Still a bit fuzzy on the recent changes to the Academy’s qualifying rules for a Best Documentary Feature nomination? Yeah, join the club––I had to look up this post from last October as a bit of a refresher. The biggest change, is that films are required to complete a seven-day run in both Los Angeles and Manhattan before August 31. So once again, the IDA has put together a mini-documentary festival later this month in Los Angeles to help a number of films make that milestone.
It seems to be a pretty diverse list, although maybe I’m not one to judge––the only title I’ve actually seen is Terrence Davies’ Of Time and the City, although I recognize others, such as Ellen Kuras’ Nerakhoon, and the Slamdance hit Dear Zachary. In any case, the full list is after the jump. DocuWeek runs from August 22-28 in Los Angeles.
One of the many fads for cinephilic YouTubers, perhaps next in popularity after mashups and sweded remakes, is the condensed movie. Actually, thanks to a recent Empire contest, the art of sweding and the art of fitting features into a 60-second time frame is now also a mashed-up fad (though I guess sweding has always involved shortened versions). But while in this day and age any fanboy can do a shortened remake of his or her favorite movie or an abridged recut that breaks a film down to its bare essentials (i.e. its use of the f-word), condensing a film is not necessarily a low art.
Just look at the 76-minute video Academy by R. Luke DuBois, a conceptual artist who works with both audio and visual mediums. A couple of years ago, using a time-lapse process, DuBois crafted this compilation of sped-up versions of Best Picture Oscar winners, which he says “allows us to explore the temporal, formal, and aesthetic progression of the first seventy-five years of the Academy awards by taking each film and compressing, sound and picture, into a single minute.”
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has invited 105 member of the industry to join their gang, including 2008 Oscar winners Marion Cotillard and Diablo Cody. Insert stripper to Hollywood establishment joke…here.
Jeffrey Katzenberg presented “clips, storyboards and early animation sequences from” several Dreamworks animation films in the works at the CinemaExpo in Amsterdam this week, as part of a push to convince European theater owners to convert to digital projection systems.
The English Surgeon, The Garden, and Throw Down Your Heart won big at the SilverDocs film festival. For our SilverDocs coverage, click here.
A California appeals court has refused to force the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give a “retroactive Oscar” to Bob Yari for producing Crash. Yari was excluded from the film’s 2005 Best Picture win when the Academy changed qualification rules the same year, limiting a film’s eligible number of producers to three. Yari, who financed a large chunk of Paul Haggis’ “Race is hard” drama, has been in court begging for an Oscar ever since.
In news that will crush Chris’ Brolin family dreams, Elizabeth Banks is on the verge of being cast as Laura Bush in Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush movie, which begins shooting next month.
On what planet would investors think an extraordinarily fickle, recession-panicked moviegoing public would be willing to pay $35 for a movie ticket––plus extra for “theater-friendly foods” like sushi and wine? Um…
Scott Kirsner passes along the news that even though the Academy has an official Oscar YouTube channel, they’ve so far failed to use it to showcase clips from last night’s show. Not only that, but they have YouTube hard at work removing clips from the show uploaded by other users––this clip, and this one, and this one were all removed within three hours of their upload.
And not only THAT, but with the exception of a clip from last year’s Jack Black/Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly medley, most of the recently uploaded clips from actual Oscar telecasts date back to the 75th edition of the show––which, of course, took place in 2003. So if you’re just now getting around to blogging about Adrien Brody kissing Halle Berry, you’re in luck! Or, you would be, if the entire channel didn’t disable embeds.
Chris is coming up with a list of things the Academy can do to improve telecast ratings, so check back later this afternoon for that. But this kind of thing has got to be one explanation for last night’s show doing so poorly. The new generation of celebrity porn addicts don’t even know they’re supposed to obsess about the Oscars, because the Perez Hiltons of the world are instead blogging about Jennifer Aniston’s frozen eggs, because at least they have visual aids for that.
***Proving that anyone who’s ever had a beer with Judd Apatow is going to have no trouble finding work this summer, Freaks and Geeks star John Francis Daley (seen above) has sold a script to New Line called The $40,000 Man. Per Variety, it’s about a “legendary astronaut and true American hero who finds himself horribly injured in a car accident and rebuilt by the government to be a bionic man, on a budget of $40,000 — which makes him not that bionic.”
***In other dude-com news, Jack Black and Todd Phillips are teaming up to develop something called Man-Witch for Warner Brothers. The pitch sounds something like School of Rock meets The Craft, but with Jack Black in the Neve Campbell part. Sexy!
***Steve Carell, Daniel Craig, and J.J. Abrams are among the notables who have been invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for 2007.
***Oh good! A Wild Hogs sequel is on the way! Your dad’s half-wit friend will be so pleased.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Still a bit fuzzy on the recent changes to the Academy’s qualifying rules for a Best Documentary Feature nomination? Yeah, join the club––I had to look up this post from last October as a bit of a refresher. The biggest change, is that films are required to complete a seven-day run in both Los Angeles and Manhattan before August 31. So once again, the IDA has put together a mini-documentary festival later this month in Los Angeles to help a number of films make that milestone.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences 
A California appeals court has 
