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Trade Roughage 01/28/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 8 months ago
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  • Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie continued their winning streaks over the weekend, each picking up the top individual prizes at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. The WGA had issued SAG a waver to allow them to produce a telecast with professional writers, which thus made it cool for stars to show up, which thus created the conditions for this photograph of Angelina Jolie in what appears to be a tie-dyed chiffon sack, thus giving credence to recent rumors that she may be carrying two new doses of Pitt spawn.
  • Of the many “specialty” films which expanded their theater count in hopes of capitalizing on Oscar nominations, only Atonement failed to see a bump in percentage this weekend, with The Savages gaining 2% even as it shed screens. But the real story of weekend in the indie box office realm––which Variety buries at the very bottom of their writeup––is that Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes-winning, Oscar-ignored drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days earned $48,176 across just 2 screens.
  • Ben Fritz gets off a nice joke about Sylvester Stallone being an “ancient warrior” in his mass-market box office writeup, but it must be little comfort to the team behind Rambo, which opened in second place behind something I had never heard of called Meet the SpartansCloverfield dropped almost 70% in its second weekend, which makes sense considering the film’s hype peaked six months ago.

Academy Releases Puzzling Foreign Film Shortlist

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 8 months ago
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Wow. AMPAS released their shortlist of nine finalists for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination today, and it’s missing a LOT of familiar titles. Like Cannes winner and presumed front runner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Like festival favorites Edge of Heaven and Persepolis. Like the great Silent Light, which Tartan has still not set a US release date for, and probably won’t now that their hopes for free publicity have been dashed.

Not to take anything away from the finalists (and though I haven’t seen any of them, I’ve certainly heard many good things about some of them, especially The Counterfeiters and Days of Darkness), but I’m sure we can expect to see much grousing about this from fans of the snubbed films, particularly 4 Months. But you have to hand the prognostication prize to Cinemascope, who predicted way back in early December that “the Romanian abortion movie” wouldn’t make the final five “because the style of the movie-making is all but indigestible to American viewers.” Of course, the same post predicted Persepolis as the race’s frontrunner. Win some, lose some, etc.

The films that did make the cut are listed after the jump.

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