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Blogging Berlin 2/12/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago
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  • Juno is honored as a work of “Cinema For Peace” on the same night a Czech party runs out of beer. Mike Jones enumerates those, and other signs of the apocalypse.
  • Brit Withey isn’t feeling the doomsday vibe––he’s just bored. “So, halfway into the festival and so far, at least the competition screenings have been met with a general ho-hum-ness.”
  • Unfortunately, it looks like Brit is not alone. With half the competition slate already screened, There Will Be Blood is apparently the clear front-runner for the Golden Bear, but no one wants to give an award that’s supposed to be about discovery to an Oscar-nominated Hollywood film.
  • Variety offers a pre-screening feature on Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure. Says Michael Barker of the film’s distributor, Sony Classics: “One of the things that I love about the film is that you watch it and you are in the shoes of the common soldier who committed all these acts, and you tell yourself, ‘That could be me.’” We doubt such testimony will win over skeptics, but early word from the choir (ie: my super-liberal Facebook friend) is positive.

Oscars: Will JUNO Benefit From a Split Decision?

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago
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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.

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