Salon.com > Movie Awards Season http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Digging deep for the Oscars’ most memorable moments http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscars_most_memorable_moments/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscars_most_memorable_moments/#comments Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12437281 The only thing that Hollywood loves more than itself is its past. And that slavish attention to nostalgia could not have been more evident Sunday, when perennial Oscar host Billy Crystal was trotted out after an eight-year hiatus, and the theme of the evening was, oh, I don't know, something about the magic of the movies. That whole James Franco and Anne Hathaway "youth" thing of last year a distant memory and those five minutes we thought Eddie Murphy would host a somewhat less distant one, this year's Oscars were awash in a self-congratulatory past. Unsurprising, maybe, given how many of the evening's big winners were movies set in the dreamy past of the Depression and the pre-civil rights era South. Magical! And though we say it every year, my God, this was truly one of the dullest, blandest evenings of millionaires slapping each other on the back ever. A show bloated with Reese Witherspoon's praise for "Overboard" couldn't spare three minutes to let Bret McKenzie perform his winning "Man or Muppet"? Is nothing sacred? But there were still a few surprises and oddities and genuine moments of joy to be had. We endured the whole three-hour broadcast to whittle down our 10 standout moments.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/27/oscars_most_memorable_moments/feed/ 29 LIVEBLOG: Oscars’ silent night http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/liveblog_the_oscars/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/liveblog_the_oscars/#comments Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12427611 Join Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams (@embeedub), Tracy Clark Flory (@tracyclarkflory) and Laura Miller (@magiciansbook) as we live-tweet Hollywood's big night, along with Salon contributors Roger Catlin (@rcatlin) and Michael Barthel (@michaelbarthel). We'll also be RT-ing outside tweets; to participate, mark your tweets with #salonoscars.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/liveblog_the_oscars/feed/ 7 How Viola Davis took Meryl Streep’s Oscar http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/how_viola_davis_took_meryl_streeps_oscar/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/how_viola_davis_took_meryl_streeps_oscar/#comments Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12406151 When I saw Viola Davis across the room, wearing a shimmering pink sheath dress, I wasn't quite sure what she was doing there. This was at the New York Film Critics Circle's awards dinner in January, a relatively intimate event that has a history of bringing out the stars. But it's not the Oscars or the SAG Awards or the Golden Globes; there are no TV cameras and no red carpet to work. More to the point, the awards are announced in advance, and Davis hadn't won anything. Maybe she'd have turned up anyway to support Jessica Chastain, her costar in "The Help," who was winning a supporting-actress award, but Davis was mostly on hand to introduce Meryl Streep, who had won the group's best actress award for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/23/how_viola_davis_took_meryl_streeps_oscar/feed/ 41 The Oscars’ old, white, male problem http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/the_oscars_old_white_male_problem/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/the_oscars_old_white_male_problem/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:50:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12397881 On one hand, the evidence dredged up by an extensive Los Angeles Times investigation into the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is damning: The Oscars are being decided by 5,765 voting members (itself a smaller number than usually reported) who are 94 percent white. The membership is also 77 percent male and 86 percent over the age of 50. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is drastically unrepresentative of the United States population as a whole, which is about 36 percent non-white and 51 percent female. The median age of all Americans is 36.8 years, meaning half the population is younger than that and half older.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/21/the_oscars_old_white_male_problem/feed/ 36 The Oscar favorite no one really likes http://www.salon.com/2012/02/18/the_oscar_favorite_no_one_really_likes/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/18/the_oscar_favorite_no_one_really_likes/#comments Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12381071 I can't be the only person who had a mixed, double reaction to George Clooney's big emotional scene near the end of Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," which seems destined to end up as the also-ran or bridegroom in this year's Oscar race. Wearing his bad haircut, his Hawaiian shirt and his 15 extra pounds as Honolulu lawyer Matt King, Clooney bends over his recumbent wife in her hospital bed, murmuring things to her that I won't specify, in case you haven't seen the movie yet. He calls her "my joy and my pain," lets a quite convincing tear run down his face, and leaves the audience digging for tissues.

