Salon.com > The Lovely Bones

The Oscar nominations: Trying to please everyone

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:03:00 +0000

So what was the inflated Academy Awards best-picture category, expanded this year from five to 10 nominees, going to bring us? More populism or more existentialism? Was it going to open the door to animated films, to fantasy and science fiction, to foreign flicks and low-budget indies -- or just to middle-of-the-road Hollywood sentimentality, calibrated to draw in heartland viewers who've increasingly tuned out the whole Oscar spectacle?

Given the Academy's catholic desire to please all its contradictory and overlapping constituencies, it shouldn't have surprised anyone that the answer was all of the above. And yet, somehow, it did. I think of the five extra nomination slots as the "Dark Knight" apology awards, but this year offered no exact TDK-cognate, i.e., no commercial-critical behemoth likely to be snubbed by the Academy members' peculiar blend of middlebrow snobbery. (Just to be clear: I didn't like "The Dark Knight" much, personally. But that's irrelevant when it comes to the Oscars. Given its alleged seriousness, cultural impact and box-office firepower, a best-picture nom should have been automatic.)

Box office report: Ho-hum, “Avatar” rolls on

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:20:00 +0000

I've written a bit about "Avatar's" unstoppable run elsewhere, so I won't repeat myself too much here. For the record, James Cameron's multiple Golden Globe-winner dropped just 15 percent in weekend five, for a $42.8 million three-day take and a $54.6 million four-day take. The previous record for a fifth weekend was Titanic's $30 million take. Each of "Avatar’s" three January weekends ($68 million, $50 million and now $41 million) have scored the top three January weekends of all time. The next biggest is "Cloverfield's" $40 million opening from 2008. "Avatar's" new total is $505 million, and it topped the $500 million mark in just 32 days, 12 days fewer than it took "The Dark Knight" to pass that milestone. At this rate, it will sail past "Titanic's" $600 million domestic gross by either the end of January or beginning of February. At well over $1.6 billion in worldwide grosses, it is less than $200 million away from "Titanic's" unfathomable $1.8 billion total. Frankly, there are only so many different ways to say "holy f&^!ing sh$&!", so let's move on.

Quote of the day: Roger Ebert

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:15:00 +0000

We generally like to keep our political agenda off our entertainment zone, but that never stopped us from calling out crap when we see it. Which is why Roger Ebert, never far from the upper reaches of our regard anyway, wins special distinction today for his blistering smackdown on "The Lovely Bones." The whole thing is great, but if you require your widely panned Peter Jackson opuses to be distilled into one line, let it be this one: "If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to."

“The Lovely Bones”: Be very afraid

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:19:00 +0000

There are all sorts of ways to botch a book-into-film adaptation: A filmmaker can be too cavalier about changing an author's character conception or meaning, or he can be so slavishly respectful of those things that he fails to make a work that resonates cinematically. He can rely too heavily on the use of voice-over; he can miscast one actor, or every actor; he can simply fall down on the job of capturing the lyricism or muscle of a particular writer's prose, as plenty of great directors have done. Adaptation is an art, not a science, and it's a thankless job to boot: Not even the most graceful filmmaker can escape the carping of the "Movies are always inferior to the books they're based on" crowd.