Sponsor
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
MOVIE NEWS
Oscar Eye: Predicting The Odds For Carnage, 50/50 And Moneyball
Author: Katey Rich | published: 2011-09-29 13:38:47
At this very early point in a very long Oscar race, buzz can be especially tricky, mostly because there's so little of it. Especially for the people who run sites that write daily about the awards race, there's a temptation to make trends out of thin air or talk in circles, like claiming the Gone With The Wind-esque poster for Steven Spielberg's War Horse cause the movie to lose "a lot of heat", or in the Oscar roundtable I participate in at Awards Daily, hash out whether or not it was a good idea to go from 5 Best Picture nominees to 10 and then now to the sliding scale. With everything so early, and really no giant contenders due for another month, it feels a little like twiddling our thumbs.
But there's a lot happening, and that ephemeral buzz really is shifting, whether we can quantify it or not. Here are a few doings in the Oscar sphere in the last week worth keeping an eye on: -- I caught Carnage at the New York Film Festival and greatly enjoyed myself. It's a very straightforward adaptation of a play that takes place entirely in one apartment, and thus doesn't feel terribly cinematic, but director Roman Polanski does a good job moving the camera around in the space and emphasizing all four lead performances, which are uniformly terrific. It's hard to guess how this might shake out Oscar wise, but I think they could get a strong Supporting Actor campaign for Christoph Waltz, who is once again a great combination of villainy and charm. Jodie Foster is also really excellent as a hippy-dippy type committed to non-violence but with some rough tendencies of her own. The movie should get fairly strong reviews, but for some reason it doesn't seem like a Best Picture possibility the way, say, Doubt or Frost/Nixon did. It's cruel and funny and very short and maybe a little slight, but the performances carry it, and they seem like the best Oscar hope. -- Eric and I got together for a Great Debate, about this weekend's release 50/50 and the fact that it's a great movie that has a minimal shot at getting nominated for anything. This happens every year, with great, critically beloved movies getting ignored by the Academy, but every now and then something like There Will Be Blood gets in the race and suddenly you start getting hope again. I think 50/50 has a very good shot at a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and that they'd be smart to campaign hard for Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Best Actor, since that field is crowded but very flexible. Beyond that, though, it's too young-skewing, too funny and a little too vulgar to make the impact it ought to. -- Yesterday we got a look at the first trailer for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of the big late-season question marks that could become a huge contender when it opens on Christmas Day. While the trailer pulled heatrstrings and touted its big names exactly the way we could have expected, it did clear up a few things-- Tom Hanks is clearly playing a small supporting role as the dead father, Thomas Horn is being touted as a huge new talent along the lines of Jamie Bell in Billy Elliott, and with U2 playing in just the trailer, they're pulling out all the stops to make everybody love this. It'll be a long time before we get a look at the actual movie but Extremely Loud will very much be part of the conversation until then. --Thought it got beat out at the box office by Lion King, Moneyball opened last weekend to both good numbers and exceptionally strong reviews, which has a lot of people suddenly thinking it could be a much bigger Best Picture, and especially Best Actor, contender than we previously thought. There's still a long way to go on both, and Moneyball seems like exactly the kind of well-liked movie that can be easily forgotten as the season goes on, but it got a big boost over the weekend. Some are even predicting it might be #1 in its second weekend, which would give it even more staying power. -- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a huge hit in the UK, and with a lot of Academy voters being British, that means a lot. But a handful of critics have been seeing it here, and the response-- particularly on the In Contention Oscar Talk podcast-- is a little more muted and respectful than enthusiastic. Of course, something being a little dullsville and aimed at adults has never hurt a movie, but I do wonder if Tinker will wind up being buzzy enough to start getting in on its own merits, or if it will be in the conversation for the performances only. -- Earlier this week we premiered the new poster for Oranges & Sunshine, the new drama starring Emily Watson as a British social worker who uncovers a giant scandal in the adoption system. It's a small movie with grim subject matter, but Watson has managed two surprising nominations in the past for gritty work, and it seems silly to underestimate her. She's added to the charts below. And speaking of the charts, let's get on to them.  No real changes here, beyond the aforementioned new strength of Moneyball and the fact that War Horse still seems to be a giant gorilla waiting for us down the stretch. Aside from 50/50 and what I've already said about it, the next thing to keep an eye on here is The Ides of March, which seems to be me to be losing steam the closer it comes to its release date. We'll talk more about that next week, though. MORTAL LOCK LIKELY CONTENDER STILL IN THE RUNNING OUTSIDE CHANCE  No changes here again this week, but this category is looking stranger and stranger the more I think about it. Last year we had the exciting fact of two very good directors-- David O. Russell and Darren Aronofsky-- getting their first nominations, then seeing it all swiped out from under them by the new kid, Tom Hooper. There are even more new kids in the mix this time, from foreigners Hazanavicius and Alfredson to young bucks like Miller, Refn and, who knows, maybe even Sean Durkin. But I start getting the feeling that with so much fresh meat, a lot of the veterans are going to swoop in with their late season efforts-- it's nothing but a hunch, but I feel like a category that's all Spielberg, Fincher, Eastwood, Daldry and Scorsese is very possible, and very boring. MORTAL LOCK LIKELY CONTENDER STILL IN THE RUNNING OUTSIDE CHANCE  MORTAL LOCK LIKELY CONTENDER STILL IN THE RUNNING OUTSIDE CHANCE  MORTAL LOCK LIKELY CONTENDER STILL IN THE RUNNING OUTSIDE CHANCE  MORTAL LOCK LIKELY CONTENDER STILL IN THE RUNNING OUTSIDE CHANCE  MORTAL LOCK LIKELY CONTENDER STILL IN THE RUNNING OUTSIDE CHANCE  Back to top
|
 
Advertisement
     |