Sure, the moment affected me -- but there was both something Pavlovian and something willed about the way I was affected. Part of me was right there with Matt and the severely ill wife he's learned a lot of unsettling things about, the daughters he's just getting to know and the big decision about selling unspoiled land on Kauai to developers that still lies ahead of him. (As if anybody in the viewing audience believes for a second that George Clooney is going to do that!) And part of me was thinking, "Boy, George is really acting his ass off right here, isn't he? I'm supposed to cry, right?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/18/the_oscar_favorite_no_one_really_likes/feed/ 111 “Undefeated”: An Oscar-friendly inner-city football odyssey http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/undefeated_an_oscar_friendly_inner_city_football_odyssey/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/undefeated_an_oscar_friendly_inner_city_football_odyssey/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12365671 If puzzling out the Oscar vote involves trying to mind-read the electorate of the world's weirdest small town, then the Academy's documentary category is more like a tiny Alpine village. People watching the Oscar ceremony probably don't realize that the best documentary award is not voted on by the entire membership (although that's supposed to change next year). Michael Moore recently observed that when a documentary filmmaker gets to stand on the stage of the Kodak Theatre and thank the Academy, he or she is really thanking 5 percent of the Academy -- and Moore's guess was way too high.

In fact, there are reportedly 157 members in the Academy's documentary branch, which is about 2.5 percent of the total membership. Until recently that tiny group was seen as a bunch of hidebound conservatives, notoriously resistant to new aesthetic and narrative approaches to documentary film. There's really no way to exaggerate the strangeness of this category over the years, or the number of important films that have been completely overlooked. The most famous non-nominees include "The Thin Blue Line," "Roger & Me," "28 Up," "Hoop Dreams" and "Grizzly Man," and it's absolutely not coincidental that I've just cited films by Moore, Werner Herzog, Steve James and Errol Morris, all of them controversial figures whose work flies in the face of long-standing cinéma-vérité convention.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/undefeated_an_oscar_friendly_inner_city_football_odyssey/feed/ 3 Oscar-nominated Oldman still feels Globe snub http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/interview_gary_oldman_talks_about_his_first_oscar_nomination/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/interview_gary_oldman_talks_about_his_first_oscar_nomination/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12360411 A woman in the audience gets up to ask Gary Oldman a question. He's finally been nominated for an Academy Award, 26 years after his breakthrough performance in "Sid and Nancy," she says, but it's for the quietest and most subdued role of his entire career. He has played Beethoven and Dracula and Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as Sid Vicious; does he regret that "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" didn't allow him to show more emotional range?

Oldman is a reflective, soft-spoken fellow who considers questions carefully before answering them, but he doesn't have to think about this one. "It was greatly liberating, powerfully liberating, to play George Smiley," he says. If he plays a character who's called upon to cry, Oldman explains, "Those are Gary's tears. They have to be real. I've had to feel that grief or that anger, and then the performance is contaminated by that emotion." With Smiley, he goes on, he didn't have to display that emotion on the outside; the character is a profoundly melancholy, even tragic figure, but all that emotion is bottled up inside, in the classic English style.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/interview_gary_oldman_talks_about_his_first_oscar_nomination/feed/ 19 And the Oscar goes to … “Twilight”! http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/and_the_oscar_goes_to_twilight/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/and_the_oscar_goes_to_twilight/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:10:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12327781 I'm here to make a modest proposal. What if the Oscars -- an imaginary Oscars, a thought-experiment Oscars, the Oscars of an alternate universe -- honored movies that people actually liked?

No, I know, I know -- they sometimes do, pretty much on the stopped-clock-occasionally-correct principle. And somebody must like each of this year's best-picture nominees, with the possible exception of the universally allergenic "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." (I appreciated one reader's recent comment that the hidden virtue of that film lay in combining the annual quota of schmaltzy Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock vehicles into one compact package.) After all, the whole reason why "The Artist" appears to be the front-runner is because it's charming and unpretentious and nearly impossible to dislike -- although I don't happen to think it's all that great -- whereas the other nominees do not share that quality.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/and_the_oscar_goes_to_twilight/feed/ 51 Oscar 2012: Chicken soup for the Hollywood soul http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/oscar_2012_chicken_soup_for_the_hollywood_soul/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/oscar_2012_chicken_soup_for_the_hollywood_soul/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12315961 It's beyond redundant to say that the Academy Awards are Hollywood's way of making itself feel better. Self-congratulation is the foundational axiom of the whole enterprise, which for many years amounted to a version of American triumphalism. We had the most powerful nation in the world and the dominant manufacturing economy, and nothing symbolized the global hegemony of American culture and values like the worldwide popularity of America's dream factory.

