New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog points to a glorified press release wire story about the menu created by James Sakatos at the Carlyle Cafe for the Academy’s official New York Oscar viewing party, with one course devoted to each of the five Best Picture nominees. Sakatos says he watched all five films in a weekend and took copious notes before putting the menu together, but he’s apparently not much of a deep reader, because each entree is a thuddingly literal interpretation of the film’s themes––and at least one isn’t even accurate.

For instance: There Will Be Blood is represented by Sakatos’ favorite dish of the five, a squid ink risotto with mushrooms, cuttlefish and blood orange foam. That sounds awesome, but the last thing I think of when I think of Daniel Plainview is a delicate seafood risotto. Check out Sakatos’ description of why this is more appropriate than, say, cold steak and a milkshake: “The black ink brings to mind the film’s oil gushers, with blood orange foam to remind diners of the struggle and, of course, the title.” OF COURSE. How silly of me.

Way, way, way worse, is Sakatos’ justification of how Dover sole is the embodiment of Michael Clayton: …Read more

Above: Mel Brooks’ The Critic, which won an Oscar in 1963. Found via this compilation of YouTube links to virtually every Oscar-winning animated short since 1932. Via Fimoculous.

• The Academy’s Sid Ganis, desperate to come to some sort of revealable conclusion as to what kind of Oscars he’s going to preside over, has been pestering the WGA to grant a waiver to allow the producers to use writers/put on a show and not get picketed. So far he’s been denied, and it sounds like his hands are wringing fairly fervently. “I’m nervous. We’re getting down to the final moments; we need to make plans.”
• In the second remake of a 1950s Fritz Lang film announced in as many weeks, Michael Douglas and Amber Tamblyn have been cast in a do-over of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.
• Do Sonic Youth get to make any money off of this?

Before I started this post, I Googled the phrase “guerilla Oscar campaigning,” and the first result was this story about how Mel Gibson vowed to spend no money on his Passion of the Christ Oscar campaign, aside from sending out 8,000 DVD screeners. Oh, how times have changed.

This year, even as the writers strike limits the venues for pre-Oscar awards show appearances and shillery, nominees are making the most of every TV moment, doing stuff that ends up on YouTube, and ensuring that they, their nominations and their movies stay in the public conversation. Here at SpoutBlog, we’re dedicated to handicapping the hype as it happens, so expect us to compare and contrast these media moments semi-regularly (Daily? Probably not. Weekly? Let’s see how it goes.)

First up: Diablo Cody goes looking for Daniel Day-Lewis cred, whilst DDL himself is busy trying to siphon off some of Heath Ledger’s headlines.

…Read more

The hot new meme in Oscar prognostication: what if the two “serious” Best Picture frontrunners split the sane vote, thus clearing a path for Juno to take the year’s top prize with a mere fraction of the Academy’s total support? Scott Feinberg elaborates:

[Juno] is heating up at just the right time. Also, I am presently of the belief that No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood will split the vote of those who feel the need to support a completely ’serious’ film, and that Juno—which might have enough passionate support anyway—would be the most obvious beneficiary…

I believe to this day that Little Miss Sunshine would have won Best Picture last year had Martin Scorsese not been in the Best Director race… Try as they might, No Country backers will not be able to elicit the same sense of obligation among Oscar voters to seize this opportunity to honor the Coens, and so there will be no coattail effect this year—in fact, I think we probably will see a Picture-Director split.

It could happen. But ST Van Airsdale––otherwise known as The Reeler, now also blogging at Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men awards sub-site––really, really hopes it doesn’t.

…Read more

The combo of last week’s DGA contract agreement and yesterday’s announcement of the Oscar noms may have set the WGA in a new direction towards ending the writer’s strike. Yesterday afternoon the WGA announced it had withdrawn demands for jurisdiction over reality and animation, which the AMTPT was dead against recognizing. The two sides are reportedly meeting together today.

The Oscar nominations were announced about an hour and a half ago. I feel like the last thing a girl needs on a cold Tuesday morning in Park City is to wake up to Dave Karger refusing to admit that he doesn’t actually know how to predict the future, so I didn’t get up to live blog it, but you can check out the full list of nominees here. Just skimming the list, I don’t see any huge huge surprises, but here are some thoughts:

**Two nominations for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Best Supporting Actor and Best Cinematography––the exact categories it should have been nominated in, really, but the latter’s something of a surprise, considering that most Academy members must have watched the film on a DVD screener. Imagine what Warner Brothers could do if they actually tried.
**Costume Design seems to be the place to give consolation prizes to ambitious but laughable period pics. I doubt either Across the Universe or The Golden Age will beat Sweeney Todd, but both get a kind of credibility that they probably don’t deserve just by being nominated. Then again, Golden Age is a film about costuming in a way like nothing else I’ve seen, maybe ever––it exists as an excuse to pit Cate Blanchett in a suit of armor––so if this category is really about which director gave up trying to tell a story in order to put on a batshit insane fashion show, it’s got to be a lock.

…Read more

• Will the strike motivate buyers to stock up on content, or will the rough recent art house climate discourage them from picking up all but the safest work? When it comes to the marketplace at the Sundance Film Festival (which begins today), all that seems certain is that star heavy, light-leaning comedies like What Just Happened? and Sunshine Cleaning are expected to have an easier time leaving Park City with a deal. So, in other words, no news to report yet.
• AMPAS is planning two separate Oscar shows: one in case the WGA makes nice with the studios or grants them a waiver to use writers, and an “alternative” strike-proof telecast. Oscar telecast producer Gil Cates is keeping quiet on what form the “alternative” show could take, but Variety speculates that it would probably “rely on industry heavyweights penning their own speeches and presenting the awards.”
• “Anticipation of a DGA deal is amping up the pressure from all sides on the leadership of the Writers Guild,” says Dave McNary. The AMPTP is expected to hand down an offer this week, and writers are apparently threatening that they’ll resign from the WGA and go “financial core,” allowing them to go back to work without union protections, if the DGA rejects it out of hand.

