• Stu at Defamer takes a look at this year’s Oscar nominees that debuted at last year’s Sundance and predicts that An Education will receive Academy Awards recognition one year from now.
• One of this year’s Sundance films has already been nominated for an Oscar: the animated short This Way Up.
• And one of this year’s Oscar nominees almost wasn’t a Sundance selection: AJ Schnack samples from an IDA interview with Geoffrey Gilmore in which Man on Wire is said to have nearly been rejected.
• The Envelope points out three Oscar nominees who are at Sundace this week: Josh Brolin, Melissa Leo and Michael Shannon, the latter of whom stars in The Missing Person.
• Four directors/projects have been named winners of this year’s Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards.
• Anne Thompson’s summary of this year’s fest notices it was a “time of transition for both Sundance and the industry,” while also quoting manager Michael Sugar, who believes it was a return to the past: “This year’s fest started to recapture the intended spirit. It seemed back to being about the filmmakers.” Also at Variety, Todd McCarthy’s summary notes that An Education and Sin Nombre were the two emblematic films of the fest, and both fit in with the start of the Obama age.
• Manohla Dargis’ NY Times summary concentrates heavily on the presence of Sundance hero Steven Soderbergh, whose latest film she didn’t care for.

With a few more days left before the Oscar nominations are revealed, it is time to look at what the non-professionals anticipate will be among those contenders announced Thursday morning. Last Monday, we posted our own predictions for the Academy Award nominees and invited readers to weigh in with their own forecasts. A lot of comments concentrated on what shouldn’t happen, like The Dark Knight shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture and Dustin Lance Black shouldn’t be nominated for his screenplay for Milk. And apparently The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could be this year’s Dreamgirls. However, there were some interesting trends among the many who chimed in. Check out some highlights after the jump.
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The Golden Globes have been handed out, and the last of Oscar ballots are to be postmarked by today. So, that’s it, the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards are being figured out as we speak, and campaigning is over until the official contenders are announced on January 22. Hopefully a few Academy members took notice of our unlikely last-minute suggestions, but it’s more probable that we’ll be looking at an unsurprising crop of films represented in the major eight categories. As you’ll see after the jump, we predict that two heavily-buzzed supporting performances will be snubbed. Of course you’re likely to disagree with these foreseen omissions. In fact, we welcome all you readers to make your own predictions in the comments section — what you think will be nominated, not what you want nominated. And on Monday, January 19, SpoutBlog will feature a post highlighting the best of these comments and predictions.

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We’re less than two weeks away from receiving this year’s Oscar nominations, and though none of the major categories are completely predictable just yet, each has at least three or four certain favorites. Meanwhile, the final slots for Best Picture, Best Director and the acting and screenwriting categories may be simply a random grab from small handfuls of rotating contenders. As of now, it doesn’t appear we’ll be seeing any huge surprises come the morning of January 22nd, when the Academy announces the nominees. The Dark Knight is sure to become the first comic book film up for Best Picture, and it won’t even be a shocker if animated feature Wall-E is listed alongside it in the same category.

But the ballots don’t need to be mailed out until Monday, so I’m taking one last chance to reach out to the procrastinators within the Academy membership. If you still don’t know who and what to write in, and you’re unwilling to go the safe route and nominate the expected bunch of films and talent, then consider some of these underdogs, under-appreciated and pretty much unlikely possibilities:
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Netflix and Film Independent got a jump on the deluge of independent filmmaking news that will be coming soon via Sundance by announcing a new independent film contest today that will be chaired by Josh Brolin and judged by Brolin, Dan Jinks, Bruce Cohen, and Dustin Lance Black.

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When the Golden Globe nominations were announced last week, there was one glaring omission from the Best Supporting Actor category: a nod for Milk. Actually, there were four glaring omissions, because Milk still does not have a definite forerunner among its quartet of campaigned-for supporting actors, which includes Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna. Did the Hollywood Foreign Press Association truly snub the film, as has been suggested, or could the organization simply not decide which actor to nominate? Perhaps the two favorites, Brolin and Franco, cancelled each other out. If so, the Academy needs to ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen with its Oscar nominations. And the best way to do this is to get behind Diego Luna for Best Supporting Actor.

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Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight.

To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between.

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Irony held center stage at the press conference for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s passionate biopic about the first openly gay man elected to higher office in the United States, that took place at The Regency Hotel in Manhattan a little more than two weeks after the passing of California’s (heavily financed by the Mormon Church) Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. It was Supervisor Harvey Milk himself who had been instrumental in the defeat of California’s Proposition 6 (a battle featured prominently in the film), which had been openly opposed by everyone from Governor Jerry Brown to Carter and Reagan. The victory over the measure that would have effectively banned homosexual teachers and their allies from the public school system occurred in the same (non-election) year Milk was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, exactly three decades ago this month. Since those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, it’s no surprise Harvey Milk is not a household name, not even to the many young actors starring in Milk, who became aware of him only upon receiving the script.

