Picture: The King's Speech
Directing: Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Actress in a Supporting Role: Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Original Screenplay: The King's Speech
Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
Foreign Language Film: Incendies
Documentary Feature: Exit Through the Gift Shop
Animated Feature Film: Toy Story 3
Documentary Short: Poster Girl
Animated Short: The Gruffalo
Live Action Short: Wish 143
Film Editing: The Social Network
Art Direction: The King's Speech
Cinematography: True Grit
Costume Design: The King's Speech
Makeup: The Wolfman
Score: The King's Speech
Song: "I See the Light," Tangled
Sound Editing: Inception
Sound Mixing: Inception
Visual Effects: Inception
The House Next Door
Posts Tagged: Toy Story 3
Oscar 2011 Winner Predictions: Picture
by Eric Henderson on February 26th, 2011 at 10:00 am in Awards, Film
The ascendance of the stuttering king and Oscar's perceived instantaneous regression into the mottled pastures of White Elephant Cinema (how quickly we forget The Reader) has rendered some of our most reliable barometers speechless. Suddenly, the movie no one wanted to pay attention to became the movie all your friends and relatives who see two movies a year have seen and just know is the best picture of the year. What can one say in the face of that? Even dependable crank Armond White, who had been working himself up a pretty good head of anti-Social Network steam leading up to an Ingracious Basterd-worthy final snit as MC of the New York Film Critics Circle awards, has been more or less reticent in the wake of The King's Speech's dozen proofs in support of the theory that dusty linens, not bloody tourniquets and certainly not hackers' grease-stained pizza boxes, are the fabric that holds Oscar together. And why shouldn't he remain mum? There's no one this year to disabuse of the notion that Oscars actually matter. Continue Reading »
Oscar 2011 Winner Predictions: Sound Editing
by Eric Henderson on February 20th, 2011 at 10:05 am in Awards, Film
In the five years since this category, which was previous known as Best Sound Effects, was bumped up from three to five nominations, it has matched up with the Best Sound Mixing slate for four out of those five slots every year. Except this year. Only Inception and, somewhat more puzzlingly, True Grit managed nominations in both fields this year. Which either goes to show the ever-widening quality gulf between the sort of effects-laden blockbusters that get cited here and the more nuanced work that earns nominations in the other category. Yeah, yeah, Salt, which got nominated for Sound Mixing, is a dozen times worse—and noisier—than any movie nominated here this year. No one said the patterns were infallible. Especially not this year, in our confusing, post-The Hurt Locker era. Continue Reading »
Oscar 2011 Winner Predictions: Animated Feature Film
by Ed Gonzalez on February 19th, 2011 at 10:00 am in Awards, Film
How to explain How to Train Your Dragon winning 10 Annie awards? Maybe Pixar was right that the group's voting procedures are stacked in favor of DreamWorks Animation movies, or maybe they're not and the voting body decided to punish Pixar for not making an effusive awards push for Toy Story 3. Since the highest-grossing film of 2010 doesn't exactly need to remind anyone of its existence, or excellence for that matter, and since Kung Fu Panda inexplicably laid waste to Wall-E at the Annies two years ago, we think Pixar might have Annie's number. Whatever you think, though, it seems unlikely that How to Train Your Dragon will best Toy Story 3 at the Oscars given the larger AMPAS voting body that will dutifully null any DreamWorks-versus-Pixar drama that may carry over into the Oscar race. There's also Toy Story 3's five nominations to How to Train Your Dragon's two. In short: We don't see Oscar pulling a Grammy here. With a nomination for Best Picture, Toy Story 3 losing this award would be as much of an upset as, well, Arcade Fire winning Album of the Year.
Oscar 2011 Winner Predictions: Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
by Eric Henderson on February 12th, 2011 at 10:00 am in Awards, Film
I see no reason why this entry need be any longer than Ed's post yesterday, the one about how his post predicting Christian Bale for Best Supporting Actor needn't be any longer than his curt prediction for Heath Ledger in the same category for 2008. Though it doesn't hurt that this is the only category the once (and probably not future) Best Picture frontrunner doesn't face off against The King's Speech, Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network would've been a pretty sure bet even if it was the movie's only nomination, because his dialogue consistently makes everyone in the cast hyperventilate.
