. Although, in between, it was fans bugging the Academy to also recognize Chicken Run in '00 that was the camel's-straw that finally brought the Academy's BAF kibosh down as the new separate category to sweep them away into.
That said, it would still take something big at the moment--on the level of King's Speech vs. Toy Story 3--to stop Inside Out's momentum at this point. The hold it's got on its viewers right now is deservedly something scary.

As a happy side effect it also limited Weinsteins successful and widely imitated strategy of chasing twos and threes. He would get his awards pablum nominated by convincing people to do him a favor with a meaningless (to them) two or three vote on their nominating ballot, but of course he wouldn't think of asking them to change their number one vote from their favorite! As a result his style of awards pablum was always getting nominated, chocolat, cider house rules etc because he knew how to secure placement in the race. By forcing the percent rule change they effectively killed the main reason this strategy is successful, it's still an important component but it's no longer a guarantee to get your "frost Nixon" or "milk" or "reader" genre of films automatically nominated.

Also, the voting period was shortened by a month, to deliberately give the Weinsteins less time to drown voters in annual-pablum FYC mailings for The Reader, The Shipping News, My Week With Marilyn, etc.--Which had the unfortunate side effect of giving already busy voters one less month to screen possibilities and think back on worthy nominees.
As a result, the ten nominees started becoming identical to the award-bloggers' last-minute blind/buzz/rumor/name-pedigree guesses of "I heard this got good reviews!", and "The studio said District 9 would get Oscar buzz!", "Scorsese's directing DiCaprio?--No suspense!", and "Tarantino's sure to be nominated for Inglorious Basterds/Django!"
The NBOR and regional Critics' Circle awards had an infamous reputation for being paranoid of the "mainstream" Oscars and thinking only big-studio Hollywood movies like American Sniper and Wolf of Wall Street would be nominated, and went out of their way to recognize the arthouse entries like Her or A Serious Man. Usually, the arthouse NBOR consensus favorite would end up being what Oscar fans called the second-place "Sucker bet" on five nominations (like the people who were convinced that Mystic River would out-sweep Return of the King because it was so much more "important", or that The Piano was so much more "critically praised" than Schindler's List), but since there were no mainstream front-runners, desperate voters just started letting the end-of-the-year critics-lists write the nominations for them, which snowballed into the "Ten Best Movies You Never Saw" we got last year. Also, again, it started being assumed that a great performance made a film Best, so if The Imitation Game happened to get a Best Actor performance and a Best Supporting Actress, or Whiplash had a BSA lock, well, there ya go.

And in terms of ceremony TV ratings, when NOBODY tuned in to watch Birdman and Boyhood battle it out, it may have finally dawned on the committee heads that there might be a problem, and maybe 1939 was a long time ago, when everything Louis B. Mayer made was mainstream.
(Which leads one to suspect that the 1939 festival may have been a deliberate propaganda stunt for the post-Wall*E/Dark Knight change they were planning anyway.)

[mfunk9786]

After the Academy's swinging and missing year in and year out, it looks like Chris Rock is hosting the Oscars again

[lacritfan]

Gena Rowlands, Debbie Reynolds and Spike Lee received honorary Oscars at Governors Awards last night.

[eerik]

You can support the Oscar campaign for Finland's entry in the foreign language category, Klaus Häro's The Fencer, on IndieGoGo.

[hearthesilence]

The BFI just released the results of their annual critics' poll in Sight & Sound.

The top ten:

1. The Assassin (38 votes)
2. Carol (35)
3. Mad Max Fury Road (33)
4. Arabian Nights (23)
5. Cemetery of Splendour (18)
6. No Home Movie (17)
7. 45 Years (16)
8. Son of Saul (14)
9. Amy (13)
10. Inherent Vice (12)

[Jeff]

Cahiers du cinéma’s Top 10 Films of 2015:

1. Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti)
2. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
3. In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel)
4. The Smell of Us (Larry Clark)
5. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
6. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso)
7. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
8. Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes)
9. The Summer of Sangaile (Alante Kavaite)
10. Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

[domino harvey]

Variety's write up on the Clark film... I really have no connection or understanding of the latest crew at Cahiers

[lacritfan]

Film Independent Spirit Awards Nominees

[Trees]

Should be quite a potential battle for Best Cinematography between Lubezki and Lee Ping-Bin, who shot "The Assassin"... assuming Lee is nominated by his fellow cinematographers. I also have noticed over the years that general Academy voters, who actually vote to award the statuette for Best Cinematography, sometimes seem to conflate art design and costumes with "cinematography" (as was the case, for example, IMO, with "Memoirs of a Geisha"), so this might also help "The Assassin's" Lee to take on Lubezki, who stands to become the first DP in history to win three Oscars back to back.

[zedz]

Should be quite a potential battle for Best Cinematography between Lubezki and Lee Ping-Bin, who shot "The Assassin"... assuming Lee is nominated by his fellow cinematographers. I also have noticed over the years that general Academy voters, who actually vote to award the statuette for Best Cinematography, sometimes seem to conflate art design and costumes with "cinematography" (as was the case, for example, IMO, with "Memoirs of a Geisha"), so this might also help "The Assassin's" Lee to take on Lubezki, who stands to become the first DP in history to win three Oscars back to back.

You seriously think The Assassin has any shot at a major Oscar? You're far more optimistic than me! It's not as if the nominations are determined on objective merit.

[flyonthewall2983]

Roger Deakins' work on Sicario should certainly be considered a major contender at least.

[domino harvey]

All three are likely noms, only one (hint: you're in its thread right now) a likely winner however

* I ruined Domino's hint by moving this from The Revenant's thread. -- Jeff

[Jeff]

As beautiful as The Assassin is, it doesn't stand much of a chance of getting a nomination in any category -- even cinematography -- and it wouldn't even if there were ten nominees. Yes, the cinematographer's branch does the nominating, but even they tend to look within their own guilds and narrow their choices to contenders in the other categories. They're frequently more adventurous than other branches, and had a great lineup last year, but I suspect only a handful of them have actually watched The Assassin. As zedz pointed out, merit actually has very little to do with the Academy Awards.

If Lubezki has any competition (and he probably doesn't), it's from A.S.C. and Academy favorite Robert Richardson for reviving Ultra Panavision 70. Deakins will surely be in as the sentimental favorite. Best Picture contenders like The Martian, Brooklyn, Carol or Bridge of Spies are likely to round out the category, while spectacle films like Mad Max and The Force Awakens have an outside shout. Luca Bigazzi would be a longshot for Youth too.

[swo17]

Ida and The Grandmaster did get nominated the last two years, so there is some precedent for high profile foreign arthouse films eking out a spot.

[Ribs]

Not this year, I think - Hateful Eight isn't even a safe bet for a nod in cinematography this year when it's probably the one that should end up winning.

[Kirkinson]

If Lubezki has any competition (and he probably doesn't), it's from A.S.C. and Academy favorite Robert Richardson for reviving Ultra Panavision 70. Deakins will surely be in as the sentimental favorite. Best Picture contenders like The Martian, Brooklyn, Carol or Bridge of Spies are likely to round out the category...

I hadn't considered until now how easily this could happen, but it would be kind of funny if we ended up with one nominee shot in Ultra Panavision 70 and another shot on Super 16, especially if the other three noms were all shot digitally.

[Cremildo]

objective merit.

As if such thing existed when voting an award for a movie.