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.

…Read more

• The WGA has refused to grant waivers to allow guild members to script the Golden Globe and Academy Awards during the strike. Unless the strike miraculously ends by the end of January–or the producers of the shows manage to negotiate with the WGA as independent contractors–this will effectively make any star who attends either award show a picket-line crossing rat. The guild has also denied the Academy the right to use clips involving the work of their writers during the telecast.
• United Artists has pushed the release of Valkyrie, the controversial WWII drama directed by Bryan Singer and starring Tom Cruise, from July 4th weekend to October 2008. Such a move from a normal studio might indicate plans to push the film as an awards contender rather than as a summer blockbuster; in this case, it appears that Singer just hasn’t finished shooting.
• Fox is “Simpsonizing” Manhattan today, as part of a marketing blitz to promote the DVD release of The Simpsons Movie. There will be a Simpsons on Ice show at Bryant Park today, the Empire State Building will be illuminated in yellow tonight, and “giant inflatable Homers” will be sprinkled through out the city.
• Nicole Holofcener will once again team with Catherine Keener for a still-untitled dramedy about “life, death and real estate” in New York City.

• Was it star power? Strong reviews? The kind of holiday shopping climate that makes hiding out in a movie theater all weekend seem ideal? Whatever it was, I Am Legend bested all expectations this weekend, to take home $76 million at the domestic box office. That’s the best December opening of all time, stronger than any of the Lord of the Rings films. Meanwhile, from the Adding Insult to Injury File: The Golden Compass continued to disappoint, while Alvin and the Chipmunks scored $45 million in its first weekend.
• On the “specialty” side: Atonement and No Country For Old Men rode their Golden Globe nominations into the overall top ten, landing at spots nine and five, respectively. Expanding to 140-something screens, Juno earned $36,018 per screen–more than any other film, and good for eleventh place overall.
• Awards sludge: the Academy has declared 15 films, including the animated films Beowulf and Ratatouille, eligible for Visual Effects prizes; the American Film Institute put out their annual, totally unremarkable list of the ten best films of the year.
• Is it even news, when Jon Favreau joins the cast of a film already starring Vince Vaughn? Apparently.

Amy Ryan has snagged at least five awards in the past four business days (I lost count after the NBR, New York critics, LA critics, DC critics and San Francisco critics) for her work in Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, and has thus usurped Cate Blanchett as the presumptive frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar race. This is, to me, a fairly shocking turn of events, and judging by the noise it’s creating amongst Oscar bloggers, I’m not totally alone in my surprise.

It doesn’t help that Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There––the film that prompted Harvey Weinstein to promise to shoot himself if it didn’t net Blanchett an Oscar nomination––has been all but shut out of the critical derby thus far. I was particularly surprised to see the film earn nary a nod from the New York Film Critics Circle–it certainly has no shortage of local, effusive defenders. And yet, the film has sort of slunk into the shadows of the season. Putting Harvey’s silly, trigger-happy bravado aside, it’s no secret that The Weinstein Company is hurting for hits, and so far, There is part of the problem; still on less than 150 screens and consistently dropping 30% from weekend to weekend, I don’t see how the distributor will be able to justify any kind of expansion unless there’s a major, major reversal in awards momentum.

The question is: where’s the loudest man in pseudo-indie distribution when his films really need him?

…Read more

• The New York Film Critics Circle chose No Country For Old Men as their film of the year yesterday. The small body of mostly print critics also awarded prizes to Daniel Day-Lewis, Julie Christie, and No End in Sight.
• The Hollywood Reporter has a long think piece on the impact of awards blogging on half-lives of award hopefuls. As usual, the blogosphere proves to be a convenient whipping boy for all manner of industry fluctuations and existential crises. There’s even a frantic quote from an unnamed publicist, who actually wonders, “What does it all mean?” Classic.
• “They lie. And then they lie again. And then they lie some more.” So begins a WGA statement, directed at the AMPTP, released yesterday in the wake of the weekend’s disastrous strike talk flameout, indicating that it’s going to be a cold day in January or February at the earliest before the two camps have cooled down enough to meet again. In related news: there will be no TV press tour this spring, because there will be (almost) no TV this spring.
• Chris Moore from Project Greenlight–you know, that reality show that had something to do with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?–will produce a feature-length doc based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States–you know, that book Matt Damon namedropped in Good Will Hunting?

• The only wide release this weekend is New Line’s The Golden Compass, which has been frought with bad buzz since its inception, and lately has been coaxing high-pitched whines from just about anyone who cares one way or another about religion, atheism, and/or the book on which its based. Variety says it should nonetheless “easily win the weekend.” The Hollywood Reporter is slightly more reserved: “Execs will need to eke out every theatrical dollar possible if this “Compass” is to prove golden, let alone any sort of franchise starter.”
• Today’s writers strike update gets the best teaser ever: “Slow pace frustrating, holidays loom.”
• This silly Variety article about why Oscar prognostication is horseshit lumps bloggers in the same sentence as “journos”! That’s some kind of small victory, even if it’s pejorative … right?