Oscar 2011 Winner Predictions: Music (Original Song)
by Eric Henderson on February 10th, 2011 at 10:00 am in Awards, Film
It's like a perfect battle. New guard vs. old school. The power of youth vs. the experience of the established. Trash vs. class. The faceoff between "Bound to You," Christina Aguilera's "Maybe This Time" moment toward the dramatic climax of Burlesque, and "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me," Cher's torch song belted as if from the depths of a movie career gone all too predictably sour with age, is one of those Oscar matches that elevates a category that in many other years seems as rote and irrelevant to the artistry of movies as Best Visual Effects. Here, at last, is a pair of nominees that, despite the general shittiness of the movie vehicle carrying them, legitimately pays tribute to the integration of form, content, and intent. These two songs say more about the stars singing them than Burlesque, a frivolous stab at camp, ever attempts. That the category pits diva against divette is just the cherry on top. Continue Reading »
Oscar 2011 Winner Predictions: Short Film (Animated)
by Ed Gonzalez on February 7th, 2011 at 10:00 am in Awards, Film
Even though some were pegging Logorama as a possible upset over A Matter of Loaf and Death in this category prior to last year's Oscar ceremony, I didn't think the former's crude hipster snark would resonate with voters as significantly as the humanist warmth of Nick Park's most recent Wallace and Gromit adventure. That it did in the end may bode well for Let's Pollute, a six-minute snarkfest about pollution so oversaturated with sarcasm it made me want to mix my cardboards and plastics out of sheer frustration, but will the young'ns who helped push Logorama to a win last year find real innovation to the ingratiating film's surface-deep regurgitation of the style of '50s educational films? Hopefully voters will embrace a film that doesn't feel as if was made in order to be excerpted by Michael Moore. Continue Reading »
Oscar 2011 Nomination Predictions: Picture
by Ed Gonzalez on January 24th, 2011 at 9:00 am in Awards
Even though AMPAS's decision last year to widen the Best Picture field to 10 nominees was an obvious publicity stunt, a means of boosting the Oscar telecast's ratings share by ensuring that more than one box office cash cow would compete for Oscar's top prize, we were optimistic that a few legitimately off-the-beaten-path treasures would somehow manage to enter the race. But we know how that turned out, and though we doubt things will pan out differently in this more middlebrow-embracing year, at least we're going to be spared the endless chatter about how so-and-so film can't win the Oscar because of its poor box office. And to give you just one example of how much money means to the corrupt Oscar race: By Tuesday morning, the bulk of the dozen or so films with a legitimate shot at a Best Picture nomination will have made in excess of $75 million each. To give you another: The only ones among those dozen or so films that anyone is even talking about possibly not making the cut (127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, and Winter's Bone) are the ones that will never make that much money even after you've added together their domestic and foreign box office and video receipts. Continue Reading »
Understanding Screenwriting #50
by Tom Stempel on July 12th, 2010 at 12:30 am in Film
Coming up in this column: Toy Story 3, Knight and Day, Cyrus, Wild Grass, but first…
Fan mail: I have always enjoyed reading David Ehrenstein's articles and reviews in such varied places as the Los Angeles Times, Film Comment and Sight & Sound, so I was delighted he showed up in the comments on US#49, even if he and I disagreed A LOT on I Am Love. One Ehrenstein piece I liked was his 2006 review in the Los Angeles Times of the dreadful David Kipen book, The Schreiber Theory. Kipen was then Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, which explains why the book was hyped beyond all reason. Kipen proposed that it was about time critics and historians paid attention to screenwriters. Ehrenstein compared him to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957) discovering love in Paris and singing, "How Long Has This Been Going On?" I assumed when I first read it that Ehrenstein was referring more to Kipen having ignored all the stuff that had been written about screenwriting, not only by me, but by everybody else who had been writing about it for the previous thirty years. Looking at the review again, I think Ehrenstein was just talking about Kipen discovering screenwriting himself rather than the historiography of screenwriting. In the review he agrees that more attention should be paid to screenwriting. Continue Reading »
Hating the Player, Losing the Game: The Armond White Meta-Review
by Paul Brunick on July 6th, 2010 at 9:25 pm in Film
When New York Press critic Armond White panned the universally admired Toy Story 3, the disapproval he expressed and the backlash it inspired were so "predictable" that they were, well, predicted. Bumping TS3 from its briefly "100% Fresh" standing at the critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, White's piece (entitled "Bored Game") channeled a steady stream of pissed off Pixar loyalists to the Press website. "Registered just to say I think you are a massive twat and I feel really sorry for you," user woahreally weighed in. "Whoever ur boss is should be slapped for allowing you to publish this disaster of a review," opined the inventively pseudonymed usuckballs.
The comments-section calls for White to be fired are occasionally hilarious in their venom and vulgarity, all the more so for being so spectacularly self-defeating—could the Press have mounted a more successful campaign to increase their web traffic and user registrations? And there's the rub. White's detractors accuse of him being a "contrarian," someone who bucks the critical establishment and defies popular taste out of little more than cynical self-promotion and antisocial perversity. (This highly circulated chart of Armond's pans and praises has been offered as definitive "proof" that his opinions are reflexively reactionary.) But if this is true, any principled stand against White paradoxically rewards and enables him. "Don't feed the trolls," as the saying goes. Continue Reading »
A Movie a Day, Day 34: Toy Story 3
by Elise Nakhnikian on June 19th, 2010 at 9:04 pm in Film
I'll get to Toy Story 3 in a minute, but first I wanted to tell you about something else I've been thinking about today. We're designed to search for patterns, so I guess it's no surprise that you can't see a lot of movies without noticing trends. Sometimes it's something minor, like a stylistic trick you see repeated or an actor who keeps popping up. But when two movies open a window onto the same little slice of life, it can change the way you experience both. That happened to me the other day when I came across For Neda, an HBO documentary about Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was killed by a government gunman during the protests that followed Iran's last election. As it happens, I'd just seen Women Without Men, one of the characters of which was a fictional forebear of Neda: a strong-willed young Iranian woman who defied taboos and risked death half a century ago to protest an illegitimate regime. Women Without Men was a little too underdeveloped and For Neda a little too didactic for my taste, but as I watched one and thought of the other, they melded into a kind of double exposure. Like Astaire and Rogers, in that quote about how he gave her class and she gave him sex, each movie made me appreciate the other more: The art-house film gave the documentary historical perspective, and the doc made the fiction film feel more urgent. Continue Reading »
Links for the Day: Christina Aguilera, Sarah Palin, and a Creepy-Ass Doll
by Sal Cinquemani on April 29th, 2010 at 11:46 am in Links for the Day
Because there wasn't enough violence in our last Links for the Day, Christina Aguilera recently called for a man who coughed during a promo interview for her upcoming album, Bionic, to be shot. Her new video premieres tomorrow!
Joshua Green over at The Atlantic posted a short but convincing case for Sarah Palin not running for president in 2012. There's also an even more convincing follow-up, in which he takes on colleague Andrew Sullivan.
Pixar has unveiled a fake TV commercial, purportedly from 1983, promoting a new character from Toy Story 3, Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear. Another toy you never had as a child, if you were lucky, Baby Laugh A-Lot:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
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