If in those days the Oscar campaign was a question of burnishing the imperial brass, this year it's something quite different. These are the Oscars of wounded dads and autistic kids, of orphans in love with old movies and lonely guys struggling to break free of nostalgia. When you look at this year's nominated films, it's not like there'a a tenuous theme that halfway threads them together. There's more like a torrent of male grief, sadness and loss that pretty well drowns you. These are the maudlin Oscars, "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"; the Therapy Oscars, the Oscars of Healing, the Oscars of Chicken Soup for the Hollywood Soul. I'm just not sure the therapy is likely to meet the patient's needs.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/oscar_2012_chicken_soup_for_the_hollywood_soul/feed/ 45 Salon’s Oscars picks http://www.salon.com/2012/01/25/salons_oscars_picks/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/25/salons_oscars_picks/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12229421 You can read the usual political-junkie analysis of Tuesday morning’s Academy Award nominations almost anywhere else, and it's not as if anything that happened today changed the horse race too much. I’m definitely going to allow myself to ventilate a little rage against the Academy for its unforgivable omissions – chant along with me: Al-Bert BROOKS! Al-Bert BROOKS! – and for showering so much love on namby-pamby, pseudo-significant, middle-of-the-road crapola like “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” (Ask me how I feel about that movie sometime. I might tell you!)

But the Oscars we have are the Oscars we have. So I want to lobby here for who really should win now, given the unfortunate but undeniable reality that Brooks and Kirsten Dunst and Tilda Swinton and Michael Fassbender, et al., are out of the picture.

BEST PICTURE

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/25/salons_oscars_picks/feed/ 35 The Oscar nominations we’re hoping for http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/oscar_nominations_were_still_hoping_to_see/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/oscar_nominations_were_still_hoping_to_see/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:25:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12164101 With the first round of Oscar voting about to close, and the announcement of this year's Academy Award nominees set for the morning of Jan. 24, those of us who follow this circus -- in spite of our better judgment, perhaps -- are still hoping for miracles. Now, it's one thing for me to offer a whole bunch of subjective blather about what I think the best films of the year are (and, let's face it, I've spent the whole year doing that). It's quite another to suggest things that lie within the penumbra of plausibility -- award candidates Academy voters might just consider, should their leathery souls be touched by the better angels of their nature.

That's the assignment for today: Films, filmmakers and actors who clearly deserve awards consideration, who would definitely receive it in a universe superior to this one, and who still have some kind of shot even in the cold, hard world of reality. If you're warming up your comment-writing fingers to accuse me of elitist snobbery, please note that we are not discussing films or actors that probably or certainly will be nominated, no matter how deserving they may be. I'll be as happy as a Pismo clam dressed in lemon butter to see George Clooney and Brad Pitt get their best-actor nominations this year; they were both terrific. But I won't pretend to be surprised. (Ditto for Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams, Albert Brooks, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, and so on.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/oscar_nominations_were_still_hoping_to_see/feed/ 22 Who’s afraid of Ricky Gervais? http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/whos_afraid_of_ricky_gervais/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/whos_afraid_of_ricky_gervais/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12122151 In the lead-up to Sunday's Golden Globe Awards, all eyes are on the return of host Ricky Gervais -- specifically about the snark that earned him a career-enhancing dose of notoriety when he took some swings at his fellow celebrities at the same ceremony last year.

