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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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Most years, one can find almost all of the Best Picture hopefuls contained in both the Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay categories. With 10 slots overall, at least half of the nominees are always present, if not more. The two categories are not looked at equally, though, as the Adapted contenders are consistently considered the better Oscar bet than their Original counterparts.

That’s certainly the perception, but is it actually the Academy Awards reality? Do adapted screenplays really have an easier road to Oscar glory than Original ones? In order to try and answer this question in a way that has modern applications, I’m going to focus on solely the past 25 years. That way, we can keep it relevant and not have too unwieldy of a sample size.

When I went back and took a look at the last quarter-decade, I came up with some results that I think you’ll all find rather interesting. While neither black nor white, the statistics show a shade of grey that fits in with most other supposed “rules” of how Academy members vote.

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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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For a filmmaker, it’s rare to make a real impact with your debut feature. Most of the time, you begin your career with a calling-card movie or a work that doesn’t fully express your true talent. There are, however, certain instances when a director is able to wow audiences and leave his or her mark on the film world right from the get-go.

This year, we’ve seen Benh Zeitlin make his debut with a film that many absolutely love in Beasts of the Southern Wild. Zeitlin’s freshman feature has been mentioned as one of the top debuts by a filmmaker in some time, so that got me thinking: What are the 10 best of all time?

Of course, there’s some level of subjectivity to this kind of a list. If I were strictly going off of my personal favorite debuts, people such as Judd Apatow, Darren Aronofsky, Mel Brooks and Kevin Smith would be high up on my own Top 10. For the purposes of this list, though, I’m putting as much of my individual preference aside as possible. Below you’ll find 10 of the great directorial debuts of all time.

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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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Audiences and critics around the globe love a good comedy. Comedies make you feel good inside and provide you with some temporary happiness and respite from the troubles of the world at large. They’re some of the hardest movies to make, and they’re appreciated by almost everyone.

The lone holdouts? The voters of the Academy Awards.

Since 1977, when the Woody Allen comedy Annie Hall won Best Picture, exactly zero full-on comedies have won the Oscar. Yes, Allen’s film had dramedy elements to it, but it was far more of a comedy than last year’s winner, The Artist, which would probably be the closest thing we’ve had since then to a comedic winner. Others in that sort of hybrid realm include American Beauty, Driving Miss Daisy, Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Love and Terms of Endearment.

This year we have an unusually strong comedy contender in the David O. Russell film Silver Linings Playbook. Generally regarded as one of the five Best Picture hopefuls that can actually win the prize, it faces an uphill battle due to its humor, much as Les Miserables does with its low Rotten Tomatoes score (as I recently discussed here) and Argo does with its comparatively early release date.

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By Beck/Smith

With a string of high-profile movies on the way — including Summit Entertainment’s “Gone” thriller that opens Friday (2/24) — Wes Bentley has built up a wave of fresh career momentum.  He has a wife and a one-year-old son he adores at home.  He looks great.  Life is good.   It’s hard to believe that between 2002 and 2009, the actor who rocketed to fame with the 1999 “American Beauty” hit the depths of addiction — alcohol, cocaine, heroin.

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On Sunday evening, the Screen Actors Guild disclosed the recipients of its 18th annual SAG Awards, and in so doing revealed a lot about the likely outcome of several close Oscar races, as well.

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This past Monday, I spent a large chunk of the day and night in the company of Charlize Theron, the strikingly beautiful South African who won the best actress Oscar eight years ago and is now in the running for it again for her work in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, which opens nationwide Dec. 9.

I first met Theron, 36, at a Paramount-hosted luncheon for the film; hours later, we were seated together — with her Young Adult co-star Patton Oswalt between us — at the Gotham Awards, where she received a special career tribute; and, in between, we recorded the interview that appears at the top of this post. From these interactions, three things became pretty clear to me about Theron: First, she is every bit as attractive as she appears on the screen (she wore two eye-catchingly low-cut outfits); second, she is much cheekier than advertised (she has a bawdy sense of humor and is also not above whacking a journalist for taking notes instead of looking at the stage during an awards show); and, third, she is as proud of Young Adult as she has been of any film of which she’s been a part since she won her Oscar in 2004.

As we discuss in the above video…

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• 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.

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend about 20 minutes at the Loews Regency Hotel in New York with one of my favorite actors, Kevin Spacey, who had just flown in from London to do a few interviews about and attend a special screening of the new film “Casino Jack” (ATO Pictures, 12/17, R, trailer), a dramedy directed by the late George Hickenlooper in which he portrays the disgraced Washington, D.C. lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and for which he recently received a Golden Globe nod — the sixth of his career — for best actor (musical or comedy). Spacey was clearly exhausted and under the weather after his travels (he sipped on a bowl of matzo ball soup throughout our time together), but he still managed to give me a wonderful interview about his remarkable life and career, and for that I am very grateful.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO AUDIO OF OUR CONVERSATION!

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• The Envelope: Reed Johnson nabs a rare interview with best actress hopeful Annette Bening, one of the two female leads in “The Kids Are All Right,” as well as Lisa Cholodenko, the film’s co-screenwriter/director. Cholodenko says that when it came to casting the part of Nic — “who in many ways is the film’s dramatic fulcrum, just as she is her family’s emotional anchor — mostly for the better, though not without the usual quotient of occasional slammed doors and raised voices” — she thought of only Bening. Fortunately, it turned out that a mutual-admiration existed between the two — Cholodenko thought of Bening because of one particularly special scene of hers from “American Beauty” (1999), and Bening always remembered enjoying Cholodenko’s earlier film “Laurel Canyon” (2002).

• 24 Frames: Steven Zeitchik scans the newly-released slate of films that will play at January’s Sundance Film Festival, and points out some potential “critical darlings” for which we should probably keep an eye out. Among them are “Higher Ground,” the Oscar nominated actress Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut, and “Pariah,” a Bronx-set film that many are likening to last year’s Sundance breakout-hit “Precious.”

• The Odds: Steve Pond noted a little less than a month ago that director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his new film “Biutiful,” which stars Javier Bardem, has a lot of friends in high places — and the list has only grown since Pond posted his piece. Werner Herzog moderated a DGA Q&A with Inarritu in Los Angeles; Robert Benton moderated a DGA Q&A with Inarritu in New York; Sean Penn, who was overheard telling Josh Brolin that the film is a “fucking masterpiece,” will be moderating a Q&A with Inarritu and Bardem this coming Sunday in Los Angeles; Michael Mann will be hosting a private screening of the film at CAA on December 10; and Alfonso Cuaron will be hosting a csreening in London on December 13. Others who have publicly stated their support of the film include Ben Affleck, Guillermo Del Toro, and Julian Schnabel.

• The Film Stage: Jordan Raup passes along a letter from “Adaptation” (2002) director Spike Jonze to online film critic Peter Sciretta in which he emphasizes how much he loves David O. Russell’s “The Fighter.” Jonze wrote, “Hey Peter — Spike here. I’m writing on behalf of my friend David Russell, regarding his new movie The Fighter. Did you get a chance to see it yet? How insanely great is Christian Bale? Can you do me a favor and post this 2 minute trailer called ‘Pressure’ on your site? The trailer that they put out originally makes the film feel a little generic and I just want to help David get the word out. I got to see it a few weeks ago, and I loved it, and if all you saw is the trailer that’s out, you might not know that it’s as interesting and strong as it is. Thanks for your help! Spike”

• The Contenders: Brad Brevet has, through a variety of means, gathered the scripts of 23 of this year’s top awards contenders and posted them on his site for anyone who would like to read them. His most recent acquisitions? “I Love You Phillip Morris” and “Winter’s Bone.”

Photo: Mia Waskinowska, Lisa Cholodenko, and Julianne Moore on the set of “The Kids Are All Right.” Credit: Columbia University.

By John H. Foote, ScottFeinberg.com contributor

Chris Cooper might be our finest character actor… yet he spent his early adult years working on a ranch. After graduating college with double majors in agriculture and drama, he and his family worked the ranch — hard work — but he always knew he was going to give acting a try one day. When the economic meltdown of the seventies hit and devastated the farming industry, he packed up and headed for New York, where his work in regional theater eventually led to even better gigs.

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