For their new film, Sugar, writer-directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden cast an actual Dominican baseball player for the lead role of Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos, a … Dominican baseball player. This employment of a non-actor with appropriate skill of course adds credibility to scenes depicting the sport while also qualifying Sugar as part of the current “neo-neorealism” trend. But Algenis Perez Soto is not the first real athlete to play a fictional athlete onscreen. Recall that before Shaquille O’Neal did his worst playing a genie and then a superhero, the NBA star played a college basketball player in Blue Chips.

Typically, though, casting a real player as a fictional player isn’t necessarily for authenticity; many pros end up starring in films as fantastical as Space Jam and Like Mike, and often they take a back seat to a Hollywood star in the lead sportsman role, whether that actor can truly play the game or not. If he or she can’t, it’s likely they’ll be made to look like they have the moves, and in many cases such an attempt at faking it fails. To illustrate why it might always be best for filmmakers to do as Fleck and Boden have done, we’ve selected five of the most unconvincing sports moments on film.
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It happened last year for Cate Blanchett. The actress starred in a biopic that critics ripped to shreds, a film that basically bombed at the (American) box office, and yet she managed to score a Best Actress nomination for her reprised performance as the titular monarch of Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Additionally, Blanchett earned another nomination for Best Supporting Actress the same year, for her portrayal of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Now Josh Brolin could achieve a similar feat this year, not just by earning separate nominations for playing the titular president of W. and portraying politician-turned-assassin Dan White in Milk, but also by overcoming the difficulty of earning recognition in a lead category for a film that otherwise is not very well regarded. Are Brolin’s hurdles higher than Blanchett’s, though? With all the praise he’s received for W., he’s still far from being considered a sure thing candidate, regardless of his worthiness or the Academy’s history of oftentimes ignoring the critics and the grosses when nominating dependable, standout actors.

And boy, does Brolin stand out. …Read more

• For the first time ever, TV commercials for new movies will be allowed to run during the Oscar telecast beginning with the 2009 ceremony. None of the nominees or movies related to the nominees (sequels, prequels, etc.) are permitted, nor are any movies opening before the last weekend in April. So, look for never-before-seen spots for the summer blockbusters, which could benefit next year’s ratings if fanboys who otherwise have no interest in the Academy Awards tune in just to see new footage from Transformers 2.
• In other Oscar news: 8 documentary shorts have been shortlisted.
• 16 years after offending Arabs with the animated feature Aladdin, Disney is now about to finance and produce its first film in Arabic — the Lebanese folk tale The Last of the Storytellers — as part of a new venture to make regionally geared movies in the Middle East. The Mouse House has also recently announced similar regional projects in Russia and India.
• Jamie Foxx will go vigilante, targeting the D.A. (Gerard Butler) who allowed his wife and child’s killer to go free, in the Frank Darabont-directed Law Abiding Citizen.
• For all you Netflix subscribers: if you don’t rent Blu-Ray discs, you apparently will need to make an adjustment to your account that says so; otherwise you will be charged a higher rate beginning in November. If you do rent Blu-Ray, you’re fine, though you now must pay the additional $1 per month for being so technologically advanced.

• Above: a detail of the special edition Julian Schnabel-designed Diving Bell poster that we’re giving away. The deadline to enter our giveaway was supposed to be earlier this week, but whilst at Sundance we got too busy to promote it. So, we’re extending the deadline to Wednesday, February 6. Full details on how to enter here.
• David Pescovitz at BoingBoing links to The Mindscape of Alan Moore, a documentary about the creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, which you can watch online.
• Amelie Gilette at The Onion A.V. Club “always thought that Jamie Foxx’s natural career progression would be Booty Call, Ray, Oscar win, release of the R&B album Unpredictable, release of the R&B album Hot Tub, Academy Award (These Are The Words I’m Sayin’ To You), followed by the launch of Academy Award Winner: The Fragrance (musky ego with notes of ugh).” She was wrong.
• “In 1993 Justin Timberlake joined the Mickey Mouse Club. In 1993 I officially joined the Mrs Doubtfire Fan Club. While membership is small, we all still share a love of vaccuming to Aerosmith’s ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady.’” Paul Scheer breaks down what sets him apart from the superstar with whom he shares a birthday.
• “It’s all in there,” James Toback tells Michael Musto of his upcoming Mike Tyson documentary. “The ear biting, the rape charge, which was indeed a setup, and the solitary confinement. Mike’s survived, but he’s not sure into what future. He talks about being 40 as if it were 105 because a lot of people around him are drugged out or dead. Where does he go now?”

• The Oscar nominations have been announced, and because we all need to complain about at least one thing every year, let my gripe be with the Jonny Greenwood snub (apparently his score was disqualified). Karina will be sharing her own analysis later today. Stay tuned.
• It’s been a serious topic that Sundance isn’t the buying frenzy we all thought it would be. But when distributors talk about a filmmaker needing to pay them, it’s really a bad time for the festival.
• I guess if one of the Jarecki brothers has to abandon documentary filmmaking for a feature debut starring Kirsten Dunst and Ryan Gosling, I’d rather it be Andrew (Capturing the Friedmans) than Eugene (Why We Fight), even if the trailer for All Good Things will be able to sneakily advertise the film as being “From Oscar-nominated director Andrew Jarecki.”
• Adrian Brody as Leonard Chess and Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters may be the best recording exec/recording artist casting pair-up since Ray’s Curtis Armstrong and Jamie Foxx, but I really just want to know who Cedric the Entertainer will be portraying.

• A strange, 800-word “how I spent my summer vacation” piece from Todd McCarthy in Variety. The critic apparently stayed in a hotel in Barcelona adjacent to the set of the film Woody Allen’s currently shooting there. He spotted Allen and Harvey Weinstein from the other side of the barricades; he tried to get on the set, but the production assistant he spoke to was unyielding. Very bloggy, but in a depressing way — if this is the closest Variety’s film critic can get to Woody Allen, what chance do the rest of us have?
• Speaking of Harvey, at a party for The Nanny Diaries in New York, he explained the decision to bump the film’s release date up two weeks to August 24: “There is nothing for females right now.”
• Jamie Foxx will star in The Soloist, a musical biopic about “a homeless musician with schizophrenia who dreams of playing at Walt Disney Concert Hall.”
• With a major Communist conference coming up this fall and the Beijing Olympics on tap for next year, writes Clifford Coonan, “Anything controversial is being delayed in favor of patriotic propaganda movies.” This includes Lost in Beijing, one of the most talked about films from the Berlin and Tribeca film festivals, which is currently on its third release date. With it’s realistic depiction of modern sexuality, the film has already rankled censors–the distributor even pushed it back once to “make room” for TMNT– and now it’s unclear whether or not the internationally-acclaimed drama will hit local theaters at all.