Gervais is in the New York Times Magazine, where David Itzkoff explains his comedic swings from kind impulses to mean-spirited rawness. In Vulture, Willa Paskin worries that all the focus on Gervais’ edge is leading him to buy his own hype, obscuring the fact that he’s very much a part of the club he got credit for lampooning. NBC’s own ad campaign features Gervais talking about how controversial it is for him to be back. In as much as the 2012 Globes are must-see television, it’s supposed to be because of the man riffing at the podium, rather than the artists who will deliver grateful speeches from it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/whos_afraid_of_ricky_gervais/feed/ 11 Michael Moore and the Oscars get it right http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/michael_moore_and_the_oscars_get_it_right/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/michael_moore_and_the_oscars_get_it_right/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12002101 As multiple media sources have reported over the last two days, under proposed new Academy rules, only films that have been reviewed by the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times will be eligible for the best documentary Oscar. But that's not the real story, and it's not nearly as dumb as it sounds.

"Everybody's getting excited about something that's not the real headline," explains filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack, a co-founder of the documentary-centric Cinema Eye Honors awards. "The headline is that the Academy is making big changes to the way it selects and nominates documentary films, and based on what I know so far, those changes are overwhelmingly positive."

Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the new docu-Oscar rules, which go much further than eligibility issues, were largely pushed through by Michael Moore, who sits on the Academy's governing board. The intention behind the changes, including the bizarre-sounding NYT/LAT requirement, is to streamline a notoriously clunky and cliquey nominating process, and to ensure that the Oscar-winning documentary is "truly a theatrical motion picture, because that's what these awards are for," as Moore told indieWIRE.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/michael_moore_and_the_oscars_get_it_right/feed/ 20 “War Horse”: Spielberg’s almost-great World War I epic http://www.salon.com/2011/12/25/war_horse_spielbergs_almost_great_world_war_i_epic/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/25/war_horse_spielbergs_almost_great_world_war_i_epic/#comments Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10760521 It's difficult to say who Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" was made for -- I suppose the most plausible and most honorable answer is that he made it for himself. This two-and-a-half-hour Great War saga with an equine hero is partly John Ford-style British Isles claptrap and partly a grueling tale of man's inhumanity to man (and also horse). It's likely to seem too dark for family audiences -- I certainly would not suggest bringing children younger than 10 or 11 -- and too treacly for many grown-ups. "War Horse" is certainly a movie for Spielberg's fans, for those who are enraptured by the blend of childhood yearning and adult grief that characterizes his mature work, and also by his film-school-on-steroids effort to re-create the look, mood and feeling of bygone cinematic eras.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/25/war_horse_spielbergs_almost_great_world_war_i_epic/feed/ 39 Hollywood’s no good, very bad year http://www.salon.com/2011/12/14/hollywoods_no_good_very_bad_year/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/14/hollywoods_no_good_very_bad_year/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:49:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10333211 It's way too early to make apocalyptic pronouncements about the death of movies -- not that that's likely to stop anyone -- but Hollywood observers were startled by the news that the weekend of Dec. 9-11 produced the lowest domestic box-office returns in more than three years. (In case you're wondering, the No. 1 movie on that dismal September 2008 weekend was "Bangkok Dangerous," with Nicolas Cage, and no, I didn't see it either.) There's already an official industry spin-control operation, best exemplified by an EW.com article which variously argues that A) things aren't as bad as they look; and B) this is the inevitable culmination of a downward trend, and hence is no big deal.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/14/hollywoods_no_good_very_bad_year/feed/ 70 “We Need to Talk About Kevin”: A mother-son horror film http://www.salon.com/2011/12/08/we_need_to_talk_about_kevin_a_mother_son_horror_film/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/08/we_need_to_talk_about_kevin_a_mother_son_horror_film/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10300228 When two youngish guys in suits with briefcases show up at the front door of Eva, a scraggly-haired, anorexic-thin New York suburbanite played by Tilda Swinton in “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” she has plenty of reasons to be alarmed. After all, Eva is a target in her town: People smash eggs in her supermarket cart, assault her in parking lots, splatter red paint across the front of her decrepit rented bungalow. So when it turns out that these guys want to talk to her about the afterlife, Eva laughs with relief. She already knows about that, she tells them. “I’m going straight to hell. Eternal damnation, the whole thing.”