And this is something Van Sant, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who grew up gay and Mormon in California, and was the sole Mormon writer/producer on the Mormon-themed Big Love – yes, as I said, irony ruled the day!) and the panel of actors, including Sean Penn (Harvey Milk), James Franco (Milk’s lover Scott), Josh Brolin (assassin Dan White), Alison Pill (campaign manager Anne Kronenberg) and Emile Hirsch (Milk protégé/activist Cleve Jones) have set out to rectify. …Read more

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

There’s an argument to be made that W., Oliver Stone’s Josh Brolin-starring sorta-biopic on our sitting but barely-standing president, has been thrust on the culture too soon. What kind of perspective could Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser possibly have on the Commander in Chief with George W. Bush still bumbling along in office, still a regular fixture on cable news and a constant target for Saturday Night Live? And wouldn’t the real W’s minuscule approval rating suggest that interest in dramatization of his presidency would be slim? But maybe a better argument is that W. has hit at exactly the right time — in fact, maybe the only time when this oddly argument-free work of trompe l’oil comedy could possibly slip seamlessly into the media diets of average Americans. Almost unbelievably, Stone has John McCain to thank for this accident of timing: W. would look much more freakish as a bizarrely idea-light folly if it had been released into a world that hadn’t ever seen (or even conceived of) Tina Fey’s dead-on impression of Sarah Palin.

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• Scott Rudin is taking his name off Stephen Daldry’s The Reader after losing his heavyweight battle with Harvey Weinstein regarding the film’s release schedule. Now that Rudin has left the project, though, can we expect the producer to push his Revolutionary Road even harder for the Oscar? And will Kate Winslet be treated like a poor child of divorce who’s made to pick one parent over the other?
• Confirming little more than what the movie blogs have been rumoring all week, Variety reports that super hot right now Josh Brolin is in talks to play the DC Comics gunslinger Jonah Hex. Perhaps with everyone respecting comic book characters so much these days this role will be the one that Brolin finally gets an Oscar nomination for.
• I guess when your film stars George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, you can get just any old actress to play the lead female part. But picking the most boring Lost character ever (well, the actress who plays her, anyway) to costar in Grant Heslov’s Men Who Stare at Goats seems a bit counterproductive.
• Continuing the trend of making uncomfortable topics funny, Seth Rogen is producing and will co-star in a comedy about cancer from an autobiographical script by HBO producer Will Reiser.
• Despite another bunch of box office contenders entering the multiplexes this weekend, including the heavily starred yet topically cursed Body of Lies, the bets are that Beverly Hills Chihuahua will stay on top for a second round.

Ben Affleck. Photo by Karina Longworth.

The film related-events surrounding the 2008 Democratic Convention reached their zenith on Wednesday with a pair of sessions devoted to The People Speak, Project Greenlight/Good Will Hunting producer Chris Moore’s theatrical documentary inspired by the writings of Howard Zinn, which has its official premiere next week at the Toronto International Film Festival. The afternoon began with a panel on progressive media, featuring Moore, actor Josh Brolin (who commented extensively on his recent experience playing George W. Bush for filmmaker Oliver Stone), artist Shepherd Fairey (the man responsible for that screenprinted Barack Obama “Hope” poster, as well as a subject of the doc Beautiful Losers) and former Clinton operative Mike Lux. Then, after a brief intermission, Brolin and Moore were joined by a host of boldfaced names, including Ben Affleck, Rosario Dawson, Taye Diggs and Kerry Washington, for a live presentation of the historical readings that make up the bulk of the film. …Read more

At a panel on progressive media (and specifically Chris Moore’s film based on Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States, Josh Brolin commented on his arrest earlier this summer at a bar near the set of W, in which he plays the title role.

“I was arrested, and it was basically because I was standing up for someone, speaking out on something I thought was wrong. And what happens when you speak out? You go to jail.”

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So far all of my fears about this trip to Denver– that my flight would never make it out of JFK, that I’d get stuck in a traffic jam trying to get into downtown Denver, that the Secret service would decide I had insufficient credentials and throw me in a secret DNC prison–have been proven to be totally unfounded. 90 minutes after my plane landed (early!), I was sitting in the Starz Green Room, eating brie, awaiting my first Impact Film Festival screening. Maybe the Democrats can run the world after all.

The photo above? That’s in front of the security checkpoint outside the Denver Film Center. At some point I’ll try to get a pic of the billboard for Oliver Stone’s W, which sits right on the highway opposite the football stadium where Obama will speak on Thursday. The Starz! employee who drove me to the Film Center sighed as we passed by, “I never thought I’d see Brand from Goonies playing the President of the United States.” Did you?