ScottFeinberg.com

A lot has happened over the last year or so for the young actress Rooney Mara, who I interviewed by phone earlier this week. (You can tune in to the audio of our conversation at the top of this post.)

Click to read more…

By Ryan Bushey

Sex sells.  Three-ways and graphic sex should too as Fox Searchlight begins the campaign for Shame opening in limited release this Friday. The powerhouse of an indie distributor and marketer, Searchlight will be juggling three prominent awards campaigns this season for three very different movies but will be focusing on one.

Click to read more…

50 gala and special presentation screenings for the 36th annual Toronto International Film Festival — the annual awards season kick-off, which will run this year from September 8 through the 18 (and receive full on-the-ground coverage from this site) — were announced earlier today.

As Jeff Wells notes, it’s somewhat surprising that “Carnage” (Sony Pictures Classics, ?/?, ?, ?) and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (Focus Features, ?/?, ?, trailer) — both of which will be playing at the Venice Film Festival, which overlaps with Toronto — are not among them. Still, the list includes plenty of riches, based on everything that I’ve seen and heard, thus far, and I just hope that there are enough hours in each day that I’m at the fest to see all of the films that I’d like to see.

At the moment, I’m most looking forward to these 25…

Read the rest of this entry »

At Sunday night’s 83rd Academy Awards, “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” will compete for the best picture Oscar, which will be the last of 24 to be presented. Though “The King’s Speech” is the clear favorite to win, there are still a few reasons to believe that “The Social Network” could pull off an upset, so it will be a nerve-wracking night for a lot of us who feel we have something riding on the outcome. There may, however, be a semi-reliable way to gauge the likely outcome earlier in the evening.

In addition to best picture, “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” will also be competing against each in six other categories that will be presented first: best director, best actor, best cinematography, best film editing, best original score, and best sound mixing. There’s no guarantee that one or the other will win in each of those categories, or that, if that happens, those wins will in any way correspond with the winner of the best picture category (which is the only one determined by a preferential balloting system), but it might offer us some early clues about how passionately voters feel — or don’t feel — about each of the films.

Here’s a quick primer for those six categories…

Read the rest of this entry »

Question: At this point, it seems more likely than not that three of this year’s best picture Oscar nominees — “127 Hours,” “The Kids Are All Right,” and “Winter’s Bone” — will go without an Oscar win in any category on the night of February 27. What were the last five best picture nominees to do the same?

Prize: The first person to correctly answer this question in the comments section below will win the soundtrack to “Get Low,” composed by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek. (Be sure to provide your email address so that we can contact you for your mailing address in the event that you win!)

CONTEST OVER: The first person to identify “Frost/Nixon” (2008), “An Education” (2009), “District 9” (2009), “A Serious Man” (2009), and “Up in the Air” (2009) was Lucas, who will be contacted shortly — congratulations!

Read the rest of this entry »

• Gold Derby: Tariq Khan provides five reasons why he thinks “The King’s Speech” can still beat “The Social Network” to win the best picture Oscar. He suggests: (1) It will lead the field in nominations, as have 75% of the films that went on to win best picture over the past 40 years have; (2) It will do especially well with actors, who comprise the largest branch of the Academy; (3) It will win the SAG Award for best ensemble, as did fellow long-shot best picture hopefuls “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) and “Crash” (2005) en route to their wins; (4) It will be helped by the preferential ballot because it will register highly — even if not first — on most ballots; and (5) It will get a boost because it is now regarded as the underdog. (How he can assert any of these things with such confidence is beyond me. I know that the bookies in Las Vegas sure aren’t buying into his argument at the moment.)

• Entertainment Weekly: Owen Gleiberman, one of the magazine’s film critics, begs to differ with his fellow EW staff member Dave Karger, with Khan, and with all others who are still betting against “The Social Network,” penning a piece entitled, “Here’s Why ‘The King’s Speech’ (As Good As It Is) Won’t Win Best Picture” in which he suggests — as others have long suggested — that the zeitgeist will be the decisive factor. (“The movie that ends up winning the Academy Award for best picture often taps into and gives voice to something that’s happening in the culture at large.”) He writes, “‘The King’s Speech’ is a movie that very much tries to speak to our time… [and] by the time it gets to ‘the king’s speech’ has become an allegory for the age of Barack Obama… [it] seems to have been timed for how a lot of people felt about Obama during the days when he was running for president… a story in America that no longer links up to where a great many people stand (even those of us who still support Obama avidly).”

• Yahoo! Movies: Will Leitch wonders why the team behind “The Social Network” is suddenly going out of its way to be nice to the subject of their film, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After winning the best screenplay Golden Globe, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said, “I wanted to say to Mark Zuckerberg, if you’re watching tonight, Rooney Mara’s character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie, and she was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary and an altruist.” After winning the best picture (drama) Golden Globe, producer Scott Rudin said, “I want to thank everybody at Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story about communication and the way we relate to each other.” And another producer of the film, Dana Brunetti, Tweeted a photo of himself arm-in-arm on the red carpet with none other than Randi Zuckerberg, Mark’s older sister and Facebook’s marketing director. So… what brought about all of this “friending”?

• The Film Experience: Nathaniel Rogers, the leading authority on foreign language films in the Oscar blogosphere, breaks the down the Academy’s recently announced short-list of nine films from which five nominees will ultimately be selected. The finalists are Algeria (“Outside the Law”), Canada (“Incendies”), Denmark (Golden Globe winner “In a Better World”), Greece (“Dogtooth”), Japan (“Confessions”), Mexico (“Biutiful”), South Africa (“Life Above All”), Spain (“Even the Rain”), and Sweden (“Simple Simon”). Rogers notes the surprise inclusions of the Greek and Japanese films, the noteworthy snubs the entries from France (“Of Gods and Men”) and   Thailand (“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”), the unusual presence of star power among the nominees (including Javier Bardem in “Biutiful” and Gael Garcia Bernal in “Even the Rain”), and his predictions for the final five (Algeria, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, and South Africa).

• UPI: An unattributed report, citing statistics compiled by the Rentrak tracking service, indicates that “The Social Network,” which was released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 11, was the top-selling and top-rented title of the week ending on January 16.

• The Hollywood Reporter: Pamela McClintock reports that Fox Searchlight has planned “a big return” for its awards hopeful “127 Hours,” which has grossed only $11.1 million to date and is now playing in only 76 theaters. The studio is apparently hoping to “take advantage of expected attention from the Oscars” by re-releasing it in over 600 locations the week after nominations are announced. (They mounted a similar theatrical comeback for “The Last King of Scotland” in 2006, which resulted in $14 million more in ticket sales.)

• The Rest Is Noise: Alex Ross, the esteemed music critic for the New Yorker, hails “two recent movie scores that I particularly liked,” the one by Hans Zimmer for “Inception” (“with its colossal augmentation of Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’”) and the one by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for “The Social Network” (“which does a stealthy job of dictating the mood of the film”), both of which are serious contenders for best original score Oscar nominations.

• The Awl: Richard Rushfield, who was the editor of the entertainment section at the Los Angeles Times when I wrote a blog for their Web site, pens a rather contrarian op-ed about “The Social Network” in which he describes the film as “a pack of lies that conveys nothing about our time.” He acknowledges that it is “a finely crafted work” and that “the acting is impeccable, the dialogue is zippy and zings along,” but alleges, “The jilted love affair that drives Mark Zuckerberg to create Facebook is invented. The resentment against the Harvard elite clubs that drives him to create an alternate society is invented. The claims of others involved in the creation of Facebook are given vastly too much credence in the film. [And] Zuckerberg is portrayed as an angry, vengeful sociopath, which by most accounts and all appearances, he is not.” (There are numerous people, however, who would dispute each of his allegations. For starters, Google the name Jessica Alona.)

Photo: Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” Credit: Columbia.

• iTunes Movie Trailers: Focus Features finally releases a clip of Julianne Moore’s show-stopping soliloquoy about marriage in “The Kids Are All Right” — and, as a fan of Moore’s, I’m furious. This should have been done months ago when it really could have made a difference, not five days before Oscar nomination ballots are due. At this point, virtually all of the heat for the film has been guided towards Moore’s co-star Annette Bening, and it seems doubtful that Moore’s prospects can be salvaged by anything.

• The Facebook Effect: Today, several awards bloggers, including yours truly, received a copy of “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World,” David Kirkpatrick’s authorized history of Facebook, from a prominent PR firm that is promoting its paperback release on February 1. The timing of this delivery struck some of us as a little strange, as did a marking on the book (“The Real Story Behind ‘The Social Network’”) and several passages in a letter that accompanied it (“So you think you know the real story of how Facebook was created? There is that nice film out there with a great script by Aaron Sorkin, but unfortunately that is just it, a script”). Representatives of films that are competing with “The Social Network” this awards season quickly and emphatically denied any advance knowledge of the mailing.

• Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells writes a tongue-in-cheek post comparing the growing number of awards pundists who have changed their best picture pick from “The King’s Speech” to “The Social Network” — including Pete Hammond, Steve Pond, and Kris Tapley — to the characters in the classic film “12 Angry Men” (1957), in which one lone juror (Henry Fonda) is slowly but surely joined on his side of an issue by all of the others. According to Jeff’s parallel, the three people who declared “The Social Network” to be the frontrunner months ago and have stuck with it (he, Sasha Stone, and me) are the Fonda character, whereas the few remaining holdouts for “The King’s Speech” (Dave Karger, Tom O’Neil, David Poland, and Anne Thompson) are other character actors from the film. (Not surprisingly, he reserves “big mouth” Lee J. Cobb for his longtime nemesis Poland).

• The Race: Pamela McClintock observes that “there has been a disturbing dissonance between Oscar voters and movie-goers when it comes to top nominations” in recent years — “many of the best picture nominees just never caught on at the box office” — but this year “it’s the opposite as moviegoers are wholeheartedly embracing a number of awards darlings.” Among the major films on which moviegoers and critics have agreed, and on which the Academy is likely to agree: “Black Swan,” “The Fighter,” “Inception,” “The King’s Speech,” “The Social Network,” “True Grit,” and “Winter’s Bone.”

• Los Angeles Times: Rebecca Keegan comments on “the evolution of dumbed-down female characters into ones that save the day with smarts and courage,” as well as “the growing influence of women in the film industry,” as demonstrated by the parts played by the teenage actresses Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter’s Bone,” Chloe Moretz in “Kick-Ass,” and Hailee Steinfeld in “True Grit,” among others.

• Variety: Steve Chagollan passes along the five films that were nominated on Monday by the American Society of Cinematographers for the ASC Award for best cinematography of a feature film: “Black Swan” (Matthew Libatique), “Inception” (Wally Pfister), “The King’s Speech” (Danny Cohen), “The Social Network” (Jeff Cronenweth), and “True Grit” (Roger Deakins). This is the first career ASC nod for Libatique, Cohen, and Cronenweth; the third for Pfister; and the ninth for Deakins (who has won this category twice). Chagollan notes that “over the last 10 years, the winners of the ASC and the Oscar d.p. kudos have overlapped four times.”

• The Hollywood Reporter: Gregg Kilday notes that “The Social Network” completed its utter dominance of the awards circuit this season by winning best picture honors at Saturday’s National Society of Film Critics gathering in New York. The film, which was similarly recognized by the National Board of Review, New York Film Critics Circle, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association, also received recognition in several other categories: David Fincher won best director, Jesse Eisenberg won best actor, and Aaron Sorkin won best screenplay. Other major honors went to Giovanna Mezzogiorno (“Vincere”), who was named best actress; Geoffrey Rush (“The King’s Speech”), who was named best supporting actor; and Olivia Williams (“The Ghost Writer”), who was named best supporting actress.

• The Envelope: Rebecca Keegan offers a recap of Saturday night’s Palm Springs International Film Festival’s 22nd annual awards gala, which she describes as Hollywood’s “first dress rehearsal of the awards season. The honorees included several top Oscar contenders: Ben Affleck (“The Town”), Javier Bardem (“Biutiful”), Robert Duvall (“Get Low”), Colin Firth (“The King’s Speech”), James Franco (“127 Hours”), Andrew Garfield (“The Social Network”), Natalie Portman (“Black Swan”), and Mark Wahlberg (“The Fighter”).

• New York Daily News: Soraya Roberts writes up and passes along a clip of a sketch from Saturday night’s “Saturday Night Live” in which the host, “I Love You Phillip Morris” best actor hopeful Jim Carrey, played the Mila Kunis character (to Bill Hader’s Vincent Cassell and Nasim Pedrad’s Natalie Portman) in a skit parodying “Black Swan.” Though only sporadically funny, the sketch really hammers home the degree to which Darren Aronofsky’s little indie has managed to crack into the mainstream conversation.

Photo: Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in “The Kids Are All Right.” Credit: Focus Features.

“Deep Vote,” an Oscar winning screenwriter and a member of the Academy, will write this column — exclusively for ScottFeinberg.com — every week until the Academy Awards in order to help to peel back the curtain on the Oscar voting process. His identity must be protected in order to spare him from repercussions for disclosing the aforementioned information.

Thus far, he has shared his thoughts in column one about his general preferences; column two about “Winter’s Bone” (Roadside Attractions, 6/11, R, trailer) and “Solitary Man” (Anchor Bay Films, 5/21, R, trailer); column three about “Alice in Wonderland” (Disney, 3/5, PG, trailer), “Toy Story 3” (Disney, 6/18, G, trailer), and “Mother and Child” (Sony Pictures Classics, 5/7, R, trailer); column four about “Get Low” (Sony Pictures Classics, 7/30, PG-13, trailer), “The Kids Are All Right” (Focus Features, 7/9, R, trailer), and “The Social Network” (Columbia, 10/1, PG-13, trailer); column five about “127 Hours” (Fox Searchlight, 11/5, R, trailer), “Biutiful” (Roadside Attractions, 12/17, R, trailer), and “Shutter Island” (Paramount, 2/19, R, trailer); column six about “Inception” (Warner Brothers, 7/16, PG-13, trailer), “Made in Dagenham” (Sony Pictures Classics, 11/19, R, trailer), and “Somewhere” (Focus Features, 12/22, R, trailer); column seven about “Another Year” (Sony Pictures Classics, 12/29, PG-13, trailer), “Fair Game” (Summit, 11/5, PG-13, trailer), and “Rabbit Hole” (Lionsgate, 12/17, PG-13, trailer); column eight about “Blue Valentine” (The Weinstein Company, 12/29, R, trailer), “The Fighter” (Paramount, 12/10, R, trailer), and “True Grit” (Paramount, 12/22, PG-13, trailer); column nine about “The Ghost Writer” (Summit, 2/19, PG-13, trailer), “The King’s Speech” (The Weinstein Company, 11/26, R, trailer), and “The Town” (Warner Brothers, 9/17, R, trailer); and column ten about “Black Swan” (Fox Searchlight, 12/3, R, trailer), “Conviction” (Fox Searchlight, 10/15, R, trailer), and “I Am Love” (Magnolia, 6/18, R, trailer).

This week, he saw three more contenders (about which he will write next week) — “All Good Things” (Magnolia, 12/3, R, trailer), “Animal Kingdom” (Sony Pictures Classics, 8/13, R, trailer), and “The Way Back” (Newmarket, 12/29, PG-13, trailer) — and shares with us the films that he has listed on his Oscar nominations ballots (in order of preference, as is required). As a member of the writing branch of the Academy, he is eligible to vote in the best picture, best adapted screenplay, and best original screenplay categories during this phase (but opted not vote for the maximum number of films in any of those categories). Here are his selections, along with a bit of commentary explaining each of them…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, the Directors Guild of America will announce its five nominees for the 2010 DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film. I believe that they will be (in alphabetical order)…

Read the rest of this entry »

• Screen Daily: Wendy Mitchell breaks down the results of the first round of voting for the BAFTA Awards. The organization’s 6,300 members selected — or “longlisted” — 15 nominees in 17 different categories, from which they will ultimately select their final nominees (to be announced on January 18). At this stage, the home-grown period piece “The King’s Speech” and the American indie “Black Swan” lead the field with 15 mentions. (Voters were so fond of the former that they even included it among the contenders for best special effects, which begs the question… what special effects?!) Mitchell notes that double-mentions were awarded to Leonardo DiCaprio in lead actor for “Inception” and “Shutter Island”; Gemma Arterton in lead actress for “Tamara Drewe” and “The Disappearance of Alice Creed”; Andrew Garfield in supporting actor for “Never Let Me Go” and “The Social Network”; and Rosamund Pike in lead actress for “Barney’s Version” and supporting actress for “Made in Dagenham.” Meanwhile, newcomer Hailee Steinfeld (“True Grit”) showed up in lead actress (as opposed to supporting actress, the category in which her studio had been pushing her), while veteran Lesley Manville (“Another Year”) registered in supporting actress (as opposed to lead actress, the category in which her studio had been pushing her). Finally, Pete Postlethwaite (“The Town”), who passed away earlier this week, earned a best supporting actor mention, one of 11 for his film.

• Company Town: Ben Fritz writes that “the Hollywood awards screener is finally catching up with the digital age,” as Fox Searchlight becomes the first studio to make some of its films available to awards voters as free downloads off of Apple’s iTunes. (The nearly 100,000 voting members of the Screen Actors Guild will be provided with a special code that will enable them to access “127 Hours,” “Black Swan,” and “Conviction” as often as they’d like through the end of SAG voting.) The move, Fritz notes, “could mark the first step in an industry-wide shift toward making digital copies of movies available to voters for all awards, eventually ending the costly, time-honored practice of producing and sending physical copies of their DVDs.” According to the piece, Fox co-chairman Jim Gianopulos “said his studio is also in talks with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose members vote for the Oscars, and with the British Film Academy, about making iTunes downloads available to their voters as well.”

• Rope of Silicon: Brad Brevet passes along “the complete set of marketing images” that Disney has been using to promote the best picture candidacy of “Toy Story 3” in the Hollywood trade papers. The campaign features stills of the animated film accompanied by text that says, “Not since [X]…” with X being the title of one of a several other films — “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935), “On the Waterfront” (1954), “The Sound of Music” (1965), “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), “The French Connection” (1971), “The Sting” (1973), “The Godfather, Part II” (1974), “Rocky” (1976), “Annie Hall” (1977), “Platoon” (1986), “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), “Titanic” (1997), “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “American Beauty” (1999), “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003), and “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) — each of which was a somewhat unlikely best picture Oscar winner (at least according to historical precedent), as “Toy Story 3″ certainly would be, as well. No animated film has ever won the top prize.

• Inside TV: Christian Blauvelt reports that “the dream James Lipton has pursued for 17 years has finally come true,” as actor Jim Carrey recently consented to be interviewed by Lipton for “Inside the Actor’s Studio” after holding out for many years because — believe it or not — he’s actually “extremely shy,” at least according to Lipton. The episode will air on Monday night at 8pm EST on Bravo. (Carrey, who is promoting the raucous new comedy “I Love You Phillip Morris,” in which he plays a gay con-artist, will also be hosting “Saturday Night Live” this weekend. According to PopWatch writer Margaret Lyons, “This is Carrey’s second time hosting. The first was way back in 1996 — back when Norm MacDonald was doing Bob Dole and Carrey was promoting ‘The Cable Guy.’”)

• The Race: Tim Appelo notes that the up-and-coming actor Andrew Garfield “makes a point of never seeing the movies he stars in” — he fears that doing so will make him more self-conscious in front of the camera — “but at Thursday’s Spago [DVD release] party for ‘The Social Network’… Garfield said that even Spider-Man [the iconic role that he is inheriting from Tobey Maguire] is not strong enough to resist peer pressure from the makers of ‘The Social Network.’” “They made me watch that one,” he confessed to Appelo.

• AMPAS: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shares the news that “10 scientific and technical achievements represented by 22 individual award recipients will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation” on February 12, noting that “unlike other Academy Awards to be presented this year, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during 2010.  Rather, the achievements must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures.” This year’s honorees are being recognized for a wide variety of accomplishments — among them, the “development of influential facial motion retargeting solutions,” “the development of the Cablecam 3-D volumetric suspended cable camera technologies,” and “the software design and continued development of cineSync, a tool for remote collaboration and review of visual effects.”

Photo: Helena Bonham Carter in “The King’s Speech.” Credit: The Weinstein Company.