That might be the only real laugh line in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully crafted but unrelentingly bleak film, which was adapted from the much-discussed novel by Lionel Shriver. But as Swinton often insists in talking about her role, there are scattered elements of comedy in "We Need to Talk About Kevin," and it is first and foremost a love story, albeit one any parent may find it painful and difficult to sit through. But Eva’s not cracking a joke with those missionaries. She might as well have told those guys she’s already in hell — none of the torments imagined by Dante could exceed what she’s already lived through.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/08/we_need_to_talk_about_kevin_a_mother_son_horror_film/feed/ 40 David Cronenberg: It’s as if my old movies don’t exist http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/david_cronenberg_its_as_if_my_old_movies_dont_exist/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/david_cronenberg_its_as_if_my_old_movies_dont_exist/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10282986 There are many reasons why David Cronenberg is a beloved interview subject for film journalists, and of course the quality, vitality and breadth of his movies have an awful lot to do with it. Beyond that, though, the Canadian director whose career stretches from near-experimental horror films like "Shivers" (better known in the United States as "They Came From Within") and "Videodrome" to more recent collaborations like "A History of Violence" and "Eastern Promises" is a genuine intellectual in a realm crowded with poseurs and pretenders. He can talk easily about almost any topic you bring up; if he hadn't turned out to be one of the premier cinematic visionaries of his generation, it'd be easy to imagine him as a writer or philosopher or historian.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/david_cronenberg_its_as_if_my_old_movies_dont_exist/feed/ 27 Pick of the week: An OWS-era “Coriolanus” http://www.salon.com/2011/12/02/pick_of_the_week_ralph_fiennes_ows_era_coriolanus/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/02/pick_of_the_week_ralph_fiennes_ows_era_coriolanus/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10279521 "Coriolanus" is a tough nut to crack, a violent and enigmatic puzzler that holds a special place in the hearts of Shakespeare performers, scholars and buffs. It sounds almost heretical to suggest that this brutal drama about a proud Roman general who betrays his own people might be Shakespeare's greatest play, or greatest tragedy, especially when you've got "Hamlet," "Macbeth" and "King Lear" next to it on the shelf. But T.S. Eliot, Frank Kermode and others might sign that petition. The story of Caius Martius Coriolanus, a controversial historical figure of the 5th century B.C., has been understood almost since its debut 400 years ago as a potent political allegory for times of crisis -- and when in modern political history do we not face a crisis?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/02/pick_of_the_week_ralph_fiennes_ows_era_coriolanus/feed/ 38 “The Descendants”: George Clooney’s Oscar-friendly Hawaii vacation http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/the_descendants_george_clooneys_oscar_friendly_hawaii_vacation/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/the_descendants_george_clooneys_oscar_friendly_hawaii_vacation/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10224364 When I covered the premiere of Alexander Payne's bittersweet, Hawaiian-themed comedy-drama "The Descendants" at the Toronto International Film Festival, I largely dodged my own mixed emotions about the film. Instead, I wrote about the evident fact that it may well win George Clooney the leading-role Oscar that has so far eluded him. (Although he's twice been nominated for best actor, in "Michael Clayton" and "Up in the Air" -- and was also nominated for both screenplay and direction with "Good Night, and Good Luck" -- Clooney's only Academy Award so far has come in the supporting category, for "Syriana.") So it's time to come clean and say that "The Descendants" bugs me quite a bit, even as it successfully navigates humor and heartbreak, and ultimately packs a considerable emotional wallop. It's an unusual combination; if a movie can be subtle and clumsy at the same time, "The Descendants" is that movie.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/the_descendants_george_clooneys_oscar_friendly_hawaii_vacation/feed/ 15 Why Oscar producer Brett Ratner had to go (updated) http://www.salon.com/2011/11/08/why_oscar_producer_brett_ratner_has_to_go/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/08/why_oscar_producer_brett_ratner_has_to_go/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10177904 UPDATE: Just after 7 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the Hollywood Reporter and other sources reported that Ratner was out as producer of the 2012 Academy Awards telecast. Shortly after that, Ratner issued a lengthy statement apologizing for "the hurtful and stupid things I said in a number of recent media appearances," and saying that he had called Academy head Tom Sherak on Tuesday to offer his resignation. "Being asked to help put on the Oscar show was the proudest moment of my career," Ratner continued. "But as painful as this may be for me, it would be worse if my association with the show were to be a distraction from the Academy and the high ideals it represents." You can read the full statement at the Hollywood Reporter link given above.

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