ScottFeinberg.com

By Sean O’Connell

Ludovic Bource won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score on Sunday evening for his work on “The Artist.” It was his first win at the Globes.

His score triumphed over “W.E.” (Abel Korzeniowski), “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), “Hugo” (Howard Shore) and “War Horse” (John Williams).

Click to read more…

Voting was conducted Sunday afternoon to determine the honorees for the 37th annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, which will take plane Jan. 13 at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, and while no single film dominated the honors, one studio certainly did.

Click to read more…

By Sean O’Connell

Now that we’re weeks away from David Fincher’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” adaptation reaching theaters, the marketing campaign for what’s shaping up to be a visceral take on Stieg Larsson’s best-seller can kick into high gear.

Click to read more…

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: Which were the last performances by a man and by a woman to be rewarded with Oscars without first being recognized by any of the major critics/journalists awards? (I’m referring to the National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Broadcast Film Critics Association, and Hollywood Foreign Press Association.)

Prize: The first person to correctly answer this question in the comments section below will win the soundtrack to “The Social Network,” composed by best original score Oscar nominees Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. (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 Alan Arkin for “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006) and Tilda Swinton for “Michael Clayton” (2005) was my fellow Oscar blogger Guy Lodge (via a direct message on Twitter), but Guy graciously declined to accept the prize so that a reader might get it, and the first reader to identify those two names was Eric Nehss, 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.

PLEASE NOTE: The following rankings and remarks reflect my personal opinions and do/will not in any way impact my projections or analysis on this site, wherein I strive above all else to correctly forecast what will happen, not what I believe should happen. My demonstrated ability to do that over the years is what has led most of you to my site, and any failure to do that will undoubtedly lead you away from it, so you can rest assured that I mean it when I say that one has/will have no bearing on the other.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced their 2010 awards this afternoon and offered further evidence that the critics’ choice this year is “The Social Network,” which won best picture, best director (David Fincher), and best screenplay (Aaron Sorkin), and tied with another film for best score (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). This is obviously encouraging news for “The Social Network” camp.

“The King’s Speech,” which most pundits believe will be the chief competition for “The Social Network” in the Oscar race, didn’t farely badly, but just not as well. It won best actor (Colin Firth) and finished second in voting for best supporting actor (Geoffrey Rush), screenplay (David Seidler), and production design (Eve Stewart).

For the record, I offered my predictions of the top six categories earlier today, and correctly anticipated the winners of four of them (“The Social Network,” Fincher, Firth, and Jacki Weaver for best supporting actress), which is not an easy thing to do with this eccentric group!

The full list of winners follows…

Read the rest of this entry »

• Movie Line: Mike Ryan reacted to the news that “Saturday Night Live” will be hosted by best actress hopeful Anne Hathaway (“Love and Other Drugs”) on November 20 and best actor hopeful Jeff Bridges (“True Grit”) on December 18 by asking, “Can the added buzz from hosting ‘SNL’ actually help the chances of a win or even a nomination?” Seeking the answer, he “dug back through 35 years of Oscar nominees and ‘SNL’ hosts to see how often a nominee or winner hosted that same year,” and found that “27 future Oscar nominees have hosted ['SNL'] during the same season that they were nominated or won. (Nine more… hosted during the season, but after the ceremony — call those a victory lap.) Of that 27, seven have gone on to win the award he or she was nominated for — most recently Forest Whitaker.”
• OscarWatch: Dave Karger reports that Disney has released this awards season’s first “For Your Consideration” trade ad, suggesting that voters consider nominating “Alice in Wonderland” for best picture and in 16 other categories, including best director (Tim Burton), best actor (Johnny Depp), and best supporting actress (Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway). Karger adds, “I’m told the studio’s major goal is a nomination in the best picture (comedy or musical) category at the Golden Globes… though the eye-popping film could end up factoring into some of the Academy’s technical races.”
• The Odds: Steve Pond shares the story behind one of the year’s most “imaginative and bracing film scores,” the one composed by Nine Inch Nails’s frontman Trent Reznor and producer Atticus Ross for “The Social Network.” Pond, a former music critic, writes that their effort captivates audiences with “piano-rooted, synthesizer-drenched work that is by turns plaintive and assaultive, and always adventurous and unconventional,” which was unlike anything on which the two had previously collaborated. He also reports that Reznor, upon being offered the job, initially said yes; then said no; then felt bad, so he called to apologize for saying no; and, at that point, learned that the job was still available and took it.
• Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells issues a mea culpa regarding Roger Michell’s “Morning Glory,” the awards prospects of which he previously disparaged after finding its one-sheet to be lacking, now that he has actually seeing the film. He says it’s “much better than what Paramount’s marketing has so far indicated,” describing it as “a notch or two above [screenwriter Aline Brosh] McKenna’s ‘The Devil Wears Prada’” (referring to McKenna’s hit rom-com from 2006) and “close to ‘Broadcast News’-level” (referring to the classic 1987 comedy about people who work in television), while adding that it features “Harrison Ford’s best performance in years” — one that he feels even “has a shot at best supporting actor recognition.”
• YouTube: There’s nothing quite like a Stephen Holt interview, as demonstrated by this one with best supporting actor hopeful Geoffrey Rush (“The King’s Speech”), which was apparently conducted during September’s Toronto International Film Festival but was only posted online yesterday. Rush’s face is priceless throughout, not least after he says he’s been going through a “king period,” having appeared in both a play (“Exit the King“) and now a film with “king” in the title,” to which Holt responds, “I’m in my queen period, but it’s lasted an awful long time!”
• RogerEbert.com: Roger Ebert gives three out of four stars to the third and final installment of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Ebert makes a point of praising the performance of Noomi Rapace, who has portrayed Lisbeth Salander all three films, and calls the character a “transfixing heroine… formidably smart and deeply wounded… [and] too good a character to suspend after three films.” He adds, “My guess is there must be sequels [still to come, even if Larsson is found not to have written any himself].”
• Vancouver Sun: Kat Angus and Leah Collins celebrate the aforementioned “tattooed and pierced rebel girl” Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) as “easily one of the most compelling female characters of the past several years,” noting that “society may brand the Gothically inclined as misfits, but when it comes to movies, audiences just can’t get enough.” To prove their point, they share a gallery of “10 other movie Goths who have already won their hearts.” Among them: Allison (Ally Sheedy) in “The Breakfast Club” (1985), Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp) in “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) in “Beetle Juice” (1988), and Wednesday Addams (Christina Ricci) in “The Addams Family” (1991).
• FSLC: The Film Society of Lincoln Center will pay tribute to legendary dancer/choreographer/filmmaker Stanley Donen, who is now 86, by screening a number of his most memorable works — including “On the Town” (1949), “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), and “It’s Always Fair Weather” (1955), which he co-directed with Gene Kelly, and “Funny Face” (1957), “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954), “Charade” (1963), “Arabesque” (1966), and “Two for the Road” (1967), which he independently directed — from November 3-10. On the first evening of the series, Donen will participate in a Q&A that is to be moderated by none other than director Mike Nichols.

Photo: “SNL” host Ellen Page (who was a recent Oscar nominee for “Juno“) and cast member Andy Samberg (portraying Diablo Cody, the screenwriter of the film) during the opening segment of the show’s March 1, 2008 episode. Credit